Jacques nods, but he remains where he is. He disentangles himself from me and says, “I have something for you,” and ducks his head. “Before we go.”
I pause, peering at him. I see us both in the mirrored window, a tall boy and a tall girl, and I see him open his hand. In it is a flower, dried and pressed. A daisy. He lays it gently in my palm. “It was left behind by another servant—” Jacques twists his hands together, stumbling over his words. “I know it is not the time, but I wanted you to have it. There is a good woman, a tavern keeper on the outskirts of Péronne, a friend of my mother’s. I thought you might hide there until transportation can be arranged. Her inn stands in a field, off the Rue de Maismont. By the millpond, do you know the place? There are many more daisies there. Well . . . I thought . . . Let this one be a promise.”
The flower rests in my palm, dry and delicate. I can smell the warm tinge of straw from it. A memory blooms in my mind of Mama and my sisters and me, lying in a meadow, sunlight falling through the apple trees and dappling our faces. I do know the millpond. We went there once, in better days, with a picnic and silver forks and a painter with a great easel and a hundred daubs of vivid color.
I tuck the flower into my sash. I clasp Jacques’s hands, and I smile at him, and he does not smile back, but grins, his face folding like an accordion. And though we both know the worst is still ahead—there is running to do now, and fighting—a flame kindles under my tired heart, and in the light of it, all the ills of the world seem suddenly small and far away.
Together we move toward the panel in the wall.
“Are you with me?” Jacques says.
“I am with you,” I answer, and we step into the servants’ passageway and begin to run.
48
You’re dumb, Anouk. You’re dumb, and now you’re alone.
I slide around a door into a bare, unpainted antechamber and slam in the floor peg. Up ahead is another double door. I burst through them. Close them behind me as quietly as I can. I scan for a way to lock them. There isn’t one. From this side they’re just panels of pale-green brocade, two brass rings for handles.
I spin. I’m in another one of these people’s pointless ballrooms. The floor is ivory-hued marble, veined with black like dirty snow. The ceiling soars forty feet above me, the chandeliers glowing bright. The walls are a mass of stone carvings and alcoves full of animal sculptures. A row of tall golden candelabras extends down both sides of the gallery.
I run for the nearest candelabra and grab it. Wedge it into the brass rings on the door. Jiggle it once to make sure it’ll hold. Whirl and start sprinting for the opposite end.
I don’t know if I’m close to the perimeter of the palace, if this is a trap room, but it’s too late to worry about that now. I’m halfway down it, running like a crazy person.
A sharp crack sounds behind me as the floor peg in the antechamber breaks.
Something’s been following me. Don’t know what, don’t know who, but it might be Miss Sei, it might be Dorf. They’re probably already at the door I came through. I go up on my tiptoes, trying to quiet the squeak of my shoes on the marble. The ballroom is way too long. That candelabra won’t hold forever. If they have a gun, I’ll be dead before I’m three-fourths of the way down it.
Whatever’s outside begins banging hard and fast. The candelabra groans.
I slip to the side of the ballroom, looking around frantically for a side door.
With a ringing snap, one of the prongs on the candelabra breaks, spinning into the air.
I won’t make it to the end. There’s no other way out. Soft and quick I shimmy up onto a ledge in the wall. My toes find the curling gilt. My fingers grip the moldings. I pull myself up silently. I’m a moderately good climber with harnesses and carabiners and a climbing partner waiting to rope me down when I slip. I’m an even better climber when running for my life.
My lungs heave. Every few feet along the wall are pillars, holding up the corners of the vaults. Each pillar is topped with a plinth. Each plinth has a tiny overhang. Maybe six inches of space. I make for the one closest to me, climbing spread-eagled along the wall. I’m high up now. If I fall, I’ll break bones.
I hear the candelabra snapping again. I brace myself. Muscles tense. I leap.
For a millisecond I’m suspended in the air, high up in that hallway of gold and marble. Now my hand catches on the overhang and I swing. My fingers almost wrench out of their sockets. I smack my other hand onto the ledge and lift myself up. Gasp for breath. There’s not enough space to rest. Sweat is dripping down my forehead, stinging my eyes.
