Emilie felt the pressure on her hand relax and looked down at her mother. As she watched, it seemed that, while Valérie's soul departed her body, the pain that had contorted her features was disappearing too, enabling Emilie to look past the emaciated face and remember the beauty her mother had once possessed.
“She has left us,” murmured Phillipe, the doctor, pointlessly.
“Yes.”
Behind her, she heard the doctor muttering a prayer, but had no thought to join him in it. Instead, she stared down in morbid wonder at the sack of slowly graying flesh which was all that remained of the presence that had dominated her life for thirty years. Emilie instinctively wanted to prod her mother awake, because the transition from life to death—given the force of nature Valérie de la Martinières had been—was too much for her senses to accept.
She wasn’t sure how she should feel. After all, she had played this moment over in her head on many occasions in the past few weeks. Emilie turned away from her dead mother’s face and gazed out the window at the wisps of cloud suspended like uncooked meringues in the blue sky. Through the open window, she could hear the faint cry of a lark come to herald the spring.
Rising slowly, her legs stiff from the long nighttime hours she had been sitting vigil, she walked over to the window. The early-morning vista had none of the heaviness that the passing of the hours would eventually bring. Nature had painted a fresh picture as it did every dawn, the soft Provençal palette of umber, green, and azure gently ushering in the new day.
Emilie gazed across the terrace and the formal gardens to the undulating vineyards that surrounded the house and spread across the earth for as far as her eyes could see. The view was simply magnificent and had remained unchanged for centuries. Château de la Martinières had been her sanctuary as a child, a place of peace and safety; its tranquillity was indelibly printed into every synapse of her brain.
And now it was hers—though whether her mother had left anything behind from her financial excesses to continue to fund its upkeep, Emilie did not know.
“Mademoiselle Emilie, I’ll leave you alone so you may say goodbye.” The doctor’s voice broke into her thoughts. “I’ll take myself downstairs to fill out the necessary form. I am so very sorry.” He gave her a small bow and left the room.
Am I sorry . . . ?
The question flashed unbidden through Emilie’s mind. She walked back to the chair and sat down once more, trying to find answers to the many questions her mother’s death posed, wanting a resolution, to add and subtract the conflicting emotional columns to produce a definitive feeling. This was, of course, impossible. The woman who lay so pathetically still—so harmless to her now, yet such a confusing influence while she had lived—would always bring the discomfort of complexity.
Valérie had given her daughter life, she had fed and clothed her and provided a substantial roof over Emilie’s head. She had never beaten or abused her.
She simply had not noticed her.
Valérie had been—Emilie searched for the word—disinterested. Which had rendered her, as her daughter, invisible.
Emilie reached out her hand and put it on top of her mother’s.
“You didn’t see me, Maman . . . you didn’t see . . . ”
Emilie was painfully aware that her birth had been a reluctant nod to the need to produce an heir for the de la Martinières line; a requirement contrived out of duty, not maternal desire for a child. And faced with an “heiress” rather than the requisite male, Valérie had been further disinterested. Too old to conceive again—Emilie had been born in the very last flush of her mother’s fertility at forty-three—Valérie had continued her life as one of Paris’s most charming, generous, and beautiful hostesses.