by Teresa Edgerton
Teresa Edgerton is the author of eight fantasy novels and a handful of short stories. Her longest and most complex book, The Queen's Necklace, is scheduled to be released shortly. The world of that novel, one of the minor characters, and Teresa's longtime interest in vegetable poisons are combined in the following story.
Miss Odilia Rowan—with eighteen years to her name, and a world of bitterness in her heart— moved through the maze of Coeur-de-Fer prison with the studied nonchalance of a long-time resident. It was a style, a pose, a posture, which Odile had been at some pains to acquire, far more difficult than the lessons in deportment she had been required to learn as a young lady of consequence in the outside world. For a denizen of this world, this claustrophobic prison world, with its feuds and hierarchies and alliances and betrayals, every move must project an arrogant confidence that one had friends to watch one's back.
That she was escorted, on this occasion, by a bailiff who went on ahead to unlock the gates, was no guarantee of Odile's safety. Prisoners had been stabbed, bludgeoned, or raped repeatedly, in full view of their guards. It all depended on whose money was jingling now inside of his pocket; the price of a life—or a death—was a handful of silver in Coeur-de-Fer, and sometimes even less.
Odile followed the bailiff down a narrow stone corridor. The floor was inches deep in straw, urine, and feces, and it was necessary to pick her way carefully: there were bits of sharp stone and sometimes broken crockery down in the muck, very dangerous to bare feet, and even the smallest cut would turn septic. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the familiar thud of an iron-banded door slamming shut; then there was a sharp crack, like a bone breaking or a hammer hitting wood, followed by a low, keening wail. As in other prisons, there was a constant coming and going. In two years, Odile had seen any number of her fellow inmates depart: some hauled off in the rickety prison tumbrils, on their way to an appointment with the ax or the noose; others nailed up in cheap pine coffins or carelessly sewn up in coarse woolen sacks.
Only a very, very few had walked out through the front gate, their sentences completed, their freedom restored—and more than half of those were back again inside a year.
But if the rumor is true, if the Governor has summoned me for the reason I suppose he has, thought Odile, I won't be like any of those others. Whatever I have to do, whoever I have to sacrifice, I'll never come back!
In the Governor's chambers, violets bloomed in a pot by a window, and a handful of herbs burning in a brass dish offset some of the stench from the wards below. When Odile walked in, followed by the bailiff, the Governor rose from his seat in a big oak armchair, a gesture of respect which spoke volumes. A dapper little man in velvet and lace, with waist-length dark hair and a neat spade beard, he even went so far as to sketch a bow as he waved her toward a bench by the door. "Miss Odilia Rowan?"
"I have been your guest for some twenty-eight months," she replied coldly, taking the offered seat and arranging her ragged skirts. The chains she wore between her ankles scraped on the hardwood floor. "I should think you would know very well who I am."
A month ago, even ten days, to answer him so would have cost her dearly. There were underground cells, at Coeur-de-Fer, that were worse than sewers; a prisoner who spoke out of turn could be "forgotten" down there for weeks at a time. Odile knew: she had once spent a fortnight in hell, attached to a wall by a short heavy chain.
But now her words had no other effect than to make the Governor look uncomfortable. "I am happy to say that your visit here will soon be over. The documents are being prepared even as we speak, and by tomorrow morning you ought to be free."
Odile felt her heart leap in her chest. The blood hammered in her veins, and for a moment she felt a little giddy. Though she had been half expecting this for several days, the shock of relief was still considerable. "The charges against me—I've never entirely understood what they were—the charges against me have all been dropped?"
"It has been determined that the charges against you have no merit at all. Your arrest, it would appear, and certainly your detention here these many months, was—a somewhat embarrassing mistake. You will be released with the apologies of the State."
