When the biographer Burke Desjardins sat down with me in his personal study, I was immediately stricken by a tension that tugged at my chest. He was nice enough; when I took my place in the cushioned chair across from him, he shook my hand cordially and asked me how I was doing. But I could tell he wanted to get down to business. He wanted to know about what happened to the Moreau family, and that was all he wanted to know.
….
“Before we get started,” Mr. Desjardins said, after clearing his throat, “for the record: I need your full name, and your relation to the Moreaus.” He looked at me as he spoke, and looked down quickly to his pad of paper as if my words would escape him and be lost forever if he didn’t have them written as soon as they were spoken.
I replied dully, “My full name is Jules Dashiell Lambert, I worked as a servant in their household for a little over half my life.”
“How many years is that?”
“About seven years, Monsieur.”
M. Desjardins scribbled this down, and I wondered if he would be able to read it, it seemed to take him no time at all. As soon as he was done writing, he looked at me thoughtfully, then jotted something else down, what I figured was a description of some sort. Once he’d gotten down what he wanted, he looked up, ushering, “Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?”
I shrugged, but he didn’t seem to notice. “How do I start?”
“You can start where you started, if you’d like. Maybe start with the first time you noticed something odd about les Moreau.”
….
For a moment I was silent, gathering my thoughts and finding the beginnings; when I started, and when the strange started; and I found that they coincided. “Well… Monsieur Elroy Moreau took me in when I was seven years old from a poor, neglective homelife,…
&1&
He told me he would shelter me and that the other servants would take care of me until I grew to be more independent, and I would have food and a bedroom and they would pay me for my service every month. I left home and never bothered telling my parents goodbye; they never seemed to notice I was gone anyway.
Elroy Moreau was a tall bald man, with a dark complexion and piercingly blue eyes. His gut protruded as the mark of a well-to-do entrepreneur, and he always wore a firm, concentrating expression, like he always had something vexing that he was mulling over in his brain. He was a very successful man in Tulles; he owned the town’s funeral home, which also ironically was a doctor’s office as well, and this earned him a healthy salary. He was a shrewd businessman, but a lousy father.
The Moreau children were known possibly more prominently than their father. There were three of them, two sons and one precious daughter. Severin Moreau was the oldest, at fourteen years when I became a servant in the maison. No one knew what to make of him, but they all had a deep fear of him. He resembled his father more closely than his siblings, but with almost-black hair and vacant black eyes, darkly attractive in his own right. Not even the staff in the Moreau home dared to approach Severin, especially when he was in a foul mood—he had a raging temper like no one in Tulles had ever imagined possible.
Aure, who was two years younger than Severin, was the Moreaus’ cherished only daughter. She was the most beautiful young woman in Tulles, and every young man knew it. Her blonde hair grew long and curled at the tips, she had a naturally tan complexion, and her eyes shone like bright blue stars. She had virtually no temper, from what anyone outside of the family knew; and her brother Severin did not dare to raise a hand to her, even in the worst of his rages—she seemed to be the only one who could soothe him.
The youngest was three years my senior. Royce was a pallid boy, strongly taking after his mother. His hair was dark blonde, and his green eyes were set in a round boyish face, even once he had reached his teen years. Royce was as much his mother’s son as Aure was her father’s daughter, and he almost never left her side.
