When my gaze lands on him, he fumbles clumsily for a smile, dabbing at the corners of his mouth.
“Nothing of any import, I’m sure,” he says weakly, pushing back from the table and waving me down when I begin to stand as well. “No, please, Catherine. Do not trouble yourself. I will go and sort it out.”
But the cheese has already soured in my mouth, a premonitory dread surging up my throat like bile. Whatever this interruption is, I suddenly know that it bodes far from well.
Gathering my dressing gown closer around my shoulders, I whisk out of the dining room and down the carpeted stairs, until I reach the landing overlooking our foyer. Below, Antoine confers with a burly man, menacing despite his grubby wig and tiny pince-nez. Beside them two muscle-bound roughs wrestle our claw-footed credenza out the door, followed by a third lout with one of our Gobelin tapestries slung like a corpse across his brawny shoulders.
“Antoine?” I call down, my voice more strained than I intended. But I cannot help the shrillness of my tone, not when my throat has turned into a vise. “What is happening? Where are they taking our Gobelins?”
When Antoine and the stranger glance up at me, I do not know if I am more terrified by the sheer blaze of panic that streaks across my husband’s face or the flat disdain in the strange man’s beady eyes.
“I told you there was no need to interrupt your petit déjeuner, Catherine,” Antoine chides feebly, jogging up the stairs to meet me on the landing. “I have everything quite under control.”
“Of course there is a need, Antoine,” I hiss under my breath, flicking a pointed glance below. “When there are men taking our things, I should say there is decidedly a need. I am sure my fromage will keep while you explain all this to me.”
He wets his lips with his tongue, his eyes skittering nervously to the side before resettling on mine. “It is truly nothing. Only that earnings at the shop have dipped a bit of late, and I have had to be … somewhat more enterprising in keeping astride our debts.”
“Our debts?” I repeat, simmering with rage. “Ours, Antoine? Surely I misheard you.”
What my well-intentioned wastrel of a husband means to say is that he spends his jeweler’s income like water, streams of coin sieving through his fingers. Even his lively trade cannot keep pace with his refined tastes. Antoine is a helpless connoisseur of every sort of beauty, drawn to luxury like a moth to any open flame. Rich clothing, the objets d’art tucked into every corner of our home, exorbitant love tokens for his petit copains; he can resist none of it. I suspect that even I was such an acquisition, with my bramble of foxy curls and cinnamon spattering of freckles, my hazel eyes that edge toward amber. Though I am not beautiful in any fashionable way and certainly do not stir his particular passion, I know Antoine finds me outwardly arresting.
I have never begrudged my husband this weakness for finery, not when he cares for me so well, indulges my own appetite for matters of the dark.
But though there have been other debts, repossession men have never come traipsing into our house before. It has never come to this.
“Catherine, do not be like this,” he pleads. “Please, ma chère, spare me a little understanding.”
“And how should I be instead, when you have beholden us to a moneylender?” I demand, striving to even out my faltering voice. “When we cannot pay what is owed?”
“It is only a few pieces to tide us over,” he soothes, squeezing my hands. “You know our profits are always scarcer over the summer, when so many of the noblesse abandon the city for their country estates. But I have several commissions lined up in the coming months, for the Vicomtesse de Polignac and the Duc de Bouillon, to start. Once they are complete and I am paid in full, I can reclaim whatever we have lost. This is only a temporary thing, Catherine. I promise you. We will be fine.”
So he says. And yet a hot reek boils up my nose, the memory of acrid tallow pierced with beeswax sweetness. I can almost feel the blister of a bullwhip falling across my back, cruel hands tightening on my shoulders, a vicious grip buried in my hair.
I do not need my scrying bowl to see a bad moon rising, its bloated outline cresting the horizon to leer above my head.
And even clasped between my husband’s hands, mine begin to shake.
“Antoine, listen to me.” I gird my tone with steel and search his eyes, trying to impress the truth into my kind yet feckless husband, whose downfall would surely spell my own. “I cannot be poor again. I would rather die, do you understand, than return to the squalor from which I came. Do you hear me, Antoine? I would rather die.”
Because, where would I go if he loses everything of ours? What choice would there be for me, besides the poorhouse or the streets?
If he cannot find us a way out of this, I will lose even this small plot of freedom that I’ve staked out for myself.
“Oh, Catherine.” Antoine draws me close, and though we are almost of a height, I allow him to tuck my head into his neck. “I promise it will never come to that. I am only sorry to have distressed you with this at all, and so needlessly!”
When I shudder against him with a restrained sob, he holds me gently away from him, attempting a reassuring smile.
“Why don’t you go out again tonight, divert yourself with your friend? I will review our ledgers, make certain that all is just as well as I know it shall be in the end. Trust me, chérie. We may not be …