"And my cousins. Evelyn and Arthur? My Aunt Clio?" She did not ask about her uncles, Jonah and Euripides. All the world knew by now that Jonah had received a dramatic stay of execution which had actually arrived as he was mounting the steps to the scaffold. It was his lengthy retrial, alongside his brother Euripides, which had caused the evidence against them all to be reviewed.
"Lord Evelyn and Sir Arthur are likely to be released within the next two or three days. As for Miss Clio Rowan—" Again, she saw him fidget in his chair. "I am sorry to be the one to tell you this. She died six months ago, of natural causes."
Odile felt ill with the compound shocks of good news and bad. Looking down at her hands, she saw that they were shaking; she gripped them together as hard as she could, in an effort to steady them. She would not let this man exult in her weakness. "Of natural causes? Of neglect and despair, more likely. Of the sort of treatment which a dog shouldn't have to endure, much less an elderly gentlewoman in uncertain health! My aunt was murdered, she was cruelly and wrongfully put to death by the very same State that had already murdered around two dozen of my relations!" Yet this was no way to learn all the things that she needed to know. Struggling for self-control, Odile swallowed her indignation. "But six long months ago—why was I not told of this until now?"
The Governor took a fine lace handkerchief out of his sleeve and mopped at his forehead. "Six months ago, the political climate was such that we still had every expectation you would eventually be tried, convicted, and executed. It hardly seemed as though the information would be of any use to you. But things have changed. Several witnesses have recanted, many new facts have come to light. It now becomes clear that you have all been victimized by a most extraordinary series of mistakes."
A series of mistakes! Odile could have laughed if it were not so tragic. Twenty-five people dead, two years of her own life gone beyond redemption, and no telling what Arthur and Evelyn, Jonah and Euripides had suffered—and it was all just an extraordinary series of mistakes. I might be dead, too, had I not possessed a certain compromising piece of information about the Crown Prince, which must have come out had I ever been tried. "Will there be compensation?" she said out loud.
The Governor shook his head. "That is hardly to be expected. But all of your lands, all of your money and movable property that may have been confiscated and reassigned—all this will be restored to you and your surviving kinsmen. For whatever satisfaction it may afford you," he added with a tight little smile, "you are now a considerable heiress."
Odile knew that this was so. The wealth of the Rowans had been immense, it had supported a large and curious and restless and luxury-loving family in a style that other men and women could scarcely even imagine—and now there were only the five of them left. Her own share of that wealth was likely to amount to a staggering sum.
She looked down at her hands again. Once they had been smooth and soft, exquisitely kept; now the skin was coarse, the palms hard, the nails broken and rimmed with dirt. As for the jewels she had once worn, they had been replaced by slim iron manacles as light as bracelets—which privilege she had bought (in lieu of the heavier and cruder fetters which chafed intolerably) with a pair of gold filigree earrings. "If everything which ought to be mine is to be restored to me," she said slowly, "there is a certain ring. A smoke-colored stone carved intaglio on a silver band. It was taken from me eight months ago. As it is very old and valuable, a family heirloom, I would be very sorry not to have it back again."
The Governor frowned. "If you lost it eight months ago-"
"Not lost. It was taken from me by force by one of your gaolers. Oh, I am certain he will deny it, but the fact remains."
"Nevertheless, after such a long time, it would be very difficult to restore your ring." The Governor made a helpless gesture. "Some of the guards here do, most unfortunately, have acquisitive habits, but they are also extremely adept at disposing of everything they acquire. Your ring has been pawned, sold, perhaps melted down and the stone reset—I know not what—and it could be practically anywhere by now."
"Then I suggest to you, sir, that you have very little time in which to find it," said Odile stubbornly. "I think you would be very sorry indeed if the ring were not on my finger when I leave here tomorrow."
She saw the fear dawning in his eyes; it was her first real indication of the power that was going to be hers, now that her fortune was coming back to her, now that she and her once-influential relations were restored to favor.
