Miss Roux

Elspeth

They let me out of the white room at four in the afternoon on the first of January, and dress me like a bride.

It is Cordelia's doing. A box arrives at three, flat and white, tied with gray ribbon, carried by a footman in the green and gold livery of Marrow Hall; and inside, folded in tissue, is a dress. It is charcoal wool, long-sleeved, high at the throat, with a row of tiny jet buttons down the back. A woman's dress. A sober, expensive, entirely correct dress, of the kind worn by a girl who has been ill and is being brought out to be looked at.

There is a note.

For Miss Roux. With the compliments of Mrs. Augustin Marrow. We dine at seven.

I turn the card over. I read it three times.

Roux.

It is not my name. It is not Dahlia's. It is not even a name that Kestrel has used. It is a color, the golden-brown of butter cooked until it nearly burns: the base of a sauce.

I understand it at once, and the understanding goes through me like a cold wire.

She has given me a name, I think, that is neither of the two I have.

She wants to see which one I answer to.

…

"It is a test," says Kestrel.

He says it in the car, in the gray hush of the Mercedes, as we take the long drive up the valley between black hills. He sits with his long hands folded on the head of his stick. He wears a black overcoat and a white silk scarf. His face has color in it. The shadows under his eyes are lighter than they have been in weeks, and every now and then I catch him glancing down at his own wrist, at the bare place where the link used to be, as a man looks at a tooth that has stopped aching.

He slept six hours. He does not know why. He found a note.

"Of course it's a test," I say.

"She does not ask my permission. She does not offer me a choice. She has sent a dress, and a name, and a car." His mouth thins. "She means to put you in a room with the family and see what your face does."

"Then she'll see a patient."

"She will see more than that."

"Ambrose." I turn my head. "Look at me."

He does.

I give him the face. It is the real one, the one I have been wearing for fifty-eight days: the soft pale vacancy, the mouth a little open, the eyes dark and slightly out of focus. I lay it on like paint. I let my hands lie slack in my lap. I let the light go out of my eyes, one lamp at a time.

He watches, with a look I cannot read.

"It is a very fine piece of work," he says. "I had not realized it was so complete."

"You made it."

"I did not." A pause. "I merely failed to notice you were making it for yourself."

The car turns in at a pair of stone gateposts, topped with lions.

…

Marrow Hall is not a house. It is a statement.

It stands at the top of a long white lawn, a great gray block of fieldstone with a slate roof and a hundred windows, every one of them lit. Smoke rises from six chimneys. Gravel crunches beneath the tires. There are lanterns on poles along the drive, and a double flight of curving steps, and at the top of them, framed in a doorway the height of two men, a stooped figure in a black tailcoat with white hair and a face like a very old, very clever tortoise.

"Pruett," says Kestrel, under his breath.

"The butler."

"Forty years. He knows everything. He will not look at you."

He is right. As we mount the steps, Pruett's pale eyes rest on Kestrel, on the hat, on the coat, on the stick; they slide across me like water across a stone, and do not catch. He bows. He takes our coats. He says, "Madam is in the drawing room, Doctor," in a voice of dry, fading, unimpeachable courtesy, and leads us across the hall.

It is a magnificent hall. It is paved in black and white marble and hung with portraits, forty or fifty of them in heavy gilded frames, a long procession of pale men in wigs and stocks and frock coats, all with the same small cold mouth. The ceiling is lost in shadow. A fire burns in a grate big enough to roast an ox. And against the far wall, tall as a door, stands a grandfather clock in a case of dark mahogany, ticking with a slow, unhurried, authoritative beat.

Philadelphia, 1791, I think.

I know it. I have heard it described. It is the clock a man named Conrad Marrow would stand under, at the age of nine, to count the seconds until his father came home.

I do not look at it. I walk past, with my hands folded, and my eyes lowered, and my footsteps tapping softly on the marble.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

…

The drawing room is long and low and gold.

