I broke the wax of the seal on the chapel step.
The Beauchamps started forward together. Cass's men had come up the shell path behind them and stopped them at the door with cocked pistols — I had not known Cass had sent men until that moment. Mr. Hollis Devereaux, in his black coat, stood at the chapel doorway with a Kodak No. 2 box at his hip and a brass wax-cylinder dictation machine standing on a porter's tripod beside him, its horn pointed at the altar.
Eulalie's face went purple.
"Cassius Thorne — you would bring men into the Beauchamp chapel."
Cass was in the door behind Devereaux. He did not look at her. He looked at the paper in my hand.
"I am here to bring her out."
I unfolded the letter on my knee.
The ink had gone fox-colored but the hand was clear.
Beatrix. If you have found this, I did not bring you out in time.
What the Beauchamps want is not that you take three killings for Silas. They want your life in exchange for his. After the third, your stars are spent and Silas keeps a long life. Your father and I learned the breaking of it: the doll undone, the bound hair severed, a few drops of the heir's heart's-blood given back to the altar.
Do not soften, my love. They are not your family.
I read the last line three times.
Do not soften.
Across two lives I had been nothing but soft.
I held the letter out to Silas.
He took it. He read it standing, his good hand starting to shake by the second paragraph, his face emptying out by the last line.
"I — did not know."
I said, "You did not have to know."
He looked up.
I said, "The one who profits never has to know what it cost."
His lips moved without sound.
Pearl pushed past Marcellus and dropped to her knees on the marble at Eulalie's feet.
"Grand-mère. If it must be heart's-blood — take mine. Let me bear it for Silas. I will not flinch."
Adèle's hand went out to her like a drowning woman's. "Pearl, you are a good child —"
Eulalie's cane swung. The flat of her hand cracked across Pearl's face.
Pearl reeled. The tears had stopped on her cheeks mid-fall.
"Grand-mère — "
Eulalie's teeth were set. "Do you know nothing. The binding accepts Beatrix. The heart's-blood accepts only Silas. You are not the article."
Pearl's face went hard in a way I had not seen on it.
I laughed once, dry.
She had imagined herself the daughter of the house. She had spent five years performing devotion. And the Beauchamps had only ever wanted my blood. Hers was nothing to them.
Silas pushed himself off the altar step. He held out his good hand to Cass.
"Give me the knife."
Adèle shrieked.
Cass passed him the pearl-handled fruit knife I had bled on. Silas turned it in his palm and brought the point to his shirtfront under the bandage. He looked at me.
"Will it stop your hating me, Beatrix."
I shook my head.
"This is not to stop my hating you."
I walked to where he stood.
"This is what you owe me."
His mouth bent. He nodded once.
He set the blade against his chest.
In that moment, Eulalie seized the chained brass thurible hanging by the altar rail in both her hands and swung it back over her shoulder and brought it down through the air at the back of my skull.
Cass's voice cracked across the chapel.
"Beatrix —"
He was already running. He was not going to be in time.
I felt the rush of air on my hair an instant before Silas turned, saw, and lunged, and the thurible caught his good shoulder rather than my head. The blade in Silas's hand jolted. The point of it skidded off his chest and went under the lace at my left collarbone — sank in and through to the shoulder muscle.
Blood opened down the front of the Worth gown.
Silas froze.
Cass crossed the room and lifted me bodily off the altar step and into his arms.
His voice came out for the first time without composure.
"Beatrix —"
Eulalie was being held by two of the household men now. She was past control. She was screaming, in French and English at once.
"Elle ne peut pas partir — she cannot leave, if she leaves Silas dies, she was always going to die for him, elle devait mourir pour lui —"
My vision was greying at the edges.
I turned my head against Cass's shoulder. Devereaux was bent slightly behind the brass horn of the cylinder. He was watching me.
I said, through teeth, "Got it on the cylinder."
He inclined his head.
"All of it, Miss Marlowe. The plate as well."