I had no understanding of these things before I came here, being little more than a child. Why, we were all children,
even the very oldest of us. We traveled the world, but we were not worldly. We were hungry for knowledge, but we were not wise. And we were so caught up in our enthusiasms, so pleased with ourselves and our ingenious schemes for acquiring more wealth, for discovering new things—it never occurred to us that we were inciting such envy, provoking such a fear of us. We were foolish beyond permission!
With a scornful glance, Odile rose from her seat. Though she had not received leave to depart, neither the Governor nor the guard made a move to stop her as she moved toward the door.
She felt the bitterness well up inside of her. She knew her world much better, now, than she had known it at sixteen: knew its cruelty, its corruption, its hypocrisy, its sin. Those few of us who remain—how much wiser we will be now. Our ingenuity will be turned to less innocent schemes, our wealth and our influence, too. And those who robbed us of our innocence will pay, and pay, and pay!
Miss Odilia Rowan at twenty: at the heart of a dozen palace intrigues, having schemed and blackmailed herself into a position of power at the court of King Rene of Montcieux.
No longer gaunt and dirty—gowned in silk as became her station—she had discovered in her own beauty a potent weapon. But she possessed, as well, a cool head, a precise facility for careful calculation, a lethal patience. She was even generous, when it suited her purpose, as it frequently did, for she knew the value of powerful friends—as, indeed, she knew the value of everything, down to a brass farthing.
Yet all too often, at some vital turn, some critical juncture she found her way blocked, her devices frustrated, by the Marquis de Villebrisant—handsome, smiling, and affable in his manner, but seeming to take a wicked delight in her every discomfiture.
"He is like one of those little jeweled vipers I have seen in the south, the ones that the women in Monte Luna keep as pets," said Odile's distant cousin, the Baroness fle-du-Perdu. "He insinuates himself everywhere, slips in and out of intrigues and assignations as though his skin were made of scales. And even those who fondly suppose he is their friend eventually succumb to his poisonous attacks."
Oddly enough, even Odile was not immune to his charm, or his handsome face and elegant figure. Statuesque herself, she liked a man who was tall and well-made, and though she found fools extremely useful, she had sworn not to bed any man less clever than she was. She shrugged off the Baroness' words with a laugh. "Well, he is a worthy adversary. I find that sparring with him sharpens my wits. And you know, Ci-celia, he is not unamusing."
But that was before Odile chanced to overhear an incriminating bit of conversation, one day as she walked through the gardens of the ancient palace, among the headless marble statues and the topiary yews.
She was deep in thought, meditating on the probable outcome of her latest scheme, as she followed the meandering pebbled path skirting the overgrown boxwood maze—when she was caught and held by the name of the Marquis, spoken in confidential tones on the other side of the ill-kept hedge.
"He was nothing five years ago," went on the low, masculine voice. 'The younger son of an impoverished noble, fresh from the country, with nothing to recommend him but his pretty face. Then the Due de Cinque-Riviere took him up, and with the Due's patronage there was one profitable appointment after another, until he was wealthy enough and important enough to buy his way into his present title."
"But what are you implying?" said a second voice— that of a woman. "I never heard yet that the Due had a weakness for young boys. If Cinque-Riviere took him up, surely it was because the Due recognized some extraordinary quality."
There was a long silence, broken only by the gentle, irregular fall of water in a leaf-choked fountain somewhere in the background. Odile had nearly given up hope of hearing more, when the man spoke again. "You are forgetting, I think, that five years ago the young Duchess of Cinque-Riviere died under mysterious circumstances—and that her suspected lover, Anthony Rowan was eventually convicted of poisoning her."
In the act of turning away, Odile froze at the mention of her cousin's name. Where she had been listening with only a casual interest before, the conversation on the other side of the boxwood hedge now possessed her entirely.
"That I do recall," said the second speaker. "But the evidence for that was really quite damning. She was poisoned with the juice of a rare herb which grows only on the slopes of the Caloris Montes. And there was a letter—was there not?—denouncing young Rowan. Written by someone who swore he had seen him procuring the herb from an apothecary in Tho-lia—where Rowan most certainly had been only weeks before, off on one of his endless botanical expeditions."