It is lit by candles, a hundred of them, in sconces and candelabra, and by the glow of a wood fire at either end. The walls are covered in faded yellow silk. The furniture is Louis Quinze, spindly and gilded, upholstered in a pattern of birds. There are two long windows hung with velvet. Between them, in a high-backed Regency chair with her feet on a footstool, sits Cordelia Marrow.

She is in black silk. A cameo at her throat. A rope of pearls. Her hands are folded in her lap and her silver hair is drawn back from her forehead in a style a hundred years out of date, and she looks like what she is: the last of a dynasty, serene and upright, waiting for the sound of the guns.

"Ambrose," she says. "How good of you."

"Cordelia."

"And this is the young lady."

She does not rise. She turns her head, slowly, and her pale gray eyes come up and settle on my face.

I have been looked at by Cordelia Marrow before.

I was twenty-six, in green velvet, at the top of a flight of marble stairs. She stood below me in a black dress with her hand on a man's arm. She looked at me for a count of three, and her eyes went from my face to my dress to my hands, and I knew with perfect certainty that she was pricing me. I remember thinking: she is the one who decides.

It is the same look.

It is exactly, to the second, the same look.

"Miss Roux," says Cordelia.

"Ma'am."

I drop a half curtsy. It is a thing I invented on the stairs: awkward, bobbing, a child's. I let my voice come out thin and a little too high. "Thank you for the beautiful dress."

"Does it fit?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I thought it would. I had it made to a size." Her eyes do not move. "You are rather smaller than I'd been led to expect."

"I'm sorry."

"There is nothing to be sorry for. I was merely noting it." A faint smile. "Come and sit by me."

…

There are six at dinner.

Cordelia at the head. Augustin at the foot, in a wheelchair, in a red velvet smoking jacket, with a napkin tied round his neck like a bib. Warren on Cordelia's right, gray-faced, in a perfectly cut dinner suit, picking at his fish. Kestrel on her left. And across from me, in the candle-glow, with his chin on his hand and an untouched glass of burgundy at his elbow, a man whom the family calls Mr. Pryce.

I do not look at him.

I look at my plate. I look at a small gold fork. I look at a piece of poached turbot in a sauce the color of a primrose, and I set my fork into it and put a morsel in my mouth, and chew, and swallow, and the whole time my left hand lies flat against my thigh under the napkin, with every finger pressed into the cloth, and holds still.

Do not tap.

Do not tap.

He is eight feet away.

"Do you ski, Miss Roux?" says a pleasant voice.

I look up.

I am looking at Conrad's face.

It is not his face. That is the first thing I notice, with the same remote shock I felt in the day room, when he came with the donors and smiled. The cheekbones are too high. The nose is too narrow. The chin has been rounded, the cleft filled in, the warm brown skin drawn smooth and tight and faintly shining, like fruit under wax. The hair is lighter, wet-sand brown, cut short. A stranger's face. A handsome one. A face that has been constructed, patiently, by expensive men, to look like no one at all.

But the eyes.

The eyes are the same. They are warm, and brown, and a little too bright, and they are looking at me across the candles with an expression of mild, courteous curiosity that I have seen on them ten thousand times, across a thousand tables, in a life I no longer live.

He knows me.

The thought arrives in my head with the clarity of a bell.

Of course he does. He knelt by my chair in the Lantern Wing and whispered his apology to a woman he believed could not hear. He has looked at this face forty times. He is not looking at a stranger. He is looking at the wife he locked away, in a gray dress, at his mother's table, and he is delighted to have me where he can see me.

This is what a Marrow does with a secret. He sets it at the table and passes the salt.

"Ski," I say. "I... I don't think so."

"A pity. We used to go to Switzerland."

"Did you?"

"Every February. My..." He hesitates, and I see something move behind the eyes. "My wife was dreadful on skis. She'd lose a pole on the first run and insist on going down without it, on principle."

My heart stops.

It is quite a short time. It is a beat, perhaps two. In it I hear the click of the candles and the tick of the tall clock in the hall and the rustle of Augustin's napkin. I hear Warren put down his fork.

"I'm so sorry," I say, in the little voice. "I didn't know you were married."

