by Beth Byers
“Three girls. They’re ten, eight, and seven.”
Severine nodded, grateful that Mr. Brand and Lisette were aware that she was stumbling about in her head and carried on without her.
“What are their names?” Lisette asked.
“Elcie, Madeline, and Cosette.”
Oh, little sisters. They looked like her in her imagination. Little silent waifs that blew into rooms uncalled for and disappeared without notice. Severine knew it was unlikely, but she felt this need to protect them and—given her own acknowledged half-brother had tried to kill her—the greatest act of love she could show them was to leave them be.
“Do they have enough to see them through this life, to settle them well?”
“They do.” Mr. Brand’s gaze was carefully fixed on Severine as though she were Lot’s wife, just turned to salt. Would she blow away now? Severine wondered.
“Can she meet them?” Lisette asked for Severine.
Severine shook her head. “No.”
“No?” Lisette asked gently.
“No. Not me. Keep an eye on them," she told Mr. Brand. "Make sure they have what they need. Some of what they want. Make sure if their mother has another lover, he’s not unkind, but nothing beyond that.”
“Oh Severine,” Lisette said low and soft.
Severine sniffed as she said, “I think that’s enough for today.”
When she left the office, she felt a bit as though she should be changed by the knowledge of more siblings. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she wished she were surprised. How lonely she’d been as a child. How she’d desperately wished for a sibling of her own. Back then, Andre hadn’t counted, older half-brother and in her life though he was, he'd had no interest in her. She had thought that if she just had a brother or sister of her own someone would love her. Someone would care.
She needed to avoid them. If they didn’t matter to her, they wouldn’t matter to whoever was trying to hurt her.
Andre had, after all, tried to kill her. To steal her fortune and her life and then refused her offers to help him when they’d trapped him in his crimes. The only reason he was free today was because Grandmère had released him from the cellar, and he’d escaped.
She hated that she was as worried that they wouldn’t like her. No, she thought, don’t think those thoughts. Her mind drifted back to Andre. Where was he now? She laughed darkly, seeing Lisette’s askance look and feeling Anubis as he leaned into her while they stood on the sidewalk. Andre certainly wasn’t practicing medicine and caring for the ill.
“Life isn’t fair,” Severine said.
Lisette’s scoff was timely and pointed. Severine found herself laughing. “Let’s get the puppies and go for a walk?”
“I don’t care to walk forever as you do,” Lisette said and then elbowed Severine lightly. “Perhaps I don't mind this time since you’ve been forced to realize yet again that your father was a bit of a bastard. We have lunch with Meline first, however.”
Severine and Lisette met Meline at a crawfish house near the dress shop. It was one of the few in the city that didn’t have the sign in the window reading, ‘No blacks.’ Severine and Lisette took a table near a window at the front and ordered for Meline, so she could use her break time to eat while they chatted.
Just after their food arrived, Meline rushed over from the dress shop and shoved a pile of drawings at Severine before digging into her food. Severine flipped through the drawings, pausing on a sketch of herself in a long slinky dress that dipped low in the front and the back.
“My scar will show.” Her brother had shot her earlier that summer and the mark was still red and angry, though healed over. It announced its existence with the contrast of red against ghostly white skin.
“Humans have scars,” Meline told Severine easily. “Whoever you spend your time with is going to want to see it anyway. I’ve heard spoiled ladies talk about Andre a few times while they’re buying dresses. Usually lamenting that he was so handsome and wondering whether he’d still be considered a good catch. Those fools are going to be looking for the scar so you might as well let them see it and then look down your nose at them.”
Severine gasped. She ran one finger down her nose while she asked, “Surely, no one would want to marry someone who tried to commit murder?”
Lisette leaned back, unsurprised. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that women will look over a lot to not be the old maid.”
Severine’s mouth dropped. “Attempted murder?”
“They don’t believe it was an attempt at murder. Your grandmother is putting it around that it was an accident and you’re high-strung,” Meline told Severine flatly. Her dark brown eyes moved over Severine, and she added, “I thought you knew.”
Severine wasn’t even surprised. Surprised or upset. If anything, she was upset that she hadn’t realized. “Thank you for telling me.”
“She’s not upset?” Meline asked Lisette. “If that were my granny, I’d throw a fit that would ring in her ears for a decade!”
“She knows what the woman is,” Lisette said. “No love lost there on either side.”
“Have you seen her since…everything?” Meline asked low.
“At events where we overlap," Severine answered. "We smile and press cheeks.”
Meline scoffed and then gestured at the drawings again, watching carefully as Severine moved through the dresses. The first dress had made her lift her brow, but she’d wanted it right away. Despite the scar, she’d wanted that long slinky thing.
The next drawing, however, had Severine lifting both brows and dropping her jaw the tiniest bit. It was Severine in a suit. The black pants were loose and flowing, but they were matched with a white version of a man’s shirt, a black tie, black suspenders, a vest, and a coat. It looked a bit like someone had combined the flow of beach pajamas with a gentlemen’s suit. Despite the austere black, it was completely feminine.
The men’s white shirt was pleated down the front. A man could have worn it, but it would still skew feminine on Severine. The black tie was embroidered, black-on-black, with dragons and roses. The vest had matching embroidery.