Without another thought, I launch myself off the plinth.
I’m going for the chandelier. The huge rack of gold and crystal balloons in front of me. I slam into it, and the chandelier swings dangerously. I realize too late that it’s set up like a shell, hollow on the inside. I’m slipping through strands of crystal, falling into the center of the chandelier—
I flail, reaching for anything I can hold on to. My fingers wrap around the golden frame. My foot finds one of the tines, and my fall jerks to a halt. I hear the doors to the ballroom burst open. I see the floor bobbing below. Nausea sweeps over me. Don’t be sick. You don’t have time to be sick.
The woman in the red dress is hurtling down the ballroom. I see her through the tinkling crystal beads, her gown swirling across the marble.
Did she see me jump? I glance around. My toes are fitted on either side of the lower bubble of beads. The woman’s directly below me, sweeping away the fallen bits of crystal, murmuring.
“Aurélie?” Her voice echoes up to me. “Aurélie, ne me quitte pas. . . .”
I feel like I might sneeze. I remember watching a YouTube clip once where a bowler-wearing guy explained how you could stop yourself from sneezing by licking the top of your mouth, so I do that, running my tongue frantically over the arch of my mouth.
Below me, the woman throws back her head. Lets loose a series of hawking, raptor-like cries:
“Aurélie! Aurélie!”
She’s looking straight up at my chandelier. The ropes of crystal cut the scene below into ribbons. I hear running. Pounding. The woman stiffens. Now she leaps away, racing for the far end of the ballroom like some sort of red gazelle. She skitters through the doors. I stay where I am, trying to steady my breathing, the shivering beads.
Trackers are filing into the ballroom through the green doors. A swarm of them, glistening black and tiny red lights. They’re passing under me—
The gilt prong I’m standing on is bending. I feel the chandelier shiver around me.
“No,” I whisper. “No!”
The prong snaps. I’m sliding through the crystal threads. They’re breaking against my back. I’m falling, tumbling through the air.
I slam against the floor so hard, it’s like a white spark exploding in the center of my skull. My brain goes out before my eyes do. I see a pair of velvet shoes approaching between all those black boots—old-fashioned block heels, bows red as poppies. And now a second pair arrives, plain and dark, standing next to the first.
“Welcome home, Anouk.”
Palais du Papillon—112 feet below, 1790
The servants’ passages are mirrored, floor, wall, ceiling. It is an odd sensation, like running down the neck of a lengthy glass bottle. The ceiling is low, the walls uncomfortably close.
“They are in the western wing,” Jacques says, breathless, and we turn a corner, my skirts billowing behind me. “The exit is at the northernmost point of the palace, in the salle d’opéra. Your sisters are very nearby.”
“Why did they ever separate us?” I whisper. “What was the point?”
He looks at me over his shoulder, a wry smile on his lips. “No doubt to avoid this happening. You all conspiring together to escape. Little good it did them.”
He says it lightly, but there is tenseness to his face, and fear, and I do not understand it, for I feel nothing but excitement.
We leave the servants�
�� passages behind us, stepping through the false back of an armoire into a room like a Parisian sweet box. The pillows are colored like petits fours, soft and lovely, the sofas fat as winter rabbits. We hurry to the doors. Jacques presses his ear to the wood. I wait impatiently. Now he nods quickly, and we slip out into a gallery, hurrying down it.
The palace feels frighteningly empty around us, dead and lovely. Candles flicker in the chandeliers overhead, thousands upon thousands of them. I think I hear something in the air, a distant thrum, like a single buzzing note.
“Jacques, do you hear that?” I whisper, and I almost cough, I have so little breath to spare.
“What?” he asks, and together we slow.
“That sound?”
“The air is strange down here. Hurry.”
We reach the end of the hall and wriggle into another hidden passage. It ends in a servants’ quarters, a warren of dank little rooms, lit only with the occasional guttering lamp. We pass rows of empty shelves, a basket of vegetables, rotting into puddles of dark liquid, a kitchen, a blackened oven with no fire inside. No one is here. It feels as though no one has been here for some time, though surely that cannot be.
