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.