A Drop of Night (22 page)

We follow the glow of reflected light, three turns, straight
ahead. Now we're out of the maze, in a music room with a gilt spinet. A tropical jungle mural is painted on all four walls, lush and colorful, bright birds peeking through the brushstroke undergrowth. There's a door in each wall. We head for the one straight ahead.

The lights are on. Finally, finally, the lights are on again.

“We'll get them,” I whisper. We're clinging to each other, stumble-running like a couple of drunks. “We'll find them; it'll be okay.”

But I don't know that.
When we get out,
Jules said, like it's a foregone conclusion. It's not. It's wishful thinking.

A voice, soft and singsong, drifts after us out of the hall of mirrors.

“Aurélieeee.”

I let go of Lilly and surge ahead. Rip open the doors of the music room. Step into a gallery. It runs perpendicular to the music room, like the crossbar on a T. There's another door straight across from me. And about thirty feet away, at the end of the gallery: people. Way too many people.

It's a triangle formation of trackers, waiting like inky statues.

Dorf and Miss Sei are next to them, sitting at a table in high-backed gilt chairs, like they're posing for a portrait. Miss Sei's legs are crossed elegantly. Dorf's hand is resting on the marble tabletop. They both have guns.

I freeze. Right in the middle of the gallery, like a deer caught in headlights. Behind me, still in the music room, Lilly does, too.

“Anouk,” Dorf calls out, and his voice echoes, deep and final, like a funeral bell.

The trackers start toward me
.
Three steps and they've accelerated to full speed. They're flashing past Dorf and Miss Sei, straight for me.

They haven't seen Lilly. She's still in the music room. I have a split second to make a decision.

“Lilly?” I keep my voice low, without turning. “Get back,
go, RUN
!”

And I throw myself forward across the gallery. I burst through the doors opposite, spin, start closing them. I see Lilly through the narrowing crack. She's running back through the music room toward the hall of mirrors—

I slam my doors, kick in the floor peg. Something massive crashes against them, rattling the hinges. I run blindly into the next room, the next, not even trying to lock anything after me.
This was your idea, Anouk. This whole thing, it was your stupid plan, and now we're separated, waiting to be picked off like ducks on a carnival conveyor belt.

The doors to the gallery crash open. They're catching up. I dive behind a sofa, coughing, gasping.

Four trackers burst in. I empty my clip into them. When I stand, there are four bodies on the floor. My hands are shaking.

“Lilly?” I whisper to the empty room. But Lilly's gone. I'm on my own.

A serving woman, huge as an ogress, leads me back to my chambers. Her face is a weary mask, her apron filthy. She smells of onions and dirt and sour milk, and yet I feel a strange sort of companionship with her as we trudge up staircases, through chamber after opulent chamber, these treasure rooms of ruby, jet, and emerald. She held a blindfold when she came for me, and perhaps she meant to use it, but she took one look at my reddened eyes and twisted it into her fist. I suppose I should be grateful for this kindness. Or perhaps
she
should be grateful, for had she tried to bind my eyes, I might have scratched out hers.

A cold, iron numbness has taken hold of me and settled into my bones. Somewhere deep inside I feel rage, hot enough to melt glass, but I cannot reach it. I stare straight ahead of me, and I try to keep my feet moving, try to forget the cracking of my heart, Mama's face when she cried out to me.

We arrive at my chambers. The serving woman unlocks the door and stands aside. She is so still, a great brooding mountain, delicate and hulking both at once. I turn to face her, my eyes pleading.

“Madam,” I say quickly. “Madam, I beg of you, let me—”

But she will not look at me. She lowers her head and pushes me hurriedly through the doors. I hear them slam shut, the wrench of the lock sliding home.

I slide to the floor and lie in a heap. Still I do not cry. I feel as though I could, feel a strained cord of muscle in my chest, fit to snap, but no tears will fall. All I can think is:
We must get away from here. Delphine, Bernadette, Charlotte, Jacques, me. We must escape.

Jacques finds me this way and pulls me upright, crushing me to him. “They are mad here,” I whisper, and bury my face in his collar. Only now do the tears come, hot and endless, wetting the linen of his shirt.