"I was."

"Is she..."

"She died," says Conrad Marrow, "in October."

He says it quite gently. He turns the stem of his glass between two fingers, and the candlelight runs in a thin red thread across the wine. He is not looking at me anymore. He's looking at something in the middle distance, over my shoulder, in the dark.

"I'm very sorry."

"Thank you."

"Was it an accident?"

I feel Kestrel go rigid beside me.

"Yes," says Conrad. "In a manner of speaking."

…

It is Augustin who saves me.

He does it quite by accident, as a clumsy man saves a drowning one by tripping into the water. There is a clatter at the end of the table. I turn my head. The old man is sitting bolt upright in his wheelchair, with his napkin torn from his neck and his face the color of raw liver, and he is pointing across the length of white linen with a shaking finger.

"You," says Augustin Marrow.

Everyone is still.

He is a ruin. I had imagined him a great man, once, as in the photographs: tall, broad, with a lion's head and a thundering voice. He is a husk. The bones show at his temples. His mouth hangs loose on the left. His hair is a few yellow wisps. But his eyes, in their deep sockets, are black and bright and burning, and they are fixed on my face with an expression of such naked horror that the whole room seems to tilt.

"You came back," he says.

"Augustin," says Cordelia.

"You came back." His voice cracks. "In the gray dress. With the hair. I told them. I told them you were dead. I signed the paper. I put my name..." He chokes. "Take her away. Take her away, she's cold."

"Augustin."

"Rosalind!"

The name goes through the room like a thrown plate.

I do not move.

I do not move at all. I sit with my fork in my hand and my eyes wide and empty and my mouth a little open, and I feel the blood leave my face, and I think, with perfect detachment: the hair. The black hair. A gray dress, in candlelight, at an angle.

He's seeing a girl he put in the ground thirty-one years ago.

"Papa," says Warren sharply, rising.

"She's got the eyes!"

"Papa, sit down."

"Look at her! Look at her, Cordelia! It's the Kestrel girl, come out of the..."

"Augustin."

It is Cordelia. She has not raised her voice. She has not even moved. But the word falls across the room like a blade, and the old man stops, with his mouth open, shaking, and gazes at her.

She is looking at me.

Not at him. At me. She sits very still at the head of the table, with her hand on the stem of her glass, and her pale eyes travel over my face as a lamp travels over a wall. The hair. The mouth. The line of the jaw. And then, quite slowly, they move down, to Ambrose Kestrel.

He has not changed expression. His face is smooth as ice. His left hand is on the cloth beside his plate, and it lies perfectly open and quite still.

"My husband is not well," says Cordelia.

"I can see that."

"He has had a stroke. Two." She says it quietly. "He mistakes people. Pruett will take him up."

Pruett is already at the old man's chair. The wheels turn. The wheelchair rolls back, and Augustin goes, rigid, still pointing, still staring over his shoulder with his loose mouth working, until the double doors close behind him and his voice is cut off in the middle of a word.

Silence.

"Well," says Cordelia, and lifts her glass. "Shall we have the pudding?"

…

She finds me afterward, in the library.

I have gone to look at the books. It is a thing a girl might do: a quiet, bookish, childlike thing, to be alone for a moment among the shelves after a fright. I stand in the green glow of a reading lamp with a volume of Tennyson open in my hands, and I stare at the page. The words swim. I breathe through my nose, in, out, in, out.

Don't shake.

"A rather dreadful evening," says Cordelia from the door.

I turn.

She stands in the arch with one hand on the frame. She has come alone. She has left the others in the drawing room: I can hear, faintly through the walls, a murmur of men's voices, Warren's low and clipped, Conrad's rising. She crosses the carpet, and the lamp lights her face from below, throwing the bones into relief, and for the first time since I met her I see how old she is.

She is seventy-four.

I have forgotten. She has been, in my mind, an eternal figure, ageless as marble. She is a small, tired woman in a black dress, whose husband has just failed to recognize her at her own table.

"Do you read, Miss Roux?"

"A little."

