بخش 5 فصل 1

PART FIVE

THE SHADOW WHO SMILED AND THE GIRL WHO SMILED BACK

Title: Ho Portado le Stelle a Letto

Artist: Matteo Renatti

Date: c. 1806–08

Medium: 20cm x 35cm pencil sketch on parchment

Location: On loan from the Gallerie dell’Accademia

Description: An illustration of a woman, the lines of her body imitated by the twisting bedsheets. Her face is little more than angles, framed by messy hair, but the artist has given her one very specific feature: seven small freckles in a band across her cheeks.

Background: This drawing, found in Renatti’s 1806–8 notebook, is thought by some to be the inspiration for his later masterpiece The Muse. While the model’s pose and the work’s medium are different, the number and placement of the freckles is conspicuous enough for many to speculate on the model’s enduring importance in Renatti’s work.

Estimated Value: $267,000

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1764

I

Addie makes her way to the church.

It sits, near the center of Villon, squat and gray and unchanged, the field beside it bordered by a low stone wall.

It does not take her long to find her father’s grave.

Jean LaRue.

Her father’s grave is spare—a name, and dates, a Bible verse—Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. No mention of the man her father was, no mention of his craft, or even his kindness.

A life reduced to a block of stone, a patch of grass.

Along the way Addie had picked a handful of flowers, wild things that grow at the edge of the path, weedy blossoms, yellow and white. She kneels to set them on the ground, stops when she sees the dates below her father’s name.

1670–1714.

The year she left.

She searches her memory, tries to remember any signs of sickness. The cough that lingered in his chest, the shadow of weakness in his limbs. The memories from her second life are trapped in amber, perfectly preserved. But the ones from before, when she was Adeline LaRue—memories of kneading bread on a stool beside her mother, of watching her father carve faces into blocks of wood, of trailing Estele through the shallows of the Sarthe—those are fading. The twenty-three years she lived before the woods, before the deal, worn to little more than edges.

Later, Addie will be able to recall almost three hundred years in perfect detail, every moment of every day, preserved.

But she is already losing the sound of her father’s laugh.

She cannot remember the exact color of her mother’s eyes.

Cannot recall the set of Estele’s jaw.

For years, she will lie awake and tell herself stories of the girl she’d been, in hopes of holding fast to every fleeting fragment, but it will have the opposite effect—the memories like talismans, too often touched; like saint’s coins, the etching worn down to silver plate and faint impressions.

As for her father’s sickness, it must have stolen in between one season and the next, and for the first time, Addie is grateful for the cleansing nature of her curse, for having made the deal at all—not for her own sake, but for her mother’s. That Marthe LaRue had only to grieve one loss, instead of two.

Jean is buried among the other members of their family. An infant sister who only saw two years. A mother and father, both gone before Addie herself was ten. One row over, their own parents and unmarried siblings. The plot beside him, empty, and waiting for his wife.

There is no place for her, of course. But this string of graves, like a timeline, charting from the past into the future, this is what drove her to the woods that night, the fear of a life like this, leading to the same small patch of grass.

Staring down at her father’s grave, Addie feels the heavy sadness of finality, the weight of an object coming to rest. The grief has come and gone—she lost this man fifty years ago, she has already mourned, and though it hurts, the pain isn’t fresh. It has long dulled to an ache, the wound given way to scar.

She lays the flowers on her father’s grave, and rises, moving deeper between the plots, drawn back in time with every step, until she is no longer Addie, but Adeline; no longer a ghost but flesh and blood and mortal. Still bound to this place, roots aching like phantom limbs.

She studies the names on the gravestones, knows each and every one, but the difference is that once upon a time, the names knew her, too.

Here is Roger, buried beside his first and only wife, Pauline.

Here is Isabelle, and her youngest, Sara, taken in the same year.

And here, almost in the center of the yard, is the name that matters most. The one that held her hand so many times, showed her there was more to life.

Estele Magritte, reads her tombstone. 1642–1719.

The dates are carved over a simple cross, and Addie can almost hear the old woman hissing through her teeth.

Estele, buried in the shadow of a house she did not worship.

Estele, who would say that a soul is just the seed returned to soil, who wanted nothing but a tree over her bones. She should have been laid to rest at the edge of the woods, or amid the vegetables in her garden. She should have at least been buried in a corner plot, where the branches of an old yew reach over the low wall to shade the graves.

