“So, Fitz, tell us about school,” Amelia said pleasantly.
“School?”
“Yes, didn’t you come back from school?”
Fitz shook his head. Confusion replaced his drugged appearance.
“He wasn’t away at school,” Ophélie said, lowering her voice with a quick glance to see if they were still alone. “Maman sent him to Italy to take the waters.”
“Take the waters?” Jacob repeated.
Ophélie seemed at a loss to explain, and Victor jumped in. “As I recall, from what Charles told my father, Fitz had trouble learning his letters and other studies. Brigitte mentioned it in a letter home to family in France, and someone recommended a Roman bath in Italy, near Turin, I believe. Fitz has been there a year.”
“Water wouldn’t do this to him,” Amelia said softly, shooting an apologetic glance at Fitz, who swirled a fork around the remnants of his dessert. The dark molasses formed a circle atop what appeared to be tiny horns.
“That is the accepted version of the story. What I was told,” Victor replied. “I cannot personally vouchsafe any of it.”
“He needs a doctor,” Jacob whispered. He cast a glance toward the door, believing Brigitte might linger outside the door like a vulture waiting for words to use against them. “Was he like this before?”
Ophélie shook her head. Tears brimmed under her lids. “No, we used to play and laugh all the time. It’s true, he didn’t learn as fast as Jean, but I could not see anything wrong with him myself. And now…” She wiped at her eyes. “Lord Donnelly, would you mind terribly to help me escort him to his room? He cannot even walk on his own anymore. He runs into walls and columns as if he can’t see them at all.”
“Of course,” he said and rose. He slipped his arm under young Fitz’s shoulder. The boy leaned into him, a slight bit of drool lingering at the corner of his mouth. Ophélie sniffled and took the other arm.
When they reached the door, Jacob realized with dismay that he was leaving Amelia alone with Victor.
His heart eased as Amelia nodded briefly at Victor and excused herself, hurrying out the door. Victor stood, but she said nothing to him.
Maybe I’m reading too much into his strange behavior. He was pleasant enough at dinner, if odd.
No, Jacob’s younger self, the fighter, chimed in. He wants you to let your guard down. And you know why.
Aye. That’s when your opponent attacks.
XV
Ophélie raced down the back steps of the house, cutting a tight corner into the butler’s pantry. The one pursuing her was close behind, within a few steps at every turn, so she had no time to think. She could no longer even hear him over the sound of her own terrified heartbeat.
The lid to the monstrous clay flour jar lay half open. She peered inside and calculated she could fit, but it would be close. Ophélie quickly slid the Titian lid aside and lifted one leg over. Her foot sank into a soft bath of white powder.
“Come out, bitch! I’ll find you, wherever you are!”
In a rush, she drew her other leg in and crouched as low as possible, resisting the urge to sneeze as a wave of the white dust filled her nostrils. She pulled the lid back over the top, reducing her light to nearly nothing. Leaving only a thin slit open, she watched.
Jean landed at the base of the stairs, his trousers still gaping open. He’d lost his shirt somewhere along the way, and sweat beaded across his throbbing torso as he dropped his hands to his knees. “You love to test me,” he wheezed. She would pay dearly for making him work for it.
Why did she? She couldn’t say. There had never truly been any real escape from the hands of her brother. She couldn’t run away from her life. So why prolong the inevitable, only for the horrors to double?
I am only alive today because I choose to fight. I would rather he tear me limb from limb than believe he could have me so easily.
“Ophélie! Come out, you sly little whore! If you show yourself to me now, I won’t hurt you.”
Liar, she thought. As if what you do to me, night upon night, is all a game.
She’d had almost a week of reprieve when Victor de Blanchefort visited a fortnight ago. Whenever Victor was on the premises, Jean stayed away. She didn’t know why; it wasn’t so with any of their other guests. But something about Victor put Jean’s cruelty to rest. Temporarily.
But Victor could not save her. Nor should she look to him, or any man, to do so.
