Copyright
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Bridget Collins 2020
Bridget Collins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008272166
Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008272180
Version: 2020-07-23
Dedication
For Sarah Ballard
Epigraph
‘But that the present order of things was not to be taken for granted, that it presupposed a certain harmony between the world and the guardians of culture, that this harmony could always be disrupted, and that world history taken as a whole by no means furthered what was durable, rational and beautiful in the life of men, but at best only tolerated it as an exception – all this they did not realise.’
– The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse, trans. Richard and Clara Winston
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Serotine Term
Chapter 1: the Rat
Chapter 2: Léo
Chapter 3: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 4
Chapter 5: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 6: Léo
Chapter 7
Chapter 8: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 9: Léo
Chapter 10
Chapter 11: the Rat
Chapter 12: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 13
Chapter 14: Léo
Chapter 15
Chapter 16: the Rat
Part Two: Vernal Term
Chapter 17: Léo
Chapter 18
Chapter 19: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 20
Chapter 21: Léo
Chapter 22
Chapter 23: Léo
Chapter 24: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 25: Léo
Chapter 26: the Rat
Chapter 27
Chapter 28: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 29
Chapter 30: Léo
Chapter 31: the Rat
Chapter 32: Léo
Chapter 33: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 34
Chapter 35: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 36: Léo
Chapter 37: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 38: Léo
Chapter 39: the Rat
Chapter 40: the Magister Ludi
Chapter 41: Léo
Chapter 42: the Rat
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Bridget Collins
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Serotine Term
1: the Rat
Tonight the moonlight makes the floor of the Great Hall into a game board. Every high window casts a bright lattice, dividing the hall into black and white, squares and margins. The ranks of wooden benches face one another on three sides; in the space between them there is nothing but straight shadows on stone, an abstract in pen and ink. It is as still as a held breath. For once not even an eddy of wind rattles the windows or hums in the great hearth. No dust dances over the dark-barred floor. The empty benches wait. If ever the hall was ready for the first move of a grand jeu, it’s now: midnight, silence, this geometry of light. Someone else would know how to play, how to begin.
But tonight there is only the Rat, shivering a little in her threadbare shirt, her arms tight around her ribcage. She stretches one scrawny foot in and out of the light, thinking dark, pale, dark, pale. She narrows her eyes at the sheen on her toenails. She is listening for footsteps; but then, she is always listening for footsteps. She is hungry; but then, she’s always hungry. She has forgotten to notice those things. She scrunches her toes. The stone is cold. The stone is always cold; even in summer the thin-aired nights are chilly, and the daytime heat doesn’t have time to seep through the walls. But tonight she notices it, because she has spent the day just gone under the eaves – sweltering breathless under hot slates, watching threads of gold creep over her sweaty knees as the sun dipped. She presses the ball of her foot down and relishes the chill. Cold stone, cold bone. She would like to pocket it and suck on it through the long days of hiding. But it is late heat this year. This is the end of summer. Yesterday the grey ones were unlocking doors, opening windows, sweeping grit and dry leaves out of fireplaces. Today they were bustling with their baskets on wheels, making beds, flapping sheets full of the stink of soap and lavender. Tomorrow they will be cleaning on the other side of the courtyard, scrubbing the floors and clanking buckets. They will grumble to one another and smell of sweat. The young ones will slip sideways to blow smoke from windows. The Rat always hides, but soon she will be hiding harder. And then there will be the black ones, the male ones, loud and greedy. There will be more food and more danger. For a few weeks she will move more in the chimneys and less in the corridors. Then, as the days dwindle, the fires will be lit and she will use the ledges and roofs and the gaps in the walls, or only move at night to the kitchen and back. She will sleep and shiver through the long snows. This is the way the year turns.
For no reason she steps further into the hall. Moonlight spills up her ankles. She will not enter the space between the benches, but she stands on the edge of it. There is a line of silver framing the bare rectangle, like a runnel of mercury between the stones. She raises one foot, but she is only testing herself. She already knows she will not cross it. Someone else would; someone else would step forward with an opening gambit ready, bow to the empty benches. But she is the Rat, and she wouldn’t know a gambit from a claw-mark on the wall. All she knows about this place is that it isn’t hers. To the Rat the silver line is a wire, the space a trap waiting to snap shut on her. It is so alien it makes her scalp crawl. The silence stretches.
There’s no wind outside. But suddenly there’s a gasp and a whisper in the chimney, a half-beat of indistinct noise like fabric tearing. The Rat whips round, poised to run. Something drops into the hearth, flapping and scratching. A dry knot of feathers, moving. Talons scrape on the stone. The small sounds echo, magnified by the stillness. An inhuman voice calls to her, fierce and plangent. For a moment she stays where she is, frozen. Then she takes a step towards the hearth, so slowly she feels every joint in her foot where it meets the floor.
