Cass's brougham was waiting at the back drive, the team already turned. I climbed in still in the Worth gown, the train of it sweeping the carriage floor, my hands beginning to shake the moment the door closed.
Not fear.
Eighteen years of pressed-down hate had finally drawn blood, and the body did not know yet what to do with the relief.
Cass passed me a flask. "You threw well."
I unscrewed the cap and swallowed brandy.
"How did you know I was going to break it?"
He smiled. Lazily, with one corner of his mouth. "The Beauchamps' entertainments — I never miss the program."
I did not answer.
The new pocket-Western Union receiver in the carriage had started chattering before we cleared the front gate. By the time we hit the River Road it was a continuous rattle. Twenty-three telegrams from Adèle in one afternoon. Three from Marcellus, copies of attorney's letters. From Silas, only one.
Come back. The evening will be forgotten.
I tore the slip and let the wind take it.
The next chatter brought Pearl's hand. The wire-boy at the next way station had wired her message ahead.
Beatrix dear — do not be cross with Silas. He only wanted to spare your feelings. If you leave tonight, Grand-mère will be ill again. Pity her.
I wired back from the next station in eight words.
Then you stand in for me.
Ten minutes of nothing.
Then the next slip — a photograph clipped to the wire, of all things, sent from a station hotel's new wire-photography service. Silas in a Touro Infirmary cot, his left arm in plaster, an ether mask still in the orderly's hand by his head.
Are you satisfied. He left the hotel and the carriage horse went mad on the bridge.
I held the slip between two fingers a long time.
A carriage accident. The bridge over the Bayou St. John.
In my first life, that bridge — that horse — had been mine. I had been in the second seat. I had gone over the railing and the wheel had clipped the back of my skull as I went. Silas had broken two ribs and lived to bury me.
Tonight I had not been in the carriage.
The horse had gone mad just the same. The bill had only changed hands.
Cass read the slip over my shoulder. His amusement was gone.
"The traiteur's reading is true, then."
"Yes."
"You have absorbed for him before."
I did not answer.
The carriage made the next mile in silence so thick I could hear the harness chains.
Then he said, low, without looking at me: "Miss Marlowe. Come up to my rooms tonight."
I looked at him.
"That isn't necessary."
"The Beauchamps will come for you," he said. "When they realize you are out and Silas is in a cot, they will not wire the parish sheriff. They will wire their own men. Their first thought won't be your freedom. It will be that you go back into the house tonight."
He was right.
The brougham was overtaken twenty minutes later on the empty stretch east of the Destrehan crossroads — three black carriages running hot, the Beauchamp livery on the lead driver's coat. They forced Cass's team off the road. The lead man pulled up at our window and rapped the glass with his knuckle.
"Miss Marlowe. Madame Beauchamp wishes you back at the house."
Cass cranked his window down.
"She is not going back."
The driver's face went stiff. "Mr. Thorne. This is Beauchamp family business."
Cass smiled.
"She is no longer Beauchamp business. She has ended the engagement."
The driver looked at me.
"Miss Marlowe. Mr. Silas has just come round. The doctors are uncertain. Madame says — if you come home tonight, the matter is forgotten."
I lowered my window the rest of the way down.
"Tell her I am not the Beauchamp remedy."
The driver's eyes shifted. His gloved hand reached for the carriage door.
Cass kicked the door open from the inside. The brass edge of it caught the man square in the sternum and folded him back into the road. Cass stepped down, unhurried, and unfastened his wristwatch and tossed it onto the driver's seat behind him.
"Mind the watch."
Three minutes later the three Beauchamp drivers were on the ground. Two were holding teeth. The lead man had dragged himself as far as his own carriage wheel and was sitting against it spitting blood into the road.
Cass climbed back into the brougham. The knuckles of his right hand had split open across two fingers. I held out a handkerchief.
He did not take it. He looked at me.
"Miss Marlowe. You owe me a favor."
I said, "I will pay it."
He tilted his head and smiled.
"Tonight."
What Cass meant by tonight turned out to be a corner suite on the top floor of a Royal Street townhouse he kept above his gaming club, and a woman doctor he had wired down from Baton Rouge.
