Chapter 5
Octavia did not deny the Green Chain once Augusta entered the room.
That told me she had learned too much to pretend ignorance.
“Who taught you?”
She looked at my aunt.
Then away.
“My aunt Sabine.”
There.
The woman in the chapel.
Sabine Vellacourt.
Octavia’s mother’s older sister.
Sixty-one.
Widowed.
Elegant.
Always seated slightly too close to powerful people.
I had met her perhaps twelve times.
I had underestimated every one.
“Why did Sabine want the bracelet?”
Octavia bristled.
“She didn’t want it.”
“You opened my mother’s grave for jewelry you didn’t want?”
Her face tightened.
“She said I needed it.”
Different.
Needed.
For the marriage.
Sabine had spent a year teaching Octavia the private traditions of old East Coast families.
Which women could command which rooms.
Which symbols old households still recognized.
Which customs men dismissed but staff remembered.
According to Sabine, entering Winslowe House without Helena’s bracelet would leave Octavia ornamental.
A fiancée.
Then wife.
But never mistress of the house.
“And you believed her?”
Octavia looked ashamed.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because everyone still talks about your mother.”
There.
Jealousy?
Not exactly.
Fear of a dead standard.
Helena’s name remained everywhere.
Not because I preserved her like a saint.
Because thirty years of people remembering kindness leaves residue.
Octavia thought she would forever be compared.
Sabine offered a shortcut.
Wear Helena’s bracelet.
Stand where Helena stood.
Let old staff see it.
Let relatives interpret it.
Authority by symbol.
“What were you going to tell me?”
Octavia whispered:
“That I found it among her things.”
She believed I had forgotten burial details after nine years.
Unfortunately for her, I had closed my mother’s clasp myself.
“And Lisette?”
Octavia’s face hardened again.
“She saw us.”
“So you made her the thief.”
No answer.
I leaned closer.
“You were willing to destroy a twenty-four-year-old woman’s livelihood because she saw you take something from the dead.”
Octavia finally cried.
May you like
Not enough.
But at least the lies were ending.
