The Reinvention of Love

stumble on the lip of a doorway and Madame Vacquerie pulls me closer to her. She is practically holding me up at this point.
    “A moment,” I say, and I lean against the door frame. “I need just a moment.”
    “Of course.”
    We pause there. Outside I can hear the clatter of the carriage as it travels back down the driveway. My luggage must have been unloaded. It will be delivered to the bedroom where I will spend the next few days, a bedroom I have never seen. I wonder what it will be like? How odd to be thinking of that, to be thinking of anything except the fact that my oldest child is dead at the age of nineteen.
    “Shall we go on?” asks Madame Vacquerie.
    “Yes. I’m fine now.”
    We walk through a drawing room, lavish with red velvet drapes and two chandeliers, a life-size marble head of a man. There is a large book open on a table. We pass the table. It is a book of maps. An atlas. I can see the blue ink of the ocean.
    “We have put her in the library,” says Madame Vacquerie. “Charles is in the dining room.”
    It seems strange to have a body in the dining room, but then I realize that it is because of the table. Léopoldine and Charles will be laid out on tables. There would have been a ready table in the library, and another in the dining room.
    “The coffins are made,” says Madame Vacquerie, reading my mind. “But we thought you would prefer to see her in a more natural state.”
    “Is death natural?” I say.
    The sun beaming in the windows of the drawing room fractures on the crystal of the chandeliers. I am momentarily dazzled by the shards of light dancing around the room.
    Madame Vacquerie puts her arm around my waist.
    “There is nothing worse than this day,” she says. “I havecried so many tears that I feel hollowed out.”
    “They were happy. Weren’t they?”
    “Yes, they were very happy.”
    We have reached the door to the library. The heavy oak door is open and I can see, in the dim interior – for there are no windows in this room – a white shape beached on a dark table.
    Madame Vacquerie slides her arm from about my waist.
    “I will leave you here,” she says. “And I will wait in the drawing room for your return.”
    I don’t want her to go. I don’t want to have to enter that room and see my dead child. I don’t feel able to make the journey by myself.
    But Madame Vacquerie has already gone. She has sidled away, and I am left standing alone on the threshold.
    Léopoldine is covered in a white shift. Her long black hair has been brushed out. Both my girls are dark like me. They resemble each other, and myself as a child. The boys take more after Victor.
    I touch her hair. It’s soft and dry. Funny, but I had expected it still to be wet, as though she would be preserved in the exact moment of her death, as though she had just been pulled from beneath the waves.
    I touch her face. I touch her lips. Her eyes are closed. Her skin is cold and her skull feels hard and fast as rock.
    “Sweetheart,” I say. “My treasure. My little one.”
    My tears fall on her from above, like rain.
    She seems like a statue of herself, but not herself at all. The girl who was Léopoldine seems utterly and entirely gone. I touch the stiff curl of her fingers. I touch the curve of her hip, the flat of her stomach through the shift. Her baby, no bigger than a stone, is dead as well.
    I bend over my daughter as though I were tucking her in at night.
    I touch her shoulders, her long, graceful neck.
    “My little swan,” I say.
    I put a crucifix around her neck. I cut a lock of her hair with the small sewing scissors I have brought with me specifically for this purpose.
    The room is dark. There are several candles flickering on the mantle, but their light is spilled close to them. Where Léopoldine lies is in shadow. In the soft darkness, with the candles nearby, and her white shift, my daughter looks like a moth. Her body looks like the body of a moth, wingless and still.
    It would have been dark under water. As dark as this room. There would have been no sounds. She could not have cried out.
    Madame Vacquerie is suddenly beside me.
    “Come and have some supper,” she says. “You must be hungry after your journey.”
    “I’m not hungry. And I don’t want to leave my child. I just got here.”
    “You’ve been in here for three hours.” Madame Vacquerie helps me to my feet. I’ve been crouching on the floor beside the library table. I can barely stand.
    “Have I really?”