He looked at her curiously, not knowing exactly what she intended to do. She pressed her hands together.
“Luc, you kept me company on many a day and we spoke of numerous things, in honesty and confidence. I want to think that we were friends,” she said. “I think you meant what you said when you proposed to me about making me happy. I apologize if I hurt you, but you cannot make me happy, despite your best intentions.”
He opened his mouth as if to utter a sharp word, but ended up observing her with eyes that were very blue, very confused.
“If you must be angry at someone, it should be me. Not him. I do not think you truly want to do this.”
“You do not understand,” Luc said.
“Luc, I want to believe … I know you are a good man. You are silly and impulsive, and you are a good man.”
There had been a wild and unpleasant spirit inside Luc, but when she spoke, it died out, like cooling embers from an extinguished fire.
“Luc Lémy, do not be a coward now,” Valérie said. “Will you allow this man to stomp over your honor and ruin your future? Remember why you are here.”
“Will you let him be?” Nina exclaimed.
Valérie held her shawl with one hand and chuckled in indignation as she approached them. “They’ll be laughing at you throughout the city, Lémy. Engaged for scarcely a day, and suddenly your bride is missing. And there are many other considerations one must not forget.”
“Are you truly that desperate for blood that you must goad him?” Nina asked.
“Do not be weak now, Lémy,” Valérie said, ignoring her. “Do not allow this silly child to take away what is rightfully yours.”
Luc’s eyes had been on the revolver, but when Valérie spoke, he raised his head and his eyes fell on Nina.
She knew he had loved her a little, just as she’d cared for him, the gentle love of friends. He had forgotten, and now remembered this detail and it was that memory that doused him.
“Nothing is rightfully mine, and it never was,” Luc said slowly.
Valérie’s body was as tense as a wire, her shoulders raised. As Luc spoke, she grew stiffer, her jaw twisted in its tightness.
“You are wrong to think me a good man. I have been terrible. I wanted to arrange a lucrative business deal using land owned by the Véries, but lacking the proper funds, I thought I could obtain the money by marrying you,” he said. “When you went with Hector, Valérie and I decided the only way to ensure the marriage took place, the only way to obtain the money I needed, was to kill Hector in a duel.”
The weight of her regard—it was leaden—hurt him. For a moment he was more boy than man. A boy who had been caught tearing the wings off insects and now faced his punishment with a quivering mouth.
“No. You can still prove me right,” Nina told him. “Call it off.”
Embarrassed, Luc lifted his eyes to the heavens and then looked down again at Nina, examining her face.
“Shots were exchanged today,” Luc said, his voice broken. “I thus consider the terms of this duel satisfied.”
“Fine words from a gutless coward!” Valérie said.
“Shoot him yourself if you desire blood,” Luc replied sharply.
“If I had a revolver in my hand, dear Lémy, do not doubt I would shoot him myself and then shoot your former fiancée,” Valérie said. “Hand me yours, and I will be happy to prove this point.”
Valérie extended her hands, as if to take Luc’s pistol.
“For heaven’s sake, what is wrong with you?” Gaetan asked.
Nina remembered a groom who had been kicked by a horse and had to walk around all summer with his arm in a sling. Gaetan was like the groom when the horse had kicked him, startled and horrified and not sure if he had broken his arm.
“For heaven’s sake!” he repeated, clutching his wife by the shoulders.
“Let go of me, you oaf.”
Valérie was as sharp as glass then, as sharp and perhaps as fragile, for she moved back and stumbled. It was as if the veil she had worn each day had grown frayed, revealing the naked, desperate truth beneath. Her eyes darted ferociously; her fingers flew into her hair as she spoke.
“Are you happy now, Hector?” she asked him. “I hope you are happy, you faithless vermin.”
Gaetan stared at his wife, and she stared at Hector. Valérie had the look of a woman who has spent many days in the desert and lies starving upon the sand.
