Chapter Seventeen

seventeen

ONE NOVEMBER MORNING WHEN DUSKY blue colored the sky and quiet colored the house, Jemma dressed and made her way downstairs before six o'clock. She still didn't know where Agnes slept, where her room off the kitchen could be. Jemma passed through the dining room to the spotless kitchen. She approached the low archway in the far wall and peeked through it before going in. The walk-through larder was neatly organized, although Jemma had never been served any of the sardines or Campbell's soups stacked on the shelves. Bags of flour, sugar and cornmeal rested on other shelves, and Jemma narrowly avoided stepping on a mousetrap not pushed back far enough against a wall. A small door sat at the far end. Jemma could probably walk through without ducking, but Honorine would likely have to lower her head to clear it.

Jemma knocked, and before she could do much more than wonder if this was indeed Agnes's private space and, if it was, if the maid would open up, her mother appeared, smoothing back her hair and tying her apron strings behind her. Her eyebrows rose in a question.

"I didn't want anything," Jemma assured her, her hands up. "I just wondered what was back here."

Agnes shut the door firmly and made her way to the kitchen, leaving Jemma no choice but to follow.

"Do you need help?" she asked as Agnes began grinding coffee beans and setting up the coffee press.

Agnes stopped what she was doing, her gaze resting on Jemma for a moment before she shook her head. She pointed toward the entrance to the dining room, indicating that Jemma should leave.

"It just seems like so much work for one person."

Jemma's hands twisted in front of her. She knew Agnes wanted her to leave, but a part of her kept talking because she wanted the maid to know that she knew.

You're my mother, Jemma imagined herself saying, not asking it as a question but stating it as the fact it was. She'd tell her that she understood what that bizarre kiss was about. It was simply a mother kissing her child.

And what then? Agnes's eyes would fill with tears? They would embrace? Agnes/Inès would be so happy that the truth was out at last that she'd explain to Jemma why the family said she was dead, even if she had to write it all down? Jemma had so many questions she thought she'd never get answers to, but now she could. First and foremost was why Agnes had allowed for Jemma to be given away. Had she wanted to keep her? What had happened? And why hadn't she told her she was her mother?

Agnes waved toward the dining room again and Jemma turned to go, but then stopped. She turned back, meeting her mother's level gaze.

She wanted to say the words, but she also wanted the realization to wash over Agnes on its own. She searched the woman's face for any hint of a resemblance to herself but found nothing. Agnes frowned, her hands falling to her sides, her body growing very still.

And just as Jemma told herself to turn and leave like Agnes wanted, she whispered the words.

"I know."

Agnes shook her head. Jemma took a step toward her, coming close enough to grab her by the shoulders.

"I know you're my mother. You're Inès."

And now Agnes furiously shook her head, her eyes filling with tears, her mouth twisting in a pained grimace.

"It's true, isn't it?" Now Jemma did grab her, and the woman simply stood there, made no effort to push her away. "Just nod. Just let me know I'm right. I found the family tree in the Bible. I saw everything. Laurence is my brother, not my cousin. They kept him because he's light, but did they make you give me away? Is that it? Who's my father?"

Agnes had begun squirming, and she wrestled against Jemma until she let her go.

"Please, just—"

"Agnes, you in there, girl? You got the coffee on—?" Dennis called as he entered through the back kitchen door, stopping when he saw the two women, both with their hands in the air, breaths coming fast and heavy. "Oh, sorry, I…" He began to duck out the door.

"Dennis, I know," Jemma said.

He looked at Agnes, who had tears freely streaming down her face, and before Jemma knew what was happening, he took two big steps into the room and grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Who else knows you know?" he whispered, the words fierce and quick, matching his gaze, moving over her shoulder before going back to her face. He gave her a little shake. "Who else?"

"No…no one," Jemma said, struggling to keep her voice level. Why was he so angry? But as he glanced behind her again, she saw the fear on both his and Agnes's faces. He jerked his head to Agnes and she rushed to the kitchen entryway, looking out, Jemma assumed, for any Duchons.

"They told her if she ever told you that she was your mother, they'd kill her and you," Dennis said. "They were scared to death bringing you down here, but they didn't know what else to do. So they threatened her and me, told us we better not say anything to you."

Agnes gestured with her arms.

"How'd you find out?" he asked.

Jemma explained about the Bible.

"You can't let them know," he said, his eyes blazing. He gave her another quick shake, making her teeth clatter. "You got that?"

