Page 74 of The Beautiful Ones

“Then go after them. I can give you records, names—everything Vale possessed. Let me out of this, and I will deliver the judge and Reuben George to you myself.”

Octavia smiled. “How generous men become when they are offering other people’s lives.”

“Their houses will answer when they open their doors,” Adrian said. “Today, this one answers.”

Monsieur Lebon screamed as the roots drew him over the broken rim.

Madame Lebon tore free of me and threw herself upon the ground. She caught one of his wrists with both hands. For several seconds they clung to one another while the roots strained in the earth beneath them. The diamonds at her ears shook loose, one falling into the grave and the other vanishing beneath the folds of her skirt.

“Do not let go,” he begged.

“I will not.”

It may have been the first honest promise I ever heard her make.

The root nearest her hand lifted its blue head. It brushed the inside of her wrist with almost tender curiosity. A white line appeared across her skin, spreading frost beneath the surface.

She cried out and released him.

Monsieur Lebon vanished into the grave.

There was no thunder and no triumphant voice from the earth. Soil slipped from beneath the flagstones in a steady dark stream, covering his legs, his chest and finally the hand that remained raised toward us. His fingers closed upon nothing before the ground swallowed them.

The grave sealed itself.

For one breath, a narrow seam divided Nathaniel Vale from the place where Monsieur Lebon had fallen. Then blue roots stitched the earth together. Gardenias opened along the line, their white petals turned upward to the ruined roof.

Cécile made a sound too small to be called a sob.

I took her hand. She did not look at me. She stared at the blossoms covering her father and Commander Vale as though the two men had been joined in a marriage only death could arrange.

Madame Lebon remained upon her knees.

“He did not kill Nathaniel alone,” she said.

No one answered.

She raised her face to Adrian. Without the diamonds, with her hair loosened and dirt upon her mouth, she appeared both older and more human. It should have made me pity her. It did not.

“Judge Dewey held him,” she continued. “Reuben watched the garden door. Étienne struck him, but they were all there.”

“And you?” I asked.

Her eyes moved to mine.

“I was in the music room.”

I remembered the letter hidden inside my mother’s Bible. I remembered Nathaniel’s unfinished sentence: I heard the pianoforte while they—

“You played,” I said.

Madame Lebon looked away.

“The servants were not to hear.”

Cécile’s hand tightened painfully around mine.

Her mother had filled the house with music while men murdered Nathaniel Vale in the garden. Afterward, she had dressed her daughter, ordered dinners and walked past the abandoned glasshouse beneath her parasol. She had done it for years without once allowing the wrong note to disturb her sleep.