Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (57 page)

I must lie to Mother, and lie quickly. Not a single lie that she can dispute, but a barrage of lies, all coming so fast and furious that she will be bewildered by the effect and forget the issue.

“I thought I would have a dress made for you,” I say, “and I was taking these to use as patterns for the dressmaker. There have been bedbugs in my room, so I wanted to have all our clothes laundered. You don’t seem to wear these dresses much, so I thought I might give them to the unfortunate girl who begs in front of the church.”

“Oh.” Mother looks at the clothes as though seeing them for the first time. “What are you doing in my room?”

“I just told you.”

We stare at each other. Mother seems more stupid than usual these days. Perhaps she’s losing what little mind she has left.

“Time for lunch, Sainte-Beuve,” she says. “You should leave those here.”

I bundle the dresses onto her divan and scuttle past her out the door.

I find a boy in the park outside the Hugos’ apartment and pay him to take a note upstairs.

Will she come? I have signed the note as Charlotte so she will know who waits below her window, who paces up and down between the trees. My heart races and my mouth is dry. A small gust of wind pulls at the edge of my skirts.

Adèle is there in a moment. She runs from the door of the building in her mourning dress, my note still clutched in her hand. Because I am not dressed in a way she will expect, she runs right past me and I have to call out to her.

“Adèle!”

“Charlotte?” She comes towards me, looking confused.

“Sister Charlotte,” I say, for I am dressed as a nun. I bought the habit this morning. It was all I could think of to do. I couldn’t risk getting caught by Mother again.

We walk to the far end of the Place des Vosges, out of sight of the apartment. We sit on a bench in the shade.

“I came as soon as I heard,” I say.

Adèle turns to me. Her face is puffy from crying. She turns away again. “It’s hard to talk to you when you’re dressed like that.”

“I’m sorry. It was the best I could do.” I tug at the wimple, which fits a bit too snugly around my face. “It’s very hot in here,” I say. “I had no idea that it was so stifling to be a nun.”

Adèle manages a faint smile. “Not that it doesn’t suit you a little,” she says.

We sit in silence. I hold her hand. The wind moves in the trees above us.

“Dédé is only thirteen,” she says after a while. “We didn’t tell her right away, and now she thinks that her sister is speaking to her from the grave. For days we knew Léopoldine was dead, but Dédé still thought her alive. Perhaps this is why she feels her sister talks to her: because at the moment of her death, Léopoldine
was
still alive to Dédé.” Adèle shifts closer to me. “I don’t know how to comfort her,” she says.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“How can I comfort you?”

Adèle leans into me, her plump body slumped against mine, all weight and no vitality.

“There is no comfort for me,” she says. “Just sit with me. For as long as we are able.”

Once, the proximity of her body would have sent me mad with delight. Now my body is simply there to hold up her sorrow, like a bolster on a bed.

What lives and what dies? The body dies, but the spirit of love persists. Love dies, but the body that tasted that love continues, absurdly, to exist. There is no knowing what will leave us and what will remain.

Perhaps this is the most frightening thing of all.

T
HEY LEAVE THE BODY
out for me.

Madame Vacquerie meets me at the door.

“Prepare yourself,” she says, her hand on my arm, leading me into the cavernous entrance hall. “She was in the water for a little while before they found her.”

The house at Villequier overlooks the Seine, wide as a lake here where it feeds in from the ocean. The carriage drove along its banks on the way to this house. The water outside the carriage window, a flat, blank sheet of grey and blue. No waves or wind today. A clear sky, and the river looking so picturesque, I had to keep reminding myself that my daughter had drowned there.

It has taken all night to get here, and I did not sleep but sat up in the rocking, darkened carriage, preparing myself for this moment, a moment for which I will never be fully prepared.

Madame Vacquerie does not take her hand from my arm, and I am grateful for this. We do not know each other well, met briefly at the wedding a few months ago. We had spoken warmly to each other then, anticipating years of becoming acquainted, years of meeting up at the various occasions of our children’s lives. In fact, with Léopoldine newly pregnant, we were expecting just such an event in the beginning of the new year.

“We have washed the bodies,” says Madame Vacquerie. “And the graves have been dug in the cemetery. We could bury them tomorrow.”

“Yes, tomorrow.” I stumble on the lip of a doorway and Madame Vacquerie pulls me closer to her. She is practically holding me up at this point.

“A moment,” I say, and I lean against the door frame. “I need just a moment.”

“Of course.”

We pause there. Outside, I can hear the clatter of the carriage as it travels back down the driveway. My luggage must have been unloaded. It will be delivered to the bedroom where I will spend the next few days, a bedroom I have never seen. I wonder what it will be like. How odd to be thinking of that, to be thinking of anything except the fact that my oldest child is dead at the age of nineteen.

“Shall we go on?” asks Madame Vacquerie.

“Yes. I’m fine now.”

We walk through a drawing room lavish with red velvet drapes and two chandeliers, a life-size marble head of a man. There is a large book open on a table. We pass the table. It is a book of maps. An atlas. I can see the blue ink of the ocean.