Not even he, the promised one, who she was destined to meet but knew nothing of. Not even a name. Her revelations and memories unraveled like the layers of the soil beneath their plantation, and she still had so much to learn about who she was.
If it even mattered, when she was spoiled. Broken.
“Do you not want to be married off to that de Blanchefort upstart? Maman will never allow it, you know. Never. Not until you’ve borne the heir.”
Ophélie held her breath as his steps drew closer.
“You’re being selfish! Don’t you think I would rather have a whore who is not my sister? I’m to marry Julianne Bonapartie. She’s a finer piece of decoration than you’ll ever be. But I can’t, you selfish, selfish girl! I can’t until we’ve done our duty, but you always have to go and make it so hard…”
Jean continued his approach until he was standing right in front of the flour pot. “Ophélie. Please. The first time was not your fault or mine. God gave us that horrid child as a sign that we were not ready spiritually. It will not happen again because Maman has doubled her Hail Marys and God smiles upon us now, as he once did. Do you not understand? The sooner we bear a healthy child, not a gargoyle who languishes into starvation like a drooling idiot, the sooner this can stop. Do you believe I want this? No, I do not, Ophélie. But we were born Deschanels, and this is our duty. Your duty is to bear a son by me and, in a few years, by Fitz. That is all, and once you are done, you are free to become the wife of another and do as you shall, as it pleases your husband. And you will do your duty, no matter how you fight, or what escape you might believe you’ve found.”
Jean crouched. His labored breathing stopped her heart. “You can hide in flour pots or behind slave cabins, but I will find you. I will always find you.”
If the potent rush of Ophélie’s dream—fear had not woken her—the pitched crying of the infant would have.
Jacob stirred; he was waking as well, and would soon hear the baby and want to follow the sound again. Amelia couldn’t. Not tonight. She was already tired of mysteries. Of strange men speaking of the future, of ghostly babies and evil mistresses. Of vivid, near lucid dreams that were surely, inexplicably, the memories of the young Ophélie Deschanel.
She fled the room before Jacob could wake and ask her about the baby, or anything. He never had to say even a word to ask his questions. They were written in bold letters across the space of his gaze, always. Unspoken, but not exactly unsaid.
Amelia still loved him. It hurt her to even consider the idea of still loving him as if there had ever been a question at all in the matter or any reason to stop. God, how she loved that man, her best friend and protector! How she would have wished to return his embrace and quell his fears about her, and how she had changed, and even sought a strange sort of solace from a man she’d only just met.
Amelia exited the heavy front door of the plantation house, into the cool night. The air was an immediate burst of relief, washing over her in one sudden, welcome wave.
She closed the door quietly behind her and crouched over the top step. The cypress boards beneath her bare feet grounded her; reminded her this was as real as everything they’d left behind in the present.
As real as her husband upstairs.
If Jacob were to ever actually put a voice to his questions, Amelia didn’t think she could give him satisfying answers.
Why do you pull away from me? Because being close to you reminds me of being close to myself.
Why won’t you let me in? Because I look in your eyes and see myself at the hands of Ba
ldur. I fear you’ll always visualize me that way, so I’ll always see myself the same.
Why are we here, Blanca? If I knew, I would tell you, and I will know when I know. Right now, I don’t understand, and I wish I did, but I don’t even have an idea of where to look.
What exactly are you doing with this man, Victor? Nothing. Running from him. Running toward him. I don’t know!
Outside, there was nothing. Only the sheer hum of the cicadas against the balmy air and the subtle current of the river ahead. No crying baby, or tortured family, no evil Brigitte, no Jacob, no Victor.
Amelia huddled tight to her knees, drawing from her own warmth. All her life, she’d believed in the power of words. Of speaking about her own pain as part of seeing it healed. She had endured grief of all kinds, from losing her beloved brother, Benjamin, a niece, cousins, aunts, uncles. In all those times she had talked; to Jacob, to her mother. To someone.
