I look for Maxime the next day, bewildered, but he’s nowhere to be found. I need confirmation that he has forged the statues, but it feels mad in the clear light of day, impossible. It is such a wild accusation… I need more proof. I need to understand why he would want to do this, what exactly he would have to gain by taking the risk of forging some works of art that would be scrutinized so deeply.
If it’s true, I should be furious to have been played. Furious at his arrogance, at the fact that he almost fooled me. Equally…his talent is dazzling. He hid himself from me, even with my gift. His mind is infuriating, dangerous, addictive, and I’ve just been given a key to it.
I imagine those hands at work, modeling me like they gave life to the clay. Focus, Camille. What is he bargaining to gain? Is it about the money he might make? It feels so wild a risk, so huge an effort, for someone already at the top of the food chain. Someone who could surely seduce their way into any pocket. I’m restless, grasping at strands that keep breaking.
I also think his training is working. I’ve become even more porous to the souls in the castle. The crying baby comes back on the regular, especially when I’m in the office, but I try to push his wails away. I’d rather be outside, surrounded by nature, where it’s quieter. I’d rather occupy myself in the frenzy of ball preparations. I join Lila to help Marie-Laure make bouquets of flowers from the garden, trying out various color combinations. My hands, already burning and sore, keep catching on the thorns, drawing invisible but painful scratches that no rubbing can soothe. I’m lost in my thoughts until they become flies bothering me. I feel Maxime must be hiding something from me, a truth about his family, something linking him to Constance that would justify the pains he’s taken to rehabilitate her. Has it got anything to do with Anne Foucault?
“Marie-Laure,” I say, snipping off a tender rosebud—one bloodred, that she said she needed for the centerpiece. “Do you know anything about Anne Foucault?”
I can’t see her face under the brim of her hat, but she brings her gloved hands down to her knees. She’s a petite woman, even smaller than me. I wonder how the frequent gusts of wind here don’t topple her over.
“I know who she was, of course. My husband’s grandmother.” She picks up her shears again; they hang around the thin stem of a rose, but she doesn’t snip. She seems rather stressed today, jittery. I think the pressure of the ball might be getting to her. Now that I think about it, I’ve hardly seen her these past couple of weeks. Maxime and I were so absorbed in our mission that we forgot to have dinner most days.
“What about her child?” I think of the blond boy running in Washerwoman. He was in Viviane too. It was clear how much both women loved him.
“What child?”
I’m surprised at her puzzlement. “Maxime’s grandfather.”
“Ah. Of course. I never got to know him, sadly, but Anne adored him. She used to say Maxime was his spitting image. She said she pulled him out of the pond, that he had been left behind by a fairy. She was adamant she hadn’t stolen him, that she was merely looking after him, waiting for the fairy to return and fetch him.” She stops. “She was very old, you understand. Her life and stories got all mixed up.”
“I think Anne and Constance were friends,” I say, aware of Lila going to town on some kind of weed next to me with her bare fingers. She is digging, pulling hard, not managing to dislodge its roots.
“Constance Sorel was rather a loner.”
“You really don’t like her, do you?”
“Ms. Leray.” Marie-Laure finally snips the rose, a sharp sound that makes me flinch. “Constance Sorel brought sadness and misery to D’Arvor. Like all artists, she was selfish; for her art she needed to create drama and anguish wherever she went. She tried to destroy our family. So I don’t think she would have made friends, as you say. In fact, unlike my son, I think it would have been much better had she never come here.”
“What do you mean, she tried to destroy your family?” I ask, despite Lila’s eyes telling me that I shouldn’t probe.
“She was unhinged. She nearly drowned him, you know that? The boy.”
Marie-Laure throws her gardening gloves on the ground. They land with a quiet thump. She brings her hand up to attempt to undo the knot under her sun hat. The longer she tries and fails, the more her fingers tremble. Lila watches her—I think she’s enjoying her struggle. I go to help, but Marie-Laure bats me away. She grows more and more agitated until Frédéric approaches from the house, carrying a pot of white paint, his T-shirt smeared with it—one look makes him hurry to her. Quietly, almost sadly, he pulls the hat off her head.
“We can undo the knot later, Mother.” The features of her face are melting now, as if she doesn’t have the strength to hold them in place any longer; her bright red mouth smeared, pulled downward. Frédéric wraps his arm around her shoulder to guide her back to the house.