“Oh.” Severine’s head tilted. “I like the shirt especially. I’d want a good half-dozen of those in white. The high collar, all of it. And the black ties. How about, along with these pants, a few skirts as well? Something to go with the jacket and the tie? Like what a school girl would wear, but a bit longer?”
Lisette looked over Severine’s shoulder and her mouth dropped too. She gasped and then her eyes narrowed with an evil smirk. “Please wear that for the first time with your grandmother. If I’ve ever seen anything that will cause an old Southern woman’s hair to curl and knock her into a swoon, it’s that ensemble, cher.”
Meline nodded and Severine kept looking. There were also designs of sporting clothes in only black and white. No colorful tweeds for her. Everything, really, was black with shades of white, wine red, and deep purple as accents.
“I set some things aside for you at the shop,” Meline said. “If you want, I can send them over. You can keep what you want, and Madam will bill you for what you keep.”
Severine nodded, immediately agreeable. Just the act of sending them to Severine would put Meline in a good position with the shop owner, and Meline had an excellent grasp of what Severine might actually wear.
“Madam is desperate to know who is making your clothes. She’d murder me if she realized it was me, and I’d be out of a job for sure.” Meline’s mouth twisted with a grin. “Ah well.”
“Ah well,” Severine echoed with a matching grin. “I have a party coming up that Grayson and Oliver are determined to attend. There’s been some activity in the house and the Spirit Society wishes to investigate and see what they can find. It’s also with a woman who knew my father quite well according to rumors.”
“So something startling then,” Meline nodded.
“Eye-catching,” Lisette told Meline. “Her aunt is determined t
o reel Severine into line. She needs something that refuses to be contained.”
“A queen’s dress, something commanding and independent.” Meline nodded. “But appropriate for a spooky ghost party.”
Severine didn’t have the imagination for dresses the same way Meline did, and Severine needed the visuals of the drawings to have an idea of what Meline could imagine up in moments.
They finished eating and Severine approved the wardrobe Meline had been working on. Then they parted ways. Lisette left to write notes for her, and Severine found her way to the city park with the three dogs to walk, as Lisette called it, endlessly.
The day rolled by as Severine wandered the park. She fed birds and sat under a tree and read one of the books she’d taken from her father’s hidden library. She reviewed her list of questions about her father and mother and their lives. She walked more.
The melancholy was fading in the face of her true emotions. She felt as though she were treading water and getting nowhere. She’d read all the reports of her father’s business, and her conclusion had been that they were well-told lies. The problem was that whatever Father had been up to during the Great War, he’d ended afterwards.
By the time he’d bought the big house in the country, his business practices had changed. Which wasn’t to say that the business partners hadn’t delved immediately into running booze into the country and secretly manufacturing deep in the bayou.
She started to read her list again when she felt eyes fixated on her. How long had he been staring? How long had it taken for her to become aware? She met those familiar eyes across the park, and then her brother lifted his hat to her, finger shooting her like a child playing cowboys.
She pretended she wasn’t bothered, and then she stayed longer because she wasn’t going to be driven away from a place she loved by a man who should be begging her forgiveness.
Chapter 3
Severine and Lisette walked out of the house, leaving behind the dogs, to Anubis’s distress. He was too well behaved to express himself beyond flopping to the ground by the door and huffing darkly. Kali and Persephone, however, flopped down next to Anubis and whimpered.
“Here we go again,” Lisette muttered. “What do you think? Will we finally discover what Grayson and Oliver are up to?”
“No,” Severine said quietly as Mr. Brand stepped out of the vehicle and opened the back door for them. He had purchased a secondary car for her, this one a chauffeured Rolls-Royce for moments like these. The driver was a friend of a friend of Lisette’s mother, and he could be counted on to keep an eye out for Andre and as backup if things turned sideways for Severine again.
The house they were going to was outside of the French Quarter and had a large old mansion with a good amount of land. It had the requisite carved pillars, arches above the windows, thick velvet drapes, and even the stone lions of the very rich. Severine kept herself from rolling her eyes at the stone lions. In her opinion, lions should only attend a castle. The smaller the house, the smaller the cat. In fact, she thought, she should really get a set of carved house cats for the walk up to her house.
Severine took Mr. Brand’s hand and let him guide her out of the car. He turned to Lisette and then they all looked up to see Mr. Thorne and Mr. Oliver waiting for them. They’d become allies, of a sort, in the hunt for the killer of Severine’s parents. For them, it was opportunities like this event that Severine provided them. They had provided her their wits, strength, and eyes when she’d needed them. Those things had been valuable, she reminded herself.
Grayson Thorne held out his arm.
“You look ravishing,” he told her.
She smiled a thank you. The dress that Meline designed was a black sleeveless number with no back. The top half of the dress clung to her form while the bottom half ended in waves of fabric that trailed on the ground. There was a black lace wrap lined with wine red to provide the sheerest touch of color, outside of her wine red lipstick. The final touch was the gloves that reached several inches past her elbow.