Why was it so hard now? She hadn’t died. Perhaps I should have. She still drew breath and had life yet to live. But of what value? Amelia was married to the only man she’d ever loved, and he patiently loved her through this, searching for the best way to give her distance while showing his strength could benefit her. I don’t deserve him. I wish he’d left me to die as I asked him to.
In grieving the loss of others, she could identify her own stage of grief… would define the transition from denial to bargaining, and even give herself a silent pat on the back when she finally hit acceptance. If measured, the loss of her brother was harder than anything she’d ever experienced, even under Baldur’s abuses.
But while God had taken Benjamin, and it was unfair, her memories were still all her own. When she thought of Ben, she saw him laughing and tugging at the bougainvillea at The Gardens or swinging from the old tire on the broad oak. She pictured them laughing at Saturday cartoons and walking down to the river to fish.
Because of Baldur, her entire marriage to Jacob felt blunted. She couldn’t simply carve out the terrible moments and leave the rest because the wonderful ones led to the terrible. Like a cancer, she had to cut away at everything around it. What remained, was a distance between herself and Jacob she feared might never be repaired.
The air around her rustled. Her breath hitched as she turned, expecting to see Victor appear from the shadows.
But she saw or heard nothing but the wind, and her own thoughts, and perhaps disappointment to have been wrong.
Amelia rested her head against the top of her knees and closed her eyes, blocking out the past, the present, and all in between.
XVI
Amelia wasn’t the only one at Ophélie who dreamed of someone else’s pain that night.
Ophélie’s own vision—for what else could it be, she wondered—was startlingly vivid.
She stood in the corner of a dimly lit room, scents of damp pine and sweat mingled between the undercurrent of terror. Before she even beheld the terrors, she felt them. These were no ordinary horrors, but the type that took hold of those unfortunate enough to partake and never let go.
Amelia hung nude from a hook drilled into the ceiling, her feet suspended an inch or two above the ground. Blood ran down the lines of her outstretched body, leaving a trail to the tips of her toes, where it dripped in a steady patter to the wood floor below.
A man—a beast—wielded the knife.
Ophélie’s world shifted on its axis as she was turned, flipped, whirled through the air. When restored to her senses, she was Amelia. She went from witnessing the deep cuts running along her friend’s inner thigh to feeling the acute sting, the aching burn of the pain as it throbbed to the beat of her heart. The shame, as her desire to survive this ordeal, slipped down her leg with her lifeblood.
Amelia—Ophélie—couldn’t bear Jacob seeing this. She wanted him to leave, to run far away, to save himself. There was no way they would leave this cabin together alive, for she would not, no matter what Baldur did to her, ever reveal what he wanted to know. She wouldn’t expose her family at any cost, even if he sliced her limb from limb. A possibility that grew more real by the moment.
Jacob floated in and out of consciousness, his own wounds a consequence of resisting the monster. He would die here trying to protect her, although her last wish would be for him to live.
When, at last, the assault culminated in the act that would leave Amelia’s soul covered in scar tissue, Ophélie understood, sadly, that she and her new friend had far more in common than she could ever have guessed. And she knew, without further validating or questioning, that what she was seeing had happened, and the scene was what Amelia had been afraid to share even though she carried the memory with her like a parcel of rotting luggage.
My sister of the soul, thought Ophélie as she transferred her strength to Amelia in the moment, knowing she could not affect the outcome of the past but hoping, somehow, it would reach Amelia in the future.
Ophélie heard the door click across the hall, the one to the room where Lady and Lord Donnelly slept.
I believe I know what haunted your dreams tonight, sweet Amelia. You can confide in me.
She waited several minutes and shrugged a heavier gown over her head before slipping from her own room and down the stairs into the central hall.
It was not Amelia she found at the base, but Victor.
He didn’t notice her, not at first. While pacing the foyer near the front door, his lips moved soundlessly. His disheveled hair was a noticeable departure from the impeccable grooming she knew him for, black hairs standing up and to the right and left, a sign he’d raked his hands through them. His nightshirt hung open, only the middle button holding it together.