“We have put her in the library,” says Madame Vacquerie. “Charles is in the dining room.”

It seems strange to have a body in the dining room, but then I realize that it is because of the table. Léopoldine and Charles will be laid out on tables. There would have been a ready table in the library, and another in the dining room.

“The coffins are made,” says Madame Vacquerie, reading my mind. “But we thought you would prefer to see her in a more natural state.”

“Is death natural?” I say.

The sun beaming in the windows of the drawing room fractures on the crystal of the chandeliers. I am momentarily dazzled by the shards of light dancing around the room.

Madame Vacquerie puts her arm around my waist.

“There is nothing worse than this day,” she says. “I have cried so many tears that I feel hollowed out.”

“They were happy. Weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were very happy.”

We have reached the door to the library. The heavy oak door is open, and I can see, in the dim interior—for there are no windows in this room—a white shape beached on a dark table.

Madame Vacquerie slides her arm from about my waist.

“I will leave you here,” she says. “And I will wait in the drawing room for your return.”

I don’t want her to go. I don’t want to have to enter that room and see my dead child. I don’t feel able to make the journey by myself.

But Madame Vacquerie has already gone. She has sidled away, and I am left standing alone on the threshold.

Léopoldine is covered in a white shift. Her long black hair has been brushed out. Both my girls are dark like me. They resemble each other, and myself as a child. The boys take more after Victor.

I touch her hair. It’s soft and dry. Funny, but I had expected it still to be wet, as though she would be preserved in the exact moment of her death, as though she had just been pulled from beneath the waves.

I touch her face. I touch her lips. Her eyes are closed. Her skin is cold and her skull feels hard and fast as rock.

“Sweetheart,” I say. “My treasure. My little one.”

My tears fall on her from above like rain.

She seems like a statue of herself, but not herself at all. The girl who was Léopoldine seems utterly and entirely gone. I touch the stiff curl of her fingers. I touch the curve of her hip, the flat of her stomach through the shift. Her baby, no bigger than a stone, is dead as well.

I bend over my daughter as though I were tucking her in at night.

I touch her shoulders, her long, graceful neck.

“My little swan,” I say.

I put a crucifix around her neck. I cut a lock of her hair with the small sewing scissors I have brought with me specifically for this purpose.

The room is dark. There are several candles flickering on the mantle, but their light is spilled close to them. Where Léopoldine lies is in shadow. In the soft darkness, with the candles nearby, and her white shift, my daughter looks like a moth. Her body looks like the body of a moth, wingless and still.

It would have been dark under water. As dark as this room. There would have been no sounds. She could not have cried out.

Madame Vacquerie is suddenly beside me.

“Come and have some supper,” she says. “You must be hungry after your journey.”

“I’m not hungry. And I don’t want to leave my child. I just got here.”

“You’ve been in here for three hours.” Madame Vacquerie helps me to my feet. I’ve been crouched on the floor beside the library table. I can barely stand.

“Have I really?” It seems only a moment ago that I first saw Léopoldine, that I touched her face. But my body is sore from being curled up. My face is wet from crying.

I allow myself to be led from the room.

“How are you able to be so strong?” I ask Madame Vacquerie as she guides me back through the drawing room.

“I have had three days to grow accustomed to my grief,” she says. “And I’m not strong at all. But I know how you are feeling right now. I know exactly.”

“Thank you.” It seems an entirely inadequate thing to be saying, but I say it again anyway. “Thank you.”

We eat downstairs in the kitchen. We are served by the cook and sit at the servants’ table in the middle of the kitchen, beside each other as though we were children.

I am unbelievably hungry. I eat the food the moment it hits my plate, although after I’ve eaten it, I can’t even remember what it was I was served.

“Where is everyone?” It suddenly strikes me that we are alone, that Madame Vacquerie’s husband and her other children are nowhere to be seen.

“I sent them all away,” she says. “Just for tonight. They will be back tomorrow for the burial, and we will have a reception afterwards. But for tonight, I thought it would be easier for you if you could be alone with me, and if we could be alone with our children.”

“I would like to see Charles,” I say.

“Yes.”

The cook comes over with a slab of cake and cream. She places it carefully in front of me. “I’m sorry, Madame Hugo,” she says. “I’m truly sorry.”

Her kindness sets me crying again. I drench the cake with my tears, then I gulp it down.

Charles is dressed only in a long white shirt. His skin is as pale as Léopoldine’s. His fair, curly hair is as soft as a baby’s.

“Are they pale from being under water?” I ask Madame Vacquerie. We are standing on opposite sides of the dining-room table where her son lies.

“I think so. And the water has made their flesh a little swollen.” She gestures towards Charles’s feet and I see that they are puffy. They look soft. I cannot see the bones in them.

“He is so beautiful,” I say.

“My most beautiful child.” Madame Vacquerie’s voice catches.

“I had a child before Léopoldine,” I say. “A boy. He died in infancy. We had called him Léopold, after Victor’s father. It seemed natural to call the next child after that first one, but I wonder if it was right to name my daughter after a child who died.”

