Page 83 of The Beautiful Ones

Lucien stared at me. “They took her.”

“No.”

“You expect me to believe she walked willingly into that carriage after they murdered our father?”

“Your father murdered Commander Vale.”

His mouth hardened. “I know what he did.”

The answer surprised me.

Lucien sank onto the chapel step and pressed both hands over his face. The anger left him as quickly as it had come, revealing the frightened young man beneath it.

“Philip told me everything he could remember,” he said. “He heard our fathers arguing before dawn. Reuben kept saying Vale should have been thrown into the river, that the garden was Étienne’s mistake. When I asked what he meant, Judge Dewey ordered the carriage stopped and tried to put me out on the road.”

He lowered his hands.

“Philip would not let him.”

“Where are they now?”

“The Deweys took the north road. Reuben means to reach Norfolk and put his family aboard the first ship that will carry them. Philip helped me take a horse at the river fork. Before I left, he said he would search his father’s papers.”

Philip’s pleasant, bewildered face rose in my memory. Perhaps he had spent his life recovering from the things his father said because he had already begun to understand the man who said them.

“Did he believe you?” I asked.

“He believed enough.”

Lucien looked toward the smoke.

“My mother?”

“She would not leave the house.”

His eyes closed.

I sat beside him. We watched the blue stain fade above the trees until nothing remained but ordinary evening.

“And Cécile chose them?” he asked at last.

“She chose to go for one day. She said she would decide the next when it came.”

“That sounds like her.”

“She asked me to tell you she is alive. And that she chose.”

He bowed his head.

“I should have been there.”

“Perhaps. But you could not have chosen for her.”

“I could have said goodbye.”

There was nothing I could offer against that grief.

After a while, Lucien noticed the raw place at my throat where the letter rested.