“Monsieur?” Ophélie whispered, wondering, with horror, of what her mother would think if she’d come upon this.
Victor’s head swung up. His eyes fell upon her, and in these first moments, Ophélie felt certain he could see straight into her soul, to every black corner, and every light one. Then he relaxed and straightened his back. “Mademoiselle. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It wasn’t you who roused me,” she answered, slipping quietly across the cypress flooring.
“Amelia then,” he said, nodding. A startled expression crossed his face, and he corrected himself. “Lady Donnelly, that is.”
“Be cautious of how you make reference to her in front of others,” Ophélie warned, with a glance up the stairs. “Not all will understand.”
Victor’s eyes lit up, hopeful. “Do you? Understand? Can you?”
“I would like to.” Pulling her arms tight across her chest, she moved closer. “I know you’re here more than perhaps you should be. Every time you arrive, something changes.” She didn’t elaborate.
“You don’t, then.” The spark died in his eyes. “It did not come to me all at once, either. I cannot… no, it was too much to expect you might know.”
“Tell me, then. Why are you down here, in the dead of night?”
“I sensed her distress.”
“And where is she?”
Victor nodded at the door. “She didn’t wander far.”
Ophélie frowned. “If you came down here from worry, what good is standing in the hall wearing holes in the carpet, when she is outside? Moreover, why is her distress your concern at all, Monsieur? Her husband sleeps upstairs.”
“You don’t understand. You will, I have to believe that. I do believe that. Yes, I believe it. But I bear this burden of understanding alone, and that must change before… before…” Victor rambled like a man intoxicated by heavy spirits.
Ophélie watched him helplessly. “Here, let us go to the kitchens. Prudence sleeps there, and I know she won’t mind helping us find you something to drink.”
Victor waved his hands at her. “I’m not thirsty, sweet Ophélie, but if I were, I would find my own way to the kitchens. You should rest now.”
His behavior disturbed her. Not only this evening but every day since the Lord and Lady Donnelly had arrived. Ophélie had witnessed Victor
following Amelia, or observing her, and only her, when they were in the same room.
And sometimes Ophélie.
She shivered.
Ophélie admittedly knew less than she should about the de Blancheforts. That they were distant cousins was no secret, and their success in cane sugar, coffee, and indigo was a matter of common knowledge. But Amelia was not the only one suspicious of Marius, and she might be more so if she had seen the rest of the family. Not a single de Blanchefort looked a day over thirty. Not one.
And now Victor was here again, languishing in dark corners, happening to be, always, where Amelia was.
“I believe it would be for the best,” Ophélie started, gathering her courage, “if you would leave Lady Donnelly alone for the duration of your stay.”
The flame from a candle flickered across Victor’s pale face, lighting his desolate smile. “I know more than you what is best for Lady Donnelly, Mademoiselle.”
“Your words make no sense,” she insisted, drawing closer. “You only met her three days past! Who is she to you?”
“Who are you to me?” he quizzed. “Is another way to ask the same question.”
“You speak nonsense.”
“I speak of a truth that is not yet yours.”
Ophélie laughed. “You speak like a man drunk on his own importance! What compels men to conceive no woman could ever grasp the complexity of their mind? Are we not creations of the same God?”
“You take my words as an insult when they aren’t intended that way at all,” Victor answered. He lifted the candelabra and narrowed the space between them. Shadows danced across the room. “You are capable of many, many things, Mademoiselle Deschanel. Far more than you know. But you will.”
Ophélie heard a creak from the upstairs floorboards, and she jumped. “I should not be down here. Not with you. Not alone.”
“I’m not the one in this house you should fear,” Victor replied. In his eyes, she saw her own painful truths, the ones she lived night after night, reflected back. How could he know? No, that was impossible!
The Secrets Amongst the Cypress Page 12