بخش 5 فصل 15

The Cotswolds, England

December 31, 1899

XV

It is snowing.

Not a patina of frost, or a few wayward flakes, but a dousing of white.

Addie sits curled in the window of the little cottage, a fire at her back, and a book open on her knee, as she watches the sky fall.

She has ushered in the change of years so many ways.

Perched on London rooftops holding bottles of Champagne, and torch in hand through the cobbled roads of Edinburgh. She has danced in the halls of Paris, and watched the sky go white with fireworks in Amsterdam. She has kissed strangers, and sung of friends she’ll never meet. Gone out with bangs and with whispers.

But tonight she is content to sit, and watch the world go white beyond the window, every line and curve erased by snow.

The cottage is not hers, of course. Not in the strictest sense.

She found it more or less intact, a place abandoned, or simply forgotten. The furniture was threadbare, the cupboards almost empty. But she has had a season to make it hers, to gather wood from the copse of trees across the field. To tend the wild garden, and steal what she could not grow.

It is simply a place to rest her bones.

Outside, the storm has stopped.

The snow lies quiet on the ground. As smooth and clean as unmarked paper.

Perhaps that is what drives her to her feet.

She pulls the cloak tight around her shoulders and surges out, boots sinking instantly into the snow. It is light, whipped into a sugar film, the taste of winter on her tongue.

Once, when she was five, or six, it snowed back in Villon. A rare sight, a film of white several inches deep that coated everything. In hours, it was ruined by horses and carts, and people trudging to and fro, but Addie found a small expanse of untouched white. She rushed out into it, leaving a trail of shoes. She ran bare hands over the frozen sheets, left fingers in her wake. She ruined every inch of the canvas.

And when she was done, she looked around at the field, now covered in tracks, and mourned that it was over. The next day, the frost broke, and the ice melted, and it was the last time she played in snow.

Until now.

Now, her steps crunch the perfect snow, and it rises in her wake.

Now, she runs her fingers through the gentle hills, and they smooth behind her touch.

Now she plays in the field, and does not leave a mark.

The world remains unblemished, and for once she is grateful.

She spins and twirls, and dances partner-less across the snow, laughing at the strange and simple magic of the moment, before stepping wrong, a patch deeper than she thought.

She loses her balance, and crashes down into the pile of white, gasping at the sudden cold along her collar, the snow that creeps inside her hood. She looks up. It has begun to snow again, lightly now, flakes falling like stars. The world goes muffled, a cotton kind of quiet. And if it were not for the icy damp leaching through her clothes, she thinks she could stay here forever.

She decides she will at least stay here for now.

She sinks into the snow, lets it swallow the edges of her sight, until there is nothing but a frame around the open sky, the night cold and clear and full of stars. And she is ten again, stretched in the tall grass behind her father’s workshop, dreaming she is anywhere but home.

How strange, the winding way a dream comes true.

But now, gazing up into the endless dark, she does not think of freedom, but of him.

And then, he’s there.

Standing over her, haloed by the dark, and she thinks perhaps she is going mad again. It would not be the first time.

“Two hundred years,” Luc says, kneeling beside her, “and still behaving like a child.” “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

He holds out his hand, and she takes it, lets him draw her up out of the cold, and together they walk back to the little house, leaving only his steps in the snow.

Inside, the fire has gone out, and she groans a little herself, reaching for the lantern, hoping it will be enough to coax the fire back to life.

But Luc only looks at the smoking ruins and flicks his fingers in an absent way, and the flames surge up inside the hearth, a bloom of heat, casting shadows over everything.

How easily he moves through the world, she thinks.

How hard he’s made it for her.

Luc considers the little cottage, the borrowed life. “My Adeline,” he says, “still longing to grow up and become Estele.” “I am not yours,” she says, though by now the words have lost their venom.

“All the world, and you pass your time playing the part of a witch in the wild, a crone praying to old gods.” “I did not pray to you. And yet you’re here.”

She takes him in, dressed in a wool coat and cashmere scarf, the collar high against his cheeks, and realizes this is the first she has seen Luc in winter. It suits him, as well as summer did. The fair skin of his cheeks gone marble white, the black curls the color of the moonless sky. Those green eyes, as cold and bright as stars. And the way he looks, standing before the fire, she wishes she could draw him. Even after all this time, her fingers itch for charcoal.

He runs a hand over the mantel.

“I saw an elephant, in Paris.”

Her words to him, so many years before. It is such a strange answer now, filled with unspoken things. I saw an elephant, and thought of you. I was in Paris, and you were not.

“And you thought of me,” she says.

It is a question. He does not answer. Instead, he looks around and says, “This is a pitiful way to usher out a year. We can do better. Come with me.” And she is curious—she is always curious—but tonight, she shakes her head. “No.” That proud chin lifts. Those dark brows draw together. “Why not?”

Addie shrugs. “Because I’m happy here. And I do not trust you to bring me back.” His smile flickers, like firelight. And she expects that to be the end of that.

To turn and find him gone, stolen back into the dark.

But he’s still there, this shadow in her borrowed home.

He lowers himself into the second chair.

He conjures cups of wine from nothing, and they sit before the fire like friends, or at least, like foes at rest, and he tells her of Paris at the close of a decade—the turn of the century. Of the writers, blooming like flowers, of the art, and the music, and the beauty. He has always known how to tempt her. He says it is a golden age, a time of light.

“You would enjoy it,” he says.

“I’m sure I would.”

She will go, in the spring, and see the World’s Fair, witness the Eiffel Tower, the iron sculpture climbing toward the sky. She will walk through buildings made of glass, ephemeral installations, and everyone will talk of the old century and the new one, as if there is a line in the sand between present and past. As if it does not all exist together.

History is a thing designed in retrospect.

For now, she listens to him talk, and it is enough.

She does not remember drifting off, but when she wakes, it is early in the morning, and the cottage is empty, the fire little more than embers. A blanket has been cast over her shoulders, and beyond the window, the world is white again.

And Addie will wonder if he was ever there.