A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  The doctor must have noticed the awkwardness since he hastened to change the subject. “I’m very intrigued by your family’s little talents,” he said, addressing Aunt Rosaline. “Your control over the most banal objects is quite simply fascinating! Please forgive my indiscretion, but might I ask you what your specialty is, madam?”

  Aunt Rosaline dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “Paper. I smooth out, I restore, I mend.” She grabbed the wine menu, unceremoniously tore it, and then, with a mere slide of the finger, resealed the edges.

  “That’s most interesting,” commented the doctor, twisting the little points of his moustache while a waiter served the soup.

  “I should say so,” the aunt said, puffing herself up. “I’ve saved archives of immense historic value from decay. Genealogists, restorers, curators, our branch of the family is at the service of Artemis’s legacy.”

  “Is that the case for you, too?” asked Bartholomew, turning his sparkling smile towards Ophelia.

  She didn’t get the chance to correct him by saying: “It was the case, sir.” Her aunt took it upon herself to answer for her, between two spoonfuls of soup: “My niece is an excellent reader.”

  “A reader?” repeated the perplexed first mate and doctor in unison.

  “I ran a museum,” explained Ophelia, succinctly. With her eyes, she beseeched her aunt to let it drop. She didn’t want to talk about what belonged to her former life, especially not in the vicinity of Thorn’s long fingers tightening around the soup spoon. The image of her family waving farewell with scarves from the watchtower haunted her. She wanted to finish her vegetable velouté and go to bed.

  Unfortunately, Aunt Rosaline was cut from the same cloth as her mother. They weren’t sisters for nothing. She was keen to impress Thorn. “No, no, no, it’s much more than that, don’t be so modest! Gentlemen, my niece can empathize with objects, go back into their past, and draw up highly reliable evaluations.”

  “Sounds like fun!” enthused Bartholomew. “Would you agree to give us a little demonstration, dear child?” He pulled on a chain attached to his fine uniform. Ophelia thought at first that it was a fob watch, but she was wrong. “This gold medal is my lucky charm. The man who gave it to me informed me that it had belonged to an emperor of the old world. I’d so love to know more!”

  “I can’t.” Ophelia retrieved a long brown hair from her soup. She could gather as many curls as possible at her nape, using hairpins, ties, and slides, but they still managed to escape.

  Bartholomew was put out. “You can’t?”

  “Deontology prevents me, sir. It’s not the past of the object that I retrace, it’s that of the owners. I would be violating your private life.”

  “It’s the ethical code of readers,” confirmed Aunt Rosaline, revealing her horse’s teeth. “A private reading is only permitted with the consent of the owner.”

  Ophelia turned her glasses towards her godmother, but she was determined that, at all costs, her niece should distinguish herself in the eyes of her betrothed. Indeed, the gnarled hands slowly rested the cutlery on the tablecloth and moved no more. Thorn was paying attention. Or then, he was no longer hungry.

  “In that case, I grant you that permission!” Bartholomew declared, very predictably. “I want to get to know my emperor!” He handed her his old gold medal, which matched his stripes and his teeth. Ophelia first examined it through her glasses. One thing was certain, this charm didn’t date back to the old world. In a hurry to get it over with, she unbuttoned her gloves. As soon as she closed her fingers around the medal, lightning flashes shot out between her half-open eyelids. Ophelia let herself be immersed, without yet interpreting the stream of sensations flooding into her, from the most recent to the oldest. A reading always proceeded in an anticlockwise direction.

  Promises in the air, whispered to a pretty girl in the street. It’s so boring up there, facing the infinite alone. The little wife and the kids are waiting for him at home. They’re far away, they almost don’t exist. Journey follows journey without leaving any trace. As do women. The boredom is stronger than the remorse. Suddenly, there’s a white flash from a black cape. It’s a knife. It’s for Ophelia, this knife, a husband is taking revenge. The blade hits the medal, in the pocket of the uniform, and is thus deflected from its mortal trajectory. Ophelia is still bored. A hand of three kings, surrounded by bursts of anger, is worth a lovely medal to him. Ophelia feels herself getting younger. The teacher summons him to the rostrum with a kind smile. He gives him a present. It shines, it’s pretty.

  “Well?” asked the first mate, amused.

  Ophelia put her gloves back on and returned his lucky charm to him. “You were duped,” she murmured. “It’s a medal of merit. A simple prize for a child.”

  The gold teeth disappeared with Bartholomew’s smile. “Excuse me? You can’t have read carefully, miss.”

  “It’s a medallion for a child,” insisted Ophelia. “It isn’t real gold and it isn’t even half a century old. That man you beat at cards, he lied to you.”

