“There are too many tenses and cases in Latin. It makes you think too much,” she said, gesticulating quickly. “There is no love in it, no emotion, no joie de vivre! With French, it just spills out.”
The heat rattled through the radiator, punctuating Madame Goût’s lecture. Next to me, Anya was taking notes, pushing her red braids aside when they got in the way of her pencil. As the professor wrote a list of pronouns on the board, I could hear Clementine whispering to two of her friends.
Madame Goût must have heard, too, because she put down the chalk and turned around, her heels rapping against the floor. “If you insist on whispering in my class, I would rather you share it with all of us.”
The sharp edges of Clementine’s shoulders shifted beneath her shirt as she faltered. She looked starched and pressed, her collared shirt crisp as an envelope.
“Well, speak up,” the professor said.
“We were talking about the Île des Soeurs. About the women who used to torture the Undead there.”
Madame Goût raised a pencil-thin eyebrow. “Torture? Who told you that?”
“Monsieur Orneaux.”
Madame Goût groaned. “Of course Monsieur Orneaux would say that. He is what we call un homme pour les hommes. A man’s man. Like most men, he is not interested in the endeavors of women,” she said, waving her hand in the air. “He does not know anything,” she muttered. “I have been telling them time and time again that he is not qualified to teach.”
The room fell into an uncomfortable silence.
“The truth is that women were the founders of our entire Monitoring society.” Madame Goût lowered her voice. “And the women you speak of are Les Neuf Soeurs, or the Nine Sisters.”
“Who were they?” Clementine asked.
Turning to the blackboard, she erased all of the pronouns scrawled across it. She then picked up a piece of chalk and wrote down the following names in a swirling cursive:
Gertrude Fine
Marie Champierre
Victoria Limon
Josephine Klein
Prudence Beaufort
Hester Olivier
Chrisette Longtemp
Alma Alphonse
“They were a secret society of female Monitors,” she said. “A sisterhood.” Smoothing out her skirt, Madame Goût went to the door and closed it. “It started in 1728 in Paris, as just a group of friends. Brilliant Monitors, young, incredibly smart, and all husbandless, which was very uncommon at the time. They called themselves Les Neuf Soeurs, after the nine muses in Greek mythology.”
“What did they do?” Anya asked.
“It is believed that they were behind most of the early Monitoring advances—Monitoring schools, hospitals, the convent on the Île des Soeurs. But most famously, they were the protectors of a secret.”
Everyone grew still, listening.
“A secret? What kind of secret?” Clementine asked.
Madame Goût clasped her hands together. “That’s where the facts end. The rest we can only guess at. The prevailing rumor is that they had discovered the secret to eternal life.”
My pencil slipped from my fingers and dropped to the floor. I felt Clementine’s eyes on me, watching my reaction. I tried to hide my surprise.
Madame Goût continued. “It has long been speculated that since children can defy death for twenty-one years, there might be a possibility that adults could defy death indefinitely. The myth of immortality has powerful allure.”
Immortality. The word floated around my mind like a feather. This is it, I thought. This is the solution that Dante and I have been looking for.
“As the story goes, once Les Neuf Soeurs found the secret to eternal life, they decided they could never use it. They were frightened by the power they held. Eternal life is perverse, unnatural. A world without death is even more frightening than a world with death. The beauty, the magic, the éphemérè…it would all be lost. So before they died, the Soeurs supposedly made a pact to let their secret die with them.”
The room went so still I could hear the footsteps of the professor in the classroom across the hall as he paced.
“So that’s it?” Clementine said. “The secret is gone?”
The professor tapped her finger on the table. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the secret was never about immortality to begin with; maybe it was about a family heirloom or a dirty rumor. It all depends on what you want to believe.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, raising my voice over the sputtering heater. “If Les Neuf Soeurs was a secret society, then how do you know so much about them? Or is it all made up?”
Madame Goût raised an eyebrow, as if she had anticipated my question. “Oh, but it’s not. At first, no one knew anything about them.” She stood behind her chair and leaned on its back. “Until they died.”
“What do you mean?” Anya asked.
Madame Goût’s expression grew solemn. “They were killed. Each found murdered at home in France in 1732. That was how their identities were discovered.”
