Chương 34

The dining room had been arranged to flatter intimacy while preventing any real privacy. Louis saw the seating arrangement and understood that the evening had not improved. Gladice was on his right. Angelique sat across the table and a few seats down, with Julian Vautrin beside her. The placement was perfect. He could watch them without effort, but he could not join them without everyone at the table noticing. He sat down. Across from him, Julian pulled out Angelique's chair without hesitation.

Angelique thanked him, sat down, and did not look at Louis. A waiter passed behind Louis with a tray of canapés: smoked alligator sausage, fried okra, and muffuletta squares. Louis took one. He tasted salt and spice until Angelique turned toward Julian. After that, he barely noticed what he was chewing. Gladice noticed.

"You should eat," she said under her breath.

"It helps to have something in your mouth when you're planning to stare." He swallowed.

"I'm not staring."

"Of course not." She took a sip of her Sazerac and set down the glass.

"You're merely observing her French conversation in detail so you can criticize her pronunciation later." The first course arrived in shallow bowls: dark, fragrant sherry turtle soup. Conversation around the table quieted. One of the older men from the preservation board remarked that New Orleans had always trusted soups more than speeches. A few people laughed. Julian smiled and spoke to Angelique in French. Louis caught the words for patience and old houses, then lost the rest. Angelique answered in French.

Her voice was quieter than when she spoke English. Julian turned toward her and switched to English. Louis could not tell whether it was courtesy or a reminder that Julian knew he was listening.

"So it wasn't a local thing," he said.

"It was a house thing." Angelique rested a finger on the stem of her glass.

"Mostly. I didn't grow up in Navarre. I grew up with people who were determined not to let it disappear just because the landscape had changed. That can make tradition feel less like an inheritance than an assignment." Julian leaned closer.

"I know that feeling. Here we have a city that has survived by learning how to refuse to become what anyone expected it to be. Though I suspect you were better educated in the art of resistance than most of us."

"Resistance is a strong word. Sometimes it's just... keeping a certain light burning in the window." Louis looked down at his soup, then back up. Julian had not touched his.

"My mother did something similar," Julian said.

"Only ours was smaller. Less royal. More improvised. I can still smell the beeswax on the old chapel floor. And the cold in winter. The kind that doesn't ask whether you're comfortable." He smiled at her.

"The city outside changed. Inside, the old arrangement remained. Sometimes I thought it was devotion. Sometimes I thought it was just... stubbornness."

"And now? Which do you think it was?" Julian paused before answering.

"Now I think it was love," he said.

"Even when love looks like stubbornness. It's just that some things have to be kept alive in a way that feels like rebellion against everything else." Maria glanced up from her soup. Angelique smiled at Julian. Louis hated how quickly it came. Gladice tasted the soup, set down her spoon, and leaned toward Louis.

"You're going to crack a tooth if you don't stop clenching your jaw."

"Thank you for your concern."

"I'm not concerned." She glanced at Angelique, then back at Louis.

"Just amused." The bowls were cleared. Waiters set down the next course, crawfish in a thick red sauce. Steam carried the smell of pepper and butter. One of the minority community organizers from the river wards said cities often declared things sacred only after deciding who would be displaced to preserve them. Julian answered that preservation was never innocent. Angelique said, "No. But innocence doesn't make a city survive. Stubbornness does." She met Julian's eyes and did not look away.

"And sometimes stubbornness is the only honest form of faith left." The organizer nodded.

"Exactly." Louis said, "It sounds more like pride to me. Calling something sacred just because you refuse to let it go." Everyone looked at him. He knew at once that his tone had been harsher than the conversation called for. Julian's expression remained pleasant.

"An interesting distinction," Julian said. The politeness made it sound condescending.

"And perhaps a very Pacific view. If everything is changeable, then what does it matter to call anything sacred?" Louis met his eyes.

"It matters because calling something sacred often means you're willing to make other people suffer for it." This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. No one spoke for a moment. Angelique watched him without smiling. Gladice set down her fork and gave him a slight smile. Julian did not look away.

"Perhaps," he said evenly.

"But if nothing is sacred, what do you stand for that's bigger than yourself?"

"Then maybe the problem is standing," Louis said before he could stop himself.

"Maybe standing is what makes people think they have the right to protect things at other people's expense." Gladice laughed quietly. One corner of Julian's mouth lifted.

"You are young, Mr. Collins. It's charming." He turned to Angelique before Louis could answer.

"Though I suspect the Dominion is more complicated than its youngest prince lets on." Angelique looked from Julian to Louis, then back again. Louis could not tell what she thought.

"I think all places are more complicated than they're allowed to appear at dinner tables." The table remained quiet. The organizer smiled and resumed his point about neighborhood displacement. Waiters served black drum with crisp edges beneath a pale butter sauce with lemon and capers. Julian turned the conversation from the fish to the Gulf. Louis resented how natural Julian made it sound.

"The Gulf teaches people that the boundary between land and sea is only ever temporary," he said.

