The morning I was discharged from Touro, Silas was waiting on the curb under the iron arcade.
He had lost weight. His coat hung off him. The skin under his eyes had gone the color of an old bruise.
"Beatrix. Let me take you to the depot."
I went around him.
He stepped into the path again.
"I have sent Pearl out of the country. The men in my family who had a hand in your parents' carriage — I will not let one of them rest. Beatrix."
I stopped.
"And you."
He went still.
I said, "Have you forgiven yourself."
His throat moved.
"I will make it up to you."
"I do not need it."
Cass's brougham had drawn up. The window came down. His voice carried just enough to reach me.
"Miss Marlowe. If you do not get in I will have to be uncivil and lift you."
Silas's head turned.
"Cassius."
Cass got down.
"What's the matter, Beauchamp. You'd like the lift yourself."
The air between them turned bad enough that the porter who had my trunk would not approach.
I had taken one step toward the brougham when Silas said, almost gently:
"Beatrix. You cannot be with him."
I turned.
Silas was watching Cass over my shoulder.
"The Thornes were also in on the cover-up of your parents' carriage. The cahier — Cassius's uncle Bertrand handled the parish notary and bought Picou. Bertrand has been using that cahier to extort the Beauchamp foreign concession for ten years. Cassius has known the whole of it since at least when you were sixteen. He has not told you."
My hand tightened on the handle of my reticule.
Cass's face had cooled.
"Silas. Don't."
Silas laughed without warmth.
"You think he is a good man. The Thornes ate the Beauchamps' Gulf shipping concession with that file. He has known the truth for years."
I looked at Cass.
He did not deny.
"Cass."
He said, evenly, "I did not have the standing then."
Silas's voice was flat.
"That is an excuse."
Cass looked at me.
"I came into the complete file two years ago."
"Then why did you not tell me."
He did not answer.
The answer was already plain enough. Two years ago I had still been at Belle Rive, still going to the chapel for the night-vigil, still wearing Adèle's pearls. If he had sent me a sealed file then, I would have burned it on the kitchen range and reported him to Marcellus. He could not have known how to reach me. It was true. It was also true that he had not tried.
I turned and pulled the brougham door open and stepped down.
He reached for my elbow to steady me. I drew my arm out from under his hand.
His hand stopped in the air.
I said, "I will go to New Orleans by myself."
Silas's face lit, briefly.
"Beatrix —"
I looked at him.
"And not with you."
The light went out of his eyes.
I lifted my trunk by the strap and walked toward the depot platform alone.
Behind me, neither of them came after me.
This life, I would not need either of them.
New Orleans set me down on Royal Street with a brass key to a half-shotgun apartment over a bookbinder's shop and the offer of a bench at Lemoine & Fils, the conservator's gallery two doors down.
I took both.
The work was quiet. There were paintings older than my grandmother on the long oak tables — water-damaged Boilly portraits, a wildfowl scene from an estate near Mobile that had taken smoke in a kitchen fire, a copy of a Bouguereau a senator's widow had brought down by river — and my work was to lay them out and clean and inpaint with my fingertips and the smallest sable brushes.
The other conservator was Mlle. Toussaint, a free-woman-of-color who had been at the bench since 'eighty-nine. She did not chatter. We worked through long afternoons in companionable silence and traded thinned spirits across the table.
For two months I forgot what my own hand felt like at rest.
Then on a morning in late November I leaned over the slop bucket in the back washroom and brought up the entire breakfast I had eaten and most of the dinner before it.
I sat on the floor of the washroom against the cool plaster a while.
When I had stopped shaking I went to a drugstore two streets over and bought what I needed from a pharmacist who did not know my face. I sat at my kitchen table at home through the lighting of the gas. I watched the second pink line come up.
I sat on the kitchen stool ten minutes looking at it.
Two months earlier, the night before I had gone to the depot alone, there had been a closing party at the gallery for a senator's wife's collection sale. Mlle. Toussaint had not been there. The other clerk had pressed sherry on me. Cass had been there because Cass was always at things that touched money, and one of the other Thorne cousins had pressed something stronger on me in a wax-paper twist of punch, and the room had begun to slip sideways.
I remembered Cass's hand under my elbow taking me out of the room.
I remembered him asking me in a hotel corridor: Beatrix Marlowe. Do you know who I am.
I remembered taking the front of his collar in both hands and pulling his mouth down to mine.
In the morning, I had got up and dressed and let myself out of the hotel and walked across Canal Street alone to the depot.
I had practiced running.
The bill had come due.
The doctor on Ursulines Street said nine weeks.
I went out of his office with the slip folded into my reticule and turned the corner into the long corridor of the women's clinic and met Pearl Lacroix coming the other way.
She was in a Touro Infirmary asylum gown under a hooded carriage cloak. Two nurses walked one at each elbow. Her hair, which had been spun-gold in life, had gone dull yellow and was pinned back without art.
