A Drop of Night(70)

“Welcome home, Anouk.”








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


The servants’ passages are mirrored, floor, wall, ceiling, and 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 northern-most 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. “The point was 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 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 now, 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 now, 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 now, and let us go. Quickly, and not a word, yes?”

Delphine tries to say something. I cannot hear it. 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. It is 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. 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 . . .