Betrayed

by Lynn Carthage

  —Constellations with a Cultural Overlay

  I walk over to her and catch her in a sideways hug. After a moment of hesitation, she curls her head onto my chest.

  “You’ve been through a lot,” I say.

  “With no one to comfort me,” she says.

  “I’m here now,” I say.

  She reacts with a shudder of pleasure that would have been completely delicious coming from anyone else.

  “You never saw your baby again. Do you think your sister killed her?”

  She stiffens. “I knew she’d keep her alive,” she says. “Yolande stole my destiny, but she was uncertain if it would work. With my daughter at her side, on her side, she had the benefit of my heir.”

  “Or she had her own heir and murdered yours,” I suggest.

  Her face goes blank.

  “It’s surely occurred to you,” I say, “that she was pregnant when she left.”

  “It did,” she says tightly.

  “She stole your child and never paid recompense.”

  She convulses and I hug her more closely. An odor, like that of ancient oranges, a rudimentary perfume, arises from her body.

  “While you’ve been here lonely, she’s been surrounded by family and good fortune. It must be so galling that you can never get your revenge,” I say.

  “Oh, I will,” she says. “The prophecy is my revenge.”

  I let her go and step back into the bedroom. I walk straight over to the cradle and make a point of looking at it. She follows me with soft footsteps in her satin slippers.

  “Tell me about the Revolution,” I say.

  “It was sheer madness,” she says. “Everyone went mad.”

  “And you tried to get yourself guillotined,” I say. It sounds so horrible out loud.

  “You say you saw me?” she asks. She takes a heavy inhale, and I see that her porcelain teeth are pretty, are still intact, like tiny chips of white candy.

  “I travel through time,” I tell her. “I was there. I saw you push your way to the front of the crowd. You wanted to die.”

  I try to put my arm back around her but she pushes it off.

  “I wanted to die most fiercely,” she says, and her voice is a pure shadow of itself, frail and pained.

  “Because of your daughter?” I press. I feel like an A-level jerkwad doing it, but it’s part of my plan.

  “Because of her, because so many years had passed. My lover gone, the only man I ever loved.”

  My eyes narrow and I quickly turn my head so she can’t see. I remember quite well how that lover was made “gone,” by her own hornet’s nest of fury.

  “Because everything I cared about or knew about was vanishing. Because the prophecy wasn’t taking place, and I thought maybe if I tested it by trying to die, it would enact.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me—that she had thought her suicide attempt wouldn’t really work. That the prophecy would jump right in and make sure she didn’t actually die. And . . . come to think of it . . . she hadn’t died. Permanently, anyway.

  “What was it like directly after?” I ask.

  “Like I saw the world through seven layers of glass,” she says. “Remote and hazy, barely visible. I welcomed the glass going dark but it didn’t. I saw everything until the dirt was shoveled onto my face. Did you see that, too?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I followed the tumbrel.”

  “And then I waited. I lay there, my body twisted, another woman’s arm tossed across my cheek, and for the other part of me, someone else’s hip digging into mine. The smell of blood in my nostrils, a thick mélange of all our spilled essence. I waited, listening for the song of the Sangreçu to stop. It grew dim, but it never truly went away.”

  “You can’t die a blood death,” I say quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once you are Sangreçu, the spilling of blood can’t kill you. There will always be a way to return the blood. But you can die other ways.”

  She looks at me sharply. “What other ways?”

  “Suffocation, drowning, strangulation . . .”

  For a long time, she stands there thinking, no doubt remembering that day in the Place du Trône Renversé and everything she felt then. Very French, she laughs bitterly. “So it was just my bad luck the Revolution chose the guillotine rather than simple hanging.”

  I look behind us at Eleanor, waiting solemnly, visible only to me.

  “You must’ve been frantic.”

  “Frantic? That is not the right word,” she says. “I craved death.”

  “I can understand,” I say.

  “No. You can’t. Do you have a child?”

  I shake my head.

  “I didn’t think so. You can’t know what it feels like. One moment you are staring down at your slumbering child in the cradle, in love with every eyelash resting on her cheeks, and the next you are howling with pain because she has vanished.”

  “Betrayed by your own sister,” I say.

  “My family went with her. I had no one left. No one. Athénaïs left to find her and never returned.”

  “You must’ve felt so alone.”

  Tears flow down her cheeks, making rivulets in the thick makeup I hadn’t realized she was wearing. Underneath is a lighter flesh tone. She rubs at the tears with the heel of her hand and a blotch appears. It’s like she is cleaning a filthy window with a rag, revealing the clean glass beneath.

  “But did later years bring peace?” I ask, knowing the answer.

  “Peace!” she spits out. “There is no peace. I hate every day, every moment, I must continue to breathe this air. I want the prophecy to unfold.”

  I pause, wondering how to respond. Should I lie, act like I know more than I do? But what if I’m wrong—what if she is the object of the prophecy and I screw everything up by convincing her she’s not?

  “Don’t you wonder sometimes if the prophecy is real?” I finally manage to ask.

  “Of course it’s real! It has to be! There must be—”

  She can’t continue on, bent double by her sobs. I put my hand on her back, rubbing in gentle circles with distaste, feeling the knobs of her vertebrae through the silk gown above the line of the corset.

