Where the years had touched it, the paper had turned the color of weak tea.
Cécile Darcourt noticed because the five o’clock sun, redirected by the sitting room mirror, fell precisely on the edge of the bundle. Paul’s letters had never been white, not even when he bought the paper. He chose a slightly thick cream laid stock that drank ink and darkened the broad strokes. Two years after his death, the paper had yellowed at the folds, more around the broken seals, as though the fingers that once opened them had left a slow warmth.
She set one aside.
“That one too?” Rose asked from the doorway.
The young woman held a laundry basket against her hip. In the past fortnight she had learned not to enter silently while Monsieur’s papers were being sorted. The first morning, Cécile had startled at her apron’s rustle and overturned the inkwell. Since then, Rose coughed or tapped the doorframe, even with full hands.
“No. That one stays here.”
“It’s the third that stays here.”
“You’re keeping count?”
“You told me to count the bundles before Monsieur Adrien comes.”
Cécile looked up. Rose was not smiling. She really was counting.
On the round table, the papers formed three piles. Cabinet Valois would take the professional letters, travel notes, and drafts of the catalog of eighteenth-century autograph manuscripts. Adrien Darcourt would receive what his brother had written to their father, mother, and cousins. Cécile would keep the rest, a category no one had thought needed further definition.
She had begun with a substantial rest.
Then she had read.
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