Page 79 of The Beautiful Ones

Even with Le Champ des Fleurs burning behind her, she arranged the future as she had arranged the drawing room: placing each person where the light would flatter her and calling the result order.

“Lucien is gone,” Cécile said. “He is safe.”

“Then we shall follow him.”

“Yes. Come with Elin. Go to the road.”

Madame Lebon looked toward the servants crossing the distant field and recoiled from the sight of her own household walking beyond command.

“And arrive where? Covered in soot, carrying a single casket, begging passage from people who dined at my table?”

“Arrive alive.”

“There is no life for me without this house.”

Cécile’s fingers trembled inside Adrian’s hand.

“Then d-do not come as Madame Lebon.”

Her mother stared at her.

“Come as my mother.”

The rosewood casket slipped an inch in Madame Lebon’s arms. Jewelry spilled over its rim—a rope of pearls, two emerald bracelets and the diamond earring lost in the glasshouse. For one moment I saw the woman she might have been before Le Champ des Fleurs taught her that possession was the nearest thing to love.

Then the front doors slammed open behind her.

A furnace of blue light filled the foyer. Every portrait along the gallery wall turned its painted face toward the terrace. Generations of Lebons watched their last mistress standing outside with ash upon her gown.

“I will not be seen running like a thief from my own house,” she said.

“No one is watching,” Cécile whispered.

But Madame Lebon was surrounded by the dead whose opinions had governed her entire life.

She stepped backward into the foyer.

“Mother.”

“If you cross that garden with them, do not call me that again.”

Cécile flinched as though the words had struck her.

The doors began to close.

She tore her hand from Adrian’s and ran.

I followed. We crossed the terrace together, but a section of the upper balcony gave way before we reached the entrance. Burning timber crashed between us and Madame Lebon, scattering blue sparks across the stone. Through the blaze, I saw her standing beneath the chandelier with the rosewood casket at her feet.

She could still have escaped through the drawing room doors. They stood open to the side lawn, untouched by flame.

“This way!” I shouted. “Madame, the side doors!”

She heard me. Her head turned toward the daylight.

Then the great mirror above the foyer table split from corner to corner.

Madame Lebon looked into the broken reflection and began smoothing her hair.