VANITAS
Emma Donoghue

This afternoon I was so stone bored I wrote something on a scrap of paper and put it in a medicine bottle, sealed it up with the stub of a candle. I was sitting on the levee; I tossed the bottle as far as I could (since I throw better than girls should) and the Mississippi took it, lazily. If you got in a boat here by the Duparc-Locoul Plantation, and didn't even row or raise a sail, the current would take you down fifty miles of slow curves to New Orleans in the end. That's if you didn't get tangled up in weed.

What I wrote on the scrap was Au secours! Then I put the date, 3 juillet 1839. The Americans if drowning or in other trouble call out help, which doesn't capture the attention near as much, it's more like a little sound a puppy would make. The bottle was green glass with Poison down one side. I wonder who'll fish it out of the brown water, and what will that man or woman or child make of my message? Or will the medicine bottle float right through the city, out into the Gulf of Mexico, and my scribble go unread till the end of time?

It was a foolish message, and a childish thing to do. I know that; I'm fifteen, which is old enough that I know when I'm being a child. But I ask you, how's a girl to pass an afternoon as long and scalding as this one? I stare at the river in hopes of seeing a boat go by, or a black gum tree with muddy roots. A week ago I saw a blue heron swallow down a wriggling snake. Once in a while a boat will have a letter for us, a boy attaches it to the line of a very long fishing rod and flicks it over to our pier. I'm supposed to call a nègre to untie the letter and bring it in; Maman hates it when I do it myself. She says I'm a gâteur de nègres, like Papa, we spoil them with soft handling. She always beats them when they steal things, which they call only taking.

I go up the pecan alley towards the Maison, and through the gate in the high fence that's meant to keep the animals out. Passers-by always know a Creole house by the yellow and red, not like the glaring white American ones. Everything on our plantation is yellow and red – not just the houses but the stables, the hospital, and the seventy slave cabins that stretch back like a village for three miles, with their vegetable gardens and chicken pens.

I go in the Maison now, not because I want to, just to get away from the bam-bam-bam of the sun on the back of my neck. I step quietly past Tante Fanny's room, because if she hears me she might call me in for some more lessons. My parents are away in New Orleans doing business; they never bring me. I've never been anywhere, truth to tell. My brother Emile has been in the Lycée Militaire in Bordeaux for five years already, and when he graduates, Maman says perhaps we will all go on a voyage to France. By all I don't mean Tante Fanny, because she never leaves her room, nor her husband Oncle Louis who lives in New Orleans and does business for us, nor Oncle Flagy and Tante Marcelite, quiet sorts who prefer to stay here always and see to the nègres, the field ones and the house ones. It will be just Maman and Papa and I who go to meet Emile in France. Maman is the head of the Famille ever since Grandmère Nannette Prud'Homme retired; we Creoles hand the reins to the smartest child, male or female (unlike the Americans, whose women are too feeble to run things). But Maman never really wanted to oversee the family enterprise; she says if her brothers Louis and Flagy were more useful she and Papa could have gone back to la belle France and stayed there. And then I would have been born a French mademoiselle. Creole means born of French stock, here in Louisiana, but Maman prefers to call us French. She says France is like nowhere else in the world, it's all things gracious and fine and civilized, and no sacrés nègres about the place.

I pass Millie on the stairs, she's my maid and sleeps on the floor of my room but she has to help with everything else as well. She's one of Pa Philippe's children, he's very old (for a nègre), and has VPD branded on both cheeks from when he used to run away, that stands for Veuve Prud'Homme Duparc. It makes me shudder a little to look at the marks. Pa Philippe can whittle anything out of cypress with his little knife: spoons, needles, pipes. Since Maman started our breeding programme we have more small nègres than we know what to do with, but Millie's the only one as old as me. 'Allô, Millie,' I say, and she says 'Mam'zelle Aimée,' and grins back but forgets to curtsey.

Aimée means beloved. I've never liked it as a name. It seems it should belong to a different kind of girl.

