Strands of Bronze and Gold (15 page)

He turned his brilliant gaze my way when I entered. “What a pleasant surprise. To what—” He ceased speaking at sight of my expression. His countenance changed to one of patience and long-suffering. “You have something to say. All right, out with it. What is it that mars your so-lovely face with … righteous indignation, is it?”

I strode briskly up, starting out strong, but then sputtering. “You can’t—she can’t—Sir, I can’t continue to have Odette descend the second I step down from the veranda. It’s intolerable to have her there every moment I’m outside.”

“Sit down, Sophia. You need not continue to loom.”

I sunk to a chair, his tone rapidly deflating me.

“Odette attends you on my orders,” he stated firmly. “You are under my protection, and you are too precious to allow the possibility of mishaps. There are poachers in the woods, sometimes slaves eluding the patrollers. Perhaps even that one-legged scoundrel who escaped.”

“But—”

He held up his hand. “Be so kind as to let me speak without interruption. It is not only that. As a man of means, and as a businessman of consequence, I have naturally incurred enemies. My traps are not intended only for poachers. Then too, you are so
delicate, such a lady, that Odette watches to ensure no tumble or accident befalls you.”

“Sir, I am not so helpless or dainty or—or—stupid as you insinuate.” I tried to speak with dignity.

“Oh, but you are very breakable.” He spanned the fine bones of my wrist with his thumb and little finger. “Now, do not embarrass Odette by trying to make her disobey my orders. And no more on this subject. It bores me.”

Anything else I might say would only make me sound foolish, so I curbed the hot words that sprang to my tongue. Ducky’s comment about Adele came back to me:
Nothing her husband gave her was what she wanted
. Could it be that he only gave her what he had already decided she must have? I turned to go.

He stopped me. “There is something I needed to ask of you before you leave me to my accounts.”

I waited.

“I must travel on some distant business soon. Will you take charge of my keys in my absence? It is a dire responsibility. I shall entrust you with keys that even our good Ducky does not have. They must be guarded and never used.”

My mouth went dry. “I would be happy to do that, sir.” His keys!

I tried to be considerate of Odette. After all, she was a foreigner alone and out of place, yet her attitude toward me was baffling. She seemed to resent me so much more than could be accounted for by the fact that she had been wellborn and come down in the world. It was as if she had arrived at the abbey prepared to hate me.

Perhaps I could win her over by kindness. When she finished my
hair one morning, I presented her with the gift of a crimson scarf that would set off her coloring beautifully.

“Merci, Mademoiselle,”
she said in a flat voice, and turned to leave, pinching the scarf between her fingers.

“And will you please mend the cranberry silk? I stepped on the lace last time I wore it.”

She turned around slowly.

“It’s torn,” I said. “Torn. The cranberry silk.”

She watched me with a faint, mocking curl of the lips as I gesticulated awkwardly to make her understand. I dropped my hands. “I know you can speak at least a little English, Odette. I know it.”

An absolute blankness came over her face.

I snatched the gown out of the wardrobe and shoved it in her arms. As usual, she eventually tired of her game and did what I had been trying to make her do for the past several minutes.

“I know it!” I called again after her as she left the room. “And here’s your scarf!”

She swept on toward the service stairs without a backward glance as I dangled her gift out the doorway.

The scarf was too good for her anyway.

She seemed to take pleasure in cinching my corset too tightly, which was daily torture, but she never made mistakes I could complain about to my godfather. Instead, she kept my things perfectly. She had a wonderful way with my hair. For the daytime she would coil and twine it, allowing a few curling tendrils to escape. In the evenings, since M. Bernard wanted it left down, she would tuck in a jade comb or a silver pin or a posy at the most becoming angle.

A few times a week she dressed me in the exotic foreign costumes
my godfather demanded. She even added to their allure. For my Indian outfit she procured kohl to outline my eyes. For my
ensemble
from Istanbul she chose a pale sapphire sash to set off the soft white trousers and deep blue silk outer robe.

Once, when she clothed me as a Manchu woman, she murmured something that included the word
poupée
, which I knew meant “doll.” I set my jaw and looked her straight in the eye. Yes, perhaps I
was
the master’s doll. What of it? I didn’t mind humoring Monsieur’s whims in my dress and hair. There was little enough I could do to cheer him and repay his generosity.

I preened in front of the mirror late one day not long afterward. Odette had just finished helping me into an evening gown of white grounded silk. The bodice and tiny sleeves were finished with broad bands of sapphire-embossed velvet. Opals dangled at my ears and on my wrist, and Odette had inserted lappets of blue and gold ribbon, intermingled with golden leaves, into my rippling hair.

“Vous etes jolie,”
Odette said.

She had never complimented me before. Was she softening toward me? Come to think of it, she had acted odd all afternoon, seeming to hurry through my dressing, as though she were expecting something.

A quick knock sounded at the door, and Talitha poked her head in. “Miss, Master say you’re to go to him in the crimson salon. Right now.”

I nodded, immediately on edge. This had never before happened.

When I entered the salon, I drew back at the sight of M. Bernard’s expression. His mouth was hard and his nostrils white and
pinched, his eyes ablaze. In his hand he held crushed papers. He waved them so close they touched my nose.

“I do not know what to say, Sophia. That you, at your tender age, should already be an experienced trollop. What am I to think?”

“What—I don’t—what are they?” I faltered.

“You pretend you do not know?”

His hot breath shot into my face.

“I don’t know what they are,” I said.

He grabbed my upper arm and squeezed painfully. “You do not recognize these missives, which you saved carefully in your jewelry chest? Letters from some man describing your lovely eyes, your lovely skin. Are such personal compliments from gentlemen so frequent that their presumptuousness is not memorable? What other liberties did you allow this
cochon
?”

