Breaking glass. Clinking bottles.

  It could have been an animal, but somehow that knowledge did not comfort her. Yvette slipped from her bed and padded barefoot across the floor to her window. The curtains billowed, each its own half-hearted ghost, glowing in dim moonlight. She knelt by the window and peered out, eyes narrowed, straining to see any shifting among the shadows or to pick out a noise that did not belong.

  The house creaked. It always creaked, but she wondered if this might be the porch speaking in its weary voice of a weight upon the step. Had Father locked the front door? Before sickness had taken Yvette’s mother, Papa would never have locked that door, but everything had changed these past few years.

  Another creak and her pulse quickened. She felt a tremor in her heart, and that was enough to get her moving. Yvette rose quickly, the breaking glass of her maybe-dreams pursuing her as she slipped from her bedroom into the short hallway with its high ceiling and the fragile little decorative shelves her mother had so adored. There were slim leather volumes on some of the shelves and several elegant, startlingly breakable odds and ends she had collected. It felt like a shrine—her mother’s books. Her mother’s things. There were pieces of furniture that had come from Mama’s family, and the kitchen was filled with reminders of her, the wooden bowl she had so loved, the copper pot, her paring knife, which she had used every morning to peel her apple. These were the things Yvette remembered, the things that remained. These were the things that Mama had left behind, along with Yvette herself.

  And Papa.

  She rushed into his room, ignoring the squeak of the hinges as she swung the door open. He slept as he always had, straight as a soldier at attention, taking only a third of the bed and leaving the other two-thirds for a wife who would never join him there again. It broke her heart to see him there and see the smoothness of the blanket and the undented pillow where Mother ought to have been. Three years now, and Yvette still ached.

  “Papa,” she rasped, kneeling at his bedside.

  His mouth hung partly open, a bit of drool tracking through the stubble on his cheek. He would wake in an hour or two anyway, up before dawn to begin the work of the vineyard. She hated to rob him of even that little sleep, for he relished every moment he managed to steal for himself. Yvette let her hand pause inches from his shoulder, reluctant to further disturb him. She cocked her head and listened to the nighttime house and to the breeze outside his half-open window.

  Nothing. No clinking glass. No creak on the front step.

  Her heart still pounded, but now she wondered how much had been a dream after all, wondered if she’d been a fool. She had turned eighteen in April and ought to have been past this sort of childhood fear, but still she knelt and listened.

  Exhaling, she began to stand.

  The sound that froze the breath was neither breaking glass nor the creak of wood, but the squeal of the front door’s hinges, which needed oiling just as desperately as the door to Papa’s room. The squeal seemed soft and distant, slow as her father’s sleeping breath, but she heard it all the same. It was no dream. Someone had entered her home.

  Yvette wanted to let herself tremble and shrink from the fear that boiled up within her, but her parents had not raised her to let fear dictate her actions.

  Silent, she grabbed her father by the shoulders and shook him fiercely. He stiffened and his eyes flew open, but Yvette put a finger to her lips and shushed him. His blue eyes gleamed in the dark and she bent to whisper to him.

  “Someone is inside the house.”

  Five words. All she needed. Whatever caul of sleep had been drawn across his face, those words tore it away. Alert, he slipped from his sheets and sprang from bed. He paused to lay a hand across her cheek and to pass strength and assurance to her with a moment’s gaze. They nodded to one another and Papa pointed at the paraffin lamp on his night table. She lit it quickly, turning the flame down so the lamp barely provided the illumination of a firefly.

  Then Papa left her.

  For a man of his size, strong from decades of physical labor, Papa moved so lightly that the floor did not creak. His door already hung open, so there were no hinges to give him away as he slipped into the corridor and toward the stairs. Yvette saw herself as little more than the breeze stirred by his passing, so slight was she in comparison, but she followed in his wake with the paraffin lamp hanging from her right hand.

