Mystery at the Edge of Madness

by Beth Byers

  “Indeed.” He gestured at the butler who again led the way up the next stairs. There were two suites and Severine handed the first one over to Lisette. Severine followed the other two to the next room and she heard the bathwater before they had even opened the next door.

  “That room was the better one,” Grandmère said with a bit of a smirk.

  “I lived in a nun’s cell up until I returned to the New Orleans mansion. I’m sure this will be better than anything I’ve had for the last half-dozen years.”

  Grandmère sniffed and left Severine while Mr. Brand said, “We could dry your dogs?”

  “Bathe them, please,” Severine told the butler, but she handed the puppies to Mr. Brand. “When they’re ready, bring them back to me.” As usual Anubis followed Severine silently.

  “The standing order on dogs is the stables, Miss DuNoir.” Disapproval tinged the butler’s voice for half a moment, but Severine lifted a brow and smoothly shoved back her hair.

  “Yes, well, that’s clearly changed.”

  “Dinner is at 8:00pm,” Mr. Brand told her. “Do you want to attend?”

  “I suppose I must,” Severine told him and then grinned wickedly before she shut the door. She didn’t hurry through her bath, soaking in the hot water until she was warmed through, and when she left the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her trunks had appeared in the bedroom along with three clean and dry dogs. Anubis lay next to the fire with the puppies on either side of him. Severine crossed to him and leaned down to nuzzle his face.

  The basket for the puppies she’d sent with Mr. Brand had also arrived, and the puppies had already learned to stay in their basket until Severine let them free. She toweled her hair dry before the fire and dressed herself quickly.

  Her dress was long and mostly black, but it was embroidered with blood red along the seams on either side. It had been made to fit her body, and it made her appear more voluptuous than she was by accentuating every curve. She looked like the wife of Hades or a sort of temptress. She could imagine what Sister Mary Chastity would say at the sight of Severine, and she flinched. She really did need to find her way to a confessional or dive into good works before she paved her way to hell.

  She wore only red lipstick and mascara on her lashes for cosmetics, which alone made her feel foreign to herself, having never worn them before. She found Lisette dressed and ready to go.

  Lisette saw Anubis at Severine’s side. Her gaze darted to Severine’s cheek. “You didn’t bruise.” She looked Severine up and down. “That dress looks like someone skinned a million black widows and made you a dress out of their carcasses.”

  “Ew,” Severine said to Lisette’s smirk and then stopped to look in the mirror at the end of the hall. Her cheeks were pale and the redness from the slap and then the bath had faded, leaving her as ghostly as ever. “You’d think it would be easier to bruise this white skin, but no, I’m thick-skinned, and she’s old.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be close with your grandmother,” Lisette told Severine bluntly. “But I wasn’t expecting that. Also, she might be old, but that woman won’t roll over for you.”

  “That was never going to happen,” Severine replied. “I hope for peace after our situations are settled. She should be more powerful in my life than she is. My father arranged that she not be, and I am realizing how grateful I am that he did. As for some sort of subjugation of her? I’d be happy as long as she’s kind to you and the dogs.”

  “You might not have been sent away if he did leave you to her,” Lisette pointed out as they passed down the hall, which was shadowed as though only half the lights had bulbs.

  Severine shrugged. “I wouldn’t have been loved as deeply as I have been if I hadn’t been put in the nunnery. The nuns loved me as truly as every child they never had themselves, even knowing that someday I would leave them. I no more regret my time in Austria than I do my birth.”

  Lisette mumbled low, but Severine caught the gist of her friend’s comments. She shouldn’t have to travel across the world to find love. Severine didn’t disagree.

  A moment later the dinner gong rang.

  “That sounds like something from a novel,” Lisette said. “I’m waiting for a ghost to appear in a cupboard or for a secret passageway to creak open and lead us to our doom.”

  Severine laughed and paused at the foot of the stairs. Did they go right or left? She closed her eyes and tried to remember. A flash of memory assaulted her. One of the maids scolding her as she’d been lost again and late for dinner.