Madame Vacquerie is stroking her son’s hair. “We couldn’t have done anything to prevent this,” she says. “Even on the day it happened, I waved them off. They were only going for a sail. The weather was fair. The wind was low. Charles was a good sailor, and they were with his cousin Arthus and his uncle Pierre, who was a retired sea captain and excellent on the water.”

“They died as well?”

“Yes, they all died.”

“What happened?”

“My husband thinks the boat was top heavy with sails. It was a racing boat, had just won first prize in the Honfleur regatta. It was a fast boat. But the conditions were ideal. I don’t know. The river is very wide there, and those on shore couldn’t get to them fast enough after the boat capsized. Your daughter’s heavy skirts pulled her down into the water and caused her to drown.”

I am quiet for a moment as I imagine Léopoldine struggling in a tangle of wet petticoats. Dresses do up so snugly at the back. It would have been impossible to wriggle out of one under water.

It is too painful to think of the moment of my daughter’s death. Every time my mind goes there, I move it forward or backward and away from the event itself.

“Léopoldine would have felt very confident, going out on the water with such good sailors.”

“Yes. She was looking forward to the afternoon.”

Madame Vacquerie puts her hand on her son’s forehead.

“Charles didn’t die,” she says.

“What?”

“He didn’t drown. He surfaced. The rescue boat was close enough to see this. He was always a good swimmer. We live so close to the water that we made sure all our children could swim. People saw him surface, look around for his wife and call her name, and when he realized she was probably dead, he dived down to find her. He was found with his arms around her. They pulled them both from the water in a fisherman’s net. He chose to drown with her rather than to live without her.”

Charles’s face is empty of feeling. He looks more serene, more calm than Léopoldine, but perhaps I do not know him so well. I do not know what his face is supposed to look like.

“Foolish, foolish boy,” says Madame Vacquerie. “How was he to know that we grow out of that romance? An older man would never have chosen to drown.”

My Charles would die for me, I think, and I realize that this is the first time I’ve thought about Charles since I got here, and that it feels wrong to think about him now.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, because it is one thing to know that your child died in an accident and quite another to know that he chose to kill himself in the name of love. I would not have wanted that for Léopoldine. Her death, terrible as it is, will be easier to bear over time. Madame Vacquerie will forever question her son’s decision. “I wish your son had not made that choice,” I say. “I wish he had loved my daughter less.”

“You don’t mean that,” says Madame Vacquerie. “But thank you. It is kind of you to say it.”

I don’t mean it. I’m glad my child knew love if she was to leave this earth so soon. I’m glad she was married to a man who loved her, and who proved it in such a dramatic fashion. It can never be doubted. From this moment forward, it can never be doubted that Léopoldine was beloved.

“When should we have the service tomorrow?” asks Madame Vacquerie. “What time are you expecting your husband to arrive?”

At last the question I have been dreading.

“He’s on a walking holiday in Spain,” I say. “He won’t be able to get here in time. We will go on without him.”

I do not know where Victor is. He said that he was tired, that he had been working too hard and needed a change. So he left for a walking holiday in Spain. Usually, when he goes off by himself, I am relieved at his absence and have no reason to contact him while he is away. But when I tried to find him this time, at the hotel where he was meant to be staying, they said that he’d never checked in, that they had no reservation for him. It seems he is not walking in Spain. God knows where he is, but the lie means he is probably with his mistress, Juliette Drouet. He is with his mistress somewhere, and he has no idea that his eldest daughter has died so tragically.

Léopoldine was always her father’s favourite. He was more affectionate with her than with the other children. He thought her the most brilliant child of the four.

“It can’t be helped,” I say. “He will just have to miss the burial.”

There’s no response from Madame Vacquerie, and when I look over at her, I see that she is weeping. She is holding on to her son’s hand and her head is bowed over his body. I back slowly out of the room without her noticing.

Léopoldine is as I left her, lying on the library table, still dead. It seems absurd that she should still be dead. I don’t want her to be dead anymore. I want her to get up, to move about, to become herself again. I want her to climb up out of the water and burst into the sunlight, opening her mouth to breathe in the sweet afternoon air. I want her husband to find her there, and to keep her afloat until the fishing boat arrives to rescue them both. I want them to have their child. I want it to be a girl. I want them to name her after Charles’s mother. I want their married happiness to continue. I want there to be other children. I want to die with my eldest daughter as a woman in middle years, sitting at my bedside, holding my hand.

The candles gutter on the mantle, sputtering and flailing. The room grows darker and darker still.

It is awkward, but I manage to climb onto the library table. I lie down beside my daughter and pull her into my arms. She is stiff and cold. It is as if I am embracing the sea itself.

Did she cry out? Was she afraid? Did she know what was happening?

This was my girl, my first living child, who was talented and beautiful, who could paint and draw and write poetry to rival her father’s, who had all the social graces, who was mischievous and kind and full of light, who had married for love. This was my child, this corpse, this heavy fish, this mermaid.