Revenant Eve (12 page)

Aurélie avoided the mirror all that winter, so time slid by for me super fast. The only thing that roused her out of her lethargy was her birthday, which, like Cassandra’s, was celebrated with a special cake full of currants, and with little gifts—a handmade reticule from Cassandra, and a gold cross from the uncle and aunt. She also roused when she wrote letters to her mother, long badly spelled and blotted passages about how ill she felt, how cold it was, how very much she wanted to go home.

Each Friday, when Cassandra brought to her mother the weekly letter she wrote to her maternal cousin Lucretia, Aurélie also handed off a letter to be sent to Jamaica. She began counting up how many days until she could expect her first answer.

Although Cassandra received regular missives from Cousin Lucretia, when spring showed its first signs, there was still no letter next to Aurélie’s plate at breakfast.

Around the time of the first thaw, Aurélie finally started talking to me in the mirror again.

“Do you see me all the time?” she asked.

I brought my head down in a nod.

Her gaze sidled one way, then the other, as her skinny fingers twitched at her high-necked gown, then she whispered, “Even when I am in the bath?”

So she’d hit
that
age. I wanted to laugh, but I was afraid she’d see it. How to explain that all the habitual tasks that we do on autopilot were a blur to me? Keep it simple, I thought.

I mimed sleep, and saw immediate relief in her face. “So you wake up when I talk to you?”

Not quite. Time stopped blurring whenever she was alert or intent about something, but again I opted for the easy answer, and nodded.

So she started talking to me once or twice a day. She paid no attention to my attempts to respond, now that she knew I didn’t have telepathic powers or connection with her loved ones on the Spirit Net. She talked for her own comfort, mostly complaining about the never-ending
cold and darkness, her confusing dreams, and how tedious were her lessons, mixed up with anxious wonderings about why
Maman
had not written back.
Maman
seldom went into Kingston—there might be hurricanes—the English ship might have gone off course, or had to stop at the other islands.

She also reminisced wistfully about her life in Jamaica, including what she’d learned from Nanny Hiasinte. I gathered that
lwa
and duppies, as supernatural beings, were too strange to be understood. Like adults and their inexplicable behavior, only more so. Maybe that was why she had no apparent interest in me, except as a listener. And until we figured out how to actually talk, I wasn’t going to be much use, but I figured it had to come.

My biggest worry was always Alec. I kept telling myself that there had to be a way around this time travel thing—that if I managed to get Aurélie safely to Dobrenica, I’d find myself stepping out of that mysterious door a second after I’d stepped in, in which case Alec would never even know I was gone.

I held hard to that image.

Meanwhile, life went on at Undertree.

Lessons were strictly organized. Aurélie adapted quickly, except for the French lessons. She and Miss Oliver clashed, neither being intelligible to the other. Being a marquis’s daughter, Aurélie was exempt from the threat of the ruler, unlike poor, near-sighted little Diana, who often blotted her paper as she crouched over it to write. But the governess was adamant when she declared first that it was unbecoming for girls to correct their betters, second, that Mrs. Kittredge had hired her specifically for the elegance of her French (it was the same French that Aunt Kittredge had been taught) and furthermore, Aurélie’s accent was decidedly “colonial.” I could have told Miss Oliver that her French, unlike Aurélie’s, only slightly resembled anything actually spoken in France, but nobody was asking me!

Aunt Kittredge ended the matter by declaring that Aurélie was excused from French lessons. She was permitted to read any of the French texts in the schoolroom, but she must not interfere with Miss Oliver’s teaching of the other girls.

Time whizzed by uneventfully after that.

When the thaw became real, servants threw open the entire house to clean it thoroughly, and the strengthening sun improved Aurélie’s spirits and energy. She returned to playing the fortepiano and was far better at it than Cassandra, who had the decided advantage in singing. Aurélie’s husky contralto was deemed too low—a clear soprano was the fashion—so it was decided she’d forego singing in favor of playing, which meant the girls no longer shared musical lessons.

One balmy March day, James showed up while Cassandra was downstairs in the salon, having her lesson. He seldom appeared in the schoolroom, being more or less under his father’s tutelage. Since he was intended for the army, nobody appeared to be concerned if he actually read any of the books his father occasionally put his way.

Aurélie often sat by the schoolroom window, warming herself by the strengthening sunlight. She was there one day, doing some fine sewing as Diana struggled through conjugating French verbs for Miss Oliver.

James strolled in, obviously bored and looking for distraction. Seeing Aurélie sitting alone in the window seat, he beckoned, a grin flaring in his pimply face. Aurélie put down her sewing and followed him to the other window. “The gallery has warmed up enough to go into without freezing,” he whispered. “You said you know the art of the
duello
. Show me.”

Her whole demeanor brightened. “Yes.” Then clouded. “But these skirts. I can’t fight, for I shall tread on my hem. And I couldn’t put my René clothes into my trunk. They said I cannot be René in England.”

“Be René?”

“I pretended to be a boy, in Jamaica. I was ever so free,” she said wistfully.

James pursed his lips, then said, “My old clothes are in trunks in the attic. Let me see if there’s something in there you can wear. Just don’t let ’em see you, or they’ll set up a screech and we’ll find ourselves in no end of trouble.”

Aurélie fervently agreed, and a short time later, they met in the gallery, a long, high-ceilinged room that doubled as a ballroom if they
threw open the back doors to the second parlor, used only for company. As Cassandra and the fortepiano were safely in the front parlor, they could engage with their swords without worrying about discovery.

At first, James seemed somewhat uncomfortable with Aurélie wearing his clothes, even though she was nothing more than a little stick figure in the flapping shirt, waistcoat, and thick breeches. It was the idea more than the actuality that appeared to bother him.