“If you spoke but a word,” Valérie said then, her tone changing, a note of warmth in her voice, as she took a step in Hector’s direction.
But there was no warmth in him to mirror that change in her. There was only a chilling, polite inclination of the head, which stopped her from taking another step.
“No,” Hector said.
Valérie’s lips trembled, but she did not say anything else. She whipped her skirts up and began walking away, back toward the clock tower.
Nina pressed her hands together, holding them beneath her bosom. She felt Hector drifting to her side, his hand circling her waist. They both stood in front of Luc.
“I apologize for dragging you here,” the younger man said.
Luc tossed his pistol to the ground with that. Not quite believing it was all over, Nina took a deep breath and exhaled. Her cousin seemed to have turned to stone, but now he lifted his head as they approached him.
Gaetan and Hector looked at each other.
“I will speak to you plainly, Mr. Beaulieu, for you deserve that,” Hector said. “I came to your house without love for Nina in my heart. Had I been a wiser man, I would have loved her from the moment I met her, but I cannot claim this wisdom. I am sorry I have caused your family any strife, but I love Nina now, and I want to marry her.”
Gaetan was somber, but he nodded his head. “I don’t think I could stop her from marrying you even if I wanted to, Mr. Auvray,” he said. “You must wed in Oldhouse. Her mother will want it.”
Gaetan clasped Nina’s hand and gave it a kiss, then he spoke to the others, and they walked off together, leaving Hector and Nina to stand alone under the shade of the elm trees.
He did not seem certain what to say, his brows lifted in surprise as he looked at her. “You stopped two bullets in the air.”
“Yes,” she replied, not knowing what to say either, drained and shaken as she was.
“How? It’s the kind of trick one has to rehearse a hundred times before getting it right,” he said, his analytical mind trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
A breeze was blowing, toying with her unwound hair and whispering against the branches.
“I am not sure.”
“You are not sure,” he repeated.
“You said to believe.”
She looked up at him, and he gave her a dazzling smile before leaning down to kiss her breathless.
Chapter 27
VALÉRIE LOOKED IN THE MIRROR at the almost imperceptible lines of dissatisfaction across her brow and bracketing her mouth. She ran a hand down her neck.
She could not rid from her mind Hector’s eyes when he’d spoken to her. How cool they were. Not hard or cruel, but lacking in any profound emotion for her and able only to reflect an odd clemency.
If he had hated her, she might have felt relieved.
She heard Gaetan walk in and did not bother looking at her husband. She wished he’d let her be, but he began talking at once in a hurried, anxious tone, as if he intended to vex her even more.
“I have spoken to Luc Lémy, and he has explained how you two confabulated, how you plotted to have Nina married off to him and Hector removed from the picture. You will explain yourself this instant, and do not attempt to lie to me.”
“Why? You said you’ve spoken to Luc,” Valérie said, rubbing her hands together.
“Because I want you to do it.”
“So you can judge me?”
“You have tried to wrong my family.”
Valérie stood up and faced her husband. Even in his ange
r, he had the quality of an insect, and she was not afraid to look him in the eye instead of feigning contrition. She was not going to crawl at the feet of this man.
“Your family. Always your family. The sacrosanct Beaulieus of Montipouret are the only thing that fills your mind. It has always been them. Camille and Madelena and most of all that worm, Antonina.”
“I have given you everything, Valérie,” he said, looking heartbroken, but she did not care.
Trinkets, she thought. Rings and necklaces and earrings, everything accounted for.
“No. Not at all,” Valérie said. “You could have lifted my family from the muck, but you decided you’d only toss them crumbs. My cousin, you wouldn’t buy him that post in the army, and my uncle—”
“I do not believe posts should be bought.”
“Not merely that. Always, always the Beaulieus have been the most important concern in your life. Is it any wonder I would attempt to try to help my own kin? That when Luc spoke to me, I seized a business proposition that could benefit my family for a change?”