She saw the slip in my hand. Her eyes changed.
"You are with child."
I folded the slip in half. "It is not your concern."
She laughed, suddenly and high.
"Does Silas know."
I turned away.
She caught my sleeve.
"Whose is it. Cassius's. Beatrix. You have a talent. The day you left Silas's bed, you climbed into the bed of his worst enemy. The Quarter will laugh for a year."
I struck her once across the mouth.
"Clean your tongue."
She held her face. The nurses on either side were already taking her elbows.
A man stepped out of an alcove at the end of the corridor. Silas had been waiting somewhere — the way he had begun waiting in corridors.
Pearl flung herself toward him.
"Silas — I only asked after her, and she struck me — "
Silas put out his hand to steady her by the elbow. His eyes were not on her. They were on the slip in my fingers.
His face turned the color of paper.
"You are with child."
I did not answer.
He came down the corridor a step at a time.
"Whose."
I looked at him.
"Not yours."
Three words. They went into him like a blade.
He stood in the middle of the linoleum.
Pearl, off-balance and rising, said with her hand still at her mouth:
"Silas darling — it is Cassius's child. She would carry a Thorne by-blow before she would turn her head once to you."
Silas's hand left her elbow. His other hand closed on her throat without warning.
She made a small choked sound. Her eyes bulged.
"Pearl. Close. Your. Mouth."
I had not moved.
He released her. She caught herself against the wall.
He looked at me.
His voice was low and not quite steady.
"Take it out."
I lifted my chin.
He said, "Beatrix. Have it removed. I will say nothing more about any of it. We will go on."
I struck him across the face the way I had struck him at the engagement banquet.
"Silas. You are nothing."
I kept the child.
Not on Cass's account.
Because I would not have any other person decide what came out of my body or stayed in it again.
By the fourth month, I had begun to show. I had let out the seams of two work dresses myself and made a third in heavier wool against the river damp. Mlle. Toussaint had handed me the first cup of ginger tea on a morning in January without saying a word.
In early March, Cass came up Royal Street and stopped in the gallery doorway with a brown paper grocer's wrap held against his side.
The grocer's paper was open at the top. White camellias.
I saw him through the front window and my first thought was to throw the bolt on the door.
He put his palm on the door before I reached it.
"Beatrix."
"Mr. Thorne. What is your business."
His eyes went down to my middle.
He did not speak for several seconds.
When he did, it was barely audible.
"Mine?"
I held my face still.
"No."
He nodded slowly.
"Then it's mine."
I started laughing. Not the laughter of an amused person. The laughter of a person at the end of a long week.
"Did you not hear me. I said no."
He set the camellias down on the front counter, gently, between the inkwell and the daybook.
"I listened to the meaning, Beatrix. Not the words."
I picked up the camellias to throw them.
He said, very low, "Easy."
My hand stopped.
The word was so close to a comfort and so far from an order I did not know what to do with it.
He took an envelope out of his coat. He laid it next to the camellias.
"The men of my family who had a hand in your parents' carriage are arrested. Bertrand. Mr. Lemoine — not your gallery's Lemoine — the parish defense lawyer for the original Marlowe inquest. Aubrey Picou. The deposition is set for next month."
I opened the envelope.
The names were all there. The bank deposit was photographed.
I shut the envelope.
"You do not need my forgiveness."
"I never asked for it."
He looked at me.
"I came to finish what should have been done."
I held the envelope. I held the camellias.
"Cassius. The child will be born. He will not be yours."
He was silent a long time.
"All right."
I waited.
He said, "I will not press. I will not insist. I will not arrive uninvited. When you need me, I am there."
He bowed shallowly and left.
The next day, an iron-fronted office at the corner across Royal Street took down its previous sign and put up another reading THORNE PRIVATE SECURITY.
The day after that, a uniformed man with a Pinkerton badge began standing under the gas lamp at my landlord's stair from dusk until dawn.
The day after that, the landlord came up to my door in a state of small panic to tell me he had received a generous offer from a buyer he did not know, and the building was to change hands by the end of the week.
I went down Royal Street to the iron-fronted office in a fury.
He was in a meeting. He saw me in the front window and cleared the room.
I slammed the cancellation notice on his desk.
"This is your idea of not pressing."
He looked at the page.
"The building was not bought by me."
I stared.
He said, with the unbending evenness of a man who is telling no lie at all: "It was bought by my assistant."
I picked up the inkwell and threw it.
He let me. He waited until I had emptied my arms of every throwable object on his desk. He bent and set on the desk between us a small brass ring of keys.
"A new building. Three blocks. Near the infirmary. Twenty-four-hour man at the foot of the stair. Lift to your floor. The deed is in your name."
I laughed in his face.
"Mr. Thorne. Do you always court a woman by purchase."
He looked at me with absolute seriousness.
"Beatrix. I do not know how to court."
A pause.
"I will learn."