As they went down the stairs, Rosalie keeping a wary eye on the man-demon, they limped arm in arm together until panic lit a fire under Rosalie’s pace.
She wouldn’t bury Marcy.
“This way, I think,” Jehanne said, and they took a left and kept silent for a good minute. When they’d made it halfway across the hall to the cellar, the girl said, “Gilles killed everyone, everyone except . . .” She cast her eyes down the stairs to the cellar.
Rosalie tensed, unsure who Gilles was. Or if he was still here. “What is that thing, that man?”
“I wish I knew. Or maybe I don’t, not anymore.” She heaved a raspy sigh. “And Gilles, I thought he was my father, but everyone I loved is dead. I have no one.”
The poor girl. “Marcy cares about you.”
“You think I’m mad, don’t you?” It wasn’t said in indignation. If anything, she sounded distant. After what Jehanne had witnessed, Rosalie couldn’t blame her.
“No—”
Matter-of-factly, Jehanne said, “It doesn’t matter.” Rosalie agreed. Only Marcy mattered. “This will all be better when Gilles dies and never hurts anyone again.”
Rosalie’s brow furrowed, shoulders going upright. Though she didn’t mind company, homicidal company was another matter. “Yes, well, Marcy.” Marcy mattered most. Although, really, she should be gentler with this girl after what she’d endured. “Unless you need to rest, and I can go?”
A light returned to the girl’s eyes, a flicker like steel, which Rosalie took as a good omen.
Jehanne grumbled, “Most of these doors are locked.” She froze. “I need to go back and find the keys.”
“Did Milla have keys?”
“No, I looked. Gilles must—damn him.”
Rosalie’s throat burned, but she held the panic at bay. Instead of dissolving, she set her pistol on the table and undid part of her hair, taking the pins and bending so she was eye level with the keyhole.
“Pray this’ll work,” she told Jehanne, who made a noise that was half-grunt, half-question. With the pieces of metal pinched between her fingers, Rosalie worked the lock until it gave.
“How do you know that?”
“My maman had her tricks when my sister and I tried to lock her out of our rooms.”
“But how did that teach you?”
“She taught us when we were older in case we needed it.” When Rosalie unlocked the door, the wood gave way to a barren room with a crooked curtain festooning a solemn window and resting defeated on the carpet. The only other object of interest was a piano with dust layering the keys.
Jehanne huffed. “This isn’t it. This’ll take forever, and if he comes back to look for me—” Before she had finished, Rosalie brushed past her with her pistol and pins. If it would take forever to find Marcy, they best be quick.
Eventually, after checking door after door, they reached the end of a dim hall with a single white door with two paper notes. Rosalie read the first:
Do not open to preserve quality of wine.
Convincing. The second note:
Tristan, if you drink yourself stupid and vomit on the study upholstery again, please clean it yourself. I have other important matters to attend to at the master’s behest, and I do not wish to be distracted from fulfilling my important duties. —M.C.
“Here we are,” Jehanne said, her shoulders falling as she finished reading the second note.
Rosalie hoped Marcy would be on the other side of the door, running toward them with a relieved grin once the wood creaked open.
After Rosalie unlocked it with her pins, they climbed down the groaning, mildewed steps. When they reached the bottom, her first thought was that, despite being a wine cellar, there was no wine at all. Instead, a stench beyond rancid pervaded the air, and she swiftly found the source: a gray wheelbarrow stained with brown matter so clumped together that they looked like black welts. Strands of hair stuck to the sides.
How could this filthy, bodiless wheelbarrow fit down the stairs? Why did it smell like that? What was here?
Who was here?
Rosalie clamped a hand over her mouth. “Can this be—?” she choked.
Jehanne trembled. “She—she—he said she was alive. She must be. God, he—I’m supposed to protect her.” She began whispering, “I need to be strong. I need to be strong.”
Rosalie was nothing. Love is the mother of death. All her life, the more she wanted to voice her grief or love, the less she could. God, You can’t let her die too.
Babel, all her life was Babel. Fractured and crumbling, scattering into incomprehensible pieces, buried and forgotten in the sand like Ozymandias. Gone, unable to be rebuilt.