Where I am bound today is the attic. Though it's hotter than the cellars, it's the one place nobody else goes. I can lie on the floor and chew my nails and fall into a sort of dream. But today the dust keeps making me sneeze. I'm restless, I can't settle. I try a trick my brother Emile once taught me, to make yourself faint. You breathe in and out very fast while you count to a hundred, then stand against the wall and press as hard as you can between your ribs. Today I do it twice, and I feel odd, but that's all; I've never managed to faint as girls do in novels.

I poke through some wooden boxes, but they hold nothing but old letters, tedious details of imports and taxes and engagements and deaths of people I never heard of. At the back there's an old-fashioned sheepskin trunk, I've tried to open it before. Today I give it a real wrench and the top comes up. Ah, now here's something worth looking at. Real silk, I'd say, as yellow as butter, with layers of tulle underneath, and an embroidered girdle. The sleeves are huge and puffy, like sacks of rice. I slip off my dull blue frock and try it on over my shift. The skirt hovers, the sleeves bear me up so I seem to float over the splinters and dust of the floorboards. If only I had a looking glass up here. I know I'm short and homely, with a fat throat, and my hands and feet are too big, but in this sun-coloured dress I feel halfway to beautiful. Grandmère Nannette, who lives in her Maison de Reprise across the yard and is descended from Louis XV's own physician, once said that like her I was pas jolie but at least we had our skin, un teint de roses. Maman turns furious if I go out without my sunhat or a parasol; she says if I get freckled like some Cajun farm girl how is she supposed to find me a good match? My stomach gets tight at the thought of a husband, but it won't happen before I'm sixteen, at least. I haven't even become a woman yet, Maman says, though I'm not sure what she means.

I dig in the trunk. A handful of books; the collected poetry of Lord Byron, and a novel by Victor Hugo called Notre Dame de Paris. More dresses – a light violet, a pale peach – and light shawls like spiders' webs, and, in a heavy travelling case, some strings of pearls, with rings rolled up in a piece of black velvet. The bottom of the case lifts up, and there I find the strangest thing. It doesn't look French, somehow; perhaps Oncle Louis got it for Eliza on one of his trips to Savannah? It's a sort of bracelet – a thin gold chain – with trinkets dangling from it. I've never seen such perfect little oddities. There's a tiny gold locket that refuses to open; a gold cross; a monkey (grimacing); a minute kneeling angel; a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny tower of some sort; a crouching tiger (I recognize his toothy roar from the encyclopaedia); and a machine with miniature wheels that go round and round; I think this must be a locomotive, like we use to haul cane to our sugarmill. But the one I like best, I don't know why, is a gold key. It's so tiny, I can't imagine what door or drawer or box in the world it might open.

Through the window I see the shadows are getting longer; I must go down and show myself, or there'll be a fuss. I pack the dresses back into the trunk, but I can't bear to give up the bracelet. I manage to open its narrow catch and fasten the chain around my left arm above the elbow, where no one will see it under my sleeve. I mustn't show it off, but I'll know it's there; I can feel the little charms moving against my skin, pricking me.

'Vanitas,' says Tante Fanny. 'The Latin word for?'

'Vanity,' I guess.

'A word with two meanings. Can you supply them?'

'A . . . a desire to be pretty or finely dressed,' I begin.

She nods, but corrects me: 'Self-conceit. The holding of too high an opinion of one's beauty, charms or talents. But it also means futility,' she says, very crisp. 'Worthlessness. What is done in vain. Vanitas paintings illustrate the vanity of all human wishes. Are you familiar with Ecclesiastes, chapter one, verse two?'

I hesitate. I scratch my arm through my sleeve, to feel the little gold charms.

My aunt purses her wide mouth. Though she is past fifty now, with the sallow look of someone who never sees the sun and always wears black, you can tell that she was once a beauty. 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities,' she quotes; 'all is vanity.'

That's Cousine Eliza on the wall behind her mother's chair, in dark oils. In the picture she looks much older than sixteen to me. She is sitting in a chair with something in her left hand, I think perhaps a handkerchief; has she been crying? Her white dress has enormous sleeves, like clouds; above them, her shoulders slope prettily. Her face is creamy and perfectly oval, her eyes are dark, her hair is coiled on top of her head like a strange plum cake. Her lips are together; it's a perfect mouth, but it looks so sad. Why does she look so sad?