"Y-yes," Jemma cried, tears now streaming down her face, too. "I won't say anything."

He let go of her. As Jemma rubbed her arms, Agnes gave Dennis a quick embrace before returning to the coffee press. He slipped back outside, and Jemma supposed he'd have to come back for that coffee in a while. She knew Agnes wanted her gone, but she couldn't stop herself from saying one more thing. Moving next to Agnes, trying to ignore the way the woman flinched, she asked, "Could you write this in a letter and explain it to me? What happened? Why you let them take me away? Please? And who's my father?" Jemma's voice was stuffed and broken. "Could you talk before? What happened?"

She wanted to scream that last question over and over. Indeed, what had happened to Inès?

As Jemma turned to leave, Agnes grabbed her wrist. Jemma watched as her mother opened her mouth wide. Where there should have been a tongue there was only a stump, set far back in her mouth. Jemma raised her hands to her face in horror. Agnes pointed up, and as Jemma looked up, she realized the woman was indicating upstairs. Someone upstairs.

"They…cut out your tongue?" she asked, amazed that she could get the words out.

Agnes nodded and pointed up again, holding up two fingers.

"Honorine?"

Another nod.

"And…Simone?"

Agnes shook her head.

"Russell?"

A nod.

Jemma placed a hand to her temple. A part of her wanted this to be a lie, but she knew it was true. She put nothing past Honorine, but now Russell, too? Genial Russell, who always made the most innocuous conversation at dinner, whose only concern seemed to be whether there would be enough food for seconds, sometimes thirds.

He'd helped his mother cut out his sister's tongue.

"Why did they do this?" Jemma didn't know why she asked this, as if the woman could answer, but now her mother riffled through a nearby drawer and pulled out a piece of paper and half a pencil. She scribbled on the paper and thrust it at Jemma.

So I couldn't curse again

After Jemma read the note, Agnes snatched it back and placed it on a tin plate. She held a lit match to it and both of them watched it go up in flames.

Her family had taken away Agnes's power to curse them again, but by what they'd done to her they'd also removed her ability to uncurse them.

"I'm so sorry," Jemma whispered. "I'm sorry they did this to you."

Had she hated the Duchons before? She hadn't known what hate was, not then. But now she did. This had to be why they didn't want Jemma to know what they'd done to her mother. They would rightly have feared her wrath, perhaps her refusal to help them. She looked at Agnes, standing next to her, her head bowed. Jemma raised a hand and stopped just short of touching her, but Agnes grabbed her hand and brought it to the side of her face, resting Jemma's palm against her cheek. She then placed her other hand on Jemma's cheek and nodded. Agnes let go then, pushed Jemma's hands back to her. Her mother put two of her own fingers together and placed them on Jemma's lips.

"I'll be quiet," Jemma said.

—

JEMMA STARED OUT OF HER open bedroom window, a cool breeze wafting in intermittently. She wanted to ask her mother if she knew how to break the curse, but she assumed Inès didn't; she was sure her mother would have done it otherwise, to save Jemma's life, at least, if no one else's.

She'd tried to talk to Inès about the ghosts, but her mother seemed to avoid her. Once, when Jemma didn't come down for breakfast and Inès had to deliver a tray of food, she shook her head, leaving the tray and rushing out of the room as soon as Jemma began asking questions. The same thing happened when she returned to retrieve the tray. So Jemma would get no answers from her.

She must still be afraid, Jemma thought. Afraid of what her—our—family will do to her.

The days grew shorter and the nights cooler. Jemma often found Russell and Laurence poring over the giant Sears catalog, and the women of the family admiring the latest fashions in Vogue .

"Maman," Fosette said one day during the week before Christmas, "why can't we simply order the clothes and have them delivered? I'm so tired of dressing like it's still 1940."

"And where exactly will we wear these fashionable pieces, ma chérie ? Around the parlor, to be seen by no one but ourselves? Once that cousin of yours frees us all, we'll have new clothes—we'll have the most beautiful clothes you've ever seen. And we'll go straight to Paris to buy everything we've been denied all these years, too much to carry home. We'll have to send trunks and trunks back here to hold everything we'll buy."

Movement outside the bedroom window drew Jemma's attention.

The lawn was empty, the croquet games suspended for the time being, although the weather was only a trifle cool to Jemma. To the rest of the family, however, fifty-degree mornings were positively frigid. In the day's waning light, she saw a twinkle far behind the lawn, along the edge of the woods. It flashed again.