The next problem came when they attempted their first pass. James was used to the art of gentleman’s dueling, with its attention to correct position and poise, and its many strictures. Aurélie had been coached to strike hard and fast, using her small size to disable an opponent before she ran.

After some stinging blows from her whip-fast, focused attack, James betrayed surprise, chagrin, and then wary respect. The lesson took an abrupt turn toward the serious, and both got an excellent workout.

He might have asked her out of idleness and boredom, but by the end of half an hour, he’d become as enthusiastic as she was, and when their hour ended, he was a fair way toward treating her like a little brother. Aurélie had found a friend at last.

As the weather brightened into spring, the two met for an hour or so on every day that Cassandra had singing lessons, for she could not always be trusted; if Cassandra thought something improper, she felt it her duty to tattle to their mother.

Their talk ranged widely. Aurélie described life in Jamaica, and James talked about his hope to someday command a regiment. His elder brother Will, at Winchester College, was the bookish one, he explained. The family hoped that Will might one day make his way into Parliament. He usually spent his holidays with friends, in particular one who was the second son of a viscount.

As soon as the weather warmed enough for rambles in the tangled park that stretched up into the wild hills behind the garden, James took Aurélie out for target practice. He sneaked her pistol out of the iron box where it had been locked, so that she might use her own weapon.

She didn’t dare go out in her borrowed clothes, for she was too visible from the many windows, but once they were beyond the neat hedgerows, she kirtled up her skirt, baring her thick woolen stockings.

The two shot at rocks set on a fallen tree. James showed her how to load and fire his fowling piece. Just as he respected her wild have-at-you style of fencing, he had been amazed at the quality of her French-made flintlock pistol, small as it was. They traded their weapons back and forth, comparing their range and seeing who could load fastest.

The rest of her time was taken up with lessons and domestic pursuits. Cassandra, encouraged by her mother to correct Aurélie’s English, claimed it was a duty, but could not quite hide her obvious enjoyment of implied superiority. Thus, Aurélie seldom had the chance to finish a sentence, with the result that she became quieter around the family, except for James, who told her he found her occasional lapses into French word order or regularized verbs as delightful as her accent.

James had completely taken over as Aurélie’s chief confidant, so my careful speech had yet to be heard. I should have expected that, I came to realize. When I was her age, I had zero interest in adults—I never asked strange ones their names, they were always Mr. or Ms. Somebody, or else Teacher, or Doctor, or Police Officer. I was the invisible friend who listened to her and watched over her when she needed me, and that was that.

I knew it would change.

E
ACH MORNING AURÉLIE FLUNG OPEN
her windows and sucked in lungfuls of fresh air. Sometimes she came to the mirror to tell me the names of blossoms. Once she asked if I knew what was blooming in Jamaica or Saint-Domingue, and when I shook my head, she turned away.

She was happier, and busy: Miss Oliver let the girls go out into the garden in the afternoons if they worked hard in the morning.

The garden was bordered by a ha-ha fence, which partly obscured the home farms down slope and also the wild tangle of woods up the hillside. The girls were not permitted to venture beyond the ha-ha unless accompanied. James and Aurélie had done their shooting well behind the barns. Cassandra would never go beyond the southern hedge, declaring that the stink of the farm made her ill.

Aurélie roamed all over the garden, now that everything was in bloom. She loved the roses most, snuffing in the fragrances that must have reminded her of flowers in the islands.

While cruising along the ha-ha and peering into the wood one day, Aurélie stopped Cassandra, who was describing in detail the latest letter from her cousin Lucretia, and casting sighs about the hundred eternities before the cousins’ expected visit.

“What is that music?” Aurélie asked, when Cassandra paused to draw breath.

“What music?” Cassandra said, hands on her hips. “
I
don’t hear anything.” Her emphasis on the “I” did not admit of the possibility that another’s perceptions had merit—one of the less endearing characteristics she’d picked up from her mother.

Aurélie stood poised on her toes, peering into the wild wood, which was dappled with golden light and blue shadows.

Cassandra sighed loudly. “If we must stand about in the sun, you ought at least to fetch your bonnet. Mama does not want you getting all burnt black as a cork again. She said so a thousand times. You are still horridly brown.”

I writhed in futile anger not just at Cassandra’s thoughtless bigotry, but at how superior she was about it.
It’s typical of the time
, I reminded myself.
She’s no worse than anyone else
.

But it didn’t make me feel any better. As for Aurélie, she ignored Cassandra, staring intently into the wood for half a minute more. The way she stood there peering, head at an angle, made it clear that she heard
something.
Whatever it was didn’t reach me.

She followed Cassandra inside, returned to the fortepiano, and warmed up with scales. She worked through her Haydn and Scottish airs. Then she bent over the keys, her brow knit as she tapped out the same pattern of notes, an entrancing bit of melody with two chord changes in it. She kept changing keys, and frowning.

Lessons became more irksome as April spooled away toward May. Only Aurélie seemed unaffected by the first warm spell of the year, though the others looked flushed and damp. Aurélie continued to wear her winter gowns, which were made high to the neck, the sleeves long, though the younger girls had shifted to lighter muslin and cotton prints. Cassandra talked continually of July, when the governess was given a month to visit her home, which meant a month off from school as well as the longed-for visit from her maternal cousins.

This talk of a month’s vacation surprised me with its forward-looking
generosity, for I remembered the horrible lives of governesses in the Brontes’ books and those by Elizabeth Gaskell. But then some things that the kids let fall made it clear that Miss Oliver didn’t get paid for the time she was gone. July was the month that various portions of the family often visited others, and Aunt Kittredge didn’t feel she was getting her money’s worth if some of the governess’s pupils were traveling or busy with visiting cousins. So the solution? Don’t pay her at all, but send her packing for a month.