  Papa quickly descended the stairs, avoiding the seventh step and its telltale groan, and she followed. The little glow inside her lamp flickered and she twisted the key a bit to heighten the flame, afraid her motion might puff it out. She watched Papa reach the bottom of the stairs and felt a gust of cold night air slink up to envelop her. Shivering, she stared at the front door, which stood open in terrifying confirmation that none of this had been her imagination. No nighttime scavenger—at least not of the four-legged variety—had disturbed the glass bottles strung along the vineyard.

  She took a deep breath, summoning her courage, and descended several steps more.

  Yvette thought of Claude. Her brother had been gone less than a year, off to make his way in the world, to earn a living when the shrinking, withered vineyard could no longer support them all. Twenty and broad- shouldered and with Papa’s quiet gravity, Claude should have been there with them, in case there was more than one thief. Papa might need help. Without Claude, Yvette would have to be that help. The thought made her shift the lamp to her left hand so her right would be free. She could defend herself if she must.

  Papa closed the front door and threw the bolt, locking it now when the thief was already inside. The irony stung, but Yvette continued down the steps, listening hard to the silence of the house. With a cautionary wave, Papa vanished through an arched entryway into the front room, to the left of the foyer. It had been Mama’s sewing room once.

  Yvette exhaled. She turned up the flame and the warm golden glow suffused the foyer. The front door seemed larger, somehow.

  Behind her, the creaky seventh step groaned, all on its own.

  Which was, of course, impossible.

  Yvette froze. She heard a soft breath behind her, halfway between a grunt and a laugh, and she spun around, raising the lamp to protect herself and to see.

  For a moment he seemed an ordinary man, hair and beard matted, face streaked with grime, the reflection of the lamp igniting twin infernos in his eyes. Then she realized that she knew him. Patrice, the son of Monsieur LeBlanc, who had owned a smaller vineyard some miles away, land that had been in his family for six generations before the insects had brought the blight.

  “What do you mean by...” she said, just the beginnings of a demand.

  Then she saw the woolen sack in his grip, heavy and laden with things he must already have taken from the second floor. While she had been waking Papa, he slipped up the steps in order to be sure that he would flank them. Patrice had done this before, as the sack and his little laugh suggested.

  Yvette spun and began to descend. “Papa!”

  The blow between her shoulder blades was no fist, no open palm, but a boot. The thief kicked her and she flew outward, arms thrown wide. The lamp spun from her grip as if hurled. It exploded in a shower of glass shards and flaming paraffin as it struck the front door.

  Yvette struck the floor of the foyer, the impact driving the breath from her. Wheezing, groaning, she turned over and stared up the steps as Patrice came down after her. Rivulets of fire wept down the door even as tendrils of flame raced toward the ceiling.

  Her father roared as he careened back into the foyer. Patrice whipped his head around, but too late to dodge or defend. Papa crashed into him, carried him off his feet, and hammered him against the wall even as flames crawled across the ceiling overhead and leaped from the door to a threadbare accent chair in the corner of the foyer, and from the chair to the drapes behind it.

  Yvette’s chest ached and each breath burned, but she scrambled to her knees, still wheezing. “Papa, the fire!”

  Her father seemed to exist now in a world without her, without the fire, without the house. His world had suddenly become comprised of himself and the thief. Himself and the thief and their fists. Patrice freed a hand and struck him. The woolsack split open, items bursting out in a spray of valuables and memories. Yvette saw a brooch that had belonged to her mother’s mother, a pair of silver candlesticks, and a small pile of fine lace kerchiefs that spilled into the fire and ignited faster than oil, snapping ablaze. The woolsack began to burn and the flames spread, inching toward the carpet runner on the stairs.

  Papa gripped Patrice by the throat and slapped him with the back of a hand, a humiliation, an insult in return for the man’s intrusion. But somehow her father seemed blind now.

  Yvette stumbled toward him, leaped the burning pile of lace and wool, and grabbed him by the arm. She screamed at him, shook him, shoved him, but he had the better of Patrice now and the way his teeth were bared he seemed ready to kill the man for his presumption, his betrayal, and his crime.

  “Papa!” she shouted, digging her fingernails into the soft skin of his wrist.

