The Betrayals

by Bridget Collins

  And then she makes the gesture of conjuration, inviting him into the space.

  For an instant the air seems to thicken. She straightens, and there’s a gleam in her eye, a tension at the corner of her mouth. Daring him. Is she serious? He can’t believe it; an incredulous part of him wants to laugh. What would happen if he took the challenge? When was the last time anyone here even saw an adversarial game? And yet somehow he knows that it would work, that he could trust her to spin and deflect and mirror his own moves back to him, like a dance, like a duel, that between them they would play a dazzling, brilliant Midsummer Game.

  All he has to do is perform the assauture. He feels the possibility of it singing in his backbone and in his shoulder blades. And if he did …

  She reaches out: it’s not a grand jeu gesture, but a human one. She sees him glance from her hand back to her face. There’s something naked about her expression, as if they’re alone. Is she pleading with him not to expose her? No, it isn’t that. It’s level, intense, the look of an equal, but … what is it? He blinks. He can’t stand still for ever, but something is making him feel unsteady, eroding the ground under his feet … She looks so like Carfax – she is so like Carfax – that he’s afraid he won’t be able to speak, after all. Coward. Now is the moment to shame her, if he wants to.

  She’s so like Carfax. She even plays the grand jeu the way Carfax did. What wouldn’t he give to see Carfax standing there, with the same steady eyes, the same elegance, the same hand beckoning …?

  He catches his breath. A sickening note sings in his ears: the whole world has turned hollow, is going to break. He staggers. Distantly a servant murmurs, ‘Sir? May I …?’ but he jerks his arm away, unable to take his gaze away from her face. That pale bony face, the grey-green eyes, the curl of hair that’s escaped from her cap, the tiny scar below her ear. Unmistakably a woman’s face – but … It’s so familiar. The face he’s dreamt about for years. Seen in his nightmares, underlined by the great gory grin of a cut throat. No. It’s crazy. He’s crazy. His sleepless night is catching up with him.

  But that conjuration … that invitation. No, he isn’t crazy.

  He says, choking a little, ‘Aimé?’

  Silence. He doesn’t look away from her, but somehow he knows that the audience’s attention has reverted from him to her, as if it’s her turn to move.

  She holds his gaze for what seems like a lifetime. Her mouth is a little open, her cheeks slapped-red.

  Then she swings round and strides out of the Great Hall, crossing the line of the terra without ceremony, as if it’s a mere crack in the stones.

  33: the Magister Ludi

  She walks blindly, empty of any thought except the need to get away. She can’t think about what has happened; all she cares about is putting distance between herself and Martin and the other open mouths, the hungry eyes. Suddenly black clouds boil up around her knees and sweep towards her from the far corners of the corridor. She has to stop and bow her head. A moment ago she was calm, but now she is breathing hard and drenched in sweat. Will they send someone after her? She glances over her shoulder – blinking away the billowing blackness – and sees movement in the doorway of the Great Hall. She sets off again, breaking into an ungainly, panicky run; behind her there are footsteps. A man’s voice calls, ‘Wait! Magister!’

  She reaches the end of the corridor. On her left a spiral staircase leads up to the Capitulum; on her right, a door leads out into the courtyard. She feels years older than this morning, when she crossed the monochrome pattern, sick with stage-fright: but when she goes out into the sunlit heat it’s clear that hardly an hour has passed. She hurries across the court to the library.

  Inside it’s dim and cool, full of the scent of old paper and beeswax. All the attendants and archivists are in the Great Hall, of course, so it’s silent and still, as though it has been abandoned for centuries. She realises with a jolt that she is breaking the rules by being here alone. If she wanted to set a fire, there’d be no one here to stop her. She laughs aloud. It has a high, hysterical note, and she covers her mouth. If anyone heard her … Her cuff smells of frankincense and amber, and she lowers her hand again, in case she gags. This morning she dabbed scent on her wrists, behind her ears and in the notch of her collarbone – like a silly girl, not a Magister Ludi. But she thought it was harmless. She’d imagined Léo Martin in the capital – thinking of her, perhaps, as he sipped coffee at a rickety table on a pavement and caught sight of the date in the newspaper; she never dreamt that he would have been asked to stay. Another surge of sweat prickles as she remembers seeing him on the front row, next to the Gold Medallists. Did she falter? Did anyone see? Not that it matters, now, after … She scrubs her wrist on her gown until the skin burns, but the perfume lingers.

