I was the Beauchamp ward for eighteen years.
The traiteur in the Vieux Carré told them I was the only girl whose blood ran hard enough to absorb three killings off the Beauchamp heir.
The first time, I went off the River Road in a runaway carriage. The second time, a holdup man's knife went in under my collarbone on the Mobile road during Mardi Gras. Both times, Silas was holding Pearl Lacroix when I bled out.
The third time I woke, I was sitting at a vanity table three hours before our engagement banquet, in a Worth gown the seamstress had stayed up two nights to finish, with nine albumen photographs and a tenth telegram from Pearl spread across my lap. I threw the diamond ring at his face before he could finish his greeting.
This engagement, I am returning. This dying — let whoever wants it have it.
Five years later, I came home through the New Orleans train shed with a five-year-old boy in a sailor suit holding my hand. Cassius Thorne was waiting at the platform, one hand braced on a porter's cart, his face the color of a man who had been awake since the wire came. He pinned me to a column with the boy still between us and laughed against my ear.
Sweet sister. You played me, and then you ran?
Silas was behind him. He had thinned to nothing inside a black overcoat. He was looking at the boy in my arms the way a starved man looks at bread through glass.
You would carry his child. You would not turn your head once for me.
I held my son closer. The sun caught his open palm, and I saw the crooked life-line that crossed his hand from base to wrist — the same line that ran across mine.
I came back to myself in front of the vanity mirror at Belle Rive, three hours before the engagement banquet, with the maid behind me pinning the last seed-pearl into my hair.
The Worth gown had cost more than the parish schoolmaster earned in a decade. The diamond rivière at my throat had been Adèle Beauchamp's mother's, and her mother's before that. I was wearing twelve thousand dollars of other people's history, and my hands were perfectly steady.
A boy from the Pinkerton agency had left an envelope at the kitchen door at dawn. Sealed with red wax, addressed in a clerk's careful copperplate to Miss Beatrix Marlowe, in confidence. Nine albumen prints and a tenth sheet folded inside.
The prints were of Silas Beauchamp with Pearl Lacroix on the galerie of Pearl's townhouse on Esplanade. His mouth on hers. His hand at the back of her neck. The photographer had been patient — there were four different afternoons in nine plates.
The tenth sheet was a telegram, sent from Pearl to me yesterday and intercepted before the wire-boy reached the gallery.
Beatrix dear. Silas says tonight is only to comfort Grand-mère. He has never loved anyone but me. Be a good cousin.
In my first life I had read that telegram an hour before the banquet and put my hand flat against the wall to keep from sliding down it.
I had not made a scene. I had walked in on Silas's arm and smiled at eighty guests, and I had sat through the toasts, because the Beauchamps had raised me, and a Beauchamp ward did not make scenes.
They had taught me, every year of those eighteen, that Silas's stars were heavy. The traiteur had told them so when he was four. He had three killings owed against his life, and only one girl's blood ran hard enough to absorb them. I was the lucky girl. I was his luck, and his shield, and his — remedy. That was the word Eulalie used in her parlor French. Mon remède.
What I remembered, sitting in that chair three hours before the banquet, was the moment the carriage went off the River Road embankment in my first life, and I saw, just before the wheel-rim clipped me out of the door, Silas's body curved over Pearl's like a man shielding a candle.
I remembered the kidnapper's knife in my second life going in soft under my collarbone, and Silas's voice — not my name, never my name — Don't touch Pearl.
I remembered Adèle by my casket the second time. She had not whispered. She had said it in her ordinary salon voice, to the Beauchamp cousin from Mobile, who I think did not even hear.
She was always going to die for him. She died as intended.
She died as intended.
That sentence kept me company in the dark a long time.
The maid pinned the veil. "Mr. Silas does love you, Miss Bea. They say he spent forty thousand dollars on this banquet alone."
I took out the small leather pocketbook I had not used since my mother packed it for me at age six. I wrote a note in pencil. I rang for the boy at the back stair.
To Mr. Hollis Devereaux of New Orleans, by hand. The marriage settlement is to be voided. Calculate the full eighteen years of board, schooling, and clothing. I will refund the Beauchamps to the cent. — B. Marlowe.
The boy bowed and went.
Devereaux's reply came up twenty minutes later, in his own hand. Miss Marlowe, are you certain. They will not consent.
I looked at myself in the mirror and made the smallest possible movement of my mouth. The veil shifted. Whether they consent does not matter.
The door opened without a knock.
Silas stood in the frame in his banquet coat, his hair freshly cut, his eyes the cool grey they always were when he was already done with a conversation he hadn't begun. His gaze caught on the envelope in my lap, on the photographs spilled face-up across the dressing-table.
He paused half a second.
"You saw them."
I nodded.
He came in and shut the door with the back of his hand. His voice when it came was the voice he used to dictate a freight order.
"Pearl is just back from Paris. She is not in good spirits. I sat with her an afternoon. Do not make trouble tonight."
I took the diamond out of its velvet box.
He saw and his face shifted. "Beatrix."
The ring caught him on the cheekbone. It rang clear off the bone — a small, clean sound, the way a coin sounds on marble. The maid clapped her hand over her mouth.
I stood up. I unclasped the rivière and threw it onto the dressing-table at his hip — the diamonds slithered like spilled water.