Addie crosses to the small shed at the edge of the churchyard, and finds a trowel amid the tools, and sets off for the woods.

It is the height of summer, but the air is cool beneath the cover of the trees. Midday, but still the smell of night lingers on the leaves. The scent of this place, so universal, and specific. With every breath the taste of soil on her tongue, the memory of desperation, a girl, sinking her hands into the dirt as she prayed.

Now, she sinks the trowel instead, coaxes a sapling from the soil. It is a fragile thing, likely to fall over with the next strong storm, but she carries it back to the churchyard, cradled like an infant in her hands, and if anyone finds it strange, they will forget about the sight long before they think to tell anyone. And if they notice the tree growing over the old woman’s grave, perhaps they will stop and think of older gods again.

And as Addie leaves the church behind, the bells begin to chime, calling the villagers to Mass.

She walks down the road as they pour from their homes, children clinging to their mother’s hands, and men and women side by side. Some faces new to her, and others, she knows.

There is George Therault, and Roger’s oldest daughter, and Isabelle’s two sons, and the next time Addie comes, they will all be dead, the last of her old life—her first life—buried in the same ten-meter plot.

The hut sits abandoned at the edge of the woods.

The low fence has fallen in, and Estele’s garden is long overgrown, the house itself slowly giving way, sagging with age and neglect. The door is shut fast, but the shutters hang on broken joints, exposing the glass of a single window, cracked open like a tired eye.

The next time Addie comes, the frame of the house will be lost beneath the green, and the time after that, the woods will have crept forward and swallowed it all.

But today, it still stands, and she makes her way up the weedy path, the stolen lantern in one hand. She keeps expecting the old woman to step out of the woods, wrinkled arms filled with cuttings, but the only rustle comes from magpies and the sound of her own feet.

Inside, the hut is damp, and empty, the dark space littered with debris—the clay shards of a broken cup, a crumbling table—but gone are the bowls in which she mixed her salves, and the cane she used when the weather was wet, and the bundles of herbs that hung from the rafters, and the iron pot that sat in the hearth.

Addie is sure that Estele’s things were taken up after her death, parceled out through the village, just as her life was, deemed public property simply because she did not wed. Villon, her ward, because Estele had no child.

She goes into the garden, and harvests what she can from the wild plot, carries the ragged bounty of carrots and long beans inside and sets it on the table. She throws the shutters open and finds herself face-to-face with the woods.

The trees stand in a dark line, tangled branches clawing at the sky. Their roots are inching forward, crawling into the garden and across the lawn. A slow and patient advance.

The sun is sinking now, and even though it’s summer, a damp has crawled in through the gaps in the thatched roof, between the stones and under the door, and a chill hangs over the bones of the little hut.

Addie carries a stolen lantern to the hearth. It has been a rainy month, and the wood is damp, but she is patient, coaxing the flame from the lamp until it catches on the kindling.

Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse.

She cannot make a thing, but she can use it.

She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it.

She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.

She does not know if it’s some kind of mercy, or simply a crack in the mortar of her curse, one of the few fissures she’s found in the walls of this new life. Perhaps Luc hasn’t noticed. Or perhaps he has put them there on purpose, to draw her out, to make her hope.

Addie draws a smoldering twig from the fireplace and brings it idly to the threadbare rug. It is dry enough that it should catch, and burn, but it does not. It gutters, and cools too quickly, just outside the safety of its hearth.

She sits on the floor, humming softly as she feeds stick after stick into the blaze until it burns the chill off the place like a breath scattering dust.

She feels him like a draft.

He does not knock.

He never knocks.

One moment she is alone, and the next, she is not.

“Adeline.”

She hates the way it makes her feel to hear him say her name, hates the way she leans into the word like a body seeking shelter from a storm.

“Luc.”

She turns, expecting to see him as he was in Paris, dressed in the fine salon fashion, but instead he is exactly as he was the night they met, wind-blown and shadow-edged, in a simple dark tunic, the laces open at the collar. The firelight dances across his face, shades the edges of his jaw and cheek and brow like charcoal.

His eyes slide over the meager bounty on the sill before returning to her. “Back where you started…” Addie rises to her feet, so he can’t look down on her.

“Fifty years,” he says. “How quickly they go by.”