“She’s going to do it all over again,” I hear her say. “Even dead, she will pull us apart.”
“What does she mean?” I ask Frédéric. I don’t care if it’s not the right moment—I’m outraged on Constance’s behalf.
He stares at me. “Not now, please. Can’t you see she’s unwell?” Marie-Laure gasps, and he turns back to her. “Let me give you something. You’ll soon be right as rain again.” As they walk away, he glances back at me among my cemetery of chopped roses.
In the evening, as I walk past the yellow salon’s open doors, Frédéric calls out to me. He is hanging fairy lights in the garden. I approach him unwillingly, the gravel crunching under my brogues. I’m still shaken from my interaction with Marie-Laure, her vitriol about Constance, which felt only one step removed from ill feelings toward me. I could leave, I suppose. I could send Maxime the unsatisfactory dossier and an invoice, tell him I’m done and I have better to do back home, but that would be a lie. Even Lowen is here, in Rennes—although we’ve barely talked since that awkward drink. I forwarded him the invitation to the ball, at Maxime’s request. Are you sure that’s a good idea, Cam? I didn’t reply because I wasn’t sure at all.
Frédéric is perched precariously on the rim of one of the fountains. I imagine visitors being told not to touch, not to sit, and here is Frédéric, trampling and groping. He beckons me, holds out the end of the cable for me to wrap around Neptune and his putti. “Thank you.”
We work in silence, then he says: “You must excuse my mother. She gets a little stressed. We’re not really used to hosting parties anymore. Certainly not on this scale.”
“What did you give her?”
He smiles. “I seem to be my family’s pharmacist. Just something to help her settle.” Then: “Don’t worry, Ms. Leray, it’s all aboveboard.”
When it’s done, we take a few steps back to judge our work.
“I think it’s going to look lovely,” I say.
Frédéric shakes his head, unsure. “Shall we try it?”
He jogs back a few paces to press a switch. The whole garden illuminates. Garlands of blue, red, and green bulbs caught on hedges; rows and rows of tiny white fairy lights twinkling on topiary and statues, multiplied by their reflection on the water basins.
It must have been hours of work and I arrived for the final flourish. Like any piece of art, I think grimly. I’m always there once it’s all said and done, right at the very end. I never make anything.
But you’re the one pressing the switch. I feel like I can hear Maxime’s voice in my ear.
“It’s gorgeous,” I whisper. “Just like Merlin’s spell when he made Viviane’s crystal palace.” I always imagined it in floating balls of color, spinning around the lake faster and faster until the air solidified into crystal spires, turrets, and windows.
Frédéric smiles, resigned. “They will find flaws with it, but I tried my best. Thank you for your help.”
“Who will find flaws with it? Your father?” I ask, remembering what Maxime told me in the bar.
He stares at me. His coloring is darker than Maxime’s; he has straight ebony hair, kept a bit longer to hide that it’s started to recede at the temples, heavy eyelids, and long eyelashes. He is shorter too. I wonder if everyone looks at him like I’ve done just now—to compare and contrast, highlight his shortcomings. “Sorry,” I say, “I shouldn’t have said that. None of my business.”
“That’s all right,” he says, mildly. Then: “I’m going to check out the orangery. Care to walk with me?”
“Why not?” I don’t really want to, but this is an opportunity to ask him about what Marie-Laure said earlier. The one in her confidence, Frédéric might also be the Foucault who is most likely to open up away from other ears.
The sun has completely disappeared now but the fairy lights guide us some way across the grounds. Our steps make damp thuds on the grass; we are walking on soft soil you could bury bodies in.
“Thank you for helping,” he says again, and I know he’s trying things out in his head. I know, because I feel that he and I connect on some deep level neither of us want to verbalize. In our families, we’re the ones who scramble, who strive, whose trainers slip at the edges of monuments.
As we get deeper into the grounds, I lose my bearings. The air grows thick and cold, mixing dew and earth and, every so often, the faded pungency of rotting rose. I expect Frédéric to use the light on his phone, but he clearly knows the park like the back of his hand, and I follow him, trying to trust that my feet will continue to meet solid ground.
“Why are we checking out the orangery?” I ask.
I can feel his proximity. It’s a different warmth from Maxime’s—this one is needy, urgent, quietly pulsing with frustration. I try to get a little more space but he keeps closing the gap, his elbow bumping into mine.
