I stayed in Cass's Royal Street rooms seven days.
On the eighth, Silas came up the front stair past a porter who could not stop him.
He looked like a man who had walked out of his own hospital. His left arm was in a sling against the dark of his banquet coat. His skin was the color of wet linen. The pupils of his eyes were so wide there was barely color around them.
I stopped on the landing.
"Beatrix. Come home."
"I have no home."
He swallowed. His throat moved.
"Pearl is gone. I sent her up to my aunt in Natchez. The engagement-night matter — I am willing to set it aside."
I almost laughed.
"You are willing."
He frowned. The frown was the one he made when a vendor over-charged him. "Whatever you want by way of compensation, Beatrix. Name it."
I came down the stairs and dropped a folded sheet at his feet.
"I want the Beauchamps to publish the truth about my parents' carriage."
He bent and picked it up. He read down the first paragraph and his face stripped.
"Who gave you this."
"Does it matter."
He stared at me.
"Cassius Thorne."
I said nothing.
He came two steps closer, fast, his right hand catching my shoulder before I could move.
"You would believe him. Over me."
I looked up at him.
"I believed you across two lives."
His hand checked.
"What did you say."
I pushed his hand off my shoulder.
"Silas. Do you know what it felt like when I died."
Something flickered behind his eyes that was almost confusion and was not quite memory.
I did not feel like explaining.
Silas Beauchamp did not deserve to know what reincarnation was.
The elevator-cage at the end of the hall clattered open. Cass stepped out in a black overcoat that I knew he had put on after seeing Silas from the back stair window. He came down the corridor at his unhurried walk and stepped between me and Silas without seeming to hurry.
"Mr. Beauchamp. Care to keep that hand."
Silas's eyes went hot.
"Cassius. Touch her and I will —"
"I have already touched her," Cass said.
He bent his head to my ear. His mouth brushed the shell of it.
"Miss Marlowe. Forgive me — I am about to be theatrical."
He took the back of my neck in his palm and kissed me, slowly, in full view of Silas and the corridor and a porter who froze with a coal-scuttle in his hand.
The kiss was short. Almost businesslike.
But it broke Silas.
He came across the carpet with his good hand swinging. Cass took the blow on the shoulder, turned inside it, and pinned him face-first to the wallpaper.
Silas's wound went under the plaster. The white linen of his shirt darkened at the shoulder.
I watched without moving.
In my second life, when the kidnapper's knife had gone into me, Silas had bled too. The blade had nicked his hand pulling Pearl out of the line. The knife had gone in me instead. I had not been able to speak from the pain. He had held Pearl against his chest and screamed at me — Beatrix, why did you not push her out of the way sooner.
Now, finally, he was the one who hurt.
Cass let him off the wall. Silas slid against it for a second and caught himself with his good arm.
His eyes when they came up to mine were red at the rims.
"Beatrix. You truly do not want me."
I said, "I do not."
He laughed — softly, almost wonderingly, the way a man laughs when he hasn't understood the joke.
"You'll come back."
Cass stepped to one side.
Silas braced on the wainscot. He held my eye.
"Your stars are tied to mine. You cannot leave the Beauchamps."
I said, "Then untie them."
His face went white in a way it had not yet.
Untying the traiteur's binding required the chapel.
Cass said no.
"That's exactly what they're waiting for. You walk under the lintel, they have you back."
I pushed the parish cahier across the table at him.
It was written out in two clerks' hands. Old Maman Vespertine's natal-chart ledger entry was copied as the third page, dated 1869.
In November of that year, the Beauchamps had sent for her after Silas was born during a hurricane night. She had cast his stars and pronounced him vouée aux trois morts — promised to three deaths. She had said the binding required a girl born on the same hour, the same day, the same month, whose chart pulled hard against his. My mother's pregnancy with me had been listed in Vespertine's ledger that very week as the only match in the parish.
Six years later, my mother had discovered what the Beauchamps had done to me at the baptismal font — what they had put under the altar plate in my name. She had begun packing. She had written to her brother in Mobile to come and fetch us.
Three days later, the carriage went off the embankment. The driver was Aubrey Picou. The two-hundred-dollar deposit in Picou's account at the parish bank was traced to Bertrand Thorne — Cassius's uncle.
Cass read it through with a cigarette burning low between his fingers. He killed the cigarette in a saucer halfway.
"I will go with you."
I shook my head.
"You cannot."
He looked up.
"The chapel altar is bound," I said. "The traiteur's wards keep out anyone not named in the binding. Cass. This is mine. I will end it."
His amusement was gone entirely. "You speak as if you are walking into your own grave."
"I am not dying."
"You told yourself that twice already."
I had no answer for that.
He came around the table and bent over me with his palms flat on the wood on either side of my chair.
"Beatrix. I am not Silas."
My breath caught.
