New York, 1899
February 11
They huddled in the kitchen of the old house, clustered around a hastily kindled fire, clutching cups of sugar lightly touched with tea.
They had staggered in bruised and soot-covered, Sebastian coughing, his nurse panicking, Mrs. Van Duyvil’s maid dissolving into paroxysms of grief, although it was unclear, from what Janie could make out, whether her laments were for the loss of her mistress or her position.
Mrs. Gerritt took charge, ordering about staff and guests alike. Fires were lit, water was boiled, and Sebastian was set to breathe a scented smoke that quieted his coughs to whimpers against his nurse’s chest. One by one, they were summoned to the kitchen pump, scrubbed clean with freezing water, their wounds slathered with evil-smelling salves. Mrs. Gerritt, like a conjurer, unearthed clothes from Janie’s grandmother’s trunks: old-fashioned trousers and shirts, full-skirted dresses with tight basques from her grandmother’s youth, children’s smocks that must have belonged to Janie’s father, if not her grandfather.
Sebastian clung close to his nurse, but Viola careened about like a toy that had been wound to breaking, peppering everyone with questions, demanding to know why the sky was red, what had happened to the house, where was Grandmother, did this mean they were could live at home again? Viola’s questions fell like pebbles striking her skin, only half-felt. It was, of all people, Giles Lacey who stumbled through answers to Viola’s questions, clearing his throat and looking to Janie for help, for answers she couldn’t give.
I would kill her again if I could. Her mother’s voice rang in Janie’s ears, brazen, half-crazed. Outside, the fire still raged, eating away at the mortar binding the new house together. The crackle of the flames, the clatter of stones tumbling down punctuated the night, making the survivors in the kitchen jump and wince.
Sebastian’s nurse, as dazed and hollow-eyed as the rest of them, her arm wrapped in a makeshift bandage, nuzzled Sebastian’s barley floss head. “The wee ones should be in bed.”
“There are still beds in the nursery, aren’t there?” said Anne. She swung a protesting Viola up in her arms. “Has anyone lit a fire?”
“Gerritt saw to it,” said Mrs. Gerritt matter-of-factly, as if midnight evacuations happened in the normal course of things. She moved about the familiar kitchen as though she had never left it, the old house already humming to her tune. “There’s clean linen in the airing cupboard. Clean nightdresses, too.”
Janie hauled herself out of her chair. It wasn’t just her legs that felt numb. It was all of her. She felt as though she were trapped in those few minutes just before the house went up in flames, living them over and over and over again. She made me do it. I would kill her again. “I’ll go.”
Anne turned with Viola on her hip. “Stay here. Drink tea. I’ll settle these creatures.”
“I am not a creature,” said Viola with dignity. “I am Viola Van Duyvil.”
Janie’s throat contracted. Viola might look like Annabelle—Georgie—but she sounded so like Bay.
“Are you? Then act like it.” Anne stared at Viola until Viola ducked her head, squirming herself into a more comfortable place against Anne’s shoulder, one strong will bowing to another. “If you’re good, I’ll sing you a lullaby.”
Viola lifted her head. “I don’t want a lullaby. I want a story.”
“Even better. I have a wonderful one about a prince who turned into a toad. You’ll adore it. It’s very educational.”
Anne and her charge disappeared up the back stair, the nurse following more slowly behind with Sebastian.
“Well?” said Mrs. Gerritt, putting her hands on her hips and surveying the three who remained. “Do you mean to sit here all night? If you’re not going to help, stop cluttering up my kitchen. There’s a fire in the drawing room. I’ll fetch you once I’ve got your rooms ready.”
“I think we’ve been dismissed,” said Burke quietly. He helped Janie up from her chair. “Don’t gawp, Lacey. Come along.”
Giles Lacey glared back over his shoulder as Burke ferried them from the room. “You let your housekeeper speak to you like that?”
