Severine spun her coffee cup in a circle and then asked, “What brings you to New Orleans, Mr. Thorne?”
“A grandmother,” he admitted with a grin. “We have that in common, though I wasn’t so fortunate to find mine when I arrived. She passed just days before my arrival, and I found myself in possession of a house in New Orleans and nothing compelling me back to England.”
The conversation turned to the windy weather and the coming trip to the house in the country. Mr. Thorne would be arriving the next day as well.
Severine wondered if it would be different. Would her father’s library still be there? Was his office untouched? Had someone taken over her rooms with the cupola and the winding stairs?
Had they gotten rid of her horse? When she’d realized she was putting off returning to the big house, she’d sent Mr. Brand to lay claim for her. She wanted her room.
As her mind roamed, she watched the city move outside. The trees were massive and the sounds were so different from other cities. It seemed as though every city was wrong but this one. The day was warming, and she could feel the humidity in the air, but it didn’t bother her despite her long absence. Instead, it felt as air should, heavy and a little wet with the promise of coming heat and just the touch of a breeze off the water.
Her city was surrounded by it with the Mississippi River winding past New Orleans to pour into the Gulf of Mexico. There was Lake Pontchartrain, and if she wanted to visit a little farther afield, she could find her way to Lakes Maurepas, Borgne, and Salvador, to name a few. Let alone, Severine thought, the bayou. She wasn’t sure she’d be home until she visited them all. Her father had loved going out on the water, and her silence hadn’t bothered him there.
Or, she thought, she was avoiding the big house. The memories that would spring to life there would be tenfold what they had been since she arrived in New Orleans, and few of them pleasant. Even thinking on it brought the images back. The sight of her father’s body lying over her mother’s. The bloom of blood across her chest and his back. The pool underneath. Severine shuddered and turned from the street to find both Lisette and Mr. Thorne looking at her.
“I’m sorry,” Severine said. “I fear that memories have been flowing heavily. My father was known to take me here. Just the scent of this coffee makes it feel as though he’s sitting a table over.”
“I know some time has passed,” Mr. Thorne told her, “but I am sorry for your loss.”
“I fear, for me,” Severine found herself confessing and wasn’t sure why, “it feels very recent. I was sent away so quickly and my life was so very different. It isn’t so much that time has passed for me here, but that I was living another life there. Now that I’m back to this one—I don’t know. It’s all muddled.”
“There is no time limit on grief, Miss DuNoir.”
She glanced at Lisette, who seemed as shocked at Severine’s confession as Severine was herself.
“We’re going to the bookstore,” Severine told him, clumsily changing the subject. “I haven’t read novels since I left home.”
“I hope you’ll get something quite frivolous then.”
“Oh, I will.”
“What did you do in the convent if not reading?”
Severine laughed, surprised again to find herself doing so. “I helped in the gardens. I am quite good, you know, with plants. I baked the bread with Sister Sophie. I learned from the different nuns. I had lessons and sometimes I went for quite long walks.”
“Did the nuns have much to teach?” The doubt was heavy and Severine laughed again.
“They didn’t all appear like waifs in the nighttime, like I did. Sister Sophie was a nurse during the Great War. She taught me how to care for wounds and the sick. She was desperately in love with her soldier, Louis. He died in the trenches, and she served to the end of the war, tried to go home, and found it no longer suited the woman she had become.”
“She sounds fascinating.”
“No one is more fascinating than Sister Bernadette.”
“Oh really?”
“She was the gardener,” Severine told him. “She could make the most healing or the most deadly concoctions. She had learned from her father and wanted to go to university. They wouldn’t let her and told her to marry and have children if she wanted to contribute to the world. She said she’d rather set her hair afire than deal with the stink and demands of an idiot man for the rest of her life. She turned to God, though I suspect she turned to the quiet and solace of a nunnery. She’d kept writing her papers and publishing under a male pseudonym. They couldn’t keep her from it, after all, and now that they know who she is, she refuses to answer their questions or correspond with anyone who slighted her before.”
“I like her,” Lisette announced. “Was she your favorite?”
Severine shook her head. “Sister Mary Chastity was my favorite. She took that name out of spite though she refused to say why. When I first met her, she was a sister; when I left, she was the Mother Superior.”
“Why did you like her best?” Mr. Thorne asked, no doubt expecting to hear an astounding story about Severine’s experience with the Mother Superior, but there wasn’t one. It wasn’t that she had been rebellious; rather, no one had been more herself than the Mother. When she was still Sister Mary Chastity, she had left the convent during the war and where she traveled, secrets traveled with her. The nun turned spy turned Mother Superior was all that a