  Raging, he slammed Patrice into the wall again. The flames seemed to drip from the ceiling, yearning for more to burn, reaching down to touch the thief.

  Her father turned to look at her. “Get out, Yvette!”

  “Papa, look around! It’s all burning! Our house—”

  “Let it burn! Soon enough it will be taken from us, like Patrice’s family lost their own vineyard. But I won’t let him—”

  Patrice wrested an arm free and struck him in the throat. Her father wheeled back, gripping at his throat, eyes wide as he rasped and staggered. Patrice lunged, wrapped his arms around Papa, and the assault carried them both into the front room. Smoke billowed, filling the rooms, filling the house, and though she went after them Yvette cast a quick glance back into the foyer and saw the fire burning its way upstairs as if the whole house had been submerged in an ocean of flame and they were sinking fast.

  Coughing, Yvette covered her mouth with the sleeve of her nightdress and backed away as the fire grew and crept and spilled toward her. Now she saw for the first time how hopeless it was. The paraffin had accelerated the spread of the blaze and in barely two minutes the ravenous flames had begun to consume all the life she had ever known.

  She refused to allow it. Yvette raced into the parlor to the right of the front door. She tore a curtain from the nearest window, rings and all, thinking she might be able to put out the blaze, but when she looked back through the arched entryway and saw the fire engulfing the woodwork, she knew her only chance was to get out, to seek help. The audacity of the thief, and perhaps his identity, had broken something in her father that had been fraying badly since her mother’s death.

  Yvette rushed through the archway and began beating at the flames around the door with the torn curtain. The metal door handle had blackened but she managed to snuff the fire around it. Wrapping the curtain around her hand, she reached for the latch, but a hand gripped her shoulder and shoved her aside. She staggered, dragging the curtain through hungry flames that engulfed it. Fire ignited the hem of her nightdress and she stumbled back down the corridor toward the dining room and the kitchens beyond, tearing at the dress, beating at the flames. The hem grew black and smoldered but she managed to put it out.

  When she glanced up, her father and Patrice were on fire.

  “Go out the back!” Papa shouted. “If you open this door, you’ll only...”

  Yvette took a step toward him, one hand in his direction. His clothes and hair were on fire. Patrice’s beard burned. Flames licked up from the back of his jacket. Papa grabbed Patrice by the shirtfront, and then he and the thief stumbled, afire, out of her sight.

  From the smoke and flames, Papa cried out for her to run. To get out. Yvette could only obey him. Coughing, eyes stung with smoke, she raced toward the back of the house. The fire seemed to roar overhead, the sounds from the second floor as if a monster rampaged there. Something gave way, thumping to the floor above, and that was when she knew there was no hope. Not for the house. Not for the vineyard. Not for Papa.

  Pain seared the backs of her legs and her left thigh, and she saw that her nightdress still burned. She reached the rear door, which she had never herself used except to allow deliverymen to enter.

  Yvette threw wide the door. The wind rushed in, seeming as hungry as the flames, and she screamed as the fire burning her nightdress raged and grew. She hurled herself out into the night, fell to the ground, and began to roll in the dirt, patting at her hair, which had begun to smoke and singe, and she screamed.

  When the echoes of her own cry had died and she knew she would not burn to death, she sat and watched the flames burst from the upstairs windows and engulf her childhood home. Despite the roar of the inferno, she listened for her father’s voice, even his death cry, but there were only the flames and the sounds of the house collapsing in upon itself.

  Yvette knew he would not emerge. She had no father left. No mother, nor any home at all. Somewhere, her brother Claude still lived, and he was all she had.

  She watched the fire for a long while before she rose and began to plan what she would do next.

  2

  The rain fell so lightly it barely seemed to dampen the cemetery grass. Yvette stood by her father’s graveside and watched the digger shovel dirt back into the hole, covering the shabby coffin her Uncle Xavier had provided. She stood alone now, a trickle of rain on her cheek that might have been tears. The sky hung low, its hue the gray of a death shroud, and the world had gone quiet. Yvette appreciated the hush and the gray—Papa would get that much dignity, at least. Fewer than twenty people had come to hear the minister’s words as the coffin had been lowered into the grave, just a handful of neighbors and merchants who’d always offered Comtois Vineyard wines for sale.