Madame Goût motioned to the list of names on the blackboard as a murmur rose over the class.
There was a long pause as we read the names on the board.
“There are only eight names here,” I said, breaking the silence. “Who was the ninth sister?”
“Ah, yes. The ninth sister. I told you that each of the Soeurs was killed at her home. Well, only eight bodies were found.”
“What happened to the ninth?” Clementine asked.
“No one knows. Some believe she died. Others believe that she used the secret and is still alive, guarding it from evil.”
Madame Goût paused. The hands on the clock above her crept toward noon.
“Who was she?” I asked.
“No one has been able to confirm her name or anything about her identity. Other than this.” Madame Goût’s heels clicked against the floor as she walked to her desk and removed a heavy book from the lower drawer. Flipping through it, she opened to a painting and passed the book around the table.
“This is the only painting we have of the Sisters. Many believe this was painted just days before their deaths. It is very famous; you will find it in all of the books about Les Neuf Soeurs.”
When it came to me, I traced my finger across each of the Soeurs, their black eyes boring through the page as they stood in a parlor, each wearing a plain housedress. They were of varying ages, some in their twenties, others not much older than me. On the far left was a girl with wild brown hair and narrow eyes. She looked the youngest. Half of her face was obscured in shadows. Perched on her arm was a yellow bird.
“The girl on the left,” Madame Goût said. “That is the ninth sister. The lost sister. Many Monitors searched for her, but all they knew was what half of her face looked like, from the portrait. But after years of nothing, everyone assumed her dead.”
“Who did it?” Anya asked. “Who murdered them?”
“I will leave that to Monsieur Orneaux to explain. I believe it’s his area of expertise. Latin is, after all, the language of the Undead.” Leaning over her book, she turned the page. “Now, back to française.”
“The Undead?” I said. “They were killed by the Undead?”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Madame Goût said, raising her index finger. “I never said that.”
“How come no one ever tried to look for the secret?” Clementine asked.
“Oh, but of course they have. It’s one of the most controversial stories in Monitoring history. Many Monitors have lost years of their lives searching for La Vie Éternel, or Life Eternal, as many of us call their secret. It is the Monitors’ version of the lost city of Atlantis. The Holy Grail. The fountain of youth.” Madame Goût shook her head. “And you’ve seen how many of those have turned out to be true.”
The class erupted in whispers.
“Quiet, please,” she said, rapping her knuckles on the table. “That’s enough futilités for today.”
As she continued her lecture on pronouns and gender, I thought back to the plane ride with Dustin, when I had blurted out the word canary. Could that have had something to do with the Nine Sisters?
That evening in the dining hall, I was pouring myself a glass of milk when a voice tickled my ear. Caught off guard, I nearly dropped the carton on the floor.
“You seemed awfully interested in the Nine Sisters today,” Clementine said over my shoulder. “What I’m wondering is why someone who supposedly already defied death is so intrigued by talk of the secret to immortality.”
“What do you want me to say? That I’m just a normal person and all the rumors are a lie?” I said, keeping my chin up as I walked to the condiments section.
Clementine followed me. “No. See, I don’t think you’re normal, either.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I said, and shrugged her off as I walked toward the table in the corner where Anya was sitting.
“I know you have a secret,” Clementine said as I left her behind. “And I’m going to find where you buried it and dig it up.”
When I got back to my room after dinner, it was so quiet I could hear footsteps coming down the hall, and then the sound of Clementine’s door unlocking. I was setting down my bag when a sudden cold breeze blew in from the windows. I ran to the other side of the room, hoping it was Dante, but of course it wasn’t. Clementine’s words crept into my head. If she ever found out about Dante…I didn’t even want to think about what would happen.
Closing the window, I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. While I was leaning on the sink, waiting for the water to get hot, I heard someone knock on Clementine’s door. I assumed it was some of her girlfriends, so it surprised me when I heard a boy’s voice.
“Noah,” Clementine said. Her voice sounded different. Soft. Sincere.
Noah? I thought. The same Noah who hit me with a bicycle, who had flirted with me? The Noah who had spilled a bouquet of daffodils all over the street. He had bought them for Clementine?