There was a short, soft explosion of laughter. "An unsigned letter, written in a hand which bore a striking resemblance (so many who saw it at Rowan's trial will attest) to that of the Marquis. And from where did the Marquis himself originate, if not from the region of Sangfleur? Which, as you know very well, lies just north of the Caloris Montes."
"You think, then," said a third voice, in a harsh whisper, "that Cinque-Riviere and Villebrisant conspired together? It is certain there was trouble between Cinque-Riviere and the Rowans long before the affair of the Duchess. And the Due must have known that the instant one of that family was shown to be vulnerable, there would be others ready enough to come forward with damning stories. Ever since that wedding in Mountfalcon, there had been many who suspected them of gross ambition, and we know very well where that sort of talk invariably leads—"
But Odile heard no more than this. The blood was drumming in her ears so that she could scarcely think; her hands were shaking with fury.
R was almost beyond belief! This creature, this parasite, this so-called Marquis, was not only the source of so many of her present troubles—he had also set in motion that entire chain of events which had destroyed so many who were dear to her. And why did he do it? Not for fear—like so many who spoke against us—not for revenge—like the Due—not for any imagined slight or wrong done to him, no—but for sheer greed, for base profit.
For all his airs, his pretensions of gentility, the man is no better than a paid assassin!
Turning sharply on her heel, she headed back toward her own set of rooms, her errand on the other side of the palace entirely forgotten. With her mind awhirl, her entire being consumed by this sudden soul-shattering need for revenge, she needed time alone to think and to plan.
A fortnight later, there was a new rumor circulating through the palace. The Marquis had received yet another appointment: Viceroy of the Southern Slopes, a post that was known to be lucrative in many ways, not the least of which was the many rich gifts (it would be crude to call them bribes) which invariably preceded any judgment or official pronouncement. Those who believed they would soon have reason to deal with the Marquis hi his new capacity began to study his tastes.
He was known to hunt—gifts of horses and hounds began to appear in his stables. He collected old books—a flood of antique volumes bound in every conceivable material—calf, sharkskin, morocco, papyrus—came his way. In the week after he went out riding in a pair of fur-lined doeskin boots, offerings of lavish footwear became the chosen sacrifice on the altar of his influence. Such gilded leathers, such satin bows, such jeweled buckles! Ever the perfect civil servant, the Marquis accepted these bribes impartially, and changed his footwear three times a day.
It was a scant three months after his appointment that Odile found herself writing up a petition for the new Viceroy's attention. A distant kinswoman was disputing her right to a certain piece of property, and though the land itself was poor and unprofitable, Odile had been very voluble in defending her rights from the very beginning. When her documents had all been reviewed by a solicitor and attested by a notary, when they were deemed to be ready for presentation to the Marquis, they were preceded, a discreet six days in advance, by a garnet ring. The cousin responding with a baroque pearl brooch, Odile must counter with a gold-handled walking stick, and so the competition went on, with gift after gift, finally exceeding the value of the land itself. "But I will not lose," Odile insisted, on more than one occasion, and in the hearing of many. "It is not the property but the principle at stake here."
The very morning the Marquis was to render his decision, an exquisitely embroidered pair of gloves was delivered to his door. Very cunningly made they were, too, of leather so soft and fine that while they fit his large and shapely hands perfectly they arrived folded up inside a silver walnut shell.
It was a gift that ought to have swayed the Marquis in Odile's favor, the entire court was certain of that, yet he confounded them all by finding for the obscure cousin—and added insult to injury by wearing the gloves and all of Odile's other offerings the very same day that his decision was announced. When they met that evening at a ball, Odile was seen to give him a look so venomous, many of the spectators declared the Marquis blanched and turned faint at the very sight of her. Not so, said others, who had already observed that the Viceroy seemed far from well, long before Odile made her appearance in the ballroom.