He said, "I do not need you to shield me. I do not need you to die in my place."
The telephone rang at the side table.
It was Pearl, sobbing.
"Beatrix — please come to Touro — Silas is coughing blood, he is calling for you — the doctor says if this keeps up he will be gone by morning —"
I made to put the receiver down.
Adèle's voice came over Pearl's mid-sob.
"Beatrix Marlowe. You will come back at once. If anything happens to Silas, I will see to it your parents do not rest in their graves."
Cass's face went to ice.
I said, evenly, "I am coming."
Adèle's breath let go.
"You are not the disgrace I took you for."
I rang off.
Cass was watching me.
"You've lost your mind."
I reached for my reticule.
"Not to the hospital."
I looked out the window at the rooftops of the Quarter.
"To the chapel."
The Beauchamps thought I was running to save Silas.
They did not know I was going to break the doll they had worshipped for twenty-four years with my own heel.
The Belle Rive chapel stood at the back of the old kitchen garden, a small whitewashed building under two enormous live oaks, the door faced with marble salvaged from a New Orleans cathedral demolition forty years before.
Grand-mère Eulalie was waiting on the chapel step when I came up the crushed-shell path. She was on the cane she only used in public. Marcellus stood behind her in his banker's coat. Adèle was at her shoulder. Pearl, pale and weeping prettily, stood a half pace back.
Silas was on his feet, just, with two of the household men under his elbows. A new bandage wrapped his chest under the open shirt.
His eyes brightened when he saw me.
"Beatrix."
I did not look at him.
Grand-mère brought the cane down once on the marble step. "Kneel."
I laughed.
"I am not here to ask pardon."
Adèle came at me with her hand raised. I caught her wrist mid-swing and turned my own hand and put the slap full across her cheek.
The sound rang off the chapel doors.
She held her face. She was a woman who in fifty years had not been struck.
"You — would dare strike me."
I looked at her.
"Across two lives, you called me bad blood. I wanted to strike you then. I am only late."
Marcellus shouted, "She is unhinged. Take her in."
Two of the men moved.
I drew from my reticule the small pearl-handled fruit knife I had carried since the banquet, opened it, and laid the blade along the heel of my left palm.
Silas's pupils contracted.
"Beatrix."
I drew the blade.
Blood ran fast and dark across my palm and dripped from the heel of my hand onto the chapel threshold.
The blood pooled at the join of the marble step.
A black mark rose up out of the marble like ink rising in still water — first a single sigil under my blood, then another, then a chain of them, faint but unmistakable, blooming up through the stone in front of every Beauchamp on the path.
I had not been wrong.
The binding tasted my blood and answered.
Eulalie's voice broke. "Stop her."
I went in through the chapel doors.
The reliquary stood at the back of the altar behind Silas's baptismal nameplate. The gilded door of it was warm to the touch. I unlatched it with the fruit knife.
Inside, on a small bed of red velvet, lay a gris-gris doll the length of my hand. The body of it was wrapped in calfskin parchment inked over in cinnabar and red ochre — my full natal chart, every house and aspect written in the traiteur's own hand. Sewn into the doll's small wax head was a lock of brown hair.
My hair. The lock Eulalie had cut from me at age six, before the font, under the lie of a baptismal blessing curl.
It was knotted around a dried dragonfly.
She had told me she was making me a keepsake.
She had been feeding her grandson my life.
Silas had stumbled in behind me. His voice was hoarse.
"Beatrix. Don't."
I lifted the doll out of the reliquary.
He took a careful step forward. "If you do not break it, I will marry you. The Beauchamp wife will be you — Pearl, I will never see again. Anything you want."
I looked at him.
The absurdity of it lit something almost gentle in me.
"Silas. Do you think I still wish to marry you."
His eyes reddened.
"Then tell me what you want. I will give it."
"I want you to hurt."
I dropped the doll onto the marble step of the altar and brought my heel down on its wax head.
Silas crossed the floor in two strides.
The wax cracked. The cinnabar parchment crumpled. The dried dragonfly broke. A cold draft moved through the chapel that I felt at the back of my neck.
Silas went down on one knee on the altar step and coughed a mouthful of blood across the marble. The palm-cut on my left hand split a second deeper. My fingers numbed.
Eulalie's voice came from the chapel door.
"Silas!"
The hidden compartment under the altar plate snapped open with the same draft.
It did not contain another parchment.
It contained a small silver music-box, oxidized black at the edges.
I went down on my knees beside it and unlatched the lid.
Inside, on faded velvet, lay my mother's gold Marlowe signet ring — the mate of the one I had carried since age six in the lining of my bible.
Under the ring, folded twice, was a letter on cream paper sealed with the Marlowe arms in red wax. Blood had brown-spotted one corner of it.
The direction was in my mother's hand.
To my Beatrix, when you find this.