“I know,” he says, but he doesn't. He cannot know the depths of their madness. I try to explain to him what I saw, what has become of Mama.

He holds me more tightly with every word, and when I am finished there is no shock or outrage from him. Only grim, weary determination. “It is not just
la marchioness
Célestine,”
he says, and I stiffen. “We found Marie-Clair in a chamber near the edge of the palace. She was barely sixteen, one of the youngest. They had emptied her of blood, taken parts of her, and that pale thing in the room . . . Monsieur Vallé saw it walking today in the western wing, free as you like. He said it turned to look at him, and its face opened like a wound. They are
keeping it
—”

I push away from him, straightening. “You are here,” I say, steadying my voice and steadying my chin. “That is what matters. I trust your arrival in my chambers means you know the way out?”

Jacques almost smiles at that. Through the grime and the tiredness, his eyes become merry and warm. “Always straight to business goes Aurélie du Bessancourt. You should be a shopkeeper.” His gaze darkens again. “I have found your sisters, yes. They are safe and as well as can be hoped. And I have found a way out. We will go today. Now, if you will allow it.”

“If I allow it?” I am laughing now, though my tears have not yet dried. “You tell me this now, when you might have told me the moment you stepped inside? Of course I will allow it, you great oaf! Havriel and Father will be distracted. They will not expect an escape. We must hurry!”

Jacques nods, but he remains where he is. He disentangles himself from me and says, “I have something for you,” and ducks his head. “Before we go.”

I pause, peering at him. I see us both in the mirrored window, a tall boy and a tall girl, and I see him open his hand. In it is a flower, dried and pressed. A daisy. He lays it gently in my palm. “It was left behind by another servant—” Jacques twists his hands together, stumbling over his words. “I know it is not the time, but I wanted you to have it. There is a good woman, a tavern keeper on the outskirts of Péronne, a friend of my mother's. I thought you might hide there until transportation can be arranged. Her inn stands in a field, off the Rue de Maismont. By the millpond, do you know the place? There are many more daisies there. Well . . . I thought . . . Let this one be a promise.”

The flower rests in my palm, dry and delicate. I can smell the warm tinge of straw from it. A memory blooms in my mind of Mama and my sisters and me, lying in a meadow, sunlight falling through the apple trees and dappling our faces. I do know the millpond. We went there once, in better days, with a picnic and silver forks and a painter with a great easel and a hundred daubs of vivid color.

I tuck the flower into my sash. I clasp Jacques's hands,
and I smile at him, and he does not smile back, but grins, his face folding like an accordion. And though we both know the worst is still ahead—there is running to do now, and fighting—a flame kindles under my tired heart, and in the light of it, all the ills of the world seem suddenly small and far away.

Together we move toward the panel in the wall.

“Are you with me?” Jacques says.

“I am with you,” I answer, and we step into the servants' passageway and begin to run.

You're dumb, Anouk. You're dumb, and now you're alone.

I slide around a door into a bare, unpainted antechamber and slam in the floor peg. Up ahead is another double door. I burst through them. Close them behind me as quietly as I can. I scan for a way to lock them. There isn't one. From this side they're just panels of pale-green brocade, two brass rings for handles.

I spin. I'm in another one of these people's pointless ballrooms. The floor is ivory-hued marble, veined with black like dirty snow. The ceiling soars forty feet above me, the chandeliers glowing bright. The walls are a mass of stone carvings and alcoves full of animal sculptures. A row of tall golden candelabras extends down both sides of the gallery.

I run for the nearest candelabra and grab it. Wedge it into the brass rings on the door. Jiggle it once to make
sure it'll hold. Whirl and start sprinting for the opposite end.

I don't know if I'm close to the perimeter of the palace, if this is a trap room, but it's too late to worry about that now. I'm halfway down it, running like a crazy person.

A sharp crack sounds behind me as the floor peg in the antechamber breaks.

Something's been following me. Don't know what, don't know who, but it might be Miss Sei, it might be Dorf. They're probably already at the door I came through. I go up on my tiptoes, trying to quiet the squeak of my shoes on the marble. The ballroom is way too long. That candelabra won't hold forever. If they have a gun, I'll be dead before I'm three-fourths of the way down it.