Jemma slipped into the cardigan hanging on the desk chair. It was nearly dinnertime, but if she got out undetected, no one would know where she'd gone. She was sure Honorine would have some ridiculous punishment in store for her for missing the meal, but some of her old recklessness had come back recently, taking small steps forward as if not sure it was safe.

Magdalene stood along the tree line, a piece of broken mirror in one hand, which she'd held up to the sun to flash.

Jemma paused, glanced at the woman sideways. "You're not mad at me anymore?"

"I never was mad. But maybe I was judging you a little too harsh. I've been known to do that. Living out here alone, I don't talk to a lot of folks. I don't always know how to deal with 'em, I suppose. But I stand by what I said about them." Magdalene lifted her chin toward the Duchon house. "You'd be better off setting yourself off from them."

"What about your family, then? Where are they?"

"All dead and gone."

Jemma wondered about Magdalene's people. Had she had brothers and sisters, parents who adored her and showed it? If she had, that probably explained why she couldn't understand why Jemma wanted to cling to the Duchons so.

"You hungry?" the woman asked Jemma.

Despite it being only an hour before dinnertime, Jemma wasn't, but she followed Magdalene to her cabin and sat at the table.

"My mother isn't dead," she said simply.

Magdalene had been leaning back in her chair, sipping a cup of nettle tea, but at that, the front legs came slamming back to the floor.

"What?" Magdalene jumped up.

"She's not. I talked to her. She didn't want to tell me, but she's alive. They…they changed her name, made her the…maid." Jemma found it hard to get the words out, stopped as they were by her occasional sobs. When had she started crying? And she hadn't even gotten to the worst of it. "They…they cut out her tongue. So that she couldn't talk, so that she couldn't curse them again."

Magdalene was shaking her head, agitation evident in the way she paced the room. "No. No, I saw someone buried the day she died."

"You saw someone buried in the vault?"

"Cut out her tongue? Is that what you said?"

Jemma nodded. The whole conversation was veering wildly, the two of them bouncing around the same as her thoughts. Magdalene slumped down in her chair, a haunted expression underneath ashen skin. As if she'd seen something unspeakable.

"A child died that day. That's who you saw buried. My cousin Lucie."

"Not a child. The body was big, like an adult. And they didn't put it in the vault. I always thought…that because of what she did to them, they wanted to bury her quick, to put her in the ground and not in the vault with the rest of the family. The body was wrapped in white, in a shroud. Even from way out here, I could see it was big. It took four of them to carry it."

"Where did they bury it?" Who? Jemma's mind screamed. Who was this person?

"In the old graveyard. It's way behind the vault, up against the tree line on the other side of the property. Back in the old days, the family buried the slaves there. If it rained heavy and old bones washed up, they didn't have to see it from the big house." Magdalene jumped up again, the heels of her hands pressed over her eyes, and screamed, "Oh my God! What did they do? What did they do?"

After a few moments, with each woman lost in her own private, horrified thoughts, Magdalene knelt next to Jemma, grabbing her hand. "What's she like now? Is she…is she all there?"

Jemma wondered how she could answer that. For over twenty-seven years, her mother had lived with her family but was also tormented by them, including her own son. She cooked and cleaned for them and couldn't speak the first word against them. Then she'd had to watch silently as they summoned her daughter to the cursed house with a trick and had been unable to warn Jemma lest the Duchons follow through with their threat to kill both of them. In light of all that, how could Inès possibly be all there?

Jemma brushed her lips with her hand, remembering the day her mother had kissed her. How long had she wanted to see her stolen child, to touch her? Until Jemma had returned to the city and the house in which she was born, her mother likely had no idea what had happened to her.

If Inès hadn't cursed the family, would they have lived together? Could Jemma have grown up with both her parents and her brother?

Magdalene shook her out of her thoughts.

"How is she?"

"As well as you'd expect, I guess. Maybe not as crazy as the rest of them, but I don't know! That house breeds craziness! If I have to stay there until I can figure out how to break the curse, I'll be just as insane as the rest of them."

"Maybe, maybe not."

"What do you mean?"

"You're still scared. If you can get yourself past that, if you can talk to the spirits instead of turning away, you can find out who was buried the day you were born."

Jemma inhaled sharply. Yes, yes, what Magdalene said made so much sense. But having to face the ghosts that she'd spent a lifetime running away from…

"I don't know if I can do it."

"You've got to."