'In this print here,' says Tante Fanny, tapping the portfolio in her lap with one long nail (I don't believe she ever cuts them), 'what does the hourglass represent?'

I bend to look at it again. A grim man in seventeenth-century robes, his desk piled with objects. 'Time?' I hazard.

'And the skull?'

'Death.'

'Très bien, Aimée.'

I was only eight when my uncle and aunt came back from France, with – among their copious baggage – Cousine Eliza in a lead coffin. She'd died of a fever. Papa came back from Paris right away, with the bad news, but the girl's parents stayed on till the end of the year, which I thought strange. I was not allowed to go to the funeral, though the cemetery of St James is only ten miles upriver. After the funeral was the last time I saw my Oncle Louis. He's never come back to the plantation since, and for seven years Tante Fanny hasn't left her room. She's shut up like a saint; she spends hours kneeling at her little prie-dieu, clutching her beads, thumping her chest. Millie brings all her meals on trays, covered to keep off the rain or the flies. Tante Fanny also sews and writes to her old friends and relations in France and Germany. And, of course, she teaches me. Art and music, French literature and handwriting, religion and etiquette (or, as she calls it, les convenances and comme il faut). She can't supervise my piano practice, as the instrument is in the salon at the other end of the house, but she leaves her door open, when I'm playing, and strains her ears to catch my mistakes.

This morning instead of practising I was up in the attic again, and I saw a ghost, or at least I thought I did. I'd taken all the dresses out of the old sheepskin trunk, to admire and hold against myself; I'd remembered to bring my hand mirror up from my bedroom, and if I held it at arm's length I could see myself from the waist up, at least. I danced like a gypsy, like the girl in Notre Dame de Paris, whose beauty wins the heart of the hideous hunchback.

When I pulled out the last dress – a vast white one that crinkled like paper – what was revealed was a face. I think I cried out; I know I jumped away from the trunk. When I made myself go nearer, the face turned out to be made of something hard and white, like chalk. It was not a bust, like the one downstairs of poor Marie Antoinette. This had no neck, no head; it was only the smooth, pitiless mask of a girl, lying among a jumble of silks.

I didn't recognize her at first; I can be slow. My heart was beating loudly in a sort of horror. Only when I'd sat for some time, staring at those pristine, lidded eyes, did I realize that the face was the same as the one in the portrait of Cousine Eliza, and the white dress I was holding was the dress she wore in the painting. These were all her clothes that I was playing with, it came to me, and the little gold bracelet round my arm had to be hers too. I tried to take it off and return it to the trunk, but my fingers were so slippery I couldn't undo the catch. I wrenched at it, and there was a red line round my arm; the little charms spun.

Tante Fanny's room is stuffy; I can smell the breakfast tray that waits for Millie to take it away. 'Tante Fanny,' I say now, without preparation, 'why does Cousine Eliza look so sad?'

My aunt's eyes widen violently. Her head snaps.

I hear my own words too late. What an idiot, to make it sound as if her ghost was in the room with us! 'In the picture,' I stammer, 'I mean in the picture, she looks sad.'

Tante Fanny doesn't look round at the portrait. 'She was dead,' she says, rather hoarse.

This can't be right. I look past her. 'But her eyes are open.'

My aunt lets out a sharp sigh and snaps her book shut. 'Do you know the meaning of the word posthumous?'

'Eh . . .'

'After death. The portrait was commissioned and painted in Paris in the months following my daughter's demise.'

I stare at it again. But how? Did the painter prop her up somehow? She doesn't look dead, only sorrowful, in her enormous, ice-white silk gown.

'Eliza did not model for it,' my aunt goes on, as if explaining something to a cretin. 'For the face, the artist worked from a death mask.' She must see the confusion in my eyes. 'A sculptor pastes wet plaster over the features of a corpse. When it hardens he uses it as a mould, to make a perfect simulacrum of the face.'

That's it. That's what scared me, up in the attic this morning: Eliza's death mask. When I look back at my aunt, there's been a metamorphosis. Tears are chasing down her papery cheeks. 'Tante Fanny—'

'Enough,' she says, her voice like mud. 'Leave me.'