She listened at my chest with a wooden stethoscope and made small marks on a card.
She rolled my sleeve back to the elbow and counted the bruises old and new on the inside of my forearm — the bruises from the laundress's tight braids, from kneeling on chapel tile, from holding my own wrist as I copied psalter.
"Long anemia," she said. "Arrhythmia. Mild starvation. Miss Marlowe, when did you last eat a meal that was your own choice."
I refastened the cuff. "I have eaten."
Cass was leaning in the doorway with his shoulder against the jamb. His face was perfectly still.
"Did the Beauchamps not feed you."
"They fed me."
It was only that, when Silas ran a fever, I sat the night-vigil in the Belle Rive chapel without supper.
When Silas was bruised from a hunt, I drank the bitter willow-bark tonic the doctor had left at his bedside.
When Silas could not sleep, I copied the family psalter by candlelight on my knees on the cold sanctuary tiles.
Eighteen years the Beauchamps dressed me in Worth gowns and Belle Époque pearls, and never once dressed me as a person.
Cass did not ask again.
The downstairs porter knocked. A telephone call had come up to the club's only line — Eulalie Beauchamp, asking for Miss Marlowe by name.
I went down with Cass at my elbow. The receiver smelled of brass and somebody else's cologne.
"Beatrix."
Her voice through the wire was thin and authoritative at once, the way she got when she was alarmed and had decided to override the alarm.
"You have had your performance. Come home and we will say no more about it. Silas's accident is serious. If you keep the three nights of vigil at the chapel altar, the run of bad luck will lift."
"I am not coming."
A breath.
"Beatrix Marlowe. Do you forget that when your parents went into the river off River Road, it was the Beauchamp men who dragged their bodies from the cane mud. It was our priest who buried them in our cemetery. You will not throw that debt back at me, child. You owe this family your life — the very fact of it."
My fingers went numb at the tips.
In my first life she had said the same thing in almost the same words, the morning she put me in the carriage that killed me.
I had been six years old when they brought me to Belle Rive.
They had told me my parents had gone over the embankment in a sudden squall. The Beauchamps had pitied a cousin's orphan. They had taken me in.
I had carried that gratitude for eighteen years.
I had carried it into the grave.
Cass reached across me and took the receiver out of my hand and held it under his mouth.
"Madame Beauchamp. I have the parish cahier of the Marlowe carriage accident. Notarized in 'sixty-nine. Witness statements. The driver's bank deposit. The natal-chart match from the traiteur. All of it."
The line went silent.
I looked up at him.
He held the receiver loose. His voice when he spoke was as light as paper folded by a knife.
"Shall I send it to Miss Marlowe by the morning train, madame. Or would you prefer to."
"Cassius Thorne — you dare insert yourself in Beauchamp affairs."
"I have inserted myself," Cass said. "Sue me."
The line clicked.
He set the receiver back in its hook.
I stood at the brass mouthpiece a moment with my hand on the wall. The blood in me cooled by degrees.
"The cahier — explain it."
He looked at me.
"You should rest tonight."
I caught the cuff of his coat.
"Now."
He looked down at my hand on his sleeve. He gave it a long moment. Then, gently:
"Your mother and father didn't go off the road in a squall. The driver was paid. The signature on the bank deposit was a Beauchamp."
A ringing started in my ears.
"They knew?"
He did not deny it.
In that instant, the eighteen years of gratitude that had held my body in shape went to powder inside me.
I turned for the door.
He caught me at the elbow.
"Where are you going."
"To Belle Rive."
He pulled me back and pushed me down on the divan. He stayed bent over me with his hand on the cushion by my shoulder.
"You walk in there tonight and they put you in a back room with a doctor's certificate of nervous collapse. You'll wake to laudanum and an annulment of your annulment."
My eyes had filled without my permission.
"Then what do I do."
He went down on one heel in front of me. His thumb came up and took the wet off my cheekbone. His hand was cool.
"You live."
He looked at me, his face for once perfectly serious.
"Live, and let them pay it back."