The Beauchamps were finished within the week.
Devereaux took the wax cylinder and the photographic plate to the Times-Picayune. The transcript was running in the Sunday edition by Saturday morning, in the city pages of three other papers by Monday: Beauchamp ward speaks; matriarch records murder confession in family chapel; River Road carriage death of 1869 reopened.
Beauchamp sugar shares opened at sixty-eight on Monday and closed at thirty-one on Wednesday. The bank in Edgard suspended Marcellus's drawing privileges. The parish sheriff opened a new file on the Marlowe accident. Bertrand Thorne was indicted on Thursday morning by a young district attorney who had taken his oath on Tuesday. Old Maman Vespertine's ledger was subpoenaed and brought up by her granddaughter from a strongbox in the Quarter. Eulalie Beauchamp was charged with the conspiracy and with assault under color of malum in se by Saturday evening.
I read most of it in a private room at Touro Infirmary.
Cass had a chair pulled up to the bed and a small oilcloth on his knee and a paring knife and a pile of Louisiana satsumas in a chipped bowl, and he was peeling a satsuma in one long unbroken curl with his face perfectly serious, the way another man might disarm a hand grenade.
The curl broke halfway down.
His mouth went tight.
He ate the broken half himself, set the rest down on the cloth, and reached for the next satsuma without comment.
I started laughing.
It was the first time in three lives I had laughed.
It came out hoarse and surprised me as much as it surprised him. He looked up. His face changed.
"Beatrix Marlowe."
"Mr. Thorne."
"You are amused at my expense."
"I am."
His mouth lifted at one corner.
He went back to peeling.
The orderly brought up another stack of telegrams. Silas's were on top, and there were six of them in two days.
Beatrix, I am sorry.
Beatrix, I did not know.
Does your shoulder give you pain.
Beatrix, in my dreams you die.
Cass took the stack out of my hand and dropped it in the porcelain basin by the bedside.
"You will read these out of habit."
I let him.
I lay back against the pillows.
"Where will you go, when they let you out."
"New Orleans."
"Alone."
"Yes."
He set down the paring knife.
He came to the side of the bed and rested his hand on the iron rail by my pillow.
"Beatrix. I want to tell you something. You may take it any way you like."
I waited.
"I was eighteen years old when I saw you at Belle Rive."
I went still.
"You were on your knees on the crushed-shell path in front of the chapel. It was August of 'eighty-seven. The shells had been heated all day by the sun. Silas was upstairs with a fever, and your aunt Adèle had told the household that you had not been faithful enough in the night-vigil and that this dust was the reason the fever had broken loose. They left you on the shells from noon until past sunset. I watched from the back of the gallery and tried to come down the avenue twice and was put back into my own carriage by my uncle's men. I came again the next morning and Eulalie had taken you indoors and I was not allowed into the house."
I remembered the day.
I had been seventeen. My knees had blistered on the shell. Even now, when a cold front moved up from the Gulf, the joints ached deep where the shells had pressed in.
He lowered his eyes.
"I am not a clean man, Beatrix. I am not a good one. My family bled the Beauchamps for ten years on the cahier before I had the standing to take it back from my uncle and put it in your hand."
He looked up again.
"But I want you alive."
The door of the private room opened.
Silas stood in it in a long black overcoat with a tin pail of hot soup hanging from his good hand.
He saw Cass's hand on the bed-rail by my pillow. His face went flat.
"What is this."
Cass straightened. "Mr. Beauchamp does not see."
Silas set the pail on the bedside table. He looked at me.
"Beatrix. I had the kitchen at Belle Rive make this for you. You used to like it."
I said, "Take it back."
His eyes reddened. "You used to like it, Beatrix."
I looked at him.
"What I used to like was the rare afternoon when you spoke to me kindly."
The room went quiet.
"I am no longer short of kindness."
His fingers tightened on the handle of the pail, slowly, until the tendons stood out at his knuckles.