  She has reached the staircase. She climbs it two steps at a time, breathing hard, and unlocks the door to the Biblioteca Ludi. Dust swirls and settles. It’s a relief to shut the door behind her, but the room is stuffy and airless, and somehow the old comfort of possession has lost its power. If this is hers, this chaos of overcrowded bookshelves and forgotten jetsam, what does that say about being Magister Ludi? And what sort of Magister Ludi walks out of a Midsummer Game? Her guts wring themselves tighter. It was unforgivable. The Magister Cartae will say that she is weak, spineless, neurotic: and he’ll be right. She goes to the desk and leans on it. She knows it’s her own body that’s trembling, but as the judders run up her arms she has the sensation that Montverre itself is trying to shake her off. She has never doubted her right to be here until now. There’s a glass paperweight, gritty with dust, next to her papers, and she picks it up and squeezes it. Solid glass against her solid bones, enough ache to keep the tears at bay …

  There’s a spate of footsteps, running up the stairs – she scarcely has time to hear them, to turn – and then Léo is there, flinging the door open with such violence that it slams into the wall and lets loose a trickle of plaster. He says, ‘Aimé.’

  ‘How dare you?’ she says, and he flinches – stupidly, as if he didn’t expect her to be angry. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done, you—’ She starts to say bastard; but suddenly she sees the word scrawled on a wall in black ink, and it dies on her tongue. ‘Get out,’ she says, like ice.

  ‘I’m not going until you talk to me.’

  ‘What else do you want from me, Martin? You’ve destroyed my career. How dare you stand up in the middle of a Midsummer Game, my Midsummer Game, you stupid, self-absorbed, arrogant—’

  ‘I only – I thought – your game—’

  She swings her arm. Glass shatters against the wall beside his head, with a crash. A second later, in the silence, she realises what she’s done. He glances at the round-backed fragments around his feet, the rough demi-semispheres still glinting with trapped bubbles, and swallows. A foot to the left, and the paperweight would have hit him. Was it too close for comfort, or did she miss? They stare at each other. Her breath is unsteady; trying not to cry is like trying not to be sick.

  She’s never seen him like this: pale, blundering, his eyes fixed on her as if she’s the only steady point against a rocking horizon. In the pause she can hear ten years’ worth of reproaches.

  He says again, ‘Aimé?’

  ‘Aimé’s dead.’

  He shakes his head, but slowly. ‘You’re a woman. You always were. Yes? I mean, you’re not a man – pretending to be a woman?’

  She laughs, incredulous. ‘Why would a man pretend to be a woman, here?’ He blinks, and an aftershock of fury goes through her: that casual blindness, that stupidity in the face of anything that doesn’t affect him personally. ‘It was the only way I could come here. Females aren’t allowed to be scholars, remember?’

  She shouldn’t have said it. She should have denied it. But it’s too late, and the admission is like a pane of glass evaporating. Suddenly they are in the same room, for the first time. He says, ‘Yes. I see,’ and the tone of his voice is oddly humble. Maybe, if he thinks
about it, he does see.

  She draws in a long breath. ‘You didn’t imagine I’d fake my own death and then dress up as a woman? Why? To seduce you?’

  ‘Well, no,’ he says. ‘Hardly a foolproof tactic.’ And then he glances at her with a brief glint of amusement, and it comes back to her in a stinging rush, what it was like to be Aimé – especially, to be Aimé with Léo. The sparks that were never quite friendly, the hostility that was never quite disagreeable. The heat of it building, until that final night – good God, why would she remind herself of that?

  She turns away. She has buried those memories for so long that they surge up like undigested fragments, tasting of bile. Another life. Another person. In one sense she was Aimé, yes, but not now, no longer, never again.