“She’s not my housekeeper,” said Janie, feeling very far away from her own body, as though her head were floating disconnected above the floor.
Giles Lacey shook his head and muttered, “I need a drink. Do you have brandy in this godforsaken wasteland?”
Given that the air was blasted with ash and snow, Janie didn’t feel she could contest his description. “There should be a decanter in the dining room.”
“My thanks.” Giles Lacey nodded at Janie and, ignoring Burke, veered off in search of liquid consolation.
“You might do with some of that brandy.” Burke stood aside to let Janie precede him into the drawing room, but she noticed that he stayed close.
Wordlessly, Janie shook her head. “Mrs. Gerritt has left us tea.”
A remedy for any ill. There was a chipped teapot in her grandmother’s pattern on a tray by the fire, five cups, and a large bowl of sugar. No candles had been lit. None were needed. The drawing room faced south, where the bonfire that had once been Bay’s home blazed like a thousand candles, infusing the room with a lurid glare.
Janie crossed to the window. “Will it spread?”
She had never been so conscious of the vulnerability of her surroundings, mere planks and boards separating her from the elements. Rather like reputation, which seemed so strong until it was lost.
“The snow is falling again.” She felt, rather than saw, Burke come to stand beside her. He lowered his head, rubbing his temples. “Christ. I never thought I’d be so glad to see snow. Let’s just hope the wind stays in the other quarter and the snow keeps falling.”
He lifted his head just as Janie turned from the window, and she found herself staring at him, staring at him as if she were memorizing him, every detail unnaturally sharp, from the sheen on his hair, still damp from the snow-water in which he had washed it, to the burn mark by his left brow. He had a sticking plaster on his forehead and another on his cheek, where he had been struck by flying glass. The coat he wore was Janie’s grandfather’s and far too big for him: the front hung loose and the sleeves had been rolled and rolled again. Janie’s grandfather had been a large man, tall and broad, the latter exacerbated by her grandmother’s skill with pastry. He would have made two of Burke.
Janie tried to focus on those sorts of thoughts, on Burke’s rolled sleeves, her grandmother’s pies. It was better than the other images that came up when she closed her eyes: her mother, dissolving into flame. Bay, lying lost and cold on the floor of the folly. Annabelle, sinking slowly into the river. The endless roar of the fire, turning the sky crimson and black.
The clothes she wore smelled of lavender and age, but Janie could still smell the reek of soot beneath it, in her hair, in her skin, beneath her nails, ground right down to her core.
The soot of her mother’s pyre.
“How long can it burn?” she blurted out.
“Days.” Burke’s eyes were red and impossibly weary. Janie remembered, vaguely, that Burke had walked two miles from the station. It seemed like a lifetime ago. An hour ago was a lifetime ago. “But the snow should damp it.”
“So you said.” Flames, shooting out of the window. Her mother’s lips moving. “What did my mother say to you? At the end.”
Burke blinked and shifted from one foot to the other. “It was hard to tell. The wind…”
“No.” Janie put her hand on his sleeve, forcing him to look at her. “I want to know.”
“It sounded like…” Burke’s lips quirked in a something out of an actor’s mask, half-comic, half-tragic. “It sounded like, If you publish this, I will haunt you.”
A harsh laugh burbled out of Janie’s throat, and then another one, and another one. No words of love, no, not for her mother. No contrition, no apologies. Just a posthumous attempt to protect her reputation. It was suddenly hysterically funny, her mother, in a bedsheet, flitting about Burke’s window, sabotaging the printing presses, spooking the horses that carried the papers. Her stomach ached with laughing, except that it wasn’t laughter anymore. Sobs pushed out of her, great heaving sobs, bending her double, mixing and mingling with the laughter as tears ran down her face, seeping through her fingers, wetting the bodice of her grandmother’s dress.
