The next day, Maxime is sitting at breakfast, his long legs stretched out under the table. I can see his teenage self in this pose and it makes me feel softer toward him, protective. Just like when he was having a panic attack and I was holding him. It all feels like a dream now, rippled with illusion.
We haven’t touched in days. I haven’t seen him interact with Lila or even his own family. I fear Frédéric might be right: he’s Yvain, dipping into madness, ambling alone in the woods of his ambitions.
Conversely, my night swimming with Lila is sobering me up, dip by dip.
I survey the breakfast spread that, today, reappeared out of nowhere. The basket of croissants and pains au chocolat, the homemade apple and blackberry jams, opaque in the absence of morning sun. Today is cloudy, a first taste of autumn. I’ve been living on oversugared black coffee since the ball. My body has become taut, hungry, dissatisfied. I imagine sweeping everything off the table, glass jars crashing on the parquet, trampling the remains with my bare feet, pressing Maxime’s face between my hands. Will you look at me? I won’t be a specimen to you. My life won’t be another antique for your attic. Please come back to me as you were.
Instead, I pat my lips with my napkin. There’s nobody else around anymore. Marie-Laure disappears into the garden, frantically trimming bushes until there’s nothing left of them, and Frédéric and Lila… I’m not sure. The castle is vast enough to lose someone here for good.
“We’re not going to work today?” I ask Maxime.
He doesn’t look up from the newspaper. “I told you, you need to rest. Make sure you’ve got your head screwed on for the press conference. Why don’t you eat something?”
I look up, and ghosts have joined us in the room. It isn’t Constance and Anne, but Maxime and me, years in the future. He is sitting as he is, and I’m fussing, wearing one of Marie-Laure’s peach mohair cardigans, as expensive and soft on me as hers is frayed, with smeared lipstick, the evidence of anxious face-rubbing. He is saying, I hear you’ve been having another one of your episodes. I spill coffee on the table as I try to serve him. His eyes linger on me, irritated, disgusted.
I can’t allow this to happen. We’re not that; I’m not her—yet. A quieter, more subdued version of my mother, her prison made from different air.
“I have thought about something else,” I say.
“Hmm.”
“What if we didn’t sell the sculptures as Sorels? What if, instead, they were a tribute, by an exciting new contemporary artist. We could hold an exhibition here, really put the spotlight on Constance as well as launching your creative career. We would just need some original pieces as well, some that really show your voice…”
“And what exactly would that achieve?”
“Well, you’re incredibly talented, Max. You don’t have to lie about your sculptures. Together we can use my gift to make people see how important and meaningful your art is. We can still go public about the fact that you’re descended from Constance. It would really help sell the story. But that’s all the truth. There is no lying, no crime involved in this. Really, I think it’s a no-brainer—”
“No.”
I look at him over the steam of my coffee, stunned. “Just no? Is that all the consideration my brilliant plan is going to receive?”
“I think you overestimate your influence.”
“Oh, right.” After everything he’s said, I’m lost. Am I powerful, am I extraordinary, or not so much? He keeps changing his tune—it’s baffling.
He sighs again. I wish he would stop talking to me like I’m an irritating child, and him my tutor. Unfortunately, I’m starting to realize, there is no open, straight-talking version of Maxime Foucault. Everything has to be controlled, packaged, twisted in a way that makes him the only guardian of the truth, the great dragon we all have to bow to and plead with. “I didn’t say anything about your power. As to your influence in the world of art—shall I remind you that you, not long ago, completely discredited yourself?”
I try to look hard at him, but I feel like he’s stabbed me, even though he is right. “This applies to the press conference too, then,” I say. “If you think they won’t trust me, won’t listen, why am I here?”
“Camille, the press conference is precisely the point. Don’t you see? That is the key. If you are the one showing the world the actual Night Swimming, that means you were right all along. That the big show you made at Courtenay was you calling for the truth. I made Night Swimming for Constance and for you, it will save her legacy and your career. I wish you were more grateful and stopped arguing with me constantly.”
“I’m not arguing. I just—I’ve been wrestling with this, Max. I’m not sure I want a career at the expense of the truth. And I’m not sure that’s what Constance would have wanted.”
“She would have wanted the world to know how much she loved him.”
He folds the newspaper slowly, looking for the right creases to do it neatly. The top of the Arts page reads:
Maxime’s nails are impeccably clean, his hands soft and moisturized. I think of Constance’s hands, red and sore and cut, breaking ice on water jugs, her honest and fearless exploration of her feelings. I think of how being at D’Arvor stopped her speaking in metaphors, how she pursued a more direct approach in all the sculptures in Rennes, of Anne and Erwan, their lives together. How she marveled, in the Tide, at the precarious balance she had found. How she was happy, and how Maxime, with his plans, and with my help, will upturn her narrative. Now it will become all about the couples in the attic, the tortured metaphors of Arthurian legends—all about her doomed love story.
It’s to do with justice. We’re descended from a genius, the best sculptor of the late nineteenth century. If that was your history, would you not claim it?
It’s like a veil has lifted in my brain. How could I have been so gullible? So blind?
Boisseau. It’s him Maxime wants to claim. The most expensive sculptor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the genius Maxime was talking about, not Constance. The man whose works, when they come on the market, can sell for tens of millions of dollars.
That’s the story of her life he wants me to tell—how devastatingly in love she was with him, how he was the inspiration for every single one of her sculptures. Boisseau is the prestige Maxime wants to reclaim, through her. Her work is only valuable to him when they’re read in the light of their love story. She’s a gateway to establishing himself as the descendant of Boisseau, to harvest his prestige.
