In the newborn morning, I saw a figure in grey emerge from a hooded stairwell. Like Orpheus, the figure was weary and sad, its motions final and useless against something larger than itself. The smallish figure in the cheap cotton dress underneath a cloak trimmed in fox closed a mundane iron gate and sealed it with a twitch of a large key. Madame was much changed, fuller in the abdomen with hair not styled by tongs or combs and milk-colored skin. She approached me with a wan smile. "Have you an envelope for me?" she whispered in a voice not unlike the sounds of her skirts.

As instructed, I had a simple plain envelope for her, one of my own. She placed the large key inside. It barely fit. With a pencil, she marked a name and address. Again, as instructed, she began to walk away from me and I brought the brougham to follow close behind her. She walked as if to a quiet dirge, her uncoweled head bowed slightly. Despite her delicate state, she walked for some time. She reached apartments not too far from the Garnier. Without knocking first, a taller pastoral beauty answered, her hair loose as well, a fichu falling from her night clothes. My lady placed the envelope directly in her hand and, trembling, kissed the woman's rosy Nordic cheek. When the woman bowed her head in tears and her white-blonde hair fell over my mistress' face, Madame merely stroked away a tear with a violet kid glove.

Madame walked away. I could see that the young woman would have followed her if I had not been there. I was pleased she did not, for my lady smiled warmly to herself, pleased, at ease. Inside the carriage, I saw her wave at the woman with finality. The brougham pulled away with my lady still waving serenely as the other woman crumpled like paper on the doorstep.

The breaking yolk of dawn washed through the window that my lady's sleeping cheek lay against, those cheekbones high in a smile. I heard her sigh before she retired to an unshakeable dream: "Now it is over. It is now done."

....

Adele and I lived in England for years, a world away from Paris and even yet from the city. Our children went to country dances, wore country fabrics, and were in this way distinguishable from their other wealthy-in-exile friends. They no more thought of going to the city than, as my second son Marc said when he was ten, to a star. Adele learned to ride after our fourth son's birth, played with the children in the endless grass, tinkered with the piano very ill, and never sewed another dress. When our children swam in the river, she was swinging on a swing by the bank. There was no governess and no sadness.

A clipping came for her near our son's fifteenth birthday from Paris. An obituary. According to the children, who spoke French much better than they read it, some countess and "chanter" had died. When their mother sat in the corner of the kitchen for days biting her thumb and staring, it was I who had to answer: no, this was not Mummy's sister; no, she had not been a friend, nor had Mummy been a singer; no, Mummy would not take them to Paris for the funeral, as Mummy was unlikely to go herself. It had been the woman's husband who had painstakingly clipped and mailed her the print, and of all things Mummy hated, she hated this man the most.

When I came to her, she said nothing. Then, late one night as I was reading, she finally laughed, turned from her chair by the window, and laughed. When I asked her what was the problem, she put her hand to her face as she laughed. With the tears running over her knuckles, she said, "Now it is finally over. It is done."

.....

She was nearly eighteen and yet eighteen seemed like an accomplished age for such a lifestyle. The thick white power was crumbling like plaster, and her eyebrows dripped onto her eyelashes. Her hand was at her stomach and the other was at her mess of wet burnt hair, now merely a river with pins and combs floating in it like so much debris. Her ankles were rubbed raw from the rope attached to the weights. She coughed up water into a bowl with a little vomit. She was slowly peeling away the layers of clothing, the metal hoops around her bustle.

"I can't let you die, you see," I said quietly, picking up the discarded wet clothes and hanging them carefully by the fire.

With fiery resentment, she sniffed, "You can't let me live as I am. You…." Her face was shaking uncontrollably. "You watched me become this. I cannot un-become what I am. I cannot bear this as I am." A sharp pain in my chest, duller than the fatal ones, alerted me that I knew she was right. I looked at her with guilt, which she seized upon like a gull. "You've killed before. You have to kill me, and this with it." She was huffing and puffing in a way I knew was an incidental mimic of my behavior, which caused another sharp pain.

"I will not," I said dully. Then, with anger: "And this is how you seek my attention? You know I have forsaken murder. I took an oath. You come here for the first time in months wanting to take all my attention and heart from my current occupation and put it on your burden? Love, as I know you know, as we both know, is of a pleasing kind. For us. We must please to keep. You should understand that, you of all people."

She came upon me. Even behind her crumbling face paint mask, she was lovely and gamine. Even moments from suicide. "We could never please each other," she said with child-like clarity. "Could we?"

My head began to slowly shake. "I never thought of it that way," I pursued as stoically as I could, "but I suppose not."

She put her hand to her chest in a way that made me understand all the Greek tragic hand motions in a different way. "You only have room for a person…that you could on most certain accounts…trust." I slowly nodded. "And you couldn't….Well, you really shouldn't trust me."

I was holding her as a lover holds another, and this surely wasn't the first time. Her pelvis was close to mine, but her back was tilted and supported by my hand. Her chin was tilted, her lips cracked. When I kissed her, it hurt. My first kiss alive hurt. It was teeth thinly veiled by lips pressed against each other, more jaws than lips. The porcelain crushed both our faces. I did not breathe, and when we pulled away everything ached and stung. Blood was on my lips from her cutting teeth, and I saw harsh lines of the porcelain on her face. She waited for me to speak. I could not think to veil my speech. In a moment of truth, I said:

"We have begun something that will not leave until one of us is dead."