  Aunt Rosaline coughed nervously; this was not the feat she’d hoped for from her niece. The doctor suddenly developed a passionate interest in the inside of his plate. Thorn’s hand wound up his fob watch with obvious boredom.

  Since the first mate seemed crushed by this revelation, Ophelia took pity on him. “It’s no less excellent a lucky charm. That medal still saved you from that jealous husband.”

  “Ophelia!” said Rosaline, choking. The rest of the meal continued in silence. When they rose from the table, Thorn was first to leave the room, without even mumbling a polite word.

  The following day, Ophelia explored the gondola of the airship, from one end to the other. With nose buried in scarf, she strolled around the port and starboard promenades; took tea in the sitting room; discreetly visited, with Bartholomew’s permission, the command bridge, the navigation cabin, and the radio room. Mostly, she killed time by looking at the view. Sometimes it was just an intensely blue sky as far as the eye could see, in which very few clouds popped up. Sometimes it was a damp fog that spluttered all over the windows. Sometimes it was the steeples of a town, when they were flying over an ark.

  Ophelia got used to the tables with no cloths, the cabins with no passengers, the armchairs with no occupants. No one ever came on board. Stops were rare: the airship never touched the ground. But the journey wasn’t shorter for that, as they made various detours to jettison postal packages and mailbags onto the arks.

  If Ophelia allowed her scarf to trail all over the place, Thorn never poked the tip of his snout out of his cabin. She saw him neither at breakfast nor at dinner, nor at tea, nor at supper. And that’s how it remained for several days.

  When the corridors started to feel chilly and the portholes to deck themselves in frosty lace, Aunt Rosaline declared that it was high time for her niece to have a real conversation with her fiancé. “If you don’t break the ice now, later it will be too late,” she warned her one evening, arms deep in a muff as they walked together on the bridge.

  The picture windows were ablaze in the sunset. Outdoors, it was doubtless terribly cold. Fragments of the old world, too small to become arks, were coated in frost and sparkled like a river of diamonds in the middle of the sky.

  “What’s it to you, whether Thorn and I like each other or not?” asked Ophelia, sighing and huddling inside her coat. “We’re getting married, isn’t that all that matters?”

  “Good grief! In my time, I was a more romantic marriageable girl than you.”

  “You’re my chaperone,” Ophelia reminded her. “Your role is to watch that nothing indecent happens to me, not to push me into the arms of that man.”

  “Indecent, indecent . . . there’s not too much risk on that score,” muttered Aunt Rosaline. “I hardly got the impression that you ignited uncontrollable desire in Mr. Thorn. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man
going to such lengths not to cross a woman’s path.”

  Ophelia couldn’t stifle a sideward smile, which, luckily, her aunt didn’t see.

  “You’re going to offer him a herbal tea,” her aunt suddenly decreed with a determined look. “A lime-blossom tea. It soothes the nerves, lime blossom.”

  “My dear aunt, it’s this man who insisted on marrying me, and not the other way round. I’m hardly going to go after him.”

  “I’m not asking you to make advances to him, I just want a bearable atmosphere for us in the days to come. You’re going to just grin and bear it, and be friendly to him!”

  Ophelia watched her shadow lengthening, widening and disappearing at her feet as the russet disc of the sun faded into the mist on the other side of the windows. Her darkened glasses adapted to the changing levels of light, gradually becoming paler. They were completely healed now. “I’ll think about it, aunt.”

  Rosaline held her by the chin to force her to look at her. Like most of the women in the family, her aunt was taller than her. With her fur hat and too-long teeth, she no longer looked like a horse, but like a marmot. “You must try your hardest, do you hear me?”

  Night had fallen behind the promenade windows. Ophelia was cold without and within, despite the scarf that was tightening its grip around her shoulders. Deep down, she knew that her aunt wasn’t wrong. They still knew nothing about the life that awaited them in the Pole.

  She would have to put aside the grievances she harbored against Thorn, long enough for a little talk.

  The Warning

  The shy knocks on the metal door got lost somewhere along the gangway. Darkness surrounded Ophelia and her little steaming tray. It wasn’t total darkness: the safety lights allowed one to distinguish the striped wallpaper, the numbers on the cabin doors, the vases of flowers on the consoles.

  Ophelia waited a few heartbeats, listened for a sound from the other side of the door, but only the background humming of the propellers cadenced the silence. She awkwardly gripped the tray with one glove and knocked again twice. No one opened to her.

  She had every right to come back later. Tray in hand, Ophelia carefully swiveled round. Immediately, she had to step backwards. Her back hit the door she’d just been turning from; the cup slopped a little of its herbal tea.