Severine placed her gloved hand on the crook of his elbow and let him lead her up the steps. At the top, she saw Grandmère accompanied by Andre. Grayson stiffened as Severine faced her brother.
“Grandmère,” Severine said easily, her eyes moving with contempt over both of them. “You’ll be glad to hear that only Andre’s income has been stopped, but of course, if he had tried to collect it, Mr. Brand might call in the authorities.”
“You are a terrible sister,” Grandmère hissed low, her eyes narrowed. “Appearances must be preserved.”
“Mmm,” Severine agreed as easily as before, but this time she laughed. She rubbed her shoulder lightly.
“You should cover that thing.”
“But then the young women of New Orleans might think Andre is a catch. Beau of the ball and all of that, dear Grandmère. One should be publicly minded first.” Severine eyed her brother coldly and then said, “The trust has been amended. Obviously, you’ve been removed. We were able to change who inherits for me as well.”
She smiled at them and turned away as Grandmère demanded who Severine’s heir was.
“You’re not of legal age,” Andre hissed at her.
“Yes, but things can be done all the same. Also my father never trusted you, so he put some clever wording into the trust and the way it will be administered. It is sad to be you and it seems, quite poor as well. Maybe murder your father instead, since you have a chance in hell of ending up with a little something there.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, grabbing her arm. Grayson Thorne reached out and pulled Andre away in a manner that had him yelping and immediately letting go.
“You’ll have to teach me that,” Severine said and then continued through the grand hall.
Mrs. Theodosia Grantley was ancient. She was the kind of old that was frail, curled, and heavily wrinkled. Her thin white hair barely covered her scalp from what Severine could tell, but Mrs. Grantley had covered it mostly with a turban. Her dress was as black as Severine’s, and she too wore a slash of powerful red lipstick.
Under all of that age, Mrs. Grantley’s eyes were sharp as ever. Her gaze moved over Severine and then Mrs. Grantley stepped back as if she needed a little distance for a proper look. With the lack of care of a woman who is past social niceties, she said, “You look nothing like your mother.”
A girl tittered, giving herself away for eavesdropping. Mrs. Grantley examined the girl, with—was that an edge of disgust?
Severine blinked just once and then said, “I’m aware.”
“That’s hardly a bad thing,” Mrs. Grantley added. “Your mother was another daisy just like Clementine over there. A dime a dozen and of little lasting interest. I suspect you have far more depth.” Mrs. Grantley snorted and then reached out and gently touched Severine’s shoulder. “Is this where he shot you?”
Severine’s head tilted.
“I’m well aware of what you have in Solange Charpentier. I don’t believe your grandmother's lies about what occurred, and anyone who knows her well knows she’s colored the story for her own wants.”
“That is where I was shot,” Severine answered, refusing to speak about her grandmère.
“Grandmama,” a woman said. “Why don’t you come sit?”
They all turned and Severine found herself looking at a face she somewhat recognized. “Amelia?”
“Sevie,” Amelia replied. She wasn’t happy to see Severine, but there was no animosity in her expression. “Come Grandmama, I’ll get you some champagne, shall I?”
“No,” Mrs. Grantley said. “I’m not dead yet and there’s time enough to sit in a corner.” Her eyes moved back to Severine, and she asked, “Was the nunnery they shut you away in haunted?”
Severine paused, considering her answer. “It’s difficult to say.”
“What does that mean?” Mrs. Grantley demanded. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I believe in life after death. I believe
it’s possible that we could see the dead. But I don’t believe that the dead linger in a house to haunt a person when there are, probably, so many more things to do. So, do I believe that the nunnery is haunted? No.”
“But you have a reason to say you believe in ghosts?”
Severine fiddled with her finger before she answered, “I suppose I do.”
“Your parents?”
Severine shook her head. Did she believe her mother or father would somehow push their way through the veil of the living and dead to convey pride and love for her? No, she didn’t. Not at all. But, should the day arrive that others she loved died, Severine wouldn’t be surprised to see them one last time.
“I have never seen a ghost.” It was an equivocation, and she could see that Mrs. Grantley wasn’t impressed.
“Then why?” Mrs. Grantley shot out. “Why do you believe? Most are skeptics.”
Severine glanced at Mr. Thorne, who had never said why he was part of the Spirit Society. She looked behind her at Mr. Brand, who had never said one way or the other. Next was Lisette, who said things were better left alone. Mr. Oliver, like Mr. Thorne, had never expressed his true feelings.
Severine turned back to Mrs. Grantley. “I’ve only loved a few people truly and deeply. And I have only trusted those few. One of them had an experience, and I completely trust that person.”
“You’ve never felt as though you’ve been haunted?”
Severine paused again before answering. “I have felt that often, but I’m not sure I believe it is ghosts. Rather it feels like memories with too much weight.”
Mrs. Grantley patted Severine on the face, ignoring the audience of the offended eavesdropper Clementine, her own granddaughter, and Severine’s friends. At further distance were Grandmère and Andre, and all of them were watching Severine with the matriarch.
“I believe,” Mrs. Grantley told Severine. “I have always believed and though I’ve never seen a thing, I have often felt as though my Roscoe or my parents were nearby. Do you feel as though your parents are nearby?”