Miramont's Ghost (27 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

A
drienne turned on her side on the narrow couch. Tears slid slowly from the edges of her eyes and dropped onto the satin fabric. She stared at the bay window across the room. Beveled glass caught the sunlight, bent it, spread geometric shapes around the walls and ceiling and floor. How could she not have known? If her powers to see, to hear, were truly so great, how could she not have known that she carried a child—his child—inside her?

She felt dirty. Shamed to the very core of her being. She blushed, even now, at the look she had seen in the doctor’s eyes. She heard his broken attempts to tell her, to explain what was wrong. She heard him, standing in the hall, breaking the news to Julien and Marie.

She saw her grand-père’s face, and bit her lip, burying her head in the couch cushion. She could not look him in the eye, not even in her imagination, with this new development. She pictured Gerard—saw his eyes, dark and gentle, as the two of them had stood at Grand-père’s grave in the blustery winds of winter twilight. She shook her head, trying to blot out the image. What would Gerard think of her now? What would anyone think?

Marie pushed the door open and carried a tray into the room. She laid it on the floor, pulled a small table next to the couch. Its legs scraped against the wood. She bent, picked up the tray, and placed it on the table. She looked at Adrienne. Adrienne did not meet her eyes; she did not speak. Marie stood for another moment, her skirts still moving slightly. She turned and left the room.

Adrienne glanced at the tray: teapot, cup and saucer, sugar and creamer, a delicate silver spoon. There was a plate with two slices of buttered toast. Adrienne looked away. She would never feed this . . . this . . . Her breath caught, hung in her throat. This baby. This child of a nightmare. She would never eat again.

She lay on her side, staring out the windows. She watched as the light changed, slowly, from the bright glare of morning to a softer, clouded gold of afternoon. When the color had started to fade, when the room had dimmed, the door opened.

Marie looked at the tray beside Adrienne, untouched. The cold toast was shriveled and hard. Marie picked it up and carried it out of the room. Several minutes later, she came back, another tray in hand.

Adrienne almost smiled into the cushion: Marie, waiting on her. Marie, carrying a tray, just like a servant. Marie, forced to be the one to care for Adrienne. Julien could not, would not. And Marie was unwilling to take the chance and ask the nuns on the hill for help. There was always the chance that they might talk about Julien, that the sisters might spread word of Adrienne’s “illness.”

Marie slid the tray onto the table. She turned toward Adrienne. She picked up the cup, poured the tea out in a slender, steaming stream. She dropped in a lump of sugar, poured the cream. The spoon clinked against the sides of the cup.

Marie held the cup in front of Adrienne’s unfocused eyes. “Drink your tea, Adrienne,” she whispered. “It will make you feel better.”

Adrienne’s eyes shot up to her aunt’s face, dim and smoky in the waning light. She’d heard that tone before . . . Where was it? It seemed many lifetimes ago. “Drink your tea, Adrienne. Drink your tea, Adrienne.” The words echoed in Adrienne’s head. “Drink your wine, Adrienne.”

Adrienne looked up at Marie, who stood holding the teacup in her hand. Adrienne looked at it, at the thin, almost translucent china of the cup. She pushed herself to a sitting position, took the cup and saucer in hands that shook. The cup rattled and sloshed. Adrienne brought it down to her lap, raised the cup in her right hand, and sipped.

Marie breathed a long, slow sigh.

Adrienne looked up at her. She sipped again. She stared at Marie, as she slowly drank every drop. She held the cup and saucer out to Marie.
“Merci,”
she whispered. She only thought the rest: there was no need to say the words out loud. “Thank you. Thank you for the poison. Thank you for helping me get this over with. I certainly hope you’ve been able to find something stronger than laudanum.” They knew, they both knew, all the ways that Marie had been wrong. Adrienne lay back down on the couch, on her side. She pulled her legs up, curled into herself, like a baby.

Marie took the tray and pulled the door closed when she left.

Baby. Baby. The word bounced around the room. It screamed inside her head. Baby. Julien’s baby.