“I often walk over at night. Check that everything is OK. Gives me an excuse to leave the house.”
“Why would you want to leave the house?”
The frustrated noise he makes startles me. “I thought you understood.”
I’m getting annoyed with him now. But I’m also walking deep into huge grounds, at night, with this man I now realize I never properly looked at. There’s something so…repressed about him. I just hope all his frustration won’t come out right now, in a form I won’t be able to contain.
“Frédéric…you must know I don’t understand anything. There’s so much concealed here. What did your mother mean earlier, about Constance? Drowning a boy?”
I can’t see his face in the dark, but it takes a moment for him to respond. “Constance wasn’t well, Ms. Leray. She became very poorly at D’Arvor. Some kind of madness. She lost track of reality. Family knowledge has it she thought my grandfather was an evil creature and she threw him into the lake. He was only a toddler. She was sent away shortly after that.”
We must be coming to the lake now because I hear lapping water. We could be walking right into it for all I know. The shock of what Frédéric just said is overwhelming. All the dampness is starting to cling to my clothes like a shroud.
“That can’t be true,” I say. “Constance wasn’t mad.” I know her mind. I know her so intimately, and yet…after the sculptures I saw in Rennes, she stopped. Is this the key piece of information I was missing about her fate? Her, what, losing her mind? It doesn’t even mean anything. That’s not a condition, not an illness. It sounds more like posthumous slander.
Frédéric laughs. “You have so many ideas about what is true, yet you have no bloody clue.” He comes to a stop, and all I can do is the same, bracing myself for the violent push that might come, when he sends me headfirst into the murky water and I disappear, pulled down by ropes of algae and the claws of fairies that come alive at nighttime.
You’re not supposed to know our secrets. Now you can’t ever go back.
“Now you know, though. She was unwell, she was kicked out after she tried to hurt a child. She stopped working, fell into poverty, end of story. I’m sorry, but that’s a truth even you and Maxime can’t rewrite. So, when are you leaving?” His voice is so close to my ear. I can’t even see him—I can’t see anything.
I try to remain calm, to pretend this is a normal conversation in normal circumstances, while I try to process what he’s just told me.
“I don’t know, Frédéric.”
“But you are planning to, though, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” My heart jumps into my throat as a screeching, terrifying noise erupts nearby. It’s an owl. It’s a barn owl, I tell myself, trying to picture their cute round faces, rather than their jet-black eyes. “Soon. After the ball. Maxime and I haven’t really talked about it yet.”
He crashes into me and I brace myself for the fall, but he wasn’t pushing me; he grabs my upper arms and shakes me. It is a weak shake, and a weak grip; I could easily shrug him off, but I freeze.
“Camille”—his voice is urgent, lower than usual—“you must leave. He told me—he told me about what he thinks you can do. I think he’s going mad. I think we’ll all suffer if you—if he realizes you can’t—that nobody can…”
That brings me back to life. “What?” I hiss, “Get your hands off me!”
But he is stronger than me, and the panic takes hold. Until there’s a noise in the lake of something much bigger than a frog moving in the water. Frédéric lets me go, fumbling to turn on his flashlight. He keeps dropping it. A human form emerges and advances on us, dark algae dripping along their arms.
The lady of the lake. She’s finally here to snatch me.
Frédéric finally manages to turn on the flashlight and points it right at her.
“Lila?”
“Leave her alone,” she hisses.
“Do you mind? This is a private conversation—” Frédéric starts.
“Fucking stop, Fred.” She turns to me.
Is it really her? A short dark wetsuit reveals the strength of her core, of her limbs. Her hair is loose, like a thick mass of algae, longer than I’ve known it to be, sticking to her arms. Her furious eyes catch the light, but she doesn’t blink.
She’s magnificent, terrifying. She is the lady of the lake. “Are you OK?” she asks me.
“Yes, thank you.” I just want to get away from Frédéric, from the unsettling darkness. I turn and start running back toward the castle.
“You’ll get lost.” Frédéric’s voice echoes on the water.
Tears prickle out, and I struggle to retrieve my phone from my pocket. But eventually I do, and it illuminates grass and more grass, and a path through the shallow woods. Eventually D’Arvor comes into view, as if to say—How could you think you could get lost when I’m this close? Did you think you could escape me?
All the while, I hear Frédéric’s voice. Some kind of madness. You must leave.