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The door of the cellar creaked open, projecting a slant of light down the steps. Verso’s voice rang into the dancing dust motes. “Julie?”
Julie didn’t answer. She silently willed him to turn around and leave her to her reading, but her name was soon followed by his footfalls, and then his head peeked out the corner of the brick wall.
“There you are,” he said, bemused. “What are you doing down here?”
“What does it look like?” she replied innocently, flipping to the next page. “I’m reading.”
“Uh huh.” He came down the stairs and stood in front of the wooden box where she was perched, blocking the light of the oil lamp she’d brought. “The light and seating would be better literally anywhere else.”
Julie stubbornly tried to keep reading, squinting at the barely visible letters on the shadowed page. “It’s cool and quiet down here. And you’re in my light, otherwise there’d be enough.”
“Julie.”
His arms were crossed over his chest, his voice gentle but firm. The white streaks of his hair caught the warm glow of the lamp; even in silhouette, she could make out the smug arch of his eyebrow and the mix of concern and mirth in his pale eyes.
With a sigh, she snapped the book shut. “Look. I love you. I love your family. I am truly grateful for everything your mother has been doing for me.” At that he laughed quietly and nodded to himself, likely guessing what was coming next. “But she is driving me insane.”
“I figured,” he said, still chuckling. He sat down at her feet and leaned back against the box, one arm resting on his bent knee. “What was it this time?”
“I swear if it was up to her, I’d be on bedrest for the next five months,” she replied, the pent-up frustration sending her hand flying through the air as she finally gave it voice. “She caught me carrying a sack of flour and I thought I’d never hear the end of it.”
He cast her an appalled look, though not for the reason she’d hoped. “A sack of flour?”
Julie rolled her eyes. “It was half-empty. And don’t you start, Verso. I’m pregnant, not terminally ill.”
He lifted his hands placatingly. “I know, I know. And I trust you know your limits, but you can be a little … obstinate sometimes,” he said, tempering the words with his easy, charming smile. “Just don’t push yourself too hard.”
No use denying it. She’d been called variations of headstrong and stubborn all her life. “I may be obstinate, but I’m not stupid. I’m not going to do anything dangerous or reckless. But the world doesn’t stop spinning just because there’s another Dessendre on the way.”
“I’m well aware, but you tell them that. That family thinks way too highly of themselves. Utterly insufferable.”
She had a long-suffering sigh. “I would know. I married one of them.”
Verso laughed. Julie set the book down to run her fingers through his hair; he heaved a deflating sigh and dropped his forehead to her knee, like a big black and white dog. Next to his head, her belly swelled in a gentle curve. The long, miserable weeks of morning sickness were mercifully over—the riskiest time, Aline had told her, though she was no less overbearing now—but Julie was still getting used to the idea that there was a baby growing in there, and that it was hers, and Verso’s.
Which, she realized for the first time, may very well be the problem.
The lamplight ran gold on his dark curls and began to waver as her eyes prickled. “Sometimes … sometimes I feel like people only care because it’s your child,” she confessed in a whisper. “Like I only matter insofar as I birth your heir.”
That effectively wiped the smile off Verso’s face. He craned his neck to look at her, frowning, then rose to his feet. “Julie …” She scooted over to make some space for him on the box; he sat down next to her, then wrapped his arms around her and gently pulled her to himself. “You don’t think Maman feels that way, do you?”
Julie sank into his embrace. His breath was warm on the crown of her head, and so was the palm of his hand on her stomach. “I know it’s unfair of me, but … I can’t help it.”
He pressed a kiss to her hair. “I know she can be a lot—to say the least—but she loves you. I promise. That’s just her way of showing it.”
“I know. And I really do appreciate her guidance and advice, but I also want to enjoy this, you know? Live it.”
“Want me to talk to her?” Verso asked.
Her doubts and concerns seemed so insignificant within the warm circle of his arms. And as tempting as it was to let him handle it, she owed her mother-in-law this much. “No, I’ll do it,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“Okay. Tell me if you change your mind.” He tucked her hair behind her ear, then kissed the crown of her head again. “You know, I have a memory of playing hide-and-seek with Clea down here,” he continued, with only the slightest hesitation. That was how he worded the memories that weren’t his own but belonged to him all the same; a turn of phrase only the two of them knew about. “She never did find me—or more likely she just got bored—so I ended up falling asleep under the stairs. It was the brigadiers who found me that evening after my parents called them.”
Julie laughed, picturing a young, bleary-eyed Verso being roused from his nap by a contingent of panicked adults. “God help us all if this baby takes after you.”
“Hey, you’re the one hiding from Maman in the cellar. We’re screwed no matter who it takes after.”
“Good point. Think it’s too late for a refund?”
“Pretty sure the receipt said ‘final sale.’”
She grinned as she took his hand and turned it over in the lamplight, watching it trickle through the interstices of their linked fingers. The cellar was silent, the everyday noises of the manor failing to reach through the ceiling; the deep, secret scent of the basement was oddly comforting, and the flickering amber glow of the lamp cocooned them gently.
It was … nice, to just sit with him like this, without the usual fuss that was apparently her lot now that she carried Verso Dessendre’s child.
He was the first to break the silence. “How about ‘Esquiette’ if it’s a girl?”
“No.”
“… ‘Monoca,’ then?”
“Keep this up and I’m putting ‘unknown father’ on the birth certificate.”