I don't believe my cousin – my only cousin, the beautiful Eliza, just sixteen years old – died of a fever. Louisiana is a hellhole for fevers of all kinds, that's why my parents sent Emile away to Bordeaux. It's good for making money, but not for living, that's why Napoleon sold it so cheap to the Americans thirty-six years ago. So how could it have happened that Eliza grew up here on the Duparc-Locoul Plantation, safe and well, and on her trip to Paris – that pearly city, that apex of civilization – she succumbed to a fever? I won't believe it, it smells like a lie.

I'm up in the attic again, but this time I've brought the Bible. My brother Emile, before he went away to France, taught me how to tell fortunes with the Book and Key. In those days we used an ugly old key we'd found in the cellars, but now I have a better one; the little gold one that hangs on my bracelet. (Eliza's bracelet, I should say.) What you do is you open the Bible to the Song of Solomon, pick any verse you like, and read it aloud. If the key goes clockwise, it's saying yes to the verse, and vice versa. Fortune-telling is a sin when gypsies or conjurors do it, like the nègres making their nasty gris-gris to put curses on each other, but it can't be wrong if you use the Good Book. The Song of Solomon is the most puzzling bit of the Bible, but it's my favourite. Sometimes it seems to be a man speaking, and sometimes a woman; she says I am black but comely, but she can't be a nègre, surely? They adore each other, but at some points it sounds as if they are brother and sister.

My first question for the Book today is did Cousine Eliza die a natural death? I pull the bracelet down to my wrist, and I hold all the other little charms still, letting only the key dangle. I shake my hand as I recite the verse I've chosen, one that reminds me of Eliza: Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold. When my hand stops moving, the key swings, most definitely anti-clockwise. I feel a thrill all the way down in my belly. So! Not a natural death; as I suspected.

What shall I ask next? I cross my legs, to get more comfortable on the bare boards, and study the Book. A verse gives me an idea. Was she – is it possible – she was murdered? Not a night goes by in a great city without a cry in the dark, I know that much. The watchmen that went about the city found me, I whisper, they smote me, they wounded me. I shake my wrist and the key dances, but every which way; I can't tell what the answer is. I search for another verse. Here's one: Every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night. What if . . . I rack my imagination. What if two young Parisian gallants fought a duel over her, after glimpsing her at the opera, and Eliza died of the shock? I chant the verse, my voice rising now, because no one will hear me up here. I wave my hand in the air, and when I stop moving the key continues to swing, anti-clockwise. No duel, then; that's clear.

But what if she had a lover, a favourite among all the gentlemen of France who were vying for the hand of the exquisite Creole maiden? What if he was mad with jealousy and strangled her, locking his hands round her long pale neck, rather than let Tante Fanny and Oncle Louis take her back to Louisiana? For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave, I croon, and my heart is thumping, I can feel the wet break out under my arms, in the secret curls there. I've forgotten to wave my hand. When I do it, the key swings straight back and forward, like the clapper of a bell. Like the thunderous bells in the high cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Is that an answer? Not jealousy, then, or not exactly; some other strange passion? Somebody killed Eliza, whether they meant to or not, I remind myself; somebody is to blame for the sad eyes in that portrait. For Tante Fanny walled up in her stifling room, and Oncle Louis who never comes home.

I can't think of any more questions about Eliza; my brain is fuzzy. Did she suffer terribly? I can't find a verse to ask that. How can I investigate a death that happened eight years ago, all the way across the ocean, when I'm only a freckled girl who's never left the plantation? Who'll listen to my questions, who'll tell me anything?

I finish by asking the Book something for myself. Will I ever be pretty, like Eliza? Will these dull and round features ever bloom into perfect conjunction? Will I grow a face that will take me to France, that will win me the love of a French gentleman? Or will I be stuck here for the rest of my life, my mother's harried assistant and perhaps her successor, running the plantation and the wine business and the many complex enterprises that make up the wealth of the Famille Duparc-Locoul? That's too many questions. Concentrate, Aimée. Will I be pretty when I grow up? Behold, thou art fair, my love, I murmur, as if to make it so; behold, thou art fair. But then something stops me from shaking my hand, making the key swing. Because what if the answer is no?