She had nothing. The dead have nothing and shake dust and spiders at Charon.
She couldn’t bury Marcy—she couldn’t—she couldn’t—
All her thoughts were of the past because the present and future had ended, but the past always trickled, always rippled like the Lethe, and now she was drained. Rosalie said, “You—you said this was where she’d be, didn’t you? This is blood, blood and other—other . . .”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m supposed to protect her,” Jehanne said.
That was the end of it. She crumbled, body hitting the ground with such force it rattled her teeth, yet she wasn’t blessed enough to faint. She stared into the pit. The darkness.
The terrible stench became her world. Marcy was hers, hers to carry wherever God led and buried them. And so here she’d stay. The more Rosalie tried to calm her breathing, the worse it got.
She broke.
She died that day in spirit, that day when she wept in the washroom and she leaked milk, blood, tears. Death was a long, ragged scream still ringing in her ears, still Hell.
I had a dove and the sweet dove died. Jehanne needed her; she was just a girl, but Rosalie was dead. O, what could it grieve for? Marcy needed her, but she was dead. Its feet were tied, with a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving.
But her daughter couldn’t be dead when Rosalie was alive, or was Marcy alive while Rosalie was dead? Marcy, alive. Alive in the blue-silver vaulted ceiling when the entire world was dead in this morning star hell. God, what would she tell Anatole and André? Rosalie rusted over, and she barely registered the hand on her back or Jehanne’s words. Though she tried to regain sense, make a plan, all she thought of was Roger, pale and still, a flood of old, burning images smashing through with relentless force. The severed tongue the officers mentioned. It could’ve been Marcy’s, discarded like trash by her murderers after a failed escape attempt.
Did the timeline fit?
Did it matter anymore?
Marcy, year-old Marcy giggling when anyone tickled her belly. Marcy rattling the crib gate with her meaty fists, wailing and glowering, as if saying, “You tried to strangle me with your sadness, and I hate you for it.”
Rosalie would spread her fingers in Marcy’s thick, curly hair. “I’m sorry. I did the best I could.” She took a handkerchief and wiped the mucus and spittle from Marcy’s face. The child reached out and babbled as Rosalie picked up the fallen pacifier and went to clean it. Marcy liked the old American trick Rosalie’s own mother had taught her, dipping clean linen in sugar and honey and twisting the cloth into a bulb for her daughter to suckle, which gave her a taste for sweets Anatole happily obliged. But that would ruin her teeth, the sugared cloth, so Rosalie stopped allowing it for her fierce child, squirming, sanguine, mine.
“Mumuh,” Marcy would whimper before she accepted the pacifier in Rosalie’s grip. She liked hearing Marcy, hearing the life vibrating inside her. She didn’t mind the sleepless nights and soiled clothes, not in the great tapestry of life set before them both. There were worse pains than a noisy child.
All Rosalie thought of was Marcy, her silly four-year-old girl who, as Rosalie read on the couch, startled her when she curiously peeked under Rosalie’s dress and tried to pluck the dark, coarse hairs off her maman’s legs. Rosalie alway
s recoiled, and Marcy would cry, as if struck, and they’d sit there, surrendering to that long space between them. It was the space that yawned and gnashed ever since Marcy had passed through that silver membrane between her maman and the world, left the peaceful, comforting dark to scream at the harsh, biting light snapping at the cord that bound them.
“Mme Dei—Rosalie?”
Jehanne is looking at me. She needs me. I’m supposed to protect her.
But all she thought of was seven-year-old Marcy who, when Rosalie informed her she had her winter boots on the wrong feet, simply twisted her legs to make an X. All she thought of was Marcy pouting and curling on top of the closed commode with a towel under her, complaining about how she’d never chosen to bleed, especially so early in life. All she thought of was Marcy dying alone in the blackness, Marcy dying and thinking her mother believed her better down here.
Is death what’s best? Is that what you want?
24
Marcy
Urine soaked her socks. Marcy was both cold and hot, and she stank, the puddled light stank. Jerking forward, her foot knocked against a rock, only for her to look down and realize that rocks couldn’t have hair. She clutched her throat, vision flashing a ghoulish yellow, and she returned to the morning she’d decided to watch a man die.