An eagle-owl on the hearthstone. It is small: not a chick but a fledgling, still blurred around the edges with the last of its down. But the fierce eyes stare at her, unblinking. Its head bobs and it calls again, a rising hopeless note like a question. The wings open into an awkward, lopsided spread of feathers. It hops, and folds back into itself. A line of moonlight fal
ls across its back, so bright the Rat can see the ghost of brown and cream in its plumage, the fiery glint in its eye. It tries again to fly: the same painful flutter, the same sharp, flinching defeat. She watches.
It tries again, and again. It quavers a long note, louder now. Echoes hum in the walls, on the edge of audibility. She imagines the nest it came from, bare stone at the top of a tower or a buttress, high and out of reach. Somewhere there will be a mother owl. Until now, the fledgling has been safe. Until now, it has been fed and watched over. It goes on calling, as if someone will help. Every time it tries to stretch its wings she feels a prickle in her chest.
The clock strikes on the far side of the courtyard, a pure, single note.
She crosses to the hearth and the fledgling bates. She pauses until it calms again. She glances at the strong claws as they clutch and clutch on the hearthstone. She waits until she is ready. Then she crouches and reaches out, quick as a blink, and both hands grasp slippery-soft feathers with thin light bones beneath. She adjusts her grip, and twists.
There is a snap. The Rat is alone again.
She stands up. She drops the fledgling. Some instinct, deeper than logic, makes her expect a noise like breaking glass; but whatever sound it makes as it hits the floor is drowned out by the rush of blood in her ears. She doesn’t kill things very often. It has made her pulse rise into a drumbeat, a booming stutter in her head that won’t slow down. She uncurls her hands. Somehow there is blood on them. A scratch across her knuckles starts to sting. At one end, where it’s deepest, a dark bead swells, overflows and runs down her wrist. She puts her hand to her mouth and sucks at the broken skin, tasting iron. Her heartbeat trembles in her bones as if they’re hollow.
There are footsteps in the passage. For a fraction of a second the Rat thinks the rhythm of her heart has doubled or tripled. But she is always listening; it only takes that split second to hear the difference between the hot thick thump of her heart and the click of shoes on stone. She scrats a foothold in the side of the hearth and swings herself up into the chimney, bracing herself with her back and feet, muscles taut, deep in the darkest shadow. There is a movement in the doorway, a flick of a pale robe. The Rat closes her eyes, wary of the moonlight reflecting off them. It is too late to climb higher; any movement will make a noise.
The figure walks forward into the room. The footsteps pause. The Rat breathes shallowly, her ribs tight with the effort of silence. Her nose is full of the scent of old ash. A long time – a minute, a second – passes. Then she can’t help herself, and she opens her eyes a slit. She stares through the flickering smudge of her eyelashes. She recognises the figure in white: the female. All the ones in white are male, except this one. The female-male, the odd one out. She is standing where the Rat stood: on the edge of the space, poised behind the silver line. She is looking at the moonlight too. But whatever she sees, it is not what the Rat saw. The Rat clenches her teeth. Her muscles are aching.
The white one makes a movement. It is a strange cut-off gesture, the beginning of something and its end, both at once. It is like a thread linked to her wrist. She lets her hand drop, and is still again.
Then, as if the Rat has made a noise, she looks round. The silence snaps taut. The Rat freezes, pulling deeper into the shadow. Her breath catches. Something tickles the underside of her forearm. A line of wetness is crawling from her wrist towards her elbow, dark on her pale skin. Any moment now it will drip.
The white one frowns. She tilts her head, as if to see a different angle of light and shadows. In the moonlight her face is a vertical half-mask. Her mouth opens.
The drop of blood falls. There is an instant when the Rat feels its absence, the infinitesimal lightening of her body. Then it ticks on the floor.
‘Who’s there?’
The Rat doesn’t move. If the white one comes closer, she will claw her way upwards, climb frantically until she reaches the narrowing in the chimney where she can brace herself and rest. But every movement will send a rain of old soot and mortar down into the hearth, and then they will know she is here. They will search and peer and drag her out. There will be men with hands, faces with eyes. They will try to make her human, and hate her when they fail. She knows enough about the world to know that.
‘Is someone there?’
Sometimes the grey ones have seen her. A glimpse, a flash, a half-print in the dust. But no one listens to them when they say either there is a girl in the walls or the school is haunted. They would believe this one.
The white one takes another step. The shadows slide over her. She sees the owl in its fractured huddle on the hearthstone. She stops.
The Rat is shaking all over now. Her shoulders burn. Sweat is soaking into her shirt, the hot smell of herself wafting from armpits and scalp. Her hand stings. There is a loose stone beside her head, where a tall man could reach. If she reached for it, she would fall. But she would fall with it in her hand. It is heavy enough, big enough to crack a skull. Her heartbeat accelerates, so loud she is sure the white one will hear. If the white one hears …
The Rat’s fingers curl against the stone. Grit pushes into the tender space under her nails.