  Right, then. Severine started that way and found herself facing her half-brother. She blinked rapidly. She had expected to see him, but she hadn’t seen him in the great hall and assumed he wasn’t in residence.

  “Andre,” Severine said with surprise. Her first instinct was to backup, but she instead pressed forward and reached out both hands. They had never been close and the 6 year gap between the last time she’d seen him and the current moment had caused a rift large enough that she might not have recognized him on the street.

  “Sevie—” He squeezed her hands and grinned at her. “You wound Grandmère up.”

  Severine lifted her brows, surprised that Grandmère had told him. “That wasn’t my intention.”

  He laughed and eyed Anubis, who paced at her side and was waiting, silent and still with his eyes fixed on her brother. “She needs a little winding. It’ll keep her sharp.” His gaze raked over her. “Things have been so calm for Grandmère with Mama gone. You look good. I suppose I thought you’d be exactly the same only taller, but you aren’t, are you?”

  Severine shook her head, wincing at the mention of the old family fights. Andre had been mother’s favorite and her father had despised him. How many times had Father and Mother argued about Andre? Mother expecting Father to somehow love Andre when her brother had been determined to make an enemy of his stepfather.

  “I miss your braids.”

  Severine’s instinct was to run her fingers through her hair, but instead she said, “You look much the same, Andre.”

  He laughed, and she didn’t blame him. She’d been kind. His eyes were red and his hair was a bit of a mess. He’d put on a bit of weight, but he just looked generally unhealthy. Had he been ill? She remembered a vain man who had already reached his adulthood. He’d never had time for her, and she’d never expected it of him. What would it be like now?

  “I’m glad you’re back, Sevie. Maybe things will change now.”

  There was no explanation, and she didn’t intend to ask for one.

  “Brand says that he’s your servant and you’re in charge now. Per your father.”

  Severine glanced at her brother and started down the hall again, signaling for Anubis to follow. “I had no idea of any such arrangements until Mr. Brand appeared at the convent.”

  “I should have written to you, Sevie,” Andre said. “I suppose I didn’t know what to say. I had lost Mother, but I still had my father. You’d lost them both and then discovered their bodies. I—I should have been better.”

  Severine glanced back at him. “Neither of us should be where we are, Andre. Mother would have still been relatively young if she hadn’t been murdered. My father was a vital man. None of us were ready for what happened and none of us knew how to handle it.”

  He laughed darkly and then he asked, “Why are you comforting me? I’m the big brother here.”

  Chapter Nine

  Dinner was nearly silent. Severine glanced around the table, noting faces that she hadn’t seen since she was a child. Her grandmother was almost unchanged. Serene and calm, golden and beautiful, she showed no sign of her earlier anger and leaned charmingly towards Mr. Oliver, Mr. Thorne’s friend. Why Mr. Oliver, Severine wondered, rather than Mr. Thorne? Why was this fellow at the house at all?

  She had yet to meet Mr. Oliver more than in passing, but perhaps it was Severine’s cousin, Florette, that had arranged his position of honor? Mr. Oliver seemed entirely at ease, she thought, as she sipped h
er wine, with her cousin on one side and her grandmother on another. Severine wasn’t all that surprised to see Florette without either parent present.

  Severine’s brother snorted as he followed her gaze. “Jealous of her position at the head of the table?”

  She turned slowly to her brother and answered honestly. “No.”

  “Your father would be infuriated to see you where you are at this table and where Florette is. He told me once she was a will of wisp, and you were the fairy queen.”

  Severine lifted a brow, finding his statement entirely unbelievable. “Florette was always like a miniature of Mama, even if she is Father’s niece rather than hers.”

  “And you think he adored all there was about Mama? He barely liked her at the end.”

  Severine met her brother’s gaze. “His body was over hers at the end. Protectively.”