I stoop over the trunk and take out the death mask, as I now know it's called. I hold it very carefully in my arms, and I lie down beside the trunk. I look into the perfect white oval of my cousin's face, and lay it beside mine. Eliza, Eliza. I whisper my apologies for disturbing her things, for borrowing her bracelet, with all its little gold trinkets. I tell her I only want to know the truth of how she died, so her spirit can be at rest. My cheek is against her cool cheek, my nose aligns itself with hers. The plaster smells of nothing. I set my dry lips to her smooth ones.

'Millie,' I ask, when she's buttoning up my dress this morning, 'you remember my Cousine Eliza?'

The girl makes a little humming sound that could mean yes, no or maybe. That's one of her irritating habits. 'You must,' I say. 'My beautiful cousin who went away to Paris. They say she died of a fever.'

This time the sound she makes is more like hmph.

I catch her eye, its milky roll. Excitement rises in my throat. 'Millie,' I say, too loud, 'have you ever heard anything about that?'

'What would I hear, Mam'zelle Aimée?'

'Oh, go on! I know you house nègres are always gossiping. Did you ever hear tell of anything strange about my cousin's death?'

Millie's glance slides to the door. I step over and shut it. 'Go on. You can speak freely.'

She shakes her head, very slow.

'I know you know something,' I say, and it comes out too fierce. Governing the nègres is an art, and I don't have it; I'm too familiar, and then too cross. Today, watching Millie's purple mouth purse, I resort to a bribe. 'I tell you what, I might give you a present. What about one of these little charms?' Through my sleeve, I tug the gold bracelet down to my wrist. I make the little jewels shake and spin in front of Millie's eyes. 'What about the tiger, would you like that one?' I point him out, because how would she know what a tiger looks like? 'Or maybe these dance slippers. Or the golden cross, that Jesus died on?' I don't mention the key, because that's my own favourite.

Millie looks hungry with delight. She's come closer; her fingers are inches away from the dancing trinkets.

I tuck the bracelet back under my wrist ruffle. 'Tell me!'

She crosses her arms and leans in close to my ear. She smells a little ripe, but not too bad. 'Your cousine?'

'Yes.'

'Your oncle and tante killed her.'

I shove the girl away, the flat of my hand against her collarbone. 'How dare you?'

She gives a luxurious shrug. 'All I say is what I hear.'

'Hear from whom?' I demand. 'Your Pa Philippe, or your ma?' Millie's mother works the hoe-gang, she's strong as a man. 'What would they know of my family's affairs?'

Millie is grinning as she shakes her head. 'From your tante.'

'Tante Marcelite? She'd never say such a thing.'

'No no. From your Tante Fanny.'

I'm so staggered I have to sit down. 'Millie, you know it's the blackest of sins to lie,' I remind her. 'I think you must have made up this story. You're saying that my Tante Fanny told you – you – that she and Oncle Louis murdered Eliza?'

Millie's looking sullen now. 'I don't make up nothing. I go in and out of that dusty old room five times a day with trays, and sometimes your tante is praying or talking to herself, and I hear her.'

'But this is ridiculous.' My voice is shaking. 'Why would – what reason could they possibly have had for killing their own daughter?' I run through the plots I invented, up in the attic. Did Eliza have a French lover? Did she give herself to him and fall into ruin? Could my uncle and aunt have murdered her, to save the Famille from shame? 'I won't hear any more of such stuff.'

The nègre has the gall to put her hand out, cupped for her reward.

'You may go now,' I tell her, stepping into my shoes.

Next morning, I wake up in a foul temper. My head starts hammering as soon as I lift it off the pillow. Maman is expected back from New Orleans today. I reach for my bracelet on the little table beside my bed and it's gone.

'Millie?' But she's not there, on the pallet at the foot of my bed; she's up already. She's taken my bracelet. I never mentioned giving her more than one little trinket; she couldn't have misunderstood me. Damn her for a thieving little nègre.

I could track her down in the kitchen behind the house, or in the sewing room with Tante Marcelite working on the slave clothes, or wherever she may be, but no. For once, I'll see to it that the girl gets punished for her outrageous impudence.