They have not gone quickly at all, not for her, and he knows it. He is looking for bare skin, soft places to slide the knife, but she will not give him such an easy target. “No time at all,” she echoes coolly. “To think one life would ever be enough.” Luc flashes only the edge of a smile.

“What a picture you make, tending that fire. You could almost be Estele.” It is the first time she has heard that name on his lips, and there is something in the way he says it, almost wistful. Luc crosses to the window, and looks out at the line of trees. “How many nights she stood here, and whispered out into the woods.” He glances over his shoulder, a coy grin playing over his lips. “For all her talk of freedom, she was so lonely in the end.” Addie shakes her head. “No.”

“You should have been here with her,” he says. “Should have eased her pain when she was ill. Should have laid her down to rest. You owed her that.” Addie draws back as if struck.

“You were so selfish, Adeline. And because of you, she died alone.”

We all die alone. That is what Estele would say—at least, she thinks. She hopes. Once, she would have been certain, but the confidence has faded with the memory of the woman’s voice.

Across the room, the darkness moves. One moment he is at the window, the next, he is behind her, his voice threading through her hair.

“She was so ready to die,” Luc says. “So desperate for that spot in the shade. She stood at that window and begged, and begged. I could have given it to her.” A memory, old fingers tight around her wrist.

Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

Addie turns on him. “She would never have prayed to you.”

A flickering smile. “No.” A sneer. “But think of how sad she’d be to know you did.” Addie’s temper flares. Her hand flies out before she thinks to stop it, and even then, she half expects to find no purchase, only air and smoke. But Luc is caught off guard, and so her palm strikes skin, or something like it. His head turns a fraction with the force of the blow. There is no blood on those perfect lips, of course, no heat on that cool skin, but she has at least wiped the smile from his face.

Or so she thinks.

Until he begins to laugh.

The sound is eerie, unreal, and when he turns his face back toward her, she stills. There is nothing human in it now. The bones are too sharp, the shadows too deep, the eyes too bright.

“You forget yourself,” he says, his voice dissolving into woodsmoke. “You forget me.” Pain lances up through Addie’s feet, sudden and sharp. She looks down, searching for a wound, but the pain lights her from within. A deep, internal ache, the force of every step she’s ever walked.

“Perhaps I have been too merciful.”

The pain climbs through her limbs, infecting knee and hip, wrist and shoulder. Her legs buckle beneath her, and it is all she can do not to scream.

The darkness looks down with a smile.

“I have made this too easy.”

Addie watches in horror as her hands begin to wrinkle and thin, blue veins standing out beneath papery skin.

“You asked only for life. I gave you your health, and youth, as well.” Her hair comes loose from its bun and hangs lank before her eyes, the strands going dry and brittle and gray.

“It has made you arrogant.”

Her sight weakens, vision blurring until the room is only smudges and vague shapes.

“Perhaps you need to suffer.”

Addie squeezes her eyes shut, heart fluttering with panic.

“No,” she says, and it is the closest she has ever come to pleading.

She can feel him, moving closer. Can feel the shadow of him looming over her.

“I will take away these pains. I will let you rest. I will even raise a tree over your bones. And all you have to do”—the voice seeps through the dark—“is surrender.” That word, like a tear in the veil. And for all the pain, and terror, of this moment, Addie knows she will not give in.

She has survived worse. She will survive worse. This is nothing but a god’s foul temper.

When she finds the breath to speak, the words come out in a ragged whisper. “Go to Hell.” She braces herself, wonders if he will rot her all the way through, bend her body into a corpse, and leave her there, a broken husk on the old woman’s floor. But there is only more laughter, low and rumbling, and then nothing, the night stretching into stillness.

Addie is afraid to open her eyes, but when she does, she finds herself alone.

The ache has faded from her bones. Her loose hair has regained its chestnut shade. Her hands, once ruined, are again young, smooth, and strong.

She rises, shaking, and turns toward the hearth.

But the fire, so carefully tended, has gone out.

That night, Addie curls up on the moldering pallet, beneath a threadbare blanket left unclaimed, and thinks of Estele.

She closes her eyes and inhales until she can almost smell the herbs that clung to the old woman’s hair, the garden and sap on her skin. She holds fast to the memory of Estele’s crooked smile, her crow-like laugh, the voice she used when she spoke to gods, and the one she used with Addie. Back when she was young, when Estele taught her not to be afraid of storms, of shadows, of sounds in the night.