Adrienne sat up, threw off the blanket. She paced to the window, pulled back the lace curtain, stared into the blue dark of twilight. She laid her head against the cold glass. Tears made silent trails down her face, glistening in the pale light of the moon. The decision came quickly. After all this time, after all this loss, her determination was rigid and unyielding. She had tolerated far too much suffering.

She turned, walked across the room, turned the handle, and softly pulled the door open. She leaned forward into the hallway, looking, listening. The castle was dark. Everything was quiet. She heard no noise in the parlor, could see no glow from the fire, or the lamps. She moved across the hall, into the kitchen. She opened the drawer with the knives, the same knives she had used to cut the cake for the Creighton family not so long ago. She reached in, picked up a long, slender handle, the blade curving slightly at the end. She looked at it, ran her finger over the tip of the blade.

She laid the knife against her skirt and moved quietly back across the hall. She closed the door of the chapel behind her, the click just a soft note in the quiet room. She sat down on the couch and held the knife in front of her. She ran her fingers over it, again and again, stroking the silver blade.

Adrienne looked up. She looked into the dark eyes of Archbishop Lamy, a portrait Julien had purchased when he left New Mexico. Her eyes rose to the rosary draped on the wall next to it. They flicked to the statue of Jesus hanging on the cross. It clung to a narrow strip of wall between the windows. His shoulders were slumped, his forehead dripping blood from his crown of thorns. His eyes, like hers, were unfocused, unseeing, as he waited for the agony to be over.

She stared at him. Waiting for the agony to be over. That was a feeling that she knew far too well. Here she was, not twenty years old, and her life had been one agony after another. She could not remember anything else; all that had been good in her life was lost, ripped away. All she felt at this moment was a horrible, swirling soup of shame, fear, revulsion, anger. But the worst of all was the hopelessness. She no longer expected God to help her. She no longer believed that
anyone
could help her.

Adrienne’s eyes dropped to the knife. She pictured Marie sitting at the dressing table in her room. She pictured standing behind her at the dressing table, the knife held hidden in the folds of her skirt. She pictured grabbing Marie by the hair, yanking her head backward. She pictured drawing the blade across that neck, blood shooting onto the mirror, and the floor, and all over her hands.

In her mind, she walked, in a trance, down the hall to Julien’s bedroom. She pictured sneaking up on him, the way he had snuck up on her. She pictured standing next to his bed, watching as he became aware of her—watching as he woke from sleep to find her standing over him, holding the knife in both hands. She pictured raising her arms above her head and driving that blade as hard as she could into his chest. She could see the fountain of blood; she could see his eyes fill with shock and horror as life escaped his body.

Adrienne ran her finger along the blade. She looked at the way the silver caught the moonlight, sending slender streams of pale white light flashing around the room. She turned the knife slowly and then laid it against her wrist, testing the weight of it, the feel of it in her hand. She watched her vein pulse from the pressure. She looked up again, at Jesus. At the savior. She thought of all the teachings of the church, all the words of Père Henri as he cautioned a much younger Adrienne about the “wages of sin.”

She would go to hell. She knew that. For what she’d just thought—for what she was about to do. Hellfire. Eternal damnation. But could hell be any worse than this? Hell was living in this prison, tortured by two people she hated, pregnant with the child of a man she abhorred.

Her eyes dropped to her wrist, pale and creamy in the moonlight. She turned the blade on its edge. She drew a deep breath, pulled the blade across her wrist, as deep as she could make it cut. The pain caused her eyes to water. Blood oozed, and then began to pour. Her hand grew wet and sticky. Blood ran down her arm, onto her skirt. She dropped the knife. It bounced on the floor.

She sat, staring into the moonlight coming through the windows, waiting for her life to leak away. Her eyes grew heavy. An exhaustion heavier than anything she had ever known pulled at her, dragging her down into its murky depths. She lay down on her side, her bloody arm between her body and the couch, but held out, like a stiff branch. Blood poured onto the floor, a slender river cascading from her arm. She closed her eyes. Sighed. A smile turned up the corners of her mouth. It was almost over. The fear, the pain, the shame. Almost over. Relief. At long last . . . relief.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

M
arie opened the door to the chapel the next morning, tray in hand. For a moment, her mind could not register the sight before her. She dropped the tray; it clattered on the floor. China shattered, tea poured along the floorboards. Marie’s hands rose to her mouth. The smell was sickening, metallic and rusty. She moved forward slowly, her skirts dragging through the blood. She reached for the knife that had fallen to the floor and held it, blood marking her hands.