“At the expense of my cousin’s happiness,” Gaetan said dryly. “You have done nothing but manipulate and deceive me, and slander her.”
Valérie curled her hands into fists against her skirts to keep herself from slapping him. “I was sacrificed. Why should she escape her fate?” Valérie asked. “I was forced to marry a man I did not care about, dragged to the altar by my elderly relatives, and told to repeat the words the priest said.”
He looked more astonished than if she had hit him, and this filled her with a deep satisfaction. All the loathing, all the hate she had kept bottled inside was oozing out, and it was delightful. In her misery, she was able to find the beauty of spite and cling to it.
“I had nothing to gain from my marriage to you,” Gaetan said. “You came to me without a dowry and the debts of your father, which had to be repaid.”
“A fact you reminded me of every day.”
“When?”
“In every look, Gaetan. Every word. Do you think I could not tell? How kind Gaetan Beaulieu is to have married her,” Valérie said in singsong. “How kind, how generous, how marvelous of him to pick a piece of trash from the street, dust it off, and set it upon the mantelpiece.”
“I did not think that,” Gaetan said, pointing a finger at her. “You might have thought it, but I did not.” He inclined his head slightly, every fiber of his being alight with sadness in that instant. “I have loved you,” Gaetan said. “I have been a good husband.”
“No, no, you never loved me. You loved Camille and Madelena and that stupid girl, Antonina,” Valérie said. “I know what it is like to be loved, and you have never loved me.”
Gaetan could not possibly deny it. All his tenderness had been intended for them. He did not smile at Valérie the way he smiled at Madelena or Antonina. He never was half so delighted with Valérie, even if Valérie was more accomplished, more learned, more beautiful than his silly cousins. Gaetan knew only the pull of blood, the bonds of familial duty.
“Only one man has loved me,” Valérie insisted.
It hurt to admit this, and yet she had to. She was burning inside, consumed with a roaring pain, and if she did not speak this truth, she would be reduced to ashes. Hector had adored her. But even Hector had not been enough. Even his love had not been enough, and Valérie hated herself for it.
Her hands shook. She might have wept, humiliating herself in this man’s presence, but then Gaetan spoke.
“At last I understand your indifference,” Gaetan said.
His tone, the disappointment in his voice, made her snap up straight. She was the one who had a right to be disappointed! What could Gaetan complain about? How dare he look at her as if she were at fault.
She had been dutiful. She had been a proper wife.
“I would have his name,” Gaetan said.
“Do you really want me to say it? Can’t you guess it?” Valérie replied.
“I will have his name, damn you!”
He was angry. Finally true emotion coursed through him instead of the tepid affection he had always granted her, she who demanded a roaring fire and had been given but a tiny match to light her heart. No wonder he disgusted her.
“Hector Auvray,” Valérie said. “We were engaged once. But I was forced to wed you and then he came back for me. From across the water, from Iblevad, as he said he would. He waited ten years for me.”
A decade, she thought desperately. Despite everything, it meant something.
“He’ll ask you for Antonina’s hand in marriage. Can you possibly grant it, knowing this?” Valérie asked, a smile dancing on her lips.
“I have granted it. I will not rescind it.”
“Even—”
“You are correct on one point, Valérie. And that is that I care for Antonina very much. I would like to see my cousin be happy, and she loves that man with all her heart, as was obvious today.
“And he loves her,” Gaetan added.
She would have slapped him this time, but he moved across the room and opened the armoire, pulling dresses and tossing them on the bed as though they were old rags rather than precious silks and velvets.
“You will pack your bags tonight. You are leaving for Eli, near the northern border. There you will remain,” Gaetan said.
“You will attempt to send me away from Loisail?” Valérie asked. “As if I’d go.”
Loisail was as important as the air that she breathed. It was her city. She was in the society pages every other week, a constant fixture at the most lavish parties. The boulevards might as well have been named after her.
“You have no choice.”
