Page 53 of The Beautiful Ones

Cécile had begun another piece at the pianoforte.

The miracle in her throat was not a gift.

It was a hook, and she had already swallowed it.

Dinah sat alone in the outer kitchen, grinding dried herbs into a stone mortar. The dull thunk-thunk of the pestle was the only sound in the shaded room. She did not look up when the heavy oak door closed behind me.

“She is still talking?”

“She has scarcely stopped.” I sat on the bench opposite her. “Her voice failed at luncheon when Adrian looked away. The moment he turned back, it returned.”

Dinah’s hands paused.

“You are certain?”

“Cécile felt it. I saw that much. She chose not to be afraid.”

Dinah resumed grinding, though the rhythm had changed. “A voice that comes in a night can leave in a night. And the price for what ain’t yours is always higher than you want to pay.”

“It is her voice.”

“Then why does that man hold the reins?”

I had no answer.

Outside, the cicadas screamed from the magnolias. Their ceaseless noise made the kitchen feel sealed away from the rest of the plantation, a small room submerged beneath a living sea.

“I need to see what Monsieur Lebon is hiding,” I said. “The ledgers Reuben George mentioned. If there is proof of what they did to Commander Vale, we need it before the Fairhavens decide to collect their debt from Cécile.”

Dinah set down the pestle.

For a moment she stared at the stone bowl as if an answer might be ground among the rosemary and rue. Then she reached into the deepest pocket of her apron and placed a heavy iron key upon the table.

Rust stained its jagged teeth.

“The study?”

“Monsieur lost this in the washhouse cellar last winter when he was too drunk to know where he had been. It is not his only key.” She pushed it toward me. “I kept it because a house built on secrets always comes to a day when the servants need doors of their own.”

I closed my hand around the cold iron.

“The men are near the study,” she warned. “They have been moving between there and the billiard room all afternoon. You go quickly, and you leave the moment you hear them.”

“What if they catch me?”

Dinah’s gaze lifted to mine. “Then you are a foreign servant found stealing from three men who have already buried one inconvenient witness.”

The truth required no embellishment.

I tucked the key into my apron.

“Elin.” Dinah caught my wrist before I could rise. “If you find something, do not mistake knowing the truth for being safe from it.”

I slipped back into the main house through the servants’ passage. The narrow corridor ran behind the formal rooms, close enough that laughter and music reached me through the plaster in muffled waves. Cécile’s playing followed me. I knew every hesitation in that Schubert impromptu, every place where she usually rushed from nerves.

That afternoon she made no mistakes.

At the crossing near the pantry, Octavia’s voice drifted through the wall, soft and amused. Nicholas answered from the opposite side of the parlor. The Fairhavens sounded as though they stood beside one another, though half the house separated them.