She bent over, blood rushing to her head, forcing her to reach for a wall and slide her body slowly to the floor. The smell, the blood, was overpowering. She held her hand over her mouth and nose, tried to fight back the bile that threatened to erupt from her throat.

Julien appeared behind her, drawn by the crash. “Oh my God!”

He rushed past Marie, knelt on the floor next to Adrienne, his pants growing damp from the pool of thickening blood. He held his hand to her neck and reached for a pulse. Marie knew there was no need. Her body was cold and rigid.

He knelt next to her, his hand resting on her shoulder. Her eyes were closed. She looked almost peaceful. As if she’d gone to sleep.

Marie sat slumped against the wall, staring at the pool of blood. The knife dropped from her now-bloody hand and clattered on the floor.

The seconds ticked by, both of them utterly quiet.

For a moment, Marie was paralyzed with memory, no longer sitting in a room in Manitou Springs, but back again at Beaulieu. She was thirteen years old. She could hear the baby, Genevieve, wailing and crying. She moved toward the door of her mother’s bedroom, an overwhelming dread filling her being. She heard the creak of the bedroom door as it swung open. Baby Genevieve lay in her bassinet, her screams punctuating the stillness in the room. The smell was the same; the pool of blood was the same. She moved closer to the body of her mother, lying on the bed. Her arm lay close by her side; blood had pooled under the wrist and leaked onto the bedding, onto Marguerite’s nightgown. It pooled on the floor. Marie moved closer, her head shaking back and forth. Her foot hit against something. She bent down and picked up the knife that Marguerite had used to take her own life.

Marie could not scream. It caught in her throat and stayed there, frozen into stillness, as the baby’s nurse rushed in behind her, her own screams loud and almost ludicrous in their ferocity. Marie had held the knife close against her own skirt, unwilling to let the nurse see it. Her father charged in a moment later, banishing the nurse from the room and quickly taking charge.

She remembered the months, the years, of walking into a room and seeing the dark eyes of the servants on her, their voices suddenly hushed. She remembered the stares of the people in the village. Her father had done his best to change the story, to make it sound as if Marguerite had died from complications of childbirth. He made a very large contribution to the church. Marguerite was buried in the family cemetery, with a full Christian burial. But the gossip never really died, and neither had the shame and humiliation and anger. Marie had spent her whole life trying to make sure that no one would ever gossip about them again. She had spent her whole life trying to protect herself, and those she loved, from any further pain and disgrace. She had spent her whole life, and especially these past few years of controlling Adrienne, trying to avoid the pain and fear of that awful moment.

“We should . . . we need . . .” Marie began. She fought nausea, pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and held it to her mouth and nose. She pushed herself up to her feet. “We . . . we have to get her out of here. The sisters will be coming with our trays . . . We cannot let anyone see this.”

Julien nodded at her words. He could not meet her eyes, and she stared at the back of his head. How could he have done this? Here she was, nearing the end of her life, and worried, once again, that word of a suicide would travel through town. Worried that Dr. Creighton might reveal the reason that the young girl had taken her own life. All the nightmares that she had spent a lifetime trying to avoid were back again, slamming against her. And
he
was the cause. The son for whom she would do anything. The son she had bent heaven and earth to protect. Marie thought quickly, as she always had. It was February; the ground outside was frozen. Trying to dispose of the body outside was out of the question. Besides, what if someone, what if one of the nuns, should see him? She looked around the room, let her mind travel through the castle. Where could they put her? She thought of staircases, closets, the coal room in the basement. She thought of the many fireplaces. None of those would work. The smell would permeate the building. When the sisters came down from Montcalme with their trays of food, they would notice it immediately.