"We're always at the mercy of negotiation. The river doesn't care what we call sacred. It cares what we build to withstand it."

"Then maybe you should build better," Louis said. He had meant it to sound neutral. It came out sharp. Julian paused with his fork in his hand.

"Indeed. Though I suspect we have different ideas about what 'better' looks like." He turned back to Angelique.

"In the old courts, one learned to read architecture the way one reads a person: as a record of desire. What they built showed what they believed they could defend." Angelique cut a piece of fish and ate it before answering. When she spoke, she kept her eyes on her plate.

"The houses in my family's history were not built to defend against nature," she said quietly.

"They were built to remind people inside them that some things could still be made to last. Even if the world outside did not agree."

"Then maybe that is the difference between us and them," Julian said.

"We have never been able to pretend the world is on our side." Angelique answered in French. Louis caught only a few words. The rest passed too quickly for him to follow. Julian replied even faster, and Angelique laughed. Louis's knife struck the plate harder than he intended. Gladice did not turn her head.

"You're making the fish nervous," she murmured. He set the knife down.

"Are you enjoying yourself?"

"Immensely." She lifted her cocktail and took a sip.

"You're so much more interesting when someone else has your full attention." The main course arrived. Waiters served tasso-spiced veal with mustard gravy and roasted Guinea hen with dirty rice and charred sweet peppers. Louis scarcely remembered which he had chosen until the plate was set in front of him. The dirty rice on Angelique's plate formed a neat mound beside the hen.

Someone near the center of the table asked whether post-collapse cities should preserve the past or change in whatever ways survival required. Constantine answered that survivability was only memory with a budget. David replied that some places had no luxury of deciding what they symbolized. New Orleans remained alive because the port had to operate tomorrow whether history approved or not.

"Cities are not kept alive by budgets alone," Julian said.

"They are kept alive because people continue to recognize themselves in them. Even when the shape has changed. Even when the reasons for belonging have become harder to articulate." He looked toward Angelique.

"Isn't that why Navarre still exists in some way? Because there are people who still recognize themselves in it?" Several people farther down the table looked toward Julian. Even Philip glanced up. Angelique looked around the table before answering.

"Like I said. I wasn't raised there. But I was raised inside it," she said.

"That's not the same thing, though it can feel close enough to be inconvenient."

"In what way?" She lifted her glass and took a drink, her eyes on the dark wine.

"If you spend your childhood learning to live in a space that isn't really there anymore, you start to wonder whether your own life is just a form of good manners." She looked at him.

"Sometimes I think I would be happier if I had been raised without all the weight of what my name is supposed to mean." Anger rose in Louis. She had never said anything like this to him. He had never made it easy for her to say these things. He drank. The wine had gone warmer in the glass. Across the table, Angelique looked at him and did not look away at once. Her eyes held his long enough that Louis thought she understood how much he had heard. Then Julian spoke, and Angelique turned back to him.

"If you had been born without any of it," he asked her, "without the inheritance, without the structure, would you have wanted it?" One corner of Angelique's mouth lifted.

"Wanting is a luxury," she said, "for people who are not expected to continue things."

"Then what is it you do want?" Julian waited for her answer. She looked down at her plate, then back at him.

"I might have wanted less of it. I would not have wanted none." Julian inclined his head. Louis stopped tasting the food entirely. At a service station near the sideboard, a waiter finished the bananas Foster by pouring rum into the pan and setting it alight. Blue and gold light flashed across the glassware, and several guests stopped talking to watch. Angelique turned toward the flames. The light caught her cheek and the pearl at her ear. Julian spoke to her in French.

Louis understood only a few words, including fire and childhood. Angelique answered with a short story, but he caught only fragments. She was smiling when she finished. Julian smiled but let her finish. He only said, "So even in Oregon you were taught to set things briefly on fire in the name of tradition." That made her laugh outright. Louis set his spoon down before he had finished the first bite. Gladice turned to look at him.

"You do realize," she said softly, "that watching you watch them is more entertaining than anything they've said to each other." He said, "You should find a better hobby."

"I already have." Coffee followed, along with little glasses of rum. Guests pushed their chairs back and leaned away from the table, ready to stand. Music from the adjoining salon came more clearly through the open doors. Several people looked toward it. Louis lifted the chicory coffee to his mouth. The bitterness made him focus. Across from him, Julian said something low to Angelique. She looked toward the adjoining room, then back at him. Julian had not offered her his hand, but Louis expected him to.

At the head of the table, Jessamine rose. The remaining conversations stopped.

"I think," she said with a smile, "that New Orleans has fed our guests well enough to satisfy even the Dominion's expectations. There will be time enough for speeches tomorrow." She looked from Constantine to David, then back again.

"For tonight, let's let the music do the talking." The guests laughed softly and began to stand. Louis set his coffee down. Across the table, Angelique released her glass. Beside him, Gladice kept her eyes ahead when she said, "Now it gets interesting."