If his family can’t be descendants of St. Louis, if the dukes can sneer at their commoner grandmother, surely that’s the next best thing.
Realization flows over me like scalding-hot coffee spilt on my chest. It burns. But for the first time, it feels like I’ve hit on a truth with no other truth hidden behind it. This is Maxime’s brain in its barest form. Nefarious, narcissistic, self-obsessed. Did he make me fall in love with him to fill my mind with echoes of their love story in ours, to ensure I’d be prepped to sell it in the right way?
And then…surely not. But it does make sense—if the Sorels are a gateway, a means to get all his ducks in a row, surely the Boisseaus are next. That’s the big forgery he’s planning. The one where the money is. As for me…I will be trapped in his crime forever, incapable of coming clean, because of being complicit in the sale of the first batch of forgeries. It will never end. He will own me.
I try to steady myself, flattening my palms on the table, but everything is on fire, the floor lava, the wallpaper melting. I can’t tell Maxime what I’m thinking. If I’m right, I might be in danger. Surely not? But I can’t be certain of anything. Better not confront him right now.
“This is what you need them to see? In Night Swimming? How much she—pined after him, or something?” I croak.
“Are you saying she never loved him? Are you rewriting her life now? Camille, I worry about you. You were the first one to say that Night Swimming was the last love letter she wrote. It can’t be anyone else but Boisseau, can it?”
But it can. Friendship can be as powerful, safer, and more fulfilling than romantic love. Yet Anne has been erased from Constance’s life like everything else—and I’ve allowed it to happen.
“I don’t want in. Not for that story.” I make to stand up. The tablecloth catches in my hand, making the fine crockery rattle.
“Very well.” I look at Maxime, wary of what he is going to say next. “You’re free to leave. Just go.”
“Really?”
He laughs. I can’t believe those are the eyes I found the world in. The mouth I kissed so passionately. The soul I longed for, that I thought I met in Avalon. It’s distorted, a cracked mask. “I don’t keep prisoners, Camille.”
Doesn’t he? Why does it feel like it, though? He and D’Arvor, complicit.
“I could tell the world what you did, what the sculptures really are.” I need to see him confronted with that possibility, so it becomes real. So that I regain some kind of agency. But I already feel, terribly, that I have lost all power in this.
He looks at me with tender pity. “Listen, I didn’t want to show you. But I think you need to know.” He grabs his phone from the table, brings up an email, and slides it toward me.
The message is from Rob, dated a couple of weeks back. I scan it quickly.
Dear Mr. Foucault,
I hope this finds you well. It’s come to my attention that you are working with Ms. Leray on some sculptures of great interest and value… I thought it my duty to alert you to the fact that she has proven somewhat unreliable lately, refusing the psychological support she clearly needs… We parted ways with her… I would strongly advise that you consider using our services… would be happy to come to France to offer you advice and valuation… reliable, dependable, and highly respected in our field, unlike Ms. Leray at present… Highly unlikely a sale would go through on the sole recommendation and expertise of Ms. Leray or that your priceless works would reach anywhere near what they are worth under her name as the expert… Sincerely yours…
“I’m afraid nobody is going to believe you. They have seen you literally go insane. And they have somebody claiming that you abused them until they broke down.” In a shiver, I remember the woman in the Hepburn dress. “As far as experts go, you have completely discredited yourself. Without my help, nobody will ever take you seriously again.”
There’s a roar, and I wonder if it’s the dragon finally waking up from under our feet. An empty fine porcelain cup is flung hard against the wall, smashing against the fireplace. I flinch…then realize I’ve done this. I study my extended hand, then the shards, sharp like baby teeth, while trying to grasp that the world outside these walls thinks I’m insane. That I’m not to be trusted. I’m unstable, destructive. And it might be right.
What Maxime does next surprises me. He isn’t angry; all tension seems to have left his body with the crash of the porcelain. He bundles me up in his arms. I let myself be held, hating my body and soul for being so lost and craving this—craving him.
“Or you could stay. And we could go ahead with the plan. You can have the career you’ve always deserved. You’ll be rehabilitated; you’ll be the one who has been right all along. A superstar. You know I think you deserve it. I’m the only person who truly knows your potential and I’d like you to let me help you.”
I nod numbly, and he kisses my forehead. When we part, I catch Marie-Laure’s eyes—she is standing on the threshold, a brush and dustpan in hand, her face a scowl of contempt, and understanding.
Max likes saving people.
But for that, they have to get in trouble first. Lila’s voice rings in my head like a wisp of clarity that wakes me up.
I smile at him.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asks. “I’m going to the gallery today, but I could stay, if you need me?”
I shake my head, pulling my cardigan tight around my body. “I’m all right. Thank you. And sorry”—I turn to Marie-Laure who is clearing up—“about that. It just—flew out.”
Where was Constance’s workshop? I dig deep into my brain to find the knowledge I painstakingly accumulated over years of research, that a few weeks with the Foucaults were enough to make me question. In the old barns. Didn’t Maxime deny it, in one of our very first conversations here? I mentally review the map of the grounds, highlighting the location at the edge of the estate. If there’s evidence that Maxime is planning forgeries of Boisseau, it might be there. I need to know his plans for sure, and what better way than through his sculptures? There, if I find them, he won’t be able to hide from me.
A muffled cry, and I see Marie-Laure has cut her finger. A drop of blood falls on the white porcelain. “Frédéric can sort you out with plasters,” I tell her.
Extraordinary doesn’t have to be mean.
I think we’re past that, I silently reply to Lowen as I hop past her.