“Oh, no,” he said, twirling one of the ringlets. “Benoit is doing his best at distraction, but I think Hammond may murder me in my bed tonight. And you should arrange your skirts, my love, your firelighter is showing. I would do it, but …”
She was sorry to see the coast. She knew he was playing his part, doing exactly as they’d planned, but she wondered whether it would feel different when he was being the real René. Or if the two could ever be one and the same.
The dock at Berck was more of an arrival and departure point than a town, and it was thronged with people trying to make their way out of the Sunken City and off the Parisian coast. Animals, bags, carts, men shouting about their tickets and muddy streets all mixed with landovers coming and going. Somewhere in that crowd there would be another man from the newspapers lurking, and if nothing of their arrival was printed, it would not be René Hasard’s fault.
Again he chided Benoit unmercifully about the baggage, took personal offense to a stranger’s innocent glance at Sophia, and now was loudly insisting to the porter that planks should be laid from the pier to the landover, so that his wife-to-be’s slippers would not be discolored by the dirt. Sophia held her skirt just above the mud, helping the underskirt take the weight of the firelighter, looking on adoringly while René explained that he was René Hasard (cousin to the Ministre of Security, but say nothing of that), that his fiancée’s brother had just been condemned (he is the Red Rook, but please do not tell anyone, Monsieur), and that dirty shoes could be the final blow to the emotional well-being of his betrothed. It was difficult not to laugh. René did not possess the first ounce of shame, and he was loving every moment of it—when you knew to look. But she was also very afraid that Spear might hit him.
Sophia reached up and unpinned her navy hat as Benoit finally drove the hired landover lurching and rattling down the pitted road that would take them to the Sunken City. René adjusted the blanket over their laps and her dress—it was chilly, clouds rolling in across the sun—and again he pulled her close to him on the seat.
“I think that is unnecessary,” said Spear from the opposite side, his features tightly controlled. He had not spoken since they got off the boat.
“I am not being impertinent, Hammond.” René’s lower, less Parisian voice was a shock after the one he’d been using on the dock. “I am keeping our heads safe. You would be surprised, I think, to know how many eyescopes are between here and the city.”
Spear looked René full in the face. “Close the curtains, then.”
“In which case we will not be seen at all. As we wish to be, or otherwise. You would rather our plan did not work?”
“Really, Spear,” Sophia said, “it’s nothing. And you know he’s right.”
René was right, but it certainly wasn’t nothing. That aching pull she’d been feeling had been soothed all day; she wanted to be soothed again. Spear crossed his arms, leaned back his head, and closed his eyes, which, Sophia thought, was probably as good an escape as he was likely to get.
She scooted in to René, his arm still around her waist, squirming about until she said, “Corsets are of the devil.”
“Sophia,” said Spear, in the corrective tone of her father, once upon a time.
“Spear,” she said, in the exact same tone. She’d felt guilty before; now she was irritated. “It’s an item of clothing. An item of clothing that happens to be worn under a woman’s clothes and happens to be of the devil. If you had one on, you’d say the same.”
“Turn this way,” René said. She could hear the amusement. And so, probably, could Spear. René guided her around until her back was to him, doing the same until his own was in the corner of the seat. She adjusted the firelighter beneath the dress and the blanket on her lap. She could feel René’s chest behind her, his chin somewhere near her ear.
“Better?” he asked.
She nodded, staring out the window where the farms of The Désolation were passing, a few vineyards yet unharvested, purple grapes hanging under the clouded sky. She was aware of his breathing, in and out against her back, of the arm around her middle, holding her in. René’s cheek settled against her curls. He was probably getting hair powder on her, but she didn’t care. Then his other arm moved very gently beneath the blanket.
She darted a glance at Spear, but he was still head back, eyes closed, swaying with the motion of the wheels. René slid his arm around her from the other direction, his fingers lacing together over her middle, the warmth of him seeping through her dress. She breathed deep. There was no risk in this. This was safety. And nothing even resembling the feeling of being trapped. Did this sort of thing go on all the time when you loved someone? She felt René’s breath slow behind her.
And then she opened her eyes. René was asleep; she could feel the relaxed stillness around her. She was pleasantly pinned inside it, and the light in the landover had changed. Slanting now, on its way to dusk. Spear was awake, looking at nothing somewhere near the floor, and she wondered how long he had been sitting there, watching the two of them sleep. Guilt snaked inside her; Spear hadn’t deserved that. He didn’t deserve any of this, really. She tried to imagine the situation reversed. Spear’s arms around her middle, Spear’s breath in her hair. She couldn’t. She looked out the window, trying to understand where they were, and only then did she comprehend what was passing by them.
She must have stiffened, because René said near her ear, “What is wrong?” His voice was even more rough with sleep. She sat up, startling Spear from his reverie.
They were driving through the cemeteries that lay outside the gates of the Sunken City, but she was not seeing what she’d expected. Mémé Annette had told her all about the one day a year the gates opened, how she could leave the Lower City and go to the cemeteries for the last day of La Toussaint, decorating the gravestones with feathers and ribbons and autumn flowers; she saved all year for those flowers. Mémé had even whispered to her once, while tying a La Toussaint ribbon of satiny yellow into the long, wild braids she’d worn as a child, that some people would slip away from the cemeteries and never come back again. The gates would close on them forever. Sophia had made her promise never to do that, and Mémé had said she wouldn’t.
But the last day of La Toussaint had not come, and yet the cemeteries had been decorated. Hundreds upon hundreds of blooms of white and black—were they dyed, or had someone actually grown a black flower?—and swaths of dark and light cloth. Masks with dual faces, one side ecstatic white, the other an anguished black, had been set up on poles among the tombstones, as far as the eye could see, ribbons trailing from beneath them and dangling in the wind, looking horribly like the staked heads the mob sometimes paraded through the Lower City.
“The answers of Fate,” René said. “Yes and no, life and death.” He sat back on the cushion of the landover. “Have either of you noticed that my cousin is a lunatic?”
This actually pulled a faint smile from Spear, which was saying something. But Sophia sat forward, watching the violated cemeteries pass in a rolling black and white sea, grave after grave, mask after empty-eyed mask. There was something ghastly about it, a wrongness beyond the obvious that she couldn’t immediately put her finger on. And then she knew. It was because this stark world LeBlanc was trying to create was a lie; there was a spectrum of color between black and white, and many, many layers of choice between yes and no.
The nethersun was dipping low when Benoit rapped twice on the roof from the driver’s seat, letting them know they were approaching the Saint-Denis Gate. Sophia pinned on her hat, René straightening his cravat and sleeves as the landover rolled to a stop. They should only have to show their papers through the window, but he was preparing to make as much of a commotion as possible. Spear didn’t move, even for his papers. René looked out the window and frowned.