  “It would be too cruel if it wasn’t real,” I say.

  She sinks to her knees, and so I do, too.

  “My life has been nothing but cruel,” she says when she can speak. She leans back and raises her face to the ceiling. “I’ve counted. I had seventeen years of happiness and three hundred and twelve years of bitterness. It is not a pleasant accounting.”

  “And the only thing that has kept you living was the thought of the prophecy?”

  There’s a long silence in which she contemplates the cradle. “No,” she says in an altered voice that makes me wonder if all along she’s been talking the way the court of Versailles trained its courtiers to speak. This voice is raw, real.

  “No,” she says again. “The only thing that kept me living was the fact that I couldn’t die.”

  My hand stills on her back.

  “But you tell me that I can,” she says.

  She rises to her feet and begins walking, her head held high. She seems filled with resolve. “The prophecy is a thin thread I’ve held on to,” she says. “But you have come with your broom and swept it away like a cobweb.”

  She walks to the doorway and without saying a word, passes through it. Eleanor stares at me with wide eyes.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “To try for a second time.”

  “All right,” I say.

  I’m terrified all of a sudden. She’s a monster, but I don’t need to be the suicide hotline’s worst nightmare.

  We walk silently through the passageway and back out to the exterior of the chateau. The moon regards us impassively as we make our way to the Hameau pond. So far away. It takes forever. I wish I could offer her moving by intention, but she’s not dead.

  She looks up at the sky while we walk, he
r face moving left to right, recognizing the constellations that have been here throughout all her miseries, and that will continue long after she passes.

  The moon has seen so many others give up throughout the centuries. It has never reached out a silvery hand to stop anyone. This is its duty: to watch with remote disinterest.

  Giraude stops and looks around at the quaint buildings, once happy, once a place where Marie-Antoinette ran and danced with her children. I look to the field where we saw the queen and her daughter cut flowers, but they are not here. Are they only a daytime haunting? Does the sun awaken their endless replay of a happy afternoon?

  “Joy is always undone,” Giraude says. “We frolic like children, but then must bow to the black master when he shows us the foolishness of our pleasure.”

  She bends and picks up a stone. Instantly, I dodge to the side, an innate suspicion in me, and she laughs.

  “I’m not going to throw it at you,” she says. “Will you help me gather them?”

  “What for?”

  “For my pockets,” she says.

  I stand there a long time watching her pick up stones until it dawns on me. She’s going to weight down her dress with the rocks, then walk into the pond.

  “I can’t help you,” I say quietly.

  Eleanor comes to my side and together we pay silent homage to the woman preparing for her own death.

  Stone by stone, she fills her pockets until her gown bulges at the hips like the elongated hoop skirts women of her era wore anyway. Finally it seems she can’t fit any more in. She becomes a statue as she looks at the flat mirror of the pond, with the moon reflected in its center. She turns to look at me.

  “What will I do if this doesn’t work?” she says, her eyes on mine, but really she’s asking herself.

  She takes her first steps toward the pond. Because it’s artificial, there’s no gradual entry. She’ll just have to step off the tufted grass into the water whose depth is unknown.

  “Hold my hand?” she asks quietly, stretching her arm to me.

  “Don’t touch her,” says Eleanor. “She’ll take you with her, and you don’t know how things work now that you are Sangreçu.”

  But I know that I can intention myself away, so I’m fearless as I take Giraude’s pale fingers. She lifts one lavender-colored shoe so it peeks out from beneath her skirts, fragile and soft as a ballet slipper. We both know she’s waiting to see if the prophecy will unleash lightning on our heads or bring dark clouds to encircle the moon, but nothing happens.

  She steps in.

  A minor splash, and she’s in up to her thighs. I steady her as she lurches, and she gives me a grateful smile. She lets go of my hand and her lips open. She’s about to say something but then thinks better of it. She walks into deeper water, her fingertips touching the surface and then her whole hand disappearing into the water. She doesn’t hesitate, but she walks with a certain sense of slow ceremony.

  Ripples spread out from her progress and I hear the water lapping the farther shore. She walks until her dress is wet above the surface, the silk taking on water like a towel. She never once turns back to look at me.

  She goes deeper until her head sits atop the water. It seems like the surface of the pond is its own horizontal guillotine.

  And then, as if I dreamed her, she is gone.

  “That’s it?” I say in disbelief. “That’s all we had to do?”

  “What a tortured soul,” says Eleanor. “You did her a great service.”

  Bubbles come to the surface in a riot, and I picture Giraude on her hands and knees at the bottom of the pond, her last lungful of air escaping up to the surface. If she changes her mind, she won’t be able to rise. The stones and her heavy skirts will keep her down. She must be struggling for air, but all we see are bubbles breaking under the calm moon.

  “Well done, Miles,” says Eleanor. “Your hands are clean.”

  “I’m a regular Pontius Pilate,” I say.

  “I tormented myself over what I did,” she says. “And all you did was . . . talk to her.”

  I shudder. “It wasn’t an easy talk.”