She’d been stealthy, too stealthy for her own good, and she hid in the back of the auto Papa drove to work. That frosty morning, André was ill and couldn’t assist with bringing the guillotine parts to the front passenger’s seat, so Papa did everything himself.
Her elbows shook when she opened the auto door. Papa said “yes” easier than Maman. He was kind; she’d never seen him angry, yet she still feared his reaction if he discovered her. But Marcy deserved to see Papa, see him truly, and see the world too. The world, in all its wonder and cruelty, couldn’t hide from her forever.
Between the time Papa kissed Marcy goodbye and the time he lugged the guillotine parts to the auto, she was under the backseat. Her legs cramped, and her palms sweated, a chilly pins-and-needles itch prickling her feet and hands. As Papa drove, she bit her bottom lip and felt the road’s blemishes and tumors. When the auto stopped and she waited, waited for the footsteps to cease, Marcy knocked her head on the seat as she lifted herself to her knees and stumbled out onto the crunching gravel.
She saw a cluster of people and, after a jolt of shock, approached them in a haze. It was still dark, close to dawn, so they were all blots of brown-blue and black-gray. The people swelled around Marcy. A woman stood closest to her with a jacket slung over both shoulders and the eyes of a spooked mouse. Spittle lingered like hazy pollen clouds. Marcy held in a sneeze, and her nose burned. Smoke, cologne, the scent of fresh loaves. Her mouth watered despite herself. A glimpse of what looked like school uniforms. A group of boys younger than her, all dressed in charcoal-gray. It was so early for schoolboys to be out. The stench of people, the collective of swarmed, perspiring bodies shouting her last name, though none of them saw her.
By Mary, Marcy hated mornings.
Papa, there was Papa by the undone guillotine with dozens of pairs of circling eyes seeding themselves in her. Her gaze caught the red carnation in his jacket pocket. It drooped like a question mark. His brows, eyes, mouth were unmoving as he and his assistants, four valets dressed in identical black frocks and hats, silently assembled the guillotine, the Maiden of Death, the Widow. There was a time, Papa told her without emotion once, when children played with tiny replicas of Her. It was normal, nothing to fret over, Marcy had been told.
Though it was hard to discern the assistants’ features, Marcy recognized Henri, her father’s one friend, the quiet man who joked even when the corners of his mouth sagged. Once the Widow was erect, Marcy’s gaze rested on Papa’s hand, which gripped the rope controlling the guillotine blade. Papa seemed to take note of the crowd without looking directly at them, no meeting their eyes, but Marcy’s heart pounced to her throat when, instead of drifting past the spot above her head, his gaze settled on her.
He paused for a second, tilted his head down only a fraction before averting his eyes without so much as widening them. All along, Marcy expected him to see her. Once she sneaked out, it was inevitable. Not only that, but Maman would notice her absence, if nothing else, so best not to prolong it. Marcy had to see. She’d been kept in for so long, and she couldn’t be a child forever. She deserved to see Papa as he was to the world.
And yet.
In that natal time of day, the scraggly, orange-haired man dragged to the Widow was Christ-like in his half-nakedness. Men in black flanked him like a murder of crows. Marcy wondered then why nobody in the crowd even suggested she, a young girl, should shield her view. The criminal was positioned on the bascule like wood for a fire, his limbs arranged just so. Under the buzzing streetlight, the condemned man’s hair was the brightest thing there. That, and Papa’s carnation, as stark as his rosebushes. The crowd jeered, oppressive and close to ravishing every side of the Widow. Marcy tensed to keep herself from falling forward.
Papa’s hand tightened on the rope, Marcy saw it well. He might stop, might let the criminal live. Her fists clenched. The condemned man resting on the bascule had the tears of a widower shining on his cheeks. Spit dribbled down his purple lips. Papa cocked his head, eyes glossy and distant, a shadow, a different half of the man who picked wild strawberries with her, who played with their dog, who danced in the living r—
Rush of noise, silence, noise again. Laughter, like the kind after an uncomfortable joke. Talk of how the body would be moved before the pallor set in.