Janie could feel Burke’s arms around her, his hand stroking her hair, his voice murmuring, over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not.” The words came out harsh and raw. Janie shoved the hair out of her eyes, blinking at Burke, her throat aching, her chest aching, all of her aching. “Is that horrible? I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry she’s gone. If anything, I’m … relieved.”
Janie could feel it like the lifting of a storm. She had never imagined that her mother might have hurt Bay—some part at the back of Janie’s mind mocked her for the euphemism—but her mother’s tension had pressed through the house, infecting them all. She had felt her madness, even if she hadn’t recognized it for what it was. It was dreadful, all of it, and she knew that, at some point, the full horror of it would hit her, but right now all she could feel was a horrible sense of relief that her mother was gone.
“It’s as if she was haunting us already, crushing all the life out of us, one by one, and now she’s gone and we can breathe again.” Janie looked up at Burke, trying to put her feelings into words. “Now is where you’re meant to be shocked and appalled.”
“You forget. I met your mother,” said Burke drily. He looked into Janie’s eyes, his voice softening. “She didn’t give you much reason to love her, did she?”
Janie gave a laugh that turned into a hiccup. She put a hand to her mouth. “My mother was charming,” she said in a muffled voice. “That’s what everyone says. But I never saw it. She never wasted her charm on me.”
Silently, Burke put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close.
Janie leaned into the comfort of that arm, the words spilling out. “She didn’t bother to charm my father either, not after she had caught him. The only one she cared about was Bay. I think she saw him as the man she might have been. Or perhaps as the man she wanted my father to be. Does that sound mad?”
“No,” said Burke. “No, it doesn’t.”
But Janie hardly heard him. She was lost in the tangled web of her own thoughts, thoughts that had always been there, but that she had never dared to voice. “With my mother … it always came back to my mother.” There had been portraits of Mrs. Van Duyvil everywhere, larger-than-life full-length portraits in the reception rooms at Newport, greeting visitors from the top of the stairs at the house on Thirty-Sixth Street. Portraits of ancestors had been relegated to dark corners, shunted off to relatives. Only Alva Van Duyvil was allowed to shine. “Her whole world was a mirror. Nothing existed except in relation to her.”
“Even her daughter?” said Burke quietly.
“Especially her daughter.” Janie’s fingers tightened on the lapels of Burke’s jacket. “Killing Bay—it must have driven her mad. As if she had taken a knife to herself. She wasn’t just killing Bay, she was killing her own legacy with it. It’s like something out of Sophocles, but the curtain doesn’t go up at the end.”
Burke’s eyes flickered towards the window, where Illyria burned still and Janie’s mother with it. “She took her punishment. For what it’s worth.”
Janie thought of her mother standing in the window, lit by the flames. Reluctantly, she shook her head. “I don’t know whether it was punishment or pride. If we hadn’t discovered the truth, would she have gone on like that? Could she?”
Burke didn’t feed her soothing lies. “I don’t know.”
Now that she had started talking, Janie couldn’t seem to stop. “Do you know, I was jealous of Bay? Everything was so easy for him. He seemed … he seemed to have a talent for always doing what was expected of him. Until Annabelle.” Janie winced. “Georgiana, I mean. Whoever she was. I’d never thought that Bay might be running away. I’d never thought that he’d had anything to run from. I’m not making much sense, am I?”
“You’ve just been through hell,” said Burke roughly. “I’d say you’re making more sense than you should.”
“Should I have hysterics like Gregson and be sent off to bed with a bellyful of laudanum?”
All those years of tisanes to calm her nerves. Her nerves had never needed calming, not like that. But it had been a convenient excuse for her mother, a way to shunt her out of sight, keep her under control.
Janie could hear her own voice, higher and higher, faster and faster, the words spilling out before she could think better of them. “I think I thought that if I could find out who killed Bay, my mother might finally look at me. She might think I … I wasn’t such a disappointment. I told myself it was for Bay—or for Bay’s children—but, really, it was for me. All those grand pronouncements about truth—how could you stand to listen to me? That wasn’t what I wanted. All I wanted was for my mother to notice me.”