  We stand guard until the bubbles stop and the pond is glass again. Tension drains from me, and I wish for the solace of sleep. The inability to close my eyes and drift away for eight hours is one of the true hardships of death. Things just don’t end.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  “We take a deep breath and then we find Tabby and Phoebe.”

  “And after that?”

  “God only knows.”

  She faces me and her arms come around my shoulders. I step closer and we hug, a long, heartfelt hug.

  “You’re a good man, Miles.”

  Her words give me a jolt. I’m not used to thinking of myself as a man. “Thanks,” I say, and we step apart.

  Then I feel her at my back and whirl around.

  Phoebe.

  She’s dressed in a black vintage dress with gray tights and black combat boots. Not the style I’m used to seeing her in. “Hi,” she says. She won’t meet my eyes.

  “Tabby’s not with you?”

  “I couldn’t find her.”

  “You’ve been looking for her all this time?”

  She looks away.

  “I’ll go with you,” I say.

  “If you promise not to let go of her this time.”

  I inhale sharply.

  Eleanor reaches out and squeezes my hand. “I’m going to wander off for a while,” she says.

  “No, don’t,” I say.

  “You need to talk,” she says, and walks away.

  I refuse to say anything first, so I wait, looking at Phoebe’s averted gaze. She sneaks a glance up at me, and I don’t think she likes what she sees on my face.

  “I’m sorry, Miles,” she says.

  “I wish I could say, ‘It’s all right.’ ”

  “I know it’s not.”

  I’m not sure what she’s talking about: losing track of Tabby or how she treated me on that beach after we made love.

  “Let’s try together. I’ll go with you. Giraude is dead.”

  She gives a wan smile. “Nicely done.”

  I wait for her to ask me details, how I managed it. She seems incredibly nonchalant about something that was intense and huge. But she doesn’t ask.

  “We don’t have to worry about her killing anyone else,” I say, “Let alone your sister.”

  She nods. If she were a man, I’d slug her.

  “Now all we have to do is rescue Tabby, and your family returns to England and everything’s fine again.”

  “Nothing’s fine when my parents have spent hours thinking they lost their second child.”

  “Then it’s all the more important that we go now.”

  “Sure.”

  “God, Phoebe!” I explode. “Stop acting that way. We have to believe in this and make it happen.”

  “The trouble is, I don’t think I believe.”

  “You think your sister’s forever stuck in time,” I say. “She’s going to find someone to give her a long skirt and put her hair up in a bun and teach her to speak French.”

  No response.

  “I don’t need this,” I say. “You’re giving me all this attitude, but actually you’re the source of the problem.”

  “I know,” she says. “That’s why the attitude.”

  I soften. “It’s okay. As soon as your parents get Tabby back, everything’s going to be fine.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s at least going to be a lot more fine than if we never go get her, right? Let’s do it.”

  She doesn’t respond. I turn around and shout to Eleanor, “We’ll be back soon, with Tabby!”

  She smiles at me but her smile fades when she looks at Phoebe. “I’ll expect you back shortly,” she says.

  “Okay, bye!”

  I feel like I’m some ridiculous cheerleader still bouncing on the balls of her feet while the entire team has been slaughtered a
nd lies in fly-encrusted heaps on the field.

  “A leader leads,” I hear Eleanor say under her breath.

  “Got it,” I say. “Let’s go, back into the past.” I close my eyes, firmly grasping Phoebe’s hand. I’m picturing that entourage on the lawn, Yolande scurrying along, her family following, Giraude’s baby passed along to another family member, the horses pawing the ground, the beautiful carriages waiting to take them away.

  But instead we land on the beach again. The rock rises up against the horizon, and the waves come to the shore and recede again.

  “See what I mean?” says Phoebe.

  “Is this what happened last time?”

  “Yes.” She nods miserably. “I tried and tried and could only wind up here.”

  “No wonder you were so upset.”

  She lets out a sob, and I press her to me. “It’s going to be okay,” I say into her hair, which smells of salt air. “Phoebe, honestly, we will find her. I know we will.”

  “I wish I had your faith.”

  “You know what else I think, though? I think Tabby has a lot of your spirit in her. I think no matter where she is, she’s fine. She’s a smart girl.”

  “But she’s surrounded by evil people.”

  “She’s smart. I left her in the shadows, and I bet she stayed there until it was safe to go. Trust her a little.”

  “She’s two!”

  “But she’s from an extraordinary family,” I say. “She’s an Arnaud.”

  “I don’t have much respect for the Arnauds, including myself.”

  “Listen, this could all turn out brilliant. There’s a prophecy, and we’re part of it.”

  “We think.”

  “Athénaïs seems to agree.”

  “Well, can Athénaïs get me to my sister?”

  I stare at her.

  And smile.

  “Maybe?” I say.

  I intention us back to the hallway above the staircase. It’s dark and I don’t even know which chamber was Athénaïs’s.

  “All we can do is hope that it happens again,” I say.

  We wait there long moments, but no light appears from under any of the doors. I guess at which door is hers and open it. Can’t see anything. I push my way to the window and look out. The moon shows the vast lawns and . . . in the distance . . . Eleanor. She’s walking back to the chateau from the Hameau.