Marcy covered her mouth, might’ve yelped like a wounded pup. A wave crashed through her, thoughts and images she couldn’t explain to herself, much less another person. The almost-dawn was mothy and tattered like an old blanket abandoned under a bed.
The head plopped into the basket, and the crowd broke into various reactions: slow applauding, grumbling, murmuring about the morning chill. No gasps, as if standing around a public guillotine would end in any other manner. “Always too quick for the likes of these bastards,” an aged man beside Marcy complained.
There had been no preamble, no pause for effect. Papa was not one for spectacle. Marcy gulped as he spoke to his assistants. Not all the blood fell into the basket. The shiny-eyed, spooked mouse-woman took a handkerchief, walked forward, and bent down to dab some of the blood on the cloth. The flickering streetlamp shone on her, made her glow. One of her coat sleeves fell into the black-gold pool, and she brought the handkerchief to her nose.
Of course, Marcy knew what her father did; despite sheltering her, Maman and Papa tended not to brush off her questions, but this was different. Once she saw him by the guillotine, it became a facet of her life with nerves and legs, a stormy portrait of the mingling crowd and the darkness of a day not fully awake, like her.
The people surrounding her laughed and snorted and joked. Marcy was little, crushed beside them all. Nevertheless, she noticed the ghosts in the air and grew dizzy. Both her grandfathers, whom she never knew, had a blood anxiety after performing executions for so long, or so Maman told her, and maybe Marcy had it too. A headsman’s curse, always seeing blood on the ground and faces in the walls.
What had she expected?
Gulping down her sick, Marcy sprinted to the right before Papa could find her again, slipped her way between the bodies splintering the space, and fled to the back of the building where the parked auto lounged and smirked, knowing. Even away from the Widow’s glare, Marcy saw the spilled curtain of that dead man’s life when she lurched and crawled into the front passenger’s seat, the Widow’s seat, not caring that she bumped her elbow and it throbbed. Papa came back to the auto with his hat and coat intact. Despite the strong scents of his cologne and the seat leather, the crowd’s stench still lingered on Marcy.
When Papa opened the driver’s side door, he didn’t falter. As he drove home without a word, Marcy stared at the windshield and squinted when day broke. He offered h
is hat to keep low over her eyes because she hadn’t brought hers. She accepted. That was all he did. No reprimands, no need for an explanation.
It was maddening, that bladed silence. Marcy clutched her throat, massaged it, thought of the Widow behind her, and asked Papa to stop the vehicle. After he pulled the auto aside, she flung herself out, crumpled on the grass, and vomited. When she thought she was done, she retched again. Papa knelt with her, rubbed circles into her back, and spoke, but she couldn’t hear what he said, only how he said it. His words were warm honey, but also gravelly like a crumbling tombstone.
No, she wanted to say, he’d get grass stains on his pants, but it was too late. They were both stained. She tucked her hair behind her ears and sniffed, which came out more like a boarish snort. A string of mucus dripped from her nose to the grass. So much for composure.
Papa cleaned her face with the handkerchief pinched in his hand, as he did when she was small and waddled about with a pool of green mucus settling above her lip. The bitterness of her breath lingered until it was all she knew for a silver-blue stretch of time. Marcy picked up her papa’s fallen hat. Papa helped her stand, gripped both her arms, and a wave of embarrassment crashed through when she thought he would offer to carry her back to the auto. He would do that when she was tinier and fit well in his hold, before she spent most of her time inside. When the park’s grassy orchestra lulled her to sleep. When dusk made the grass as red as scone jam. When Papa’s heartbeat was against her cheek and fireflies fuzzed the air.
As she returned to her seat and they resumed the drive, she shook from exhaustion, but kept the tears at bay. With the Widow, they were a company of three, and there was this distinct sense of eavesdropping.
It looked like it hurt, how tightly Papa gripped the wheel.
The lanterns returned her to hell. The cavern walls eyed her, and she knew she’d never see Maman or Papa again, never laugh and kick up dirt in the garden, never feel the tiny little curls on Jolie’s body, the little mats before Maman or Papa combed out her undercoat. Blue lips and blue silk and the mouths, oh God, their mouths. Mouths on the walls, but no throats. No way to scream.
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