  ‘But your brother … Aimé did exist.’ He says it slowly, as if he’s working through a tricky quaintise. ‘You had a brother. Who would have come here, if you hadn’t taken his place. And he really did kill himself. I mean, you didn’t fake—’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ How can he be so obtuse? ‘Aimé’s gone.’ A breath later she adds, ‘I loved him.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Forgive me,’ he says, each word like a weight. ‘I’m still taking it in. I’m sure you did, he was very …’ He trails off: she can almost see the effort it takes him to remember that the Aimé he knew isn’t the one they’re talking about now. ‘I should have known,’ he says. ‘Part of me did know. Why didn’t I see it before?’

  ‘Because,’ she says, ‘you never actually looked at me, did you?’

  She doesn’t have to be watching him to know that he starts to speak. But he can’t protest, after all; he thinks better of it. She tries not to like him more for that. ‘You look like him,’ he says, ‘I mean – I thought it was a family resemblance … You’ve changed so much. And …’ He pauses, as if he’s expecting her to answer; but she’s not going to make it easier for him. ‘How did you do it?’ he says. ‘All that time, no one noticed. I suppose we all thought you were strange, but we never dreamt – it must have been difficult.’

  ‘Not that difficult.’ Why should she tell him what it was like, to know she could never be herself, never undress – never even take off her gown, in case someone saw the bandages under her shirt? To push her voice deeper than was comfortable, to dread the days she menstruated, to have to sneak her bloodied rags into the servants’ waste-buckets and claim fever or diarrhoea when her cramps were so bad they blanked out everything else in her head? Once, when Léo saw a stray blot of blood on her floor, she had to nick her jaw deliberately with a razor to explain it; she still has the scar, under her ear. But worst of all was the constant fear that somehow she would give herself away: not because of biology but something else, some violation of their mysterious, untaught code. She cultivated arrogance, the most masculine mask she could think of, but at times it felt so flimsy she almost broke out in hysterical laughter, dreading the moment when someone would squint at her and say, ‘Hey, wait …’ He wouldn’t understand, not even if she tried to explain: two years of bleak, fragile, lonely happiness, until he got under her skin.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘well, you got away with it, didn’t you? You must’ve thought we were all idiots. Especially me.’ He pauses. ‘Were you laughing up your sleeve at us, all that time? Sniggering. Poor pathetic Martin, can’t see what’s in front of him. Doesn’t even realise he’s being beaten by a girl.’

  ‘Is that why you care?’

  He doesn’t seem to hear her. ‘I should’ve known – I should’ve … Emile always said you were using me. All that time. Lying about who you were. Was any of it true? Did you ever say anything you meant?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Letting us think you were someone you weren’t – inventing a whole life for yourself.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she says. ‘Why was it any of your business? Why does it matter? If I hadn’t lied, I wouldn’t have been able to—’

  ‘I thought you were dead!’ His voice cracks. He blinks, shocked, as if it was someone else who said it, not him; and then, with a strange slow exhalation, his knees fold and he subsides to the floor. He crouches there like an animal, his head bent. She stands still, frozen, uncomprehending; until he gives a sudden gasp, scrubbing at his face with his sleeve, and she realises he’s crying.

  ‘Aimé died,’ she says. It sounds hollow. ‘My brother died. I never lied about that.’

  He says, forcing the words out, ‘I thought you were dead. I thought it was my fault. You let me think that …’

  ‘It was,’ she says. ‘It was your fault.’ It’s like finally being sick, after hours of rising nausea: a disgusting relief. She’d rather feel anger than shame.

  He raises his head. His face is blotchy.

  ‘He sent a telegram,’ she says. ‘The night the marks were meant to go up. He asked me to come home. He said he didn’t feel safe on his own. So I packed. I was going to catch the sleeper. I would have been with him by the next morning. But—’ She turns away from him. He looks obscene, unmanned and raw-skinned. ‘You came to find me,’ she goes on, staring unseeing at the sunlit slope outside the window, the road down to the village. ‘You told me I’d won the Gold Medal. You made me promise to stay. So I stayed. And when I got home, it was too late.’

  ‘I didn’t know. How could I have known?’

  ‘You lied to me!’