She found Aline in her glasshouse, tending to her plants. After the dim cellar, the harsh daylight spilling through the ceiling was a shock; Julie had to squint at first, only making out her mother-in-law as a slender blur in the back of the room. The commingled fragrance of dozens of flowers enveloped her as she made her way towards her, her eyes slowly getting used to the brightness.
“Hello, dear,” Aline said without looking up from her spray of orchid. “Are you well?”
The Dessendre matriarch had this way of leaving Julie unsure as to whether she was intruding or not, but she decided to trust Verso on this one. “I am, thank you. No more nausea,” she volunteered as a show of good faith.
Aline had a small, crooked smile that was remarkably similar to her son’s. “Glad to hear it. I was constantly ill for the first six months with Clea.”
“That sounds like Clea,” Julie said, drawing soft laughter from Aline. Then she took a pair of secateurs and moved a stool next to her mother-in-law, who eyed her like she was in danger of impaling herself on the blades but luckily didn’t comment on it.
“I doubt you’ve come up here to help me prune plants,” Aline said.
Julie’s cheeks prickled with heat. “Did Verso say something?”
“He didn’t have to. I … apologize if I’ve been overbearing. It was not my intent.”
Apologies did not seem to come naturally to Aline: her posture was a little stiffer, her grip a little too tight around the handle of her own secateurs. Julie pretended not to notice. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said, delicately lifting a large hibiscus flower to prune the dried stems at the base of the plant. The sprightly scent of soil and leaves rose with her movements, invigorating. “I should have said something sooner, but I didn’t want to appear ungrateful. I appreciate how generous you’ve been with your time and experience, I really do.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aline relax, her movements fluid again as she returned her focus on pruning the orchid’s browning leaves. “It is nothing. I worried you would feel alone or unsupported, considering your mother isn’t here to share these moments with you.”
Their dead were never far, it seemed; Julie had the sudden impression that Angélique and Verso—the other Verso—were in the glasshouse with them, but that wasn’t quite right, was it? They were always there. She’d only just noticed their ghostly presence in the redolent air, the bright light filtering through the corollas of purple and red.
“I … thank you.” Emotion swelled inside her: she never stopped missing her mother, but she felt her absence even more keenly now that she was on the cusp of becoming one herself. She was fortunate to have Aline to rely on, especially considering what the woman had gone through. Julie cleared her throat. “I also realize I don’t know what it means to lose a child, so … I should have been more considerate of your feelings.”
Aline sighed, sending the spray of orchids fluttering in her breath. Only the clicking noise of the secateurs punctuated the silence for a few long minutes. “He wasn’t the first, you know,” Aline said so quietly Julie thought she’d misheard at first. “It’s different, of course, to lose a child you’ve raised and watched become his own person, but I often think about the babies I lost. I grieve for them, too.”
As strange and indistinct as the life growing inside her still felt, Julie knew it would break her heart if it was lost. If there was one thing that defined its early existence, it was how wanted this baby was. It wasn’t something she and Verso had taken lightly. They’d talked about it and then talked about it some more, and there was something reckless and defiant in their decision to have a child despite all they’d seen and endured: a mutual acknowledgement that the good had been worth the bad; the wild, fierce, unfounded hope that it could—that it would be better.
Fragile as it was, in the end they’d agreed their world was beautiful enough to take the risk. But as intimately familiar as she was with loss, Julie was only just starting to realize what that risk truly entailed.
She dipped her head. “I … I had no idea. I’m so sorry, Aline.”
“It’s one of those things we women are expected to simply carry in silence,” Aline said, turning the orchid pot around to examine all its angles. “I wouldn’t want you to know that pain if I can help it, but I may have gone too far in trying to shield you from it.”
She set the orchid aside to examine Julie’s work on the hibiscus, the dried paint under her fingernails the only thing belying her dignified appearance. She took the secateurs to cut one wayward leaf; seemingly satisfied, she then set to straightening the stake holding up the main stem.
Julie took a breath. “Aline, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She groped for the right words while the fresh spring of emotions settled inside her again. “Isn’t it strange for you to have a grandchild here first? Inside the Canvas?” Aline looked at her, her proud expression lightly quizzical; Julie tried to clarify what she meant, but she wasn’t even sure what she meant. “I just … I feel like I’m taking something away from you or the rest of your family, or … or maybe even from Verso. I mean, your Verso—the other Verso. Does that make sense?”
Aline gently tightened the ribbons supporting the hibiscus. “It does, I suppose,” she generously conceded. “But … I made them both. They are both my sons. One getting to live the life they both deserved does not take anything away from anyone.”
Except Verso—her Verso, Julie’s Verso—wouldn’t exist if the other hadn’t died, and neither would she. But … she looked down again at her belly and rested her fingertips on its curve, felt the liquid flutter she was starting to suspect was the child moving. Verso and she may have sprung from Aline’s paintbrush, but the little bud blooming inside her hadn’t.
That was hers—hers and Verso’s alone, their own little creation that they’d made together.
Julie blinked the haze from her eyes. “Thank you, Aline. I just … I want to live this to the fullest. But I promise to be careful.”
Aline’s fingers paused briefly under the drooping head of a fiery flower. “And I should trust your judgment,” she said, bestowing upon Julie one of her brief, rare smiles. “You did choose my son, after all.”