In any case, nothing daunted, he continued to wear the gloves for the next few days and might have done so even longer, had he not been stricken by a sudden, mysterious, and debilitating complaint which kept him in bed for a solid week. When he finally emerged from his bedchamber he was seen to lean heavily on a gold-handled walking stick, and his long fair hair was noticeably thinner.
Odile had just returned from a visit to one of her country houses, when the Baroness !le-du-Perdu stopped by her rooms for a chat.
"You will have heard, of course, about poor Ville-brisant, his pitiful relapse," said the Baroness. "He collapsed at a banquet, and those who were near swear that they actually saw him sweating blood! But perhaps you don't know the most recent twist: it appears he has been secretly married for quite some time to that sweet little lady the Baroness Ferouille, and she has finally abandoned all attempts at concealment in order to attend his sickbed."
Odile shrugged, making a show of arranging a bouquet of blood-red roses in a porcelain vase. "She is much too good for him, that much is certain. But perhaps she will soon be a widow and inherit his fabulous wealth. There are many, I am sure, who would be glad to see her benefit in that particular way."
"Without a doubt," said the Baroness, "but not the little Ferouille herself, who would certainly be brokenhearted if she was widowed, and not likely to take consolation from inheriting his money." She gave Odile a shrewd glance. "And I would have thought that you, too, would feel something, considering that you once told me you found him amusing, that you even enjoyed your battle of wits. I must confess, this indifference is the one reaction I had never expected. My dearest one, are you hiding something?"
"What should I be hiding?" Odile seemed dissatisfied with her arrangement of the flowers, and began to pull them out one by one, casting them down on the marble tabletop. "The man is ill, I have never really liked him, and if he should die, there is a plague and a nuisance removed from the court."
"You seem very certain," said the Baroness, "that he will die. I wonder how you can possibly be so sure?"
Odile said nothing, and her friend continued to study her half-averted face. "Do you know—if I thought you had any real grudge against the man, I would suspect you were somehow responsible. But you can't have really cared about that worthless parcel of land. In fact, I wondered at the time why you went to such lengths—" She drew in her breath sharply, as she realized the truth. "My dear! You didn't care about that land in the least—it was just a device to get the Marquis to accept all of your gifts without suspicion!" She reached out with both hands, put one on each of Odile's shoulders, and turned her young kinswoman to face her. "Which one was it, I wonder. The ring? The silver cup—no, it was the gloves, of course, with some ghastly vegetable poison impregnated in the leather. This much is obvious. But how did you convince our cousin Elodie to go along with your scheme? She doesn't even know the Marquis; living so retired as she does, she's never even seen him."
Unwilling to meet the Baroness' eyes, Odile lowered her own. "Elodie knew Anthony Rowan," she said under her breath. "Knew him and loved him, since they were both children."
"Of course," said the Baroness, releasing her grip and taking a backward step. " Why did it never occur to me that you had heard that rumor about Villebrisant's infamous letter?"
Odile looked up then with a flash of anger. "And do you say that you heard the story—and never told me? You're a fine sort of friend, Cicelia!"
"Why should I repeat what might only be malicious gossip, and certain to inflame you whether it was true or not. But Odile, Odile, do you mean to tell me that you would kill a man for nothing more than an unconfirmed rumor? You of all people!"
"I, of all people, have the right to exact my revenge on the basis of a rumor." Odile began to pace the floor with a restless step. "There is a certain poetic justice at work here, after all, and I'm surprised that you don't see it."
"What I see," said the Baroness sadly, "is that unless you possess some means to bring the Marquis back from the brink of death, you are going to carry the guilt of this crime with you for the rest of your life. Yes, a crime. Not against that pig of a Ville-brisant, perhaps—who may deserve to die for all that I know—but a crime against yourself, against your very soul, which God knows is in a very questionable state as it is!"
