A Drop of Night(43)

I hear the others congregating behind me, rustling like birds. I feel my face rearranging itself into an expression of abject horror. “What’s that?” I squeak. “What—?”

Jules breathes out: “Whoa.”

My knuckles go white. I want to hold my skull, squeeze it like a lemon and feel the craziness drip out, bitter and golden between my fingers. I’m hallucinating again. Pressure sickness. Bad air. It’s been happening a lot lately.

I drop my head, breathe.

I look back at the portrait. Still me. Still my thin arms protruding from the dress, snaking around the bust. Still my angular, closed-up face, looking miffed even when I’m not. My eyes are narrowed, a spark of rebellion in them as if I was angry at the person painting me, and now I’m angry at the person watching me, I’m angry at me––

I shake my head violently. Turn away. We’re in the underground palace of a psycho-criminal-weapons-dealer-family. There’s a portrait of me on their wall. It didn’t make sense before, it doesn’t have to now––

I start running. What if it does make sense? A sick, guilty feeling slithers into my stomach, the one that comes every time I win an award and no one cares, every time I learn a language and I don’t have anyone to speak it with, the one that was there when I was standing in the airport and my mom was chewing gum and Penny was hiding her scarred face behind her hair and they wouldn’t look at me; they didn’t even want to. You’re hanging on that wall like a prize buck because that’s where you belong, Anouk. You’re a bad person.

I hear the others coming after me. Lilly tries to grab my arm. I shove her off. She grabs me again and jerks me around. “Hey,” she says. “Anouk, stop it. Stop.”

I can’t look at her.

She keeps walking with me toward the doors, but she doesn’t let go. I have a flash of fear that she’s going to turn on me now. They all are. They’re going to bash my head in and leave me for dead, a psycho daughter, bleeding out on a psycho’s floor. I would if I were them. If it were Jules or Will or Lilly inside that gilt frame, I would go ballistic.

I feel something welling up inside me, a sort of rage at myself, but also hurt and fear, and I feel like I’m slipping—losing control.

Lilly pushes open the double doors at the end of the gallery. Jules closes them behind us.

You’re not going to cry, Ooky. You’ve gone eight years without crying. It was just a picture. It was just a picture, and you have to think––

I let out a long, grating sob. The sensation is so bizarre I kind of wonder if it came from someone else. I spin away from Lilly, try to hide my face. She’s staring at me. “Go away,” I say, stupidly. I want to make them all go away, turn their backs. “Get lost!”

But they don’t, and I’m crying now, and for some reason the others don’t look like they want to bash my head in. They look worried. They’re huddling around me, and now Lilly grabs my hand and knots her fingers through mine. “It’s okay, Anouk. It’s okay.”

How is this okay? I want to shriek. How is any of this okay?

But I feel Lilly’s hand in mine, and Jules and Will—the warmth of them and the weight of them beside me—and I hear myself wail, loud and long like a newborn baby, and for one blinding second I think it might be.








Palais du Papillon, Chambres Jacinthe—112 feet below, 1790


“Aurélie? Aurélie, I must speak with you!”

Jacques comes tearing into the boudoir. I leap to my feet, smiling, straightening my sleeves—his visits are becoming ever more seldom—but now I see him and the smile drops from my face. He is gasping, his shirt drenched with sweat. His eyes are wild.

“Jacques, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. I don’t know!” He begins pacing, his hands raking through his hair.

I grip his arm, guiding him quickly toward a chair. “Jacques, stop this. What has happened?”

He collapses into the chair and stares at me, and something odd and fearful passes behind his eyes. Now he blinks, and he is himself again.

“I have seen something, I—”

“What. Tell me.” I say it as gently as I can, but I want to scream and shake him.

“One of the cooks,” Jacques says, and his breathing begins to slow, his posture dropping deep into the chair. “Madame Boucheron. She was a saucier in the chateau’s kitchen, Parisian, very good and well paid. But they do not need sauces here. The marquis eats only biscuits and boiled mutton, day in and day out, and she is left stirring bouillon for the servants—

“I do not see how this is so alarming.”

“Aurélie, listen! The servants are all discontented. Everyone is. There are no parties to cook for, nothing to look forward to. And she was saying so. She was demanding to be let back up, to be allowed to return to Paris. And now . . .”

“Now what?”

He turns his head away, his eyes pinched shut.

“Jacques, tell me! What is it?”

I will not go down there, I hear Mama whispering, framed in the open window to the park. Do not ask me to.

“I found her today,” Jacques says. “I was cleaning the marquis’s private apartments above the salle de Jupiter. The marquis did not know, he was busy elsewhere, but Monsieur Vallé gave me the key and told me to hurry. I went in with brushes and buckets. There was something on a table. I thought it was an animal at first, I thought—”