"Silas. The engagement, I am returning."
His face went still.
I held his eyes.
"This dying — let whoever wants it have it."
The Belle Rive banquet hall had been set for ninety. The long table was dressed in white damask and crystal. The magic-lantern projector at the far wall had been wheeled in by Marcellus's man that afternoon, the slide carousel loaded with the hand-tinted engagement portrait of me and Silas at its head, ready to throw twelve feet wide onto the linen screen above the mantelpiece.
I had switched the carousel myself, twenty minutes before the guests sat. My hands had not been steady then; they were steady now.
Grand-mère Eulalie was at the head of the table in black silk, the jet mourning rosary running through her left hand the way it had run through her left hand for twenty years. Her face when I came in alone was the face of a woman who had already begun composing a public correction.
The slide projector lit. The engagement portrait went up on the linen — me at nineteen with my hair down, Silas's hand on my shoulder, both of us painted into the kind of smile that takes a painter four sittings to compose.
In the slide I was smiling exactly the way a girl smiles for the man who owns her.
It looked, in the candlelight, like a memorial portrait.
Adèle Beauchamp left her chair before any of the men had registered I was alone. She came down the length of the table at a half-run no Beauchamp woman had taken in public in a generation, and her hand closed on my wrist above the glove.
"Beatrix. What are you about. Do you know what evening this is."
I pulled my wrist out of her hand.
"I came to dissolve the engagement."
The hall went quiet.
Adèle's color came up in patches under her powder. "You have lost your mind. You forget yourself. We had you finished in Paris, we presented you at the Twelfth Night ball, we put your name on the list of every old family between Natchez and Mobile. You were nothing — a charity ward in mourning bonnets — until we made you a Beauchamp in everything but the name. And this is how you repay us."
Marcellus pushed back his chair. The legs scraped. "Beatrix Marlowe. The Beauchamps fed you and clothed you and gave you your name in society. We did not do all of that to be made a public spectacle at our own table."
I reached for the projectionist's handle myself.
The carousel clicked. The engagement portrait blanked.
Then the next slide came up on the linen — twelve feet wide, sharp enough that every guest at the far end of the table could count the buttons on Pearl Lacroix's tea-gown.
It was Silas with his mouth on hers on the galerie of her townhouse, his hand at the back of her neck.
The hall made a single sound — the sound ninety people make when they all draw breath at once. Glassware clinked where someone's hand jolted.
Pearl had been seated near the cousins from Mobile. Her face went the color of paper. Tears arrived on cue.
"Beatrix dear — you misread it — I was unwell, Silas only steadied me —"
I clicked the carousel forward.
The next slide was a still of the wax-cylinder transcript Devereaux's clerks had typed out from the cylinder Cass's man had recorded in Pearl's parlor a fortnight ago. The cylinder itself was in Devereaux's coat pocket. The slide was the transcript blown up.
The engagement won't change your place. The Beauchamp wife is whoever Grand-mère decides. The woman I love is you.
Silas's words in his own dictating cadence, line-broken across the slide.
Pearl's cry caught in her throat.
Silas crossed the room and reached for the carousel.
I stepped half a pace to the side, the way a fencer steps off a line.
"Don't be hasty, Silas. There are more. The cylinder records you in the carriage. In the hotel suite at the Saint Charles. On the galerie of the Beauchamp chapel itself, last Easter."
The jet rosary in Eulalie's hand snapped audibly. Black beads scattered across the parquet like spilled shot. A footman bent.
"Stop it. Stop it at once."
Silas's eyes had iced. "Beatrix. Do you know what you are doing."
I smiled at him.
"I do."
I took out the folded sheet from the bodice of the Worth gown.
"From tonight, the Marlowe-Beauchamp engagement is at an end. I will repay the Beauchamps the full eighteen years of my keep, by the ledger. Whether Silas Beauchamp lives or dies after tonight is no longer my concern."
Adèle's voice cracked. "You dare wish him dead?"
I looked at her.
"I did not wish him dead. I am only refusing to die for him."
Silas laughed then. It was the same laugh he had made in the second life over a hand of cards. Light and amused, a man hearing a joke at the wrong moment.
"Beatrix. Off the Beauchamp roof, what becomes of you."
The hall doors opened.
A man stood in the frame in a black coat with the cuffs turned back on the forearms, no hat, his eyes catching every candle in the room.
"Where she goes," he said, "you may consider my concern."
Silas's face went bloodless.
"Cassius Thorne."
Cass walked in past two footmen who did not quite know whether to bar him. He did not look at Silas. He looked at me.
"Miss Marlowe. The carriage is on the drive."
The hall held its breath again.
I did not ask Cass why he had come.
In my first life, when I died, only Cassius Thorne had paid for the coffin. He had taken my body out of the Beauchamp family vault, where the deed of internment had me as Beatrix Beauchamp, ward, and he had had a small headstone cut at a parish cemetery upriver with only my own name.
In this life, I walked to him.
Silas's hand closed on my wrist above the glove. Hard enough to bruise the small bones.
"You would leave with him."
I lifted my other hand and struck him across the face.
The sound was the sound the ring had made earlier, only larger.
"Silas. You are not in a position to stop me."