I bide my time; I do my lessons with Tante Fanny all morning. My skin feels greasy, I've a bouton coming on my chin; I'm a martyr to pimples. This little drum keeps banging away in the back of my head. And a queasiness, too; a faraway aching. What could I have eaten, to put me in such a state?

When the boat arrives I don't rush down to the pier; my mother hates such displays. I sit in the shady gallery and wait. When Maman comes to find me, I kiss her on both cheeks. 'Perfectly well,' I reply. (She doesn't like to hear of symptoms, unless one is seriously ill.) 'But that dreadful brat Millie has stolen a bracelet from my room.' As I say it I feel a pang, but only a little one. Such an awful story for her to make up, calling my aunt and uncle murderers of their own flesh! The least the girl deserves is a whipping.

'Which bracelet?'

'A . . . a gold chain, with trinkets on it,' I say, with only a small hesitation. 'I found it.'

'Found it?' she repeats, her eyebrows soaring.

I'm sweating. 'It was stoppered up in a bottle,' I improvise; 'it washed up on the levee.'

'How peculiar.'

'But it's mine,' I repeat. 'And Millie took it off my table, while I was sleeping!'

Maman nods judiciously, and turns away. 'Do tidy yourself up before dinner, Aimée, won't you?'

We often have a guest to dinner; Creoles never refuse our hospitality to anyone who needs a meal or a bed for the night, unless he's a beggar. Today it's a slave trader who comes up and down the River Road several times a year; he has a long beard that gets things caught in it. Millie and two other house nègres carry in the dishes, lukewarm as always, since the kitchen is so far behind the house. Millie's face shows nothing; she can't have been punished yet. I avoid her eyes. I pick at the edges of my food; I've no appetite today, though I usually like poule d'eau – a duck that eats nothing but fish, so the Church allows it on Fridays. I listen to the trader and Maman discuss the cost of living, and sip my glass of claret. (Papa brings in ten thousand bottles a year from his estates at Château Bon-Air; our Famille is the greatest wine distributor in Louisiana.) The trader offers us our pick of the three males he has with him, fresh from the auction block at New Orleans, but Maman says with considerable pride that we breed all we need, and more.

After dinner I'm practising piano in the salon – stumbling repeatedly over a tricky phrase of Beethoven's – when my mother comes in. 'If you can't manage this piece, Aimée, perhaps you could try one of your Schuberts?' Very dry.

'Certainly, Maman.'

'Here's your bracelet. A charming thing, if eccentric. Don't make a habit of fishing things out of the river, will you?'

'No, Maman.' Gleeful, I fiddle with the catch, fitting it round my wrist.

'The girl claimed you'd given it to her as a present.'

Guilt, like a lump of gristle in my throat.

'They always claim that, strangely enough,' remarks my mother, walking away. 'One would think they might come up with something more plausible.'

The next day I'm in Tante Fanny's room, at my lessons. There was no sign of Millie this morning, and I had to dress myself; the girl must be sulking. I'm supposed to be improving my spelling of verbs in the subjunctive mode, but my stomach is a rat's nest, my dress is too tight, my head's fit to split. I gaze out the window to the yard, where the trader's saddling his mules. He has four nègres with him, their hands lashed to their saddles.

'Do sit down, child.'

'Just a minute, Tante—'

'Aimée, come back here!'

But I'm thudding along the gallery, down the stairs. I trip over my hem, and catch the railing. I'm in the yard, and the sun is piercing my eyes. 'Maman!'

She turns, frowning. 'Where is your sunhat, Aimée?'

I ignore that. 'But Millie – what's happening?'

'I suggest you use your powers of deduction.'

I throw a desperate look at the girl, bundled up on the last mule, her mute face striped with tears. 'Have you sold her? She didn't do anything so very bad. I have the bracelet back safe. Maybe she only meant to borrow it.'

My mother sighs. 'I won't stand for thieving or back-answers, and Millie has been guilty of both.'

'But Pa Philippe, and her mother – you can't part her from them—'

Maman draws me aside, her arm like a cage round my back. 'Aimée, I won't stoop to dispute my methods with an impudent and sentimental girl, especially in front of strangers. Go back to your lesson.'