Whatever's outside begins banging hard and fast. The candelabra groans.

I slip to the side of the ballroom, looking around frantically for a side door.

With a ringing
snap
, one of the prongs on the candelabra breaks, spinning into the air.

I won't make it to the end. There's no other way out. Soft and quick I shimmy up onto a ledge in the wall. My toes find the curling gilt. My fingers grip the moldings.
I pull myself up silently. I'm a moderately good climber with harnesses and carabiners and a climbing partner waiting to rope me down when I slip. I'm an even better climber when running for my life.

My lungs heave. Every few feet along the wall are pillars, holding up the corners of the vaults. Each pillar is topped with a plinth. Each plinth has a tiny overhang. Maybe six inches of space. I make for the one closest to me, climbing spread-eagled along the wall. I'm high up now. If I fall, I'll break bones.

I hear the candelabra snapping again. I brace myself. Muscles tense. I leap.

For a millisecond I'm suspended in the air, high up in that hallway of gold and marble. Now my hand catches on the overhang and I swing. My fingers almost wrench out of their sockets. I smack my other hand onto the ledge and lift myself up. Gasp for breath. There's not enough space to rest. Sweat is dripping down my forehead, stinging my eyes.

Without another thought, I launch myself off the plinth.

I'm going for the chandelier. The huge rack of gold and crystal balloons in front of me. I slam into it, and
the chandelier swings dangerously. I realize too late that it's set up like a shell, hollow on the inside. I'm slipping through strands of crystal, falling into the center of the chandelier—

I flail, reaching for anything I can hold on to. My fingers wrap around the golden frame. My foot finds one of the tines, and my fall jerks to a halt. I hear the doors to the ballroom burst open. I see the floor bobbing below. Nausea sweeps over me.
Don't be sick.
You don't have time to be sick
.

The woman in the red dress is hurtling down the ballroom. I see her through the tinkling crystal beads, her gown swirling across the marble.

Did she see me jump?
I glance around. My toes are fitted on either side of the lower bubble of beads. The woman's directly below me, sweeping away the fallen bits of crystal, murmuring.

“Aurélie?”
Her voice echoes up to me.
“Aurélie,
ne me quitte pas
. . . .”

I feel like I might sneeze. I remember watching a YouTube clip once where a bowler-wearing guy explained how you could stop yourself from sneezing by licking the top of your mouth, so I do that, running my
tongue frantically over the arch of my mouth.

Below me, the woman throws back her head. Lets loose a series of hawking, raptor-like cries:

“Aurélie! Aurélie!”

She's looking straight up at my chandelier. The ropes of crystal cut the scene below into ribbons. I hear running. Pounding. The woman stiffens. Now she leaps away, racing for the far end of the ballroom like some sort of red gazelle. She skitters through the doors. I stay where I am, trying to steady my breathing, the shivering beads.

Trackers are filing into the ballroom through the green doors. A swarm of them, glistening black and tiny red lights. They're passing under me—

The gilt prong I'm standing on is bending. I feel the chandelier shiver around me.

“No,” I whisper. “No!”

The prong snaps. I'm sliding through the crystal threads. They're breaking against my back. I'm falling, tumbling through the air.

I slam against the floor so hard, it's like a white spark exploding in the center of my skull. My brain goes out before my eyes do. I see a pair of velvet shoes approaching
between all those black boots—old-fashioned block heels, bows red as poppies. And now a second pair arrives, plain and dark, standing next to the first.

“Welcome home, Anouk.”

The servants' passages are mirrored, floor, wall, ceiling. It is an odd sensation, like running down the neck of a lengthy glass bottle. The ceiling is low, the walls uncomfortably close.

“They are in the western wing,” Jacques says, breathless, and we turn a corner, my skirts billowing behind me. “The exit is at the northernmost point of the palace, in the
salle d'opéra
. Your sisters are very nearby.”

“Why did they ever separate us?” I whisper. “What was the point?”

He looks at me over his shoulder, a wry smile on his lips. “No doubt to avoid this happening. You all conspiring together to escape. Little good it did them.”

