A Drop of Night(30)

“We need to go!” Lilly whines. She’s standing next to us, shifting from foot to foot and brandishing her sword like an angry garden gnome.

I knot the last strip of velvet around the makeshift bandage and stand quickly.

“We’re going. Can you walk?” I say to the pale man. “Vous pouvez marcher?”

He nods, but he doesn’t stand. Will helps him up. Lets him go. His leg cricks grotesquely, and he almost drops again. Will catches him.

“By yourself?” Jules asks testily.

Will holds him up, and we start to walk across the room. Slowly. Okay, maybe this was stupid.

“Take us to the exit,” I say in French. “The way out. La police pour nous, l’h?pital pour vous.”

He shakes his head wildly.

“What d’you mean ‘no’? Yes! Like, right now!”

“Not yet,” he says, lowering his head, squeezing his eyes closed, doing that bobbing bow again. “Not safe. We must hide!”

“He says we need to hide?”

“Where? Where do we hide?”

“Follow,” he says, and now he rips out of Will’s grasp and begins to hobble unsteadily into the Sistine Room, through the doors, back toward the white antechamber. We hurry after him, Will going right up to his side in case he wants to make a run for it. We’re slamming through doors, through an endless string of sumptuous rooms. Drapes, gilt, paintings, and furniture pass in blur. Now we’re in a narrow corridor, the walls paneled in dark wood, the ceiling ribbed with gilt, patterned as if it’s made up of massive dragonfly wings. The pale guy skids to a stop in front of a double door. He starts nodding, gesturing with his hands.

“Safe?” I ask, tapping a hand on the wood. “We’ll be safe in here?”

He stares at me, eyes twitching. Jules turns, staring down the corridor.

“Safe!” I repeat, urgently. “Est-il sécuritaire?”

Something’s coming. I hear it now that we’ve stopped—far, far away, but getting closer, the unmistakable sound of pounding feet. Doors opening. And that humming’s back, sudden and sharp. The same humming I heard in the bone-white antechamber, but louder now—a thin, fuzzy line of sound, rising painfully. Whoever’s approaching, they can’t be more than five rooms away. In a few seconds they’ll be bursting into the corridor.

The pale man is freaking out, and so is Jules. The hum is a bone saw now, cutting into my brain.

Unless there’s a contingent of Sapanis on the other side of these doors, draped over chaises longues and sipping the blood of infants from martini glasses, this is where we’re hiding.

I rip open the doors. Will grabs the pale guy, Lilly grabs Jules, and we’re all piling into someplace big, someplace dark—








Palais du Papillon, Chambres Jacinthe—112 feet below, 1789


They have separated me from my sisters. I cannot remember the moment it happened. Perhaps I went mad for a short while after meeting with Father, or perhaps I was simply too tired and battered with grief to notice, but they are gone now. I remember the dry click of our shoes on wooden floors, Delphine’s soft crying, and the swish of Charlotte’s and Bernadette’s skirts as they held hands and comforted each other. A door, creaking open and shut. Crawling into the cold sheets of a bed. When I woke, I was alone. I have been alone ever since.

Nine days since I have seen the sun.

Nine days since Mama died.

Nine nights in these close and muffled chambers.

Nine scratches on the wood behind the bed canopy.

I feel as though I have been buried alive.

My tomb is lovely. It consists of two rooms. The hyacinth rooms, so says a scroll above the door, the chambres jacinthe. There is a bedroom, lavish in colors of pale green and rose. There is a boudoir draped in blue silks, with a great curling fireplace of snowy marble. I tried to climb up the chimney on the second day, but there was a grate only four feet from the ground and no way to loosen it. I still wonder sometimes where it comes out, whether there are chimneys poking out of the earth in the middle of Péronne’s woods far above.

Or perhaps it is a fakery like the mirror windows and the drapes. Perhaps it goes nowhere. I have never seen the fire lit.

My rooms are connected to each other by a tall gilt doorway. There is a small toilet through a panel by the bed, and the door from the boudoir leads to a hallway. That is all I know. The door to the hallway is always locked, and no one has entered or left by it since I arrived.

The servants do not use the doors. They have their own clever system and I never see them, even during the day when they bring me luncheon or tidy one of the rooms. Every night, I go to sleep determined to doze lightly and to wake at the smallest sound, but in the end I sleep like a rock, and in the morning my clothes are cleaned and the lamps have all been trimmed and there is breakfast waiting for me. I have discovered how they do it: when I move from the bedroom to the boudoir or vice-versa, the door will click shut behind me, locking. I can rattle and hammer as much as I please, but it will not open until it wants to, and when it wants to, the room beyond is always empty of anybody. I will find dishes of pastries and bowls of fruit, cups of thick cream, freshly starched petticoats, little pots of tea, and sometimes a new volume of poetry or tales. But the one who brings me these gifts is always gone.