  Andre shuddered, but his words were steady. “The act of a Southern gentlemen. Nothing more. He’d have done the same for your — friend.” He used the same term Grandmère had before, and Severine scowled.

  “I don’t want to hear that word again,” Severine hissed.

  He smirked, but said, “Father would have protected any female.”

  The wine flowed freely and she drank deeply with the next glance. One would think that her first dinner with her brother in a half-dozen years would be one that didn’t drive her to drown herself in drink.

  She sighed and sipped again, glancing down at her plate. The roast beef was dry, the vegetables were somehow both soggy and burnt, the gravy was lumpy, and the roll was tough. Severine might have been the mistress of the house, or an approximation thereof, but she could have turned out a better meal if she cooked the food herself.

  Mr. Thorne didn’t seem bothered as he popped a piece of a roll in his mouth. Neither did her cousin, Florette, who nodded at a servant and had her plate reloaded with another round of roast beef. Was it possible, she wondered, if only her plate was disgusting? She hadn’t been mindful of the other plates. Her brother’s was empty, so he hadn’t found anything wrong with the meal.

  Her gaze moved to the fellow who was serving food, and when her gaze landed on him and lingered, he flushed deeply. She knew what she needed to know.

  Severine shook her head and ignored the plate and the insult. From there, her gaze moved up the table to her grandmother, who lifted her glass at Severine with a smooth, genteel smile.

  Severine didn’t bother to reply in any way. It was a matter to take up later. She turned back to her brother and asked, “How is your father?”

  “Old, mean, angry.” Andre looked so disgusted when he said it, Severine flinched for him.

  “He married again, didn’t he?”

  “His wife is practically younger than you,” Andre told her as disgusted as before. “There’s two little girls.”

  “How fun,” Severine said honestly and her brother’s expression said he didn’t see his other half-sisters’ existence the same way she did.

  Her gaze moved to Clive and his brother, her cousin Erik, who had Lisette near them and were ignoring her. Given Lisette’s sour expression, Severine had to assume that Erik wasn’t pretending at chivalry like Clive did. Poor Lisette. Any thought that Severine had been doing Lisette a favor by bringing her here was well squashed.

  Severine felt the flash of guilt and hoped that there would be better days ahead for them both. Severine let her gaze move to the other end of the table where Clive and Erik’s father sat next to Mr. Brand. Given the expression of Mr. Brand’s face, someone else was declaring Clive’s destitute case or his own.

  What if she intervened? Mr. Brand held firm to the line presented by her father and didn’t provide leniency in the payment dates. If she intervened would that encourage Clive or get him to go away?

  If she were quite honest with herself, she might need him. Mr. Brand wouldn’t move through the upper echelons of the southern society like her cousins would, and it was in those areas that Severine would find the person who killed her parents.

  “What about you, Sevie? What will you do now that you’re home? Marry and have your own slew of brats?”

  Severine lifted a brow and then told her brother honestly, “I have no dreams of children and family. Do you? After our childhoods?”

  “Your childhood? The poor little rich girl passed from school to nanny to nunnery? You didn’t go hungry, did you? Tell me your tale of woe, girl.”

  “My mother and father fought almost daily,” Severine told him before taking a deep swallow of wine. She felt a bit fuzzy when she added, “That isn’t a future that sells me on the joys of marriage and family.”

  He grunted in reply, but it was a mocking sound.

  “Your parents must have fought as well,” she said to him and eyed him fiercely until she saw his nod. Why else divorce?

  “They did. Cats and dogs. Mother shouldn’t have married anyone from what I could see, but still—I’d have her back, if I could.”

  Severine nodded. “What do you remember of that night?”

  He laughed darkly. “Too many drinks, too many people, screaming. The blood.”

  Severine flashed back to the blood again and then sighed deeply. The blood. There was something about being so close to the scene, she wasn’t quite sure if she would be able to face it after all.

  “Better let it go, Sevie. Being drawn into the dark again isn’t good for anyone.”

  “It is though,” she told him. “It’s good for who killed them.”