He says it lightly, but there is tenseness to his face, and fear, and I do not understand it, for I feel nothing but excitement.

We leave the servants' passages behind us, stepping through the false back of an armoire into a room like a
Parisian sweet box. The pillows are colored like petits fours, soft and lovely, the sofas fat as winter rabbits. We hurry to the doors. Jacques presses his ear to the wood. I wait impatiently. Now he nods quickly, and we slip out into a gallery, hurrying down it.

The palace feels frighteningly empty around us, dead and lovely. Candles flicker in the chandeliers overhead, thousands upon thousands of them. I think I hear something in the air, a distant thrum, like a single buzzing note.

“Jacques, do you hear that?” I whisper, and I almost cough, I have so little breath to spare.

“What?” he asks, and together we slow.

“That sound?”

“The air is strange down here. Hurry.”

We reach the end of the hall and wriggle into another hidden passage. It ends in a servants' quarters, a warren of dank little rooms, lit only with the occasional guttering lamp. We pass rows of empty shelves, a basket of vegetables, rotting into puddles of dark liquid, a kitchen, a blackened oven with no fire inside. No one is here. It feels as though no one has been here for some time, though surely that cannot be.

My legs begin to ache from running. I have hardly done more than pace and brood for months, and now my body
rebels. Jacques's gaze is fixed ahead, as if he is following some thread only he can see. He pauses from time to time and flattens his back against the mirrored wall. There is no sound but our own breathing. Even the hideous, waspish buzz is gone, and in its wake is less than silence, an absolute, deadening void.

We leave the serving passageway through a hinged portrait and step out directly in front of a blue-and-black lacquered door.

“It will be locked—” I start, but Jacques draws a key from his pocket, ornate and toothy. The head is a butterfly, made of iron.

“One of the master keys,” he says, and I want to ask him where he got it, but he is already inserting it, the lock clicking back, the door yawning open. And there are my sisters, sprawled across the furniture of a gloomy boudoir. They are rather unkempt. Charlotte has overturned a chair, and is poking her head from under it like a mouse from its hole. Bernadette lies on the bed and does not move. Delphine stands huddled against a small rocking horse. Her little gown is ripped at the sleeve. It has been stitched up with a caterpillar of bad sewing, as if one of the girls tried to mend it herself.

I run to her and drag her to her feet.

“Delphine,” I say, crying and hugging her neck. “Delphine, are you well? Come to me, all of you, come! We are going now! We are leaving!”

They approach me cautiously, and I gather them up, and the four of us clutch each other, kneeling on the floor like a swaying, many-armed beast. They make hardly a sound as I embrace them, simply cling to me. Even Bernadette, who before would not have embraced me for all the jewels of Spain, does so now, weeping quietly into my shoulder.

“We are going, my sisters,
oui
?” I murmur. “Upstairs.”

I look at Jacques. He stands by the door, smiling.

I pull my sisters to their feet and turn them toward him. “This is Jacques,” I say, lifting Delphine to my hip. “He is our friend. Put on your shoes and let us go. Quickly, and not a word, yes?”

Delphine tries to say something I cannot hear. She repeats herself, twice, a third time, her voice oddly stretched and cooing, as if she has forgotten how to speak. “Where is Mama?”

“Mama is not here,” I say, and I look up at the ceiling, because I cannot bear to look at Delphine. “She has gone up ahead of us, she—”

A sound behind me stops my lying tongue: a light step, deeper in the chambers.

I clutch Delphine to me and look over my shoulder. “Bernadette?” I say, and my insides twist. “Bernadette, are you alone here?”

The hum is back, that twitching, intoxicating whine, the sound of a thousand nervous bees, boiling within their hive.

“Bernadette?” I whisper frantically.

She turns to me, her eyes wide. Her back is to the door into the boudoir, and one of her hands is clutching at something, a fine toy that seems to be made of bone: a butterfly. The buzzing rises, crawling into my ears. I take hold of Delphine's hand—“Bernadette, take your sister. Follow Jacques, quickly!”

Someone is there. In the doorway behind Bernadette, someone is standing, a small figure in livery, red and gold, and his face, oh heavens,
his face. . . .