Tempêtes

In the soot-laced twilight of a nameless French port, a veiled woman boards the evening train with a porcelain child clutched to her breast, the sea behind her hissing like a scalded animal. Years later, the same woman—now Madame Hélène de Kerillis, porcelain still but sunlit—glides through the manicured hush of a Loire château, her silk heel striking Versailles parquet in perfect quadrille with the heartbeat she has learned to mute. The man on her arm, the stoic timber-merchant Étienne, believes her past to be as blank as the parchment on which he calculates his cargo tonnage; yet every night she hears the echo of another man’s name reverberating in her marrow: Moriz Rozen, ghost of salt, smoke, and carnality, the child’s real progenitor, once presumed drowned in a Baltic squall. Rozen, of course, did not drown; he has merely marinated in the brine of his own venom, resurfacing like a netted shark to extort the woman who swapped truth for comfort. Letters arrive sealed with black wax, each demand a graver theft of breath. When Étienne uncovers the deception, the marriage’s gilt fractures into a spider’s web of recrimination, the château’s mirrors reflecting a triptych of anguish: the betrayed husband clutching ledgers as though they were commandments; the wife, half-mad, whispering lullabies to a child no longer hers; and Rozen, a prowling chiaroscuro in a stolen coat, snatching the boy as a human shield against the gendarmes snapping at his heels. The pursuit corkscrews through fog-cloaked quays, candle-lit ossuaries, and a final, rain-lashed bell tower where Rozen, cornered like a feral deity, turns the razor inward rather than outward, his blood mixing with the downpour that baptizes the sobbing child now reclaimed by the couple whose innocence has been flayed to the raw quick.