Odile affected to laugh this off. "Is this religion, Cicelia? You preach like an Anti-demonist! But I would not have spoken at all if I did not place the greatest trust in your discretion. You won't tell anyone, will you, about this conversation?"
"Never," said the Baroness, with an emphatic shake of her head. "After all, what do I have to repeat but my own suspicions? You have admitted nothing. Even if you had, I would never sacrifice my own flesh and blood for the sake of someone I loathe so much as the Marquis." Her glance softened, and her tone became coaxing. "But please, please consider carefully, Odile. I urge you to think well and long before you do yourself irreparable harm!"
The Marquis continued to fade. Reports from his sickroom filled the court with dismay, as his symptoms—not to mention the treatments inflicted by his doctors—grew more and more grotesque with every passing day. He had been cupped, sweated, and blistered by the busy physicians. Potions of theriac and bull's-piss, opium and horse-dung had been administered. What remained of his hair was all shaved off, and leeches applied to his scalp. Still he showed no signs of improvement, and it was impossible to pass by his rooms without catching the stench of his repeated purgings.
Few were moved by pity for the sick man himself— but what if his mysterious disease should prove contagious?
Odile tried not to think about it, tried to keep herself busy and amused, arranging a fete, taking a new lover—yet, though she would never have admitted as much to Cicelia, this grindingly slow death watch had begun to wear on her.
So the Baroness found her one afternoon, seated at her little writing desk, checking off the names of the guests who had accepted her invitation. "You look perfectly dreadful," said Cicelia, bending to bestow a kiss on one cold smooth cheek. "Dare I hope you are beginning to feel some remorse? He is dying by inches, by all accounts, and his sufferings are terrible."
Odile's hand wavered as she crossed out a name from her list; the pen broke, and a blot of black ink marred the surface of the paper. "Do you think that he suffers, lying there between clean linen sheets with his pretty little wife and two dozen servants on hand to attend him? Do his torments horrify you? But of course they do! You've not been where I've been or seen what I've seen. You can't know what it is like in a place like Coeur-de-Fer prison—the dirt, and the vermin, and the daily degradation." She shook her head stubbornly. "There is more than one way of 'dying by inches.' I have watched old men and women lying in their own filth, too weak to move, and the maggots already eating away at their flesh. I have nightmares, sometimes, knowing full well this must be the way my Aunt Clio died: alone in her cell, with no one there to hold up her head or offer her a sip of water, no one there to brush off the flies before they laid their eggs. As he was responsible, why should not the Marquis suffer, too?"
"Because you know nothing for certain. Because if you discover too late that the Marquis is innocent, there will be no going back, no making amends."
Odile bit her lip. "Cicelia, do you really doubt that Villebrisant is guilty?"
"No. No, I do not. But that is beside the point. I am fallible, as are you; whatever we may think, it might not be the truth. I beg you to reconsider, before if's too late."
"It is already too late," said Odile. "By tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon at the latest, Villebrisant will be dead."
Midnight came and went, and the palace was quiet, except for the shriek of a rabbit caught by an owl in the garden, the incessant nibbling of mice inside the wainscoting. Sometime after two, Odile awoke in a cold sweat, her pulses racing. She sat bolt upright in her bed, wondering what had roused her. She glanced around the dim bedchamber, but there was nothing— and the crystal clock on the mantle had struck the hour twenty minutes ago.
Cicelia's words echoed in her mind. "// you discover too late that the Marquis was innocent… think well, Odile, before you do yourself irreparable harm."
"It is too late," she said out loud. "In all likelihood the Marquis is dead—certainly past saving. If I do or say anything now, I will only incriminate myself."
Yet even so, she threw back the satin coverlet, slid down from the high bedstead to the cracked marble floor. Crossing to the window on bare feet, she pushed aside the velvet draperies to let in more of the milky moonlight, and rang for a maid to assist her in dressing.