  Uncle Xavier and Aunt Bette had come many miles on short notice. Aunt Bette had been her mother’s sister, and the two women had never gotten on well in life, so Yvette had nearly forgotten the aging pair still lived. Uncle Xavier was a stonemason who worked with his two grown sons. His hands were huge and powerful. His features seemed carved from the very stone he handled daily, and he had a demeanor to match. Aunt Bette, on the other hand, had features sharp as cut glass, and a glance that cut even deeper.

  The sound of the shovel plunging into the dirt made Yvette flinch every time. Worse was the noise it made when that shovelful of dirt cascaded down into the grave, weighing more and more on the coffin lid, thickening the barrier between Yvette and her father, between the life she’d always known and the desperate mystery the rest of her days had become.

  All she had to do was turn away, face her aunt and uncle, go along with them. One turn, one step, another step, and her new life would begin.

  “—not going to make it simple for you, Monsieur Foucault,” Uncle Xavier said. “You must understand that as her only family, I cannot allow you to take ownership of the vineyard without some provision for young Ms. Comtois herself. The shades of her late parents would never cease to haunt us if we saw her so ill used and did not intervene.”

  In that moment, Yvette thought her expression must be as stony as Uncle Xavier’s usual countenance. The gravedigger caught a glimpse of her and faltered, perhaps thinking her disapproval had been aimed at him. She closed her eyes, lowering her head as if in prayer, and listened to her aunt’s husband wheedle with Papa’s biggest debt holder. The man wanted to simply take the vineyard in payment for those debts. The house had burned to the ground, but the land and the vineyard and the outbuildings still had value. Uncle Xavier managed to persuade the man to part with a small sum simply to make them all go away, which meant that Yvette truly had nothing. Her clothes had burned along with her father. Her memories of her mother, the shelves of her things, burned in her mind’s eye even now. She had not seen them ignite, but she imagined it over and over.

  “Girl,” her aunt said, placing a firm hand on her shoulder.

  Yvette turned and met Aunt Bette’s sharp gaze with one of her own. “I’m hardly a girl, Madame. I’m eighteen years of age.”

  “I am aware,” Aunt Bette said, eyes narrowed as she studied her niece, openly displeased with the idea of sharing a home with her. “I’ve told Xavier we’re to have you for a year, by which time we will have found a suitable husband for you. Until then, you’ll work for your keep.”

  “Of course,” Yvette said, burning with a secret hatred that she knew did not show on the mask of her face.

  She turned back to the grave and whispered a final farewell to her father. Then Uncle Xavier called for her and Aunt Bette, and the two women followed him back to the carriage that waited at the cemetery gates.

  The rain abated, but the sky darkened, the clouds seeming lower, as if to suffocate them all. There would be no moon or stars at all tonight, not with such a mournful heaven above. All the better for Yvette to make her departure. Let Uncle Xavier bleed what little money he could from the vineyard. The place had nothing to offer her, nor did her aunt and uncle. All she wanted now was to find her brother, to inform him of their father’s horrific fate, and to discover whether he still cared for his sister’s welfare.

  Claude had donned the greasepaint. He had become a clown with Le Circus Furneaux.

  Yvette prayed he would be pleased to see her. Without Claude... without the circus...she had nowhere else to go.

  3

  Le Circus Furneaux had nearly completed its evening performance when Hugo Schuster led his little brother, Oskar, around behind the animal pens so the boy could relieve himself. Hugo and Oskar crept hurriedly through the darkness, the muffled glee of the crowd reaching them from the main tent. Children were laughing within. Parents were applauding. Sweethearts were hand in hand, suffused with a full night’s surfeit of laughter and spectacle, faces aching from hours spent smiling. This was a night unlike any Hugo had ever had. A night he and Oskar would remember forever.