The letters from Felix out of my jewelry chest. Those innocent, sweet love letters. M. Bernard was insinuating something vile. I glared at him. “Sir, is it the act of a gentleman to read correspondence addressed to me? They are private notes, written years ago for my viewing only. The young man who sent them was always respectful. I saved them because I had never before and have never since received such kind words.”

I snatched the papers from his hand, broke from his grasp, and fled, scorching heat flaming my cheeks. I passed Odette in the corridor. She averted guilty, beady black eyes.
She
had given them to my godfather.

I flung the poor notepapers into the low blaze of my fireplace and threw myself on the bed, weeping bitterly. He had spoiled
everything with his ugly, unjust, and untrue insinuations. I wept until I could weep no more.

I was staring bleakly at the underside of the bed’s quilted canopy, thinking it resembled the lid to a coffin, when Talitha entered. “Master asks, do you be coming to supper?”

“Tell him that no, I’m not.”

She didn’t withdraw. “Please, Miss Sophia.”

I said nothing.

“Please, he be angry.”

“Then let him be angry. This time I’m not coming down.”

I rolled over and buried my face into my pillow, but I could still feel Talitha’s presence. I heard her cross the room. She gave my back an awkward little pat.

“Thank you,” I whispered, “but I’m still not coming down.”

She sighed and left the room.

When my bedchamber was darkening, I wriggled out of my gown and into a nightdress. I ripped the ribbons and golden leaves from my hair and hurled them toward the dressing table. When Odette entered, I feigned sleep. At the sound of her footsteps, suffocating red fury flooded me. I wondered if she could feel it.

“Je suis désolé,”
she murmured. Her fingers brushed the place on my arm marked by M. Bernard’s fingers. I recoiled.

She was sorry. If she was sorry, then why had she done it? I kept my eyes tightly shut. I heard her pick up and shake out the dress, hang it, and leave the room.

M. Bernard commanded her presence, so Odette I must have.

She could pry into my drawers, my trinket boxes. What if she
were to find the secrets I’d hidden beneath the blotter? I slipped out of bed to remove the paper on which I’d written the lyrics to the “Drinking Gourd” song, as well as the envelope containing the red hair and the note to Tara. I had memorized the words to the song, so I burned that page in the fireplace. The envelope I placed casually in the desk drawer. If Odette found it there amid the jumble of odds and ends, she would attach no significance to it.

Off and on all night long I awakened and replayed the scene with M. Bernard, thinking of what I should have said. When I slept, my dreams were ill.

Cool air tickled my legs. The bedclothes were down at my feet. Slowly, stealthily, my nightgown was moving up my body, inch by inch. Now it was just below my knees, now just above. I gave a short, strangled scream, bolted straight up to snatch the blankets from the foot of the bed, and awoke completely.

I peered into the shadowy corners of the moonlit room. No one. The door was locked.
Or did I forget to lock it?
I tiptoed to the door and found it gaping open. I shut it and turned the key.

No one was in the room. It had been a nightmare.

“Charles,” I said the next morning, “would you please bring my trunk down from the attic and put it in my bedroom?”

He raised his eyebrows, but said only, “Yes, Miss.”

Out on the veranda I cuddled Buttercup.

“I’m leaving,” I whispered. “I’ll never return to this place.”

I set him gently on the bench with one last stroke down his long tail and stepped into the garden for a final stroll and to make my plans. Buttercup lightly leaped down to follow me.

“Come along, then,” I said.

We made our way down the sinuous paths between the beds, Buttercup nosing under my skirts and twisting between my legs to nearly trip me. I would miss him so much. “I’ll ask Charles to keep feeding you,” I told him.

Today I would inform M. Bernard I was leaving. Surely he would loan me traveling money in order to be rid of a person he so despised. My family would be disappointed to see me back already and all their hopes dashed, but I had no choice. I would finally learn why their letters had ceased. I would find some sort of job. Perhaps as a seamstress. It would be terrible, but I could help out family finances a little.

An hour later, as I was placing into the trunk the few possessions I considered mine, my godfather breezed into the room.

“They told me you had ordered your baggage brought down, but I did not expect—this.” He captured my hands and held them tightly in his own.

I turned my head away. “I’m leaving, sir. If you’d be so good as to loan the money for the train, I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.” I had to speak carefully so my voice wouldn’t break.

“Your stay here is not a visit,” he said, his tone gentle. “This is your home and I am your legal guardian. Will it help if I apologize? Here, I am doing it. I do beg your pardon. The letters came as a shock; at your age I had thought you completely inexperienced in matters of the heart. But upon consideration I should not have spoken so. I am sorry I was abrupt.”

Abrupt?
Was that how he chose to describe his speech and actions of yesterday? Had he forgotten how his words had lashed me like a
whip? Should I show him the bruises on my arm? I snatched my hands from his. “I can’t possibly stay here when you called me—when you called me a … 
trollop
.”

“I was wrong. It was unforgivable, but—will you forgive me anyway?” His tone was soft and pleading. “I will do all in my power to make it up to you. You see, I was worried you had given the young man encouragement, to have those many epistles from him. I have been—I have been betrayed before, so I am perhaps oversensitive to these things.”

At this moment I couldn’t blame Victoire for leaving her husband.

I was so weary from lack of sleep and the difficulty of holding up through the morning that I swayed on my feet.

He pulled me against his chest and put his arms around me, and I didn’t pull away, though I remained stiff.

“I’ll try,” I said at last.

With one hand, he brushed the hair from my face. “Oh,
ma fifille
, were you crying all night?”

“Not all,” I said shakily.