“Hush.” Burke reached out to stroke her hair, and Janie jerked away, a jangle of raw nerves, jumpy in her own skin. “Do you think anyone’s motives are pure? Just because you wanted your mother’s attention doesn’t mean—”
“That I’m not St. Genevieve?” Janie swiped at her eyes. She gestured wildly at the window. “I lit a larger candle than I intended, didn’t I? So much for lighting the world. I burned it down instead.”
Burke grasped her shoulders with both hands. “Janie. Janie. Listen to me. Look at me. That chimney would have exploded no matter what you did.”
“But would my mother have chosen to—” She couldn’t make her lips form around the words. “She’s dead, and I can never make it better now.”
“She killed her son.” Burke held tightly to her shoulders, holding her gaze with his own, speaking rapidly. “Can you imagine having to relive that moment, over and over? She said it herself. She took the only way out she could. Janie, it wasn’t your doing. Any of it.”
Just a little cog on the wheel of events beyond her control. Janie choked on a laugh. “I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.”
“What do you want me to tell you?” Burke’s voice broke, and Janie realized, with a shock, that he was on the verge of cracking. “You did what you had to do, and you had the guts to see it through. Do you want expiation? Talk to a priest.” He gave her a little shake. “You’re the strongest woman I know, Janie Van Duyvil. Don’t go wobbly on me now.”
“Is that what you say on all your condolence calls?” quipped Janie shakily.
Burke’s arms closed convulsively around her, squeezing her tight. “I’ve been so afraid,” he muttered into her hair. “This morning, when I learned about Lacey, I thought—”
“I know,” murmured Janie, burrowing into his shirtfront, her arms beneath his coat, locked around his waist.
Burke was still talking, his cheek against her brow, half in a dream. “I was so terrified that I was going to lose you, that I was never going to get a chance to tell you I love you.”
“Love? Me?” Janie pulled back, staring at him, and saw the look of alarm cross Burke’s face as he realized what he had said. “You love me?”
“I didn’t mean to … it’s a hell of a time to say it, isn’t it? I wasn’t going to.” He drew in a deep breath. Janie could feel it reverberating through her own lungs. His green eyes held hers, defiantly. “But it’s true. I love you. I shouldn’t and I can’t, but I do.”
The fire cast an orange light across his skin. Janie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You’re right. It is a hell of a time.” Words she never thought would come out of her mouth. But she was different now; they were all different. “Burke—”
“Never mind.” Burke let go of her and took a step back, holding up both hands. “It’s all right. You should go to bed. I should go to bed. Different beds,” he added quickly. “This never happened. We can pretend I never said anything.”
Janie took a step forward. “Burke?”
Burke’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Yes?”
“Stop talking,” said Janie, and kissed him.
There was nothing romantic or tender about it. She kissed him desperately, kissed him with all the grief and fear and longing coursing through her. She kissed him as the fire crackled and the stones of Illyria fell. Let Rome in Tiber melt. But she wasn’t melting, she was burning, burning where the stubble on his chin grazed her palm, burning where his hands pressed against her back, all the pain and doubt burning up and away in the fire of their touch, frantic, animal, alive.
“Ah-ah-ah-ahem.”
The sound of a man loudly clearing his throat made them jump apart, Janie’s hand against her swollen lips, Burke running a hand through his wildly disordered hair.
Giles Lacey swaggered into the room, lifting one of Janie’s grandmother’s precious Irish crystal goblets in a casual salute.
“Your gorgon sent me to tell you she has rooms for us.” He swirled the ruby liquid in his glass and frowned accusingly at Janie. “That cherry brandy in the dining room is appalling stuff.”
Janie repressed the urge to kick Mr. Lacey in the shin, if only to take the smirk off his face. “That’s because it’s not cherry brandy,” she said shortly. “It’s my grandmother’s raspberry cordial.”