  ‘No – I didn’t lie, I got it wrong, I truly thought—’

  ‘You lied to me. Don’t pretend it was a mistake – you submitted the wrong game, you made them fail me! And then you kissed me.’ She tries to control her voice, but it’s rising and rising. ‘What did you want? To humiliate me, every way you could?’

  He’s on his feet. ‘It wasn’t like that. You know it wasn’t.’

  She swings round to face him, drawing breath. He meets her eyes. With his shaggy, unoiled hair, and the weight he’s lost, he looks young again. His eyelashes are still wet.

  And suddenly, when she most needs it, her anger is gone, sinking away to ash. ‘Yes,’ she says, and her throat aches. ‘Yes, I know.’ Confusion flickers across his face. She shuts her eyes. What if she admits to herself that he wasn’t the enemy? She’s been so angry with him, for so long: that he submitted the wrong game without asking her, that he told her she’d won when she hadn’t, that he kissed her. Even his diary didn’t absolve him, because he was only lying to himself. Self-indulgent, self-absorbed. Hadn’t he said he wanted to find a way to beat her? And he’d done it. Once and for all … He fooled himself, but he didn’t fool her. She’d seen through it. Labelling it ‘love’ – she shrinks from the memory of the kiss, of reading about the kiss later – ‘love’ just meant he hadn’t had to think about her; he could tell himself it wasn’t sabotage, it was a mistake. It was the best of excuses, an unassailable move.

  And yet, what if …? The sight of his face has caught her off balance, as though all this time she’s been the naïve one. She has blamed him for so long that now she’s lost. If it wasn’t his fault, then …? The question is an abyss at her feet: she’s tried so hard not to look at it directly. But now it’s there, undeniable, and she knows what the answer is. It wasn’t Léo’s fault, it was hers. Wholly hers. She’d read the telegram, and he hadn’t; she knew Aimé, and he didn’t. If it hadn’t been for her own sentiment and pride and (yes) desire …

  She sits down at the desk. How many times has she run over the memory of that morning in her head? She climbed the stairs at home, under the crumbling plaster and dingy scrolling paint, calling Aimé’s name. It was nearly midday, already warm, and in the silence she could hear a fly throwing itself against a window, the buzz-crunch of more impacts than a person could stand. ‘Aimé,’ she’d said, ‘Aimé,’ – that name which was his and hers, the name she’d stolen – and then she pushed open the bathroom door, and saw. If only it was a moving picture she could reverse it, so that as she walked backwards down the overgrown drive the blood would trickle upward
s, defying gravity, sucked back by the wound in his throat and gathering force until the last drops were enough to knit his skin back together. And she would step, heel-first, into the train, and let it take her back to Montverre, all the way to the time before she saw her name, his name, on the noticeboard and knew Léo had lied to her.

  Aimé gave her so much, and she’d let him down. If it hadn’t been for him … She can see him now, that night when he’d got the summons for his Entrance viva: he’d been sitting at the piano, hands crossed behind his head, staring at the damp patches on the ceiling. ‘What a drag,’ he said, as if they were in the middle of a conversation. ‘Montverre sounds like a prison anyway. I’d much rather stay here and read.’

  ‘You’re lucky you get the choice,’ she said, turning a page, refusing to be drawn. It was an old sore point – the subject of endless childhood taunts – that Montverre didn’t accept women.

  ‘They can’t teach me anything. It’s a waste of time.’ He grinned at her. When she didn’t answer he jabbed at the top C, plinking until she rolled her eyes. ‘I’m a de Courcy. I’ve been playing the grand jeu since I could read. I don’t need three years in a monastery.’

  ‘Don’t be so big-headed.’

  ‘And yet … if I don’t go, I’ll be letting down the family name.’

  ‘We’d survive.’ She went back to her book, while he went back to twiddling on C-sharp. But a second later she lowered it again. ‘You don’t mean it, Aimé?’

  ‘What if I do?’ He hunched his shoulders as if her stare was a jet of freezing water. Suddenly his voice was flat, with the weight of certainty behind it; that casual spontaneity had been fake. ‘I don’t want to go. I’ve made up my mind, actually. I’m not going. So there’s no reason to do a viva, is there?’