Forty-five minutes later, on the other side of the palace, the Marquessa de Villebrisant—weary with watching at her husband's bedside—was startled by a loud outcry among the servants in one of the outer chambers, and the sudden appearance of a disheveled and wild-eyed young woman on the threshold.
"Does he still live?" said the intruder, panting softly.
"The doctors say he will be gone within the hour."
"Then we must prove them wrong," said Odile, reaching into the bosom of her gown and extracting a slender crystal phial rilled with an amber-colored liq-uid.
More than a week later, the Baroness met Odile in the long picture gallery. "My dear, you look more pale and pulled about every time that I see you. But I heard that your patient shows signs of recovering."
Though the picture above her was obscured by dirt, age, and smoke, Odile pretended to study it. "He will live. It seemed for a time that I had left it too late, but we were able to save him after all."
"But how did you ever convince the Marquessa to let you near him?"
"By confessing everything, by convincing her that only I, who knew the poison, could administer the antidote."
The Baroness frowned. "But what will she do now—now that you have placed yourself in her power by confessing? For all that you ultimately saved him, you did put her husband through an agonizing experience, which is hardly something she could ever forgive."
"But I am forgiven," said Odile, with a wry smile and a shake of her head. "Or what is even better—" The smile turned bitter. "It was a great night for confessions, as it turned out. After we gave him the antidote, the Marquis grew delirious, and seeing me there beside his bed, he admitted everything—everything he and the Due of Cinque-Riviere had done to cause the downfall of Anthony Rowan, and other things he had done, even more wicked. Poor little Ferouille was appalled. And she's no fool—considering all the corroborating details he provided, I know more than enough to take him down with me."
"Supposing, that is," said the Baroness, slipping her arm through Odile's and leading her out of the gallery, "the State would subject itself to the embarrassment of another Rowan on trial."
"Which is somewhat unlikely," Odile admitted, very much alive to the irony of the situation. Because the courts had acted so swiftly to condemn her family in the past, those few who survived carried a certain immunity from prosecution—no matter what crimes they might commit in the future. Ironic, too, that for the second time she avoided a trial partly on the basis of damaging information accidentally acquired.
"And now that you know the Marquis was guilty all along, do you regret saving him?"
Odile was uncertain how to answer. Though she had imagined she was far beyond the point of being shocked by anything, the memory of that long, terrible night continued to disturb her. "No. Yes. I hardly know. If I had done nothing to save him, I would never have been there to hear his confession. I would have always wondered if I had caused the death of an innocent man." She drew the back of her hand across her eyes. "Yet having determined to kill him, I do hate myself for my failure of nerve."
The Baroness regarded her with a touch of pity in her fine dark eyes. "Do you see this as a display of cowardice? But why should you? In risking yourself to save the Marquis, you showed great courage."
"If it was not a failure of nerve, yet it was a failure nevertheless. Because the Marquis and the Due did everything in their power to destroy my family. They stripped me of youth, innocence, dignity, hope—my very capacity to think and feel as ordinary people do—" Odile made a hard sound at the back of her throat. "Indeed, they robbed me of everything, it would appear, but the one thing I could well do without: a conscience."
"On the contrary," said the Baroness. Torches flickered as the two women passed by; an icy draft seemed to follow them down the corridor. "They did everything in their power to transform you into something monstrous, and yet they failed. The victory is yours, Odile."
But Odile was unconvinced. During her years in prison she had been at some pains to acquire an armor of cynicism—which armor had served her well, then and since. Now that it had failed her, she felt confused and vulnerable. While she understood that it was both necessary and possible to acquire new defenses, she did not know where to look for them—or how she would ever learn to trust them, once she had acquired them.
Thus Miss Odilia Rowan, at the venerable age of twenty, moving through the mazelike corridors of the ancient palace, arm in arm with her friend—realized that she still had much to learn about herself and the world around her.