Julien stood, walked to the other side of the couch, out of the pool of blood, and knelt, sliding his arms under Adrienne’s legs and shoulders. Heaving from the weight, he stood on shaky legs and turned toward the door. Adrienne’s head tipped back; her hair fell in a sheet of reddish gold.

“I’ll bury her,” he whispered. “In my private chapel, at the other end of the parlor. There’s a tunnel, an old mining tunnel, behind the north wall. We found it during construction. I think I can get her in there.”

Marie nodded.

Julien shifted the weight in his arms. Adrienne’s arm fell to the side. He maneuvered her through the door. “Could you . . .”

Marie stared at the puddles of blood on the floor. She held the handkerchief to her mouth. “I’ll clean up,” she whispered.

Julien turned and walked down the hallway, to the other end of the castle. He laid Adrienne on the floor, next to the chapel door, while he fumbled with his keys. This was his personal chapel. He never allowed anyone in here. He found the key, jammed it into the lock. The door swung open.

He bent, and picked up the body once again. He panted, as if her slender weight had turned to lead with the alchemy of death. He carried her to the other end of the room. The room was stone on all four sides. Only one window shone in the space. It was small, high up on the wall. He laid her, again, on the floor.

He moved back to the door, went through to the parlor, and looked for some tool to work with. He returned with the letter opener, removed his jacket, and closed the door to the chapel behind him. He began to chip at the mortar between the stones, the stones that lined the back wall of the room, next to the mountainside.

It took several hours. The light in the window had paled to gray when he had finally removed enough of the stones to fit himself through. He wiped the dust from his hands, lit a candle, and stepped into the dark, damp space. He shivered. The belly of the mountain swallowed him in its eerie silence.

Julien went back, slipped his hands under Adrienne’s arms, and pulled, sliding her, one tug at a time, into the tunnel. He crouched, pulled her several feet into the tunnel, and laid her body on the cold, damp earth. He arranged her limbs, which had grown stiff in the hours of digging. He thought of getting a blanket, her cloak, something to wrap her in, but it was more trouble than he could manage. He wanted nothing more than to get this over with, to get out of this dark space, away from the eerie feeling of death. He wanted to pretend it had never happened. He wanted to erase the words of the doctor; he wanted to eradicate the look on his mother’s face.

He knelt, shivering, tired in every limb, every muscle. It crossed his mind, briefly, that he should pray—that he should whisper a “Hail Mary” or an “Our Father.” He shivered again and started to cough.

He knelt and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. But the words caught, stuck in his craw. He could not speak. He could not pray. He looked at her body, at the wisp of a frame that held a baby. Not his baby, he insisted to the dark. With a girl like Adrienne, how could you ever be sure? She had been trouble from the moment she was born. There was no telling what other secrets she held.

He turned and hurried away from her, rushed to evade his own guilt. Inside the little chapel, he knelt and began to put the stones back in place. He felt exhausted, unable to continue. The only light in the room was the flicker of the candle, the window having gone dark and black while he was inside the tunnel. He sat back on his heels, staring into the dark crevice.

The thought of going to bed, upstairs, just above this room, sent a shiver down his spine. He could not leave the space open, her body stiff and cold, uncovered. No matter how tired he felt, he knew he had to continue, to get those stones back into place. He could mortar them later. But tonight, he had to close that dark opening, shut off that ghastly sight. Erase her from memory. Block her in, as if she had never existed.

He worked into the early-morning hours. When he had finished, he moved to the door of the little chapel, shut it hard, and locked it behind him. He could barely hold his head up, barely move his feet through the parlor.

He stopped, staring down the hall toward the other chapel, the one by the kitchen. He moved slowly, holding his candle before him. The door swung backward slowly when he pushed it, a soft swoosh against the floor.

The room was clean. The broken dishes were gone, the spilled tea wiped from the walls. The knife no longer lay on the wooden planks. There was no sign of blood on the floor. The couch looked pale silver in the night. He could feel the dampness where Marie had cleaned it. But he could see no sign of blood.

He turned and dragged himself to bed.