"What are you reading?"

"Poems."

"Which?"

"I don't know. It was open."

"Ah." A faint smile. "That is the best way."

She takes the book from my hands. She does not look at it. She closes it, and holds it, and looks at me; and I stand there with my empty hands at my sides and my chin lowered and my eyes on the pattern in the carpet.

"I want to tell you something," she says.

"Yes, ma'am."

"I am not an unkind woman."

I say nothing.

"I have never in my life done anything that I did not believe was necessary. I have buried a good many people. I have sat in a good many chairs, in a good many rooms, and decided what ought to be done. And I have been right more often than not." She turns the book over in her small hands. "I should like you to know that I have no quarrel with you."

"I don't understand."

"No. I don't suppose you do." Her voice is very low. "Ambrose tells me that you do not. He tells me that there is nothing left. That the woman I knew was taken out like a tooth, and that what remains is a very sweet, very frightened girl who cannot say her own name."

"I'm Dahlia."

"Yes, dear. So I'm told."

She is watching me. She is watching the way a cat watches a hole in a wall.

"I have been asking myself all evening," says Cordelia Marrow, "whether there is anybody at home."

I breathe in. I breathe out. I look at her with the soft, damp, trusting eyes of a girl who has been asked a question in a language she does not speak.

"Elspeth," says Cordelia.

She says it very quietly. She says it without emphasis, in the tone of a woman reading a name from a list.

I do not turn my head.

I do not blink. I do not draw breath. I stand quite still in the green light with my empty hands at my sides, and the name goes into me like a hook into water; and I feel it catch, and I feel it pull, and I hold perfectly, perfectly still.

"Who's Elspeth?" I say.

A long pause.

"Nobody, dear," says Cordelia. "A girl who died."

"I'm sorry."

"There is nothing to be sorry for." She sets the book on the table. She smooths her skirt. And as she turns toward the door I see, in the lamplight, a thing I have not seen on her before: a faint line between the brows, such as a woman wears when she has added a column twice and arrived at two different totals.

"Good night, Miss Roux," she says. "I do hope we shall meet again."

The clock in the hall strikes nine.

…

We leave at half past ten.

Pruett brings our coats. The footman brings the car. The night is black and bitterly cold, with a hard white moon above the roofline and the sound, far off, of an owl in the beeches. Warren does not come out. Conrad does. He stands on the top step, hatless, with his hands in his pockets and the light behind him, and watches me cross the gravel.

"Miss Roux."

I turn.

"I hope we meet again."

"Thank you."

"You hum," says Conrad.

I go cold.

"At dinner. When you thought nobody was listening. Under your breath." He tilts his head. His smile is warm, and a little puzzled. "I wonder what it was. It was rather lovely."

"I don't know."

"No?"

"I just do it," I say. "I don't know why."

"Funny." He looks away, down the long white lawn. "So does my wife."

I get into the car.

Kestrel is already in his seat. He does not look at me. He does not say a word. The door closes, and Marcus pulls away, and the great gray house, with its hundred windows, recedes behind us into the dark.

We are three miles down the valley before I realize what I am holding.

It is in my left hand, in the pocket of the charcoal dress. A small flat object, cold and heavy. I draw it out and open my palm.

A brass lighter.

It is engraved on the lid with three interlocking rings. It is warm from my skin. On the side, in tiny letters, is cut a line of script I cannot read in the dark.

I do not remember taking it.

I do not remember how it got there.

"Elspeth," says Kestrel, very softly.

"Yes."

"Where did you find that?"

"I don't know."

"It was on the library table. In the light. I saw him leave it." His voice shakes. "I saw you pick it up. You were holding the Tennyson, and you set it down, and you put your hand on the lighter, and then you turned and spoke to Cordelia."

"I didn't."

"You did."

"I don't remember."

"I know."

He turns, at last, and looks at me.

His eyes are gray and frightened. In the passing glow of the headlamps I see the whole lean exhausted shape of his face, and under it, the bright quick pulse in his throat.

"I think," he says, "that we had better count again."