“Attempt to put me on a train, and tomorrow The Courier will have the most scandalous story printed on the front page, and it will concern Antonina Beaulieu. All a woman has is her reputation,” she warned him.
He moved back toward her, clasping her arm with a force she did not know he possessed, his fingers tight.
“Attempt to say a word against my family, Valérie, and not only will I divorce you, I will see that you are left begging in the streets.”
She tried to shove him off, but Gaetan only squeezed her arm tighter until at last he flung her away. Valérie landed by the bed, stumbling and almost tripping as her foot tangled in a dress that lay on the floor.
She heard the fabric rip as she straightened herself up.
“You wouldn’t divorce me,” Valérie said. “They’d blather all around the city about it.”
“Yes, they would. Which is why I’m sending you to Eli. A separation of this sort is not unheard of and better for both of us. I’ll give you an annuity. But my kindness has a price, and that price is that you stay far away from me and my kin, that you never speak of us.”
“I am no fool, Gaetan. Kindness can run dry rather quickly.”
“So can my patience. I want you out of this house by nightfall.”
Nearly breathless and in shock, she tried to think of a solution, of a way to escape this maze she had trapped herself in.
“I’ll speak to The Courier today,” she said, and though she wanted to deny it, she was afraid. Gaetan’s eyes had an edge she did not know.
“As you’ve said, all a woman has is her reputation. Take Antonina’s, I’ll take yours, and as I’ve explained to you, my kindness will cease. Trash on the streets, you said? Pray someone lifts you up then. Pray very hard,” Gaetan told her.
He left her to sit at the edge of her bed, all her finery spread upon the floor. Valérie rubbed her hands desperately. For five minutes, she labored over a letter for the papers, then ended up tossing ink and paper upon the fine carpet when the futility of the situation hit her.
She rushed to her vanity and opened her jewelry box, thinking that she might sell the precious items in there and … and what? Return to her father’s home? To do what?
She pulled out necklaces and bracelets, until she found that lonely, thin circle of gold Hector had given her.
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She clutched it tight, and as she grasped it, everything bled away from her heart. The anger, the desperation, until she was left hollow and cold. She felt herself disappearing. If she looked in the mirror, she thought she would not be able to make out her own face.
A maid came to help her pack. Valérie did not resist.
She went into the carriage, then boarded the train. As it was leaving the station, her fury returned for a moment as she watched the city speed by. She took the ring, which she had been cradling for a long time now, and tossed it out the window.
Valérie regretted the gesture at once, pressing both hands against the glass.
“It is gone,” she told a startled passenger who sat in front of her and surely thought her mad.
She looked down at her perfect hands, and she recalled how her grandmother had praised them. You can tell a lady by her hands, she had said. One day, she had promised, Valérie would marry a very wealthy man, she would bring glory to the family, and she would be very happy.
But Valérie hadn’t known how to be happy.
She turned away from the window.
Chapter 28
IT WAS A RELATIVELY MODEST wedding, but then again it was put together with haste. The tradition of gifting silver items and exhibiting them upon a long table for a week before the couple wed was eschewed since there was no time to properly monogram the items. In any event, neighbors from all the nearby estates came to Oldhouse, as did assorted Beaulieus.
Nina wore a dress of rich yellow satin with a short train, the neckline and sleeves encrusted with crystal and mother-of-pearl. She shunned the veil. Instead, her hair was up, yellow flowers carefully woven into it. The priest made a bit of a fuss about this detail, since it really was not decent for a young woman to get married without a veil, but there was a precedent, since Madelena had gone without a veil as well.
Hector sported a gray suit and a yellow cravat and a single, yellow flower boutonniere, to better match his bride.
Had they been in the city, they would have journeyed to the photographer to have their official portrait taken, and their names would have been published in the newspaper three weeks in anticipation of the wedding, but in the countryside, such things did not matter so much, and, anyway, everyone in Montipouret knew Camille’s youngest daughter was to wed.
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