  He laughed at her, and it was a mean sound. “Don’t tell me you have a half-sketched dream of finding whoever did it after all this time? You?” His laugh rang out and heads turned their way.

  “My dear brother,” Severine told him easily, “it is natural to revisit what has gone before after so long. Don’t be silly.”

  She didn’t quite sigh in relief at the end of dinner, but she was happy enough to rise with the ladies and disappear into the parlor with the other women. She didn’t bother with her cousin, grandmother, or aunt when the painting of her parents was looming.

  The parlor, if something so large could have such a prosaic name, had been off limits when Severine had been a child in the school room. She crossed to the painting and gazed up at it. It was telling, she thought that she wasn’t in the painting as well.

  Her father had the same artist paint her, but she’d been alone, standing near a globe with a book in her hand. Where was it, she wondered. She hadn’t seen it since it had been completed.

  “Severine darling,” Florette called, “look at the jewelry your mother had. Whatever happened to it?”

  Severine glanced back quickly at her cousin and shrugged silently. Her head was starting to pound. Too much family, too much interaction. What would she give for a quiet fire with the Mother Superior and a book?

  Lisette stepped up next to Severine and said low, “My father left my mother alone and with child and I think your family has greater scoundrels.”

  Severine shocked herself again with a laugh. “At least he only left and didn’t rid himself of her and you far more permanently.”

  Mr. Brand approached after the men joined them and handed Severine a small envelope. She looked up at him in surprise. “I locked your father’s office after the police were finished.”

  She shivered at the sudden chill, feeling as though arctic wind blew across her neck. It had been growing the evening over—that feeling of her parents looming. She rubbed her aching head, wishing for brilliant insight.

  “Those are the keys.”

  Severine took the envelope with shaking fingers and then sighed as Anubis pressed against her side. She let the presence of Mr. Brand shelter her from the guests as her exhaustion with them grew. Clive and Erik both eyed her like a lion who had found a gazelle. Grandmère wasn’t bothering to hide her dislike while Florette seemed to be entirely encompassed only with the British guests.

  Her Uncle Alphonse smoked his cigar and scowled at everyone else. He hadn�
��t received an inheritance, and he hadn’t been part of her father’s company. Was it possible that Alphonse had thought he would inherit from his brother and that the murder had been the result of his hands?

  The sight of Alphonse—who seemed to be a wrong version of Severine’s father—made her eyes hurt. They were dry even. As though she didn’t have tears for what should have been. She moved to the two strangers instead. They were easier on the eyes because there was no emotion there.

  Only Florette leaned in and let her hand trail down Mr. Thorne’s arm. When Severine and Florette had been children, Florette was the favored—blonde, beautiful, bright-eyed. She was the pet of Severine’s mother. And here she was even more lovely than when they were children. With her blonde curls and big eyes, her perfectly applied cosmetics, Florette was the perfect bright young thing.

  Florette caught Severine’s staring and grinned easily, crossing to her and bringing the British fellows along. “Severine! How lovely to see you again.”

  Severine murmured something appropriate, the pain in her head increasing. She glanced at Mr. Brand, but Clive had taken Severine’s inattention as a chance to lean in and hiss at Mr. Brand.

  Florette’s voice covered whatever Clive was saying. “I’d have thought you would stay in Paris or travel to London. Why come back to this old place? There’s nothing to do.” There was a pout in Florette’s voice and then her gaze turned to Mr. Thorne and Mr. Oliver. Her lashes fluttered at them. She whispered low so that only Severine could hear, “I think I’ll keep them.”

  Her wicked grin followed and Severine felt as though she had seen that expression before.

  Severine smiled easily, trying to ignore her headache and the burning in her eyes. “Both of them?”

  “Either of them. Grandmère is discovering who has the greater income.” Florette scowled. “I suppose you don’t have to worry about that. I don’t get my allowance until I turn twenty-one unless I marry and even then, it’s hardly noteworthy.”