Page 75 of The Beautiful Ones

Adrian stepped over the bed of new gardenias.

“You did not strike him,” he said. “You merely gave the killing a song and taught the house to keep time.”

Madame Lebon rose unsteadily. “I protected my family.”

“You protected its name.”

“They are the same.”

“Only to those who have nothing else.”

From somewhere inside Le Champ des Fleurs, a bell began ringing.

Another answered from the servants’ passage, then another from the upper floor. Within moments every bell in the house was clamoring at once. The sound poured across the garden, summoning servants to rooms whose owners had fled and masters who would never command them again.

The first blue flame appeared behind the glass of the music-room windows.

It moved across the panes like reflected water. No smoke rose, yet the curtains blackened from hem to cornice, revealing the shape of the fire room by room. A second flame awakened in my attic window. A third traveled along the roofline, outlining Le Champ des Fleurs against the red morning sky.

The servants came out.

They did not emerge in an orderly line. They ran through the kitchen yard and side doors carrying children, shawls, loaves of bread and whatever small possessions could be seized in passing. Dinah crossed the lawn with a little boy upon one hip and an old woman leaning upon her shoulder. She looked toward Cécile, then at the grave beneath the gardenias.

“Go,” Cécile told her.

The word trembled, but it reached her.

Dinah nodded once and continued toward the fields.

Madame Lebon watched them leave with growing disbelief.

“They cannot simply go.”

“They can,” Nicholas said. “No bell in this house will ever call them again.”

“The contracts—”

“Are burning.”

She turned toward the mansion. Through the tall windows we saw papers lifting in the blue light, each page curling into ash before the shelves and carpets caught. The strange fire chose ink and seals before silk or timber. It climbed the ledgers in Monsieur Lebon’s study and moved from name to name.

Madame Lebon gathered her torn skirt.

“My jewelry is upstairs.”

Cécile looked at her mother as if she had spoken in a foreign tongue.

“The h-house is b-burning.”

“Then I must be quick.”

“Mother.”

Madame Lebon stopped. For one hopeful instant, I believed the sound of her daughter’s voice had reached whatever living part remained within her.

Then she lifted her chin.

“I am a Lebon,” she said, and walked toward the house.