The white one turns away. One moment she is there, staring into the Rat’s shadow with a line between her eyebrows: then she is gone, out of the doorway in a whirl of white, moonlit to dark in an instant. Her footsteps fade.
The Rat waits. After a long time she lets herself down. Her bare feet press the floor. She stretches her arms, slowly, knowing better than to relax. Even when one danger is past, there is always another. But at least she can breathe freely. She is glad that she didn’t have to kill the white one. The thought is like a newly missing tooth: she explores the shape of it. Perhaps she isn’t glad. Perhaps she is disappointed.
She shakes herself. Glad, disappointed … She is the Rat. Life is simple for rats. She does what she has to, no more or less. More and less are for humans. More and less are this hall, the empty space, the white one’s gesture-that-was-not-a-gesture. The Rat has no part in that. She will not be human, no matter what happens. Only tonight the moonlight tempted her in.
Her foot brushes the dead owl. A rat would sniff it and leave it: scarce tricky flesh, bony and unappetising. It is easier to steal food from the kitchens, and she has no other use for a bundle of bones and feathers. But she picks it up. She crosses the hall with it swinging from her grasp. She knocked the setting clot off her hand when she lowered her feet to the floor, and now she feels a fresh tickle of blood rolling down between her fingers. The scratch itself is throbbing. She will steal wine and honey from the kitchen, clean it and wrap it in a rag; even a rat would choose not to lose its paw.
The moon has moved. The rectangles of caged light have swept around and up, folding into the right angle of walls and floor. Now the middle of the floor is dark, and the line of silver is hidden. Soon the mountain will swallow the moon completely, and the hall will be dark, the game board extinguished. There will be no grand jeu tonight.
The Rat doesn’t give herself time to think; or perhaps it is the new gap in her head – the thought of a stone in her hand – that nudges her over the invisible boundary without hesitating. She crouches and puts the dead fledgling down in the middle of the space. She spreads the wings into a lopsided fan of feathers. The dark lies on it like dust. Blood drips from her hand onto the floor beside her toes. She looks up, but from here she can’t see the moon, only the bleached blue-black sky and the hump of the mountain.
She gets to her feet and stares into the darkness as if she is meeting someone’s gaze. Another drop of blood falls, but she seems not to notice it. She is listening for something else, something she doesn’t understand. Then she steps backwards out of the space, opening her arms wide, like an invitation.
2: Léo
When Léo wakes there’s a theme running through his head. For a second he can’t place it. It could be a dream: an elusive melody, a shape that broadens into something abstract, a fragment of poetry with
the sting of a half-remembered association. He rolls over, squeezing his eyes shut as if he can retreat into sleep, but it’s no good. It echoes in his brain, exasperating, taunting him. Then, abruptly, he recognises it. The bloody Bridges of Königsberg. It mingles with the noise of a door banging and plates clattering in the kitchen below. That must have been what woke him; otherwise he’d have slept late, drowsing uneasily after a night of near-insomnia.
He pulls the bedclothes more tightly round his shoulders, but now he’s awake he’s cold. The blankets are scratchy and thin, and the pillow feels damp to the touch. Last night the proprietor gave him a confidential smile as he said, ‘The Arnauld Suite, sir. I must say, it is an honour,’ and the maid looked at him sideways as she showed him the room, expecting him to be impressed by the draperies and the heavy gilt-framed portraits of grand jeu masters; but there are clusters of dark spots on the headboard where bedbugs are nesting in the cracks, and the mattress sags in the middle like a hammock. Every time he turned over in the night it jangled and creaked, and now there’s a spring digging into his ribs. At this moment, Chryseïs will be spread-eagled under Egyptian cotton sheets, taking up the whole of their bed. She’ll still be asleep, golden hair tangled, an errant smudge of eye-black smeared across her temple, while the curtains billow at the open French window and the scent of hot dust and traffic fumes mingles with the roses on the mantelpiece. Sometimes he feels like summer in the city will choke him, but right now, in this mildewed room, he’d give a year’s salary to be there, back in his old life. He drags his hands over his face, trying to wipe away the sticky feeling of not having slept properly, and sits up. The theme of the Bridges of Königsberg reasserts itself in his head. It’s like a stuck record, the move between the melody and the first development of the Eulerian path, then back to that infuriating tune … Out of all the games to get into his head, it has to be one he can’t stand. He gets out of bed, pulls on his trousers and shirt, and rings for shaving water. ‘And coffee,’ he adds, as the maid bobs a curtsy and turns to leave. She swings back to him, so eager she almost stumbles, and he notices without caring that they’ve sent him the prettiest one. ‘Coffee first. Make sure it’s hot.’
The Betrayals Page 1