“Whatever it is, it tastes like summer pudding gone wrong.”
“That doesn’t seem to have stopped you.” Burke kept a protective arm around Janie’s shoulder.
“We all have different means of—hic—escape.” Lacey raised a brow at the location of Burke’s arm. “Don’t want to intrude, but … we’d best get our story straight, eh, what? Convenient, having a journalist on hand. How long does it take you to get a story out? Never mind. Don’t tell me. As I see it, you tell ’em ’bout the chimney and leave out the resht—rest. Tragic fire, et cetera, et cetera.”
“By the rest,” said Burke slowly, “you mean Mrs. Van Duyvil’s confession.”
“If you can call it that. Just the ramblings of an old lady, eh? Lost her mind with grief. Could happen to anyone.” Giles Lacey gestured widely, slopping raspberry cordial on the carpet. “Georgie as good as done it, didn’t she? No need to muddy the waters.”
Burke looked at Janie, his expression troubled. “He has a point, you know. We only have your mother’s word.”
“And her brooch.” The portrait that proved it had burned, was burning even now, but there might be sketches, copies. Copies the police would never find unless someone drew them to official attention. “A brooch is a very silent witness, isn’t it?”
“If you wanted…,” Burke began and broke off.
“You can’t make yourself say it.” Janie knew what he was offering her. The ability to wave a magic wand and make it all go away. But it wouldn’t, would it? Bay was still dead. And the twins deserved to know the truth. “If I wanted you to lie.”
“Not lie, exactly. Just … leave out the bit where the old bat started raving.” Mr. Lacey winked broadly and staggered a bit with the exertion. He was, Janie realized, very drunk indeed. To Burke, he added, “You’ll be paid, of course. Sure you can make a good thing of it. Grieving mother dies in flames, murderess still missing. You know the sort of thing. Make your editor happy and get a bit on the side.”
Janie ignored him. She turned to Burke. “Would you do that?”
“Not for money. And not for him.” Burke jammed his hands deep in his pockets. There was honor even among journalists, he had told her once. “Is it what you want?”
Save her mother’s reputation and destroy Burke’s soul. No, not just Burke. Annabelle and her children and Bay and everyone else who had been touched by this.
Janie’s nails made crescents in her palms. “No,” she said fiercely. “We’ve had enough secrets and lies. The children need to know their mother wasn’t a murderess. We owe it to them. And to Annabelle.”
“She wasn’t—” began Giles Lacey, and Janie turned on him.
“She was Annabelle to us. She was Bay’s wife.” Janie was shaking, with reaction and fatigue and anger and goodness only knew what else. “I want the children to remember their mother with love. She loved them. They deserve that.”
“You don’t have to bite my head off,” Giles muttered. “It was only a suggestion.”
As an apology, Janie felt that lacked something. She advanced on Giles, one finger outstretched. “I don’t care what feuds you brought with you from England. You can take them back there with you. I’m telling the truth as I know it whether it suits you or not. And you can go … go drink raspberry cordial until your teeth rot.”
Behind her, Burke choked on a laugh.
Janie whirled to face him. “As for you, Mr. Burke—”
“Yes?” he said, and his voice was so tender that any tart words Janie might have uttered faltered on her tongue.
I love you.
Janie met Burke’s eyes levelly. “As a good man once told me—do what you have to do and have the guts to see it through. Go back to town. Write your story. Tell the truth and shame the devil.”
“Language,” muttered Giles Lacey and upended his glass.
“You sound like your grandmother,” said Mrs. Gerritt from the doorway. “She was a good woman. Nothing mealy-mouthed about her. Good hand with a piecrust, too.”
Burke banged his elbow on the window frame. Giles Lacey dropped his glass, spraying the last few droplets of raspberry cordial across the carpet.
“That’s enough of that,” said Mrs. Gerritt. “Are you all going to bed, or do I have to carry you up?”