The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(10)

“Don’t be,” she said, her face expressionless. “She loved me. She still does.” Indigo turned back to the wrought-iron door, now half-open and bearing witness to conversations out of earshot as the chauffeur announced our arrival. “I’m merely unrecognizable to her.”

Her. Hippolyta Maxwell-Caste?ada.

If you looked hard enough—and I did—you could find photos of Hippolyta and Indigo from various functions, back when Hippolyta had agreed to be the face of the Maxwell-Caste?ada hospitality empire. In every one she is turning Indigo away from the camera. There’s a fierce, almost wounded, look in Hippolyta’s gaze. She has—or at least had—the wide-set, expressive eyes of a martyr, and Indigo was always a scrap of magenta taffeta or blue frills, a child half-steeped in shadow.

I looked up at the sound of footsteps crunching gravel. The chauffeur opened our door. My breath plumed in the cold. About a hundred feet away, an older woman whose skin was nearly as white as her hair walked down the front steps, then stopped short the moment she saw Indigo.

“It’s you,” said the older woman.

At first, I thought this was Hippolyta, but that was impossible. Hippolyta was supposedly blind—though I hadn’t known that until Indigo spoke of it—and there was something too neat about the woman’s black dress and pulled-back hair that suggested a daily uniform. Her voice was rich with memory. I reached for Indigo’s gloved hand, and she trembled and stiffened. She was afraid, though I could not guess why.

“I can’t believe it’s you!” said the woman, opening her arms. “Indigo, how long has it been? Ten years?”

“Eleven,” said Indigo, her voice a touch short of warm. She bent in time to be embraced. When she pulled back, the older woman had tears in her eyes.

“Look at me,” she said, laughing as she wiped them away. “Old and sentimental as anything.” She clasped her hands, nodding at me. “I’m Mrs. Revand, the housekeeper. I knew this one before she became this hopelessly elegant woman.” Mrs. Revand stepped back, admiring Indigo. “You look just like her, you know. Your mother.”

Indigo demurred. “Impossible, but thank you.”

“And you’re married!” said Mrs. Revand. She winked. “He’s almost as beautiful as you.”

“Almost,” I said, with an indulgent, bored smile even as my mind was creeping up the stairs of the House.

Indigo had always treated her past as if it were dead. So I planned to approach this visit like an autopsy. I wanted to see mundane things—pieces of homework left in drawers, a book holding her adolescent handwriting. She had given me so little that even the thought of knowing how she curled her g’s and dotted her i’s tempted sacrilege.

“The House has been through some changes since the last time you were here,” said Mrs. Revand. The warmth of her expression cooled. “We have, of course, honored you and your aunt’s wishes regarding the presence of maintenance workers on the estate, though I do have to wonder why we can’t make some necessary repairs? The roof, for instance, has severe water damage. The pipes need replacing too—”

While Mrs. Revand droned on about maintenance, I scanned the facade. Far above me loomed the turret, the eye-shaped window, and, standing against it, a figure in white. I blinked. When I looked back, the figure was gone.

“Forgive me,” said Mrs. Revand, shaking her head. “I’m being unforgivably rude. No doubt you wish to see your aunt, but she . . . she had another episode this morning, I’m afraid. We had to sedate her. There’s no use waiting, my dear. I’d come back tomorrow.”

Indigo frowned. She touched my arm. “Would you give us a moment alone? Maybe you should head back to the car.”

I made my farewells to Mrs. Revand. The only thing I heard as I moved out of earshot was Indigo’s smoky voice:

“What has she been saying about me?”

The car was still parked right in front. Some distance away, our driver—a young, dark-skinned man from the mainland—smoked a cigarette beside a maple tree. I’d nearly reached the door when a soft chirping song rose from the ground.

I stepped onto the lawn, following the sound a few feet away to something small and dark, quivering in the grass. A bird with a midnight-blue belly, green wings edged in gold, speckled white with a glossy, iridescent head. The starling twitched, one wing still, the other twisted at an odd angle. I bent to pick it up when I noticed little marks moving across its plumage—

Ants. Dozens of ants. Ants squirming in its eyes, lifting its broken talons, crawling in the gaps of its wing.

It was being eaten alive, and yet it sang.

“What a waste of time,” Indigo said as she ducked into the car, the door slamming shut.

The chauffeur held open my side. “Sir?”

The starling’s threnody followed me. I found myself thinking of omens and cedar wood, the slow turn of strange faces and the sound of a door closing. Indigo curled against me in the back seat. I tried to feel the warmth of her, but I thought only of those ants, of their thousand wet mouths opening and closing.

All full of teeth.



By the time we arrived at the Caste?ada hotel, it was completely dark. The drive from the car and subsequent ferry trip to the mainland left us tired. As the valet stacked our bags and the night manager enthusiastically greeted Indigo—and, by a far lesser extent, me—I recognized my handprint on the property.