My legs begin to ache from running. I have hardly done more than pace and brood for months, and now my body rebels. Jacques’s gaze is fixed ahead, as if he is following some thread only he can see. He pauses from time to time and flattens his back against the mirrored wall. There is no sound but our own breathing. Even the hideous, waspish buzz is gone, and in its wake is less than silence, an absolute, deadening void.
We leave the serving passageway through a hinged portrait and step out directly in front of a blue-and-black lacquered door.
“It will be locked—” I start, but Jacques draws a key from his pocket, ornate and toothy. The head is a butterfly, made of iron.
“One of the master keys,” he says, and I want to ask him where he got it, but he is already inserting it, the lock clicking back, the door yawning open. And there are my sisters, sprawled across the furniture of a gloomy boudoir. They are rather unkempt. Charlotte has overturned a chair, and is poking her head from under it like a mouse from its hole. Bernadette lies on the bed and does not move. Delphine stands huddled against a small rocking horse. Her little gown is ripped at the sleeve. It has been stitched up with a caterpillar of bad sewing, as if one of the girls tried to mend it herself.
I run to her and drag her to her feet.
“Delphine,” I say, crying and hugging her neck. “Delphine, are you well? Come to me, all of you, come! We are going now! We are leaving!”
They approach me cautiously, and I gather them up, and the four of us clutch each other, kneeling on the floor like a swaying, many-armed beast. They make hardly a sound as I embrace them, simply cling to me. Even Bernadette, who before would not have embraced me for all the jewels of Spain, does so now, weeping quietly into my shoulder.
“We are going, my sisters, oui?” I murmur. “Upstairs.”
I look at Jacques. He stands by the door, smiling.
I pull my sisters to their feet and turn them toward him. “This is Jacques,” I say, lifting Delphine to my hip. “He is our friend. Put on your shoes and let us go. Quickly, and not a word, yes?”
Delphine tries to say something I cannot hear. She repeats herself, twice, a third time, her voice oddly stretched and cooing, as if she has forgotten how to speak. “Where is Mama?”
“Mama is not here,” I say, and I look up at the ceiling, because I cannot bear to look at Delphine. “She has gone up ahead of us, she—”
A sound behind me stops my lying tongue: a light step, deeper in the chambers.
I clutch Delphine to me and look over my shoulder. “Bernadette?” I say, and my insides twist. “Bernadette, are you alone here?”
The hum is back, that twitching, intoxicating whine, the sound of a thousand nervous bees, boiling within their hive.
“Bernadette?” I whisper frantically.
She turns to me, her eyes wide. Her back is to the door into the boudoir, and one of her hands is clutching at something, a fine toy that seems to be made of bone: a butterfly. The buzzing rises, crawling into my ears. I take hold of Delphine’s hand—“Bernadette, take your sister. Follow Jacques, quickly!”
Someone is there. In the doorway behind Bernadette, someone is standing, a small figure in livery, red and gold, and his face, oh heavens, his face. . . .
49
I wake up in an enormous bed. Cupids stare down at me from the corners of the canopy, blank eyed and creepy, like they want to eat my face. Red velvet curtains are drawn around the bed, dimming the light on the other side. A thick, embroidered comforter lies heavily across my chest. And I’m clean. So clean my skin feels like a peeled egg. All that sweat, blood, and grime—all gone.
I lie for a second, reveling. My bones feel weird, like they’ve started to gel, like they haven’t moved in ages.
I blink a few times. Wrinkle my nose.
I fell out of a chandelier.
The thought comes to me slowly. Now the next one: the bed smells awful. Like dust, and locked-up sheets, and the time I had to render my own soap out of cow fat during summer camp in Wyoming. It wasn’t fun. I didn’t stay long. I don’t want to stay here long, either. I hear the hiss of gas lamps. The flat, no-sound air.
I’m still underground. They caught me. But why haven’t they killed me yet?
My eyes flick from side to side. I hear the tick of a clock somewhere beyond the drawn curtains. I imagine someone sitting in a chair right next to the bed, waiting. Waiting for me.
