Picture the Dead

would have gotten me the money. But so will your death, almost as easily. My father is your next of kin, after all, and he is not as young as he once was. I’ll inherit all the same. I’ll just have to wait a little longer for my fortune than I expected…or maybe I can speed that along as well.”

His grip is squeezing out my breath. My eyes float closed. I can’t bear to look into a face that has deceived me so utterly.

“You’ve figured out everything, haven’t you?”

“I’d never planned on loving you, Jennie. I never planned on a that. It made everything so complicated. And, yes, I do blame you for it. But your spell on me is over, my dear. I’ve decided I don’t want my brother’s used goods after all.”

Then Quinn dips forward and kisses me, licking the blood from my split lip down to my chin before he pushes me backward over the bridge with such brute intention that I hear the splintering, then the crunch and snap of wooden railing as I lose balance and fall.

29.

My own clothing is my coffin. My heavy hoop wire, the whalebone corset, the layers and layers of underskirts. Pinned and hooked and buttoned to my body, they drag me under. My arms and legs twist in helpless panic as water closes around the crown of my head. I’m sinking, drowning, imprisoned in my cage of finery.

Swim. The word terrifies me. Once I saw an old man’s body washed into harbor. His bloated flesh and lips blue as meat have held in my memory ever since and are what I see in my mind’s wild eye. My legs and arms flail; my skirts billow up over my face.

As if it is being tugged by invisible fingers, I feel my ring loosen from my finger. I open my eyes and watch it drop, a chunk of red and gold light through black water, and then out of sight. So this is my death.

Any consecrated space. The ruined sketches, the stain of ink. Will had wanted me to remember his fury. That afternoon had been the angriest I’d ever seen him. He’d come to me in rage, not guilt. Betrayed by a brother who, in the end, had been a stranger to him. A stranger to us both. A murderer to us both. Will’s fate is now mine.

Water is heavy like sand, and it is pushing me deeper. I’m insignificant as a pebble down a well. My death will be silent. No screams, no wailing witnesses, no grip of hands hauling me to safety.

I imagine Quinn leaning over the rails, the moon catching the reflection in his dead wolf’s eye. His hands loose in his pockets as he turns away from me, just as he’d turned away from his brother. His mind carefully, detachedly preparing his alibi.

Quinn is doubtless correct, in every word, about how my death will be perceived. Alas, poor Jennie, she never did move past her grief perhaps it is all for the best.

Maybe they’re right. What use is my life if I’ve been wrenched from everyone who meant most to me? I have lost so much. Love made me mad with pleasure, but loss has made me mad with grief. What a pleasant sleep my death will bring. Unplagued by nightmares or grim reawakening.

But this is not the way it will be. For he is here, as he always has been. Pressing colder, pressing upward. I can’t perceive, I can’t touch, I can only sense the overriding force of his protection and love. Enormous and quick and unexpected, it lifts me sharp under my arms as if I’m being offered to heaven itself. Forced up against the current, I rise in a rush of vertigo.

A spy must… A spy must…

I open my mouth to cry out, and water rushes in to fill the scream. My story is not over, and today is not my death day after all. I break through the surface of the water, gasping and reborn.

30.

A ghost will find his way home. But I am not a ghost. And this house is not my home.

My feet are frozen and blistered and bare. I hardly feel the pinching pain of the gravel. My hand on the front door is a muddied bird claw. My sodden skirts drag along the carpet runner, then the polished parquet floor, as I tread steady, a sleepwalker, down the familiar hallway and into the drawing room, which overspills its gilded jewel box of assembled guests.

After so many hours in the dark and pouring rain, all this heat and light, the spiced and fruited perfumes and powders, the voices richly lacquered in wine and laughter, seem to wrap over me in a bracing clench of humanity.

Their awareness is gradual. And then I am the entire performance. All jaws drop mid-gape. All eyes round. Fingers lift to press over mouths and chins.

Scandalized murmuring, whispering, but ultimately silence becomes the disease, spreading through the room and infecting everyone. Oh, but I am a sight worth seeing. I find the full specter of myself in the mirror above the mantel. My face is ghoulish, as deadly as the Du Keating girl. My eyes are fear-gored, my skin is scraped to blood. My hair has fallen from its pins to hang in a dripping shroud. Mud and scum streak black marks over my neck and arms.

And in my own expression, I see my beloved. That hot August day. Will’s face twisted in fury. His sketches wet and streaming, ruined. As angry as I’d ever seen him. It is the core of that rage that shoots through the ether, a jolt of his life energy pumping through my own outraged blood.

“You’ll be true to me forever?” he’d asked me once, almost with anger. No, not anger. Passion.

“Always and forever,” I’d answered. “With my whole, entire heart.”

In the mirror I am one of Will’s ruined sketches. And yet I have survived. I have lived to avenge the betrayed, to damn the culprit.

I’ve sensed him from the moment of my entrance. Moments before he became aware of me. There is something in the way Quinn stands. Perhaps it is the angle of his head, or maybe it’s just the luck of an opportune moment, cozied into a corner and basking in Aunt’s attention. How could I never have seen it? That inexorable devotion, that primal and insistent blood tie between a mother and her only son?

Who was I to ever think I could come between them?

Who was I to them?

“Careless, careless. I suppose you were anxious to get back to playing host.” My words are to Quinn, and my voice carries through the room, a clarion call for everyone to hear. “But such sloppy work, Quinn. You ought to have held my head under the water for three minutes. Or checked my pulse to make sure it had stopped.”

“Fleur, darling,” says Quinn, forcing a smile as he stands and steps away from Aunt. I can see and smell his fear. It is palpable to me, no matter how intently he tries to look both unconcerned and dutiful. “You’re not well. Come, I’ll take you up to your rooms myself.”

“How very kind of you. But unnecessary.” My gaze flicks to Uncle Henry. “Am I to presume that the bill for this party you cannot afford will be subtracted from my trust?”

Uncle looks so startled and abjectly shamed that I want to laugh. Good. Let him crumble. Let him be the talk of Brookline, of Boston. Let his worst nightmare of public scandal come true.

“Jennie, I must insist.” Quinn, ever the actor, signals to Doctor Perkins, who half stands despite being pink with drink. Quinn knots his hands together while furrowing his brow, trying to look helpful, though his good eye has a cast of madness to it. “Sir, my apologies. I ought to have engaged you sooner,” he says, “for I’m afraid that our dear Jennie has been very ill.”