Chapter 10 - The Song of the Three Herons
The nursery on the third floor was dark, but it was not the suffocating darkness of a tomb.
The three tall French casements were thrown wide to the night air, letting in the cool, salt-drenched breeze that blew off the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Far below, the city of Seattle was a constellation of amber and emerald lights strung along the dark curve of the bay, its sirens and its engines reduced to a distant, musical murmur that sounded like water falling over smooth stones.
The three ash cribs were empty.
In their place stood three small beds of dark cherry wood, lined up along the southern wall, each covered in an identical quilt of faded blue linen that had been stitched by the hand of an old woman in the kitchen below.
The three children were asleep.
Sloane lay on her stomach, her arms wrapped around a stuffed woolen wolfhound whose button eyes were loose from two months of violent affection. Beatrix was curled into a small, tight ball near the footboard, her thumb resting against her lower lip. Maeve lay on her back, her dark curls spread across the pillow, her chest rising and falling in that deep, untroubled rhythm that belongs only to those who have forgotten that the dark ever held a face.
In the center of the white wool rug sat the rocking chair of carved ash.
Evelyn sat with her head tipped back against the linen cushion, her eyes half-closed, her hands resting peacefully in her lap.
She wore a long white cotton nightgown with simple lace at the throat, her feet bare, her hair loose over her shoulders, smelling of the lavender soap she still bought from the harbor mission—not because she was poor, but because she liked to remember the woman who had walked out of the hospital with sixty dollars and a scar behind her ear and had refused to die in the gutter.
Adrienne stood behind the chair, his hands resting on the carved horns of the headrest, his fingers lightly brushing the tips of her dark hair.
"Sing it," he whispered into the room.
Evelyn did not open her eyes.
She began to hum.
It was the Breton song, but it was no longer broken.
The rhythm did not stumble; the fifth note did not catch on the memory of the fire; and when she reached the seventh measure, her voice lifted into the clear, sharp B-flat with the effortless grace of a tern rising off the face of a green wave.
She sang the words now—the old French words that had been carried across the Atlantic by the fishermen of Saint-Malo two hundred years ago:
Le vent du soir se lève sur la grève,
Les herons blancs sont rentrés au marais;
Dors, mon enfant, car la nuit n'est qu'un rêve,
Et le matin ne t'oubliera jamais.
(The evening wind rises upon the shore,
The white herons have returned to the marsh;
Sleep, my child, for the night is only a dream,
And the morning will never forget you.)
As the last note died into the salt air of the room, Adrienne leaned down, his forehead coming to rest against the crown of her head, his breath warm against her temple.
"They're three years old tomorrow," he said softly.
"I know," she murmured.
"I bought them three small ponies from the island," he said. "The white ones with the black knees."
Evelyn smiled in the dark.
Her right hand reached up behind her shoulder, finding his fingers on the ash wood, her thumb tracing the anchor tattoo that had survived the navy, the street wars, and the two years of winter.
"They’ll ride them into the kitchen, Addie," she said.
"Let them," Adrienne replied.
He kissed the titanium scar behind her ear—the cold, pale line where the bone had been remade—and then he reached out with his left hand and clicked off the small brass lantern on the low table.
The room plunged into darkness, but nobody screamed.
Nobody reached for an iron gun.
May you like
Nobody looked for the monsters behind the white ash panels.
There was only the sound of the rain beginning to fall again over Puget Sound—a soft, gentle, benevolent gray rain that washed the salt from the leaves of the climbing roses and drummed against the glass with the quiet, rhythmic promise of another morning waiting just beyond the turn of the tide.