I sit up slowly, soundlessly, pushing back the comforter. I’m wearing an old-fashioned nightgown. Frills and white cotton and persimmon-seed buttons. My hair’s been washed. The cut on my ankle is still exposed, an ugly scab. That’s disturbing. Someone washed my hair and dressed me up like a pilgrim, but they didn’t bandage my ankle?
I glance around quickly. The curtains are open slightly on either side, letting in a sliver of light and air. I see the corner of a carpet. The leg of a chair.
In one smooth motion I slide out through the curtains. My bare feet hit the floor. I spin, staring around the room. I need to find 1) Something to use as a weapon. 2) Someone to use it on. There’s plenty of the first. None of the second. I like that arrangement.
I grab a candlestick from the mantel and pull the gnarled stump of wax off it. There’s a long, mean spike where the candle was skewered. I heft the candlestick and pad across the carpet to the other side of the bed. I see a big old armoire, a double door in the far wall, a mirror.
I move toward the mirror, staring at myself. My hair’s been pushed up under a white cap. My eyes are huge and ghostly in my face. I feel like I can see every vein in my irises, every strand of dark blue and light blue and gray—
“Aurélie?”
Something behind me moves.
I whirl, raise the candlestick. A man is standing in the corner of the room. He’s been there all along. He’s huge, face painted chalk white, wearing a red brocade coat and poppy-red shoes.
“Aurélie?” he says softly. “Aurélie, retourné de l’autre coté de la mer?”
I run at him like a freaking psycho. Slash out with the candlestick. The spike snips at his waistcoat. He jerks back, fast for someone so large.
“Who are you?” It hurts to talk. My lungs heave, and a sharp pain like nothing I’ve ever felt before spreads across my chest. I might have cracked a rib.
The man stares at me. His eyes are weird. Quivering, watery, but under it is a sharpness. A watchfulness.
I slash out again, and this time the spike catches him and rips a ragged gash down his waistcoat. He shrinks, cowering against the wall. He’s crazy. Everyone here is crazy.
“Stay back,” I say in French, moving. I keep the spike pointed at his chest. “There’s another girl down here. Lilly Watts. And three boys. One of them’s crazy. Have you caught them?”
The man’s eyes are tiny in his powdered f
ace. It’s like they don’t even belong to him, like there’s a small animal looking out from behind the folds of human flesh. He’s breathing hard.
“Answer me!” I yell. “Why are you doing this? Is this some kind of sick game? Throw a bunch of kids in with some bionic men and deformed monsters and enjoy the spectacle?”
His breathing slows. His eyes fix on mine. And now the quivering is gone, replaced by the tiniest slither of derision. “Game?” he says. “My dear, this is not a game.”
His hand comes up. There’s a bottle in it, a tiny vial. It snaps between his fingers, and a rich, sharp tang hits my nose. Hits my brain. I’m tipping, falling. The candlestick is ripped from my grasp.
The man is leaning over me, screaming: “Havriel? Havriel, quickly!”
This can’t be happening. I’m on the floor. My hand finds a chair leg and I pull myself up.
I hear running footsteps. I heave myself onto the chair, my head lolling, my muscles suddenly useless. The doors to the bedroom fly open.
The man who enters is dressed in black. Black velvet knee breeches, black stockings, a long black frock coat. I recognize his calm gray eyes. The way he drifts along, great as a giant, but elegant. Like a dancer.
“Anouk,” Dorf says. He bows slightly. “Lovely to see you again.”
The accent I couldn’t place before comes into sharp focus. French. Oddly curled and old-fashioned, but definitely French.
I feel sick. I feel like I need to crawl back into the bed and pull the covers over my head and sleep until it’s all over and done. “Dorf,” I whisper. “Dorf, why are you doing this? Why are we here?” I stand, wobbly. Why do you want to kill us? Why did Hayden come back from the dead? Why-why-why . . .
He’s watching me, his gaze hooded, like I’m some exotic display behind glass. Now he turns to the other man and murmurs something. I catch the words “fille” and “parcourt.”
A Drop of Night Page 21