I open my mouth to tell her that Millie didn't steal the bracelet, exactly; that she thought I had promised it to her. But that would call for too much explanation, and what if Maman found out that I've been interrogating the nègres about private family business? I shut my mouth again. I don't look at Millie; I can't bear it. The trader whistles to his mules to start walking. I go back into the house. My head's bursting from the sun; I have to keep my eyes squeezed shut.

'What is it, child?' asks Tante Fanny, when I open the door. Her anger has turned to concern; it must be my face.

'I feel . . . weak.'

'Sit down on this sofa, then. Shall I ring for a glass of wine?'

Next thing I know I'm flat on my back, choking. I feel so sick. I push Tante Fanny's hand away. She stoppers her smelling salts. 'My dear.'

'What . . .'

'You fainted.'

I feel oddly disappointed. I always thought it would be a luxuriant feeling – a surrendering of the spirit – but it turns out that fainting is just a sick sensation, and then you wake up.

'It's very natural,' she says, with the ghost of a smile. 'I believe you have become a woman today.'

I stare down at myself, but my shape hasn't changed.

'Your petticoat's a little stained,' she whispers, showing me the spots – some brown, some fresh scarlet – and suddenly I understand. 'You should go to your room and ask Millie to show you what to do.'

At the mention of Millie I put my hands over my face.

'Where did you get that?' asks Tante Fanny, in a changed voice. She reaches out to touch the bracelet that's slipped out from beneath my sleeve. I flinch. Aimée, where did you get that?'

'It was in a trunk, in the attic,' I confess. 'I know it was Eliza's. Can I ask you, how did she die?' My words astonish me as they spill out.

My aunt's face contorts. I think perhaps she's going to strike me. After a long minute, she says 'We killed her. Your uncle and I.'

My God. So Millie told the truth, and in return I've had her sold, banished from the sight of every face she knows in the world.

'Your cousin died for our pride, for our greed.' Tante Fanny puts her fingers round her throat. 'She was perfect, but we couldn't see it, because of the mote in our eyes.'

What is she talking about?

'You see, Aimée, when my darling daughter was about your age she developed some boutons.'

Pimples? What can pimples have to do with anything?

My aunt's face is a mask of creases. 'They weren't so very bad, but they were the only defect in such a lovely face, they stood out terribly. I was going to take her to the local root-doctor for an ointment, but your Papa happened to know a famous skin specialist in Paris. I think he was glad of the excuse for a trip to his native country. And we knew that nothing in Louisiana could compare to France. So your Papa accompanied us – Eliza and myself and your Oncle Louis – on the long voyage, and he introduced us to this doctor. For eight days' – Tante Fanny's tone has taken on a Biblical timbre – 'the doctor gave the girl injections, and she bore it bravely. We waited for her face to become perfectly clear again – but instead she took a fever. We knew the doctor must have made some terrible mistake with his medicines. When Eliza died—' Here the voice cracks, and Tante Fanny lets out a sort of barking sob. 'Your oncle wanted to kill the doctor; he drew his sword to run him through. But your Papa, the peacemaker, persuaded us that it must have been the cholera or some other contagion. We tried to believe that; we assured each other that we believed it. But when I looked at my lovely daughter in her coffin, at sixteen years old, I knew the truth as if God had spoken in my heart.'

She's weeping so much now, her words are muffled. I wish I had a handkerchief for her.

'I knew that Eliza had died for a handful of pimples. Because in our vanity, our dreadful pride, we couldn't accept the least defect in our daughter. We were ungrateful, and she was taken from us, and all the years since, and all the years ahead allotted to me, will be expiation.'

The bracelet seems to burn me. I've managed to undo the catch. I pull it off, the little gold charms tinkling.

Tante Fanny wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. 'Throw that away. My curse on it, and on all glittering vanities,' she says hoarsely. 'Get rid of it, Aimée, and thank God you'll never be beautiful.'

Her words are like a blow to the ribs. But a moment later I'm glad she said it. It's better to know these things. Who'd want to spend a whole life hankering?

I go out of the room without a word. I can feel the blood welling, sticky on my thighs. But first I must do this. I fetch an old bottle from the kitchen, and a candle stub. I seal up the bracelet in its green translucent tomb, and go to the top of the levee, and throw it as far as I can into the Mississippi.