  Standing at full altitude, Thorn looked piercingly down at her. Far from softening his angular features, the safety lights deepened the scars and also magnified his fur’s spiky shadow on the corridor walls.

  Ophelia decided he was definitely much too tall for her.

  “What do you want?” He had asked his question in a flat voice, devoid of warmth, his Northern accent harshly stressing each consonant.

  Ophelia held her tray out to him. “My aunt insists that I serve you a herbal tea.” Her godmother would have disapproved of this candor, but Ophelia was a bad liar. Stiff as a stalagmite and with arms dangling, Thorn made not a move to take the cup she was handing to him. It made one wonder whether, deep down, he wasn’t more stupid than scornful.

  “It’s a lime-blossom tea,” she said. “Apparently, it sooth—”

  “Do you always speak so quietly?” he interrupted her, abruptly. “One can barely understand you.”

  Ophelia maintained a silence, and then spoke even more quietly: “Always.”

  Thorn frowned while seeming to search, in vain, for something worthy of interest in this slip of a woman, behind her heavy brown locks, behind her rectangular glasses, behind her old muffler. Ophelia became aware, after an endless face-to-face, that he wanted to access his cabin. She, along with her tray of herbal tea, stepped aside.

  Thorn had to bend his extendable form until he could fit under his door’s lintel. Ophelia remained on the threshold, encumbered by her tray. Thorn’s cabin, like all those in the airship, was very cramped. An upholstered bench that turned into a bed, a luggage rack, a narrow passage for moving around, a work surface at the back of the room with a writing case on it, and that was it. Ophelia found moving around her suite hard enough, but it was almost miraculous that Thorn could get into his without banging himself, left, right, and center.

  He pulled the cord of a ceiling bulb, threw his bear fur across the bench, and leant with both hands on the work surface. On it there were notebooks and pads covered in scrawls. Once he was leaning, back bent in two, over this bizarre paperwork, Thorn didn’t budge. Ophelia wondered whether he was thinking or reading. He seemed quite simply to have forgotten her, out in the corridor, but at least he hadn’t shut door behind him.

  It wasn’t in Ophelia’s nature to bother a man with questions, so she waited with all the patience in the world outside the cabin, frozen to the bone, creating clouds of condensation with every breath. She studied carefully the tense muscles at the nape; the bony wrists sticking out from the sleeves; the jutting shoulder blades under the tunic; the long, restless legs. This man was totally on edge, as though uncomfortable in this too-tall, too-thin body that was electrified by a constant tension.

  “Still there?” he grunted, not bothering to turn round. Ophelia realized that he wouldn’t touch the herbal tea, so, to lighten her load, drank it herself. The hot liquid did her good.

  “Am I distracting you?” she murmured, sipping at the cup.

  “You won’t survive.”

  Ophelia’s heart skipped a beat. She had to spit her tea back into the cup. It was either that, or it going down the wrong way. Thorn obstinately kept his back turned to her. She would have given anything to see him from the front and check he wasn’t making fun of her. “What is it that you reckon I won’t survive?” she asked.

  “The Pole. The court. Our engagement. You should go back to your mother’s apron strings while you still can.”

  Disconcerted, Ophelia couldn’t take in these barely concealed threats. “Are you renouncing me?”

  Thorn’s shoulders tensed up. He half-turned his lanky scarecrow body and looked at her, uncaringly. Ophelia wondered whether the twist of his mouth was more smile or grimace. “Renouncing?” he rasped. “You have a very saccharine vision of our customs.”

  “I’m not following you,” whispered Ophelia.

  “This marriage is as loathsome to me as it is to you, be in no doubt, but I have committed to your family in the name of my own family. I’m not in a position to go back on my pledge without paying the price, and it’s a high one.”

  Ophelia took the time to take these words in. “I’m not in a position to either, sir, if that’s what you’re hoping from me. For me to reject this marriage for no admissible reason would be to dishonor my family. I would be summarily banished.”

  Thorn knitted his brows—one being sliced in two by his scar—even more. Ophelia’s response wasn’t the one he would have liked to hear. “Your customs are more flexible than ours,” he countered with a condescending look. “I’ve sniffed around the nest you grew up in. Nothing to compare with the world that awaits you.”

  Ophelia tightened her grip around the cup. This man had turned to tactics of intimidation and she didn’t like it. He didn’t want her—she understood that perfectly and didn’t hold it against him. But for him to expect the woman he’d asked in marriage to take all responsibility for a split, that was pretty cowardly. “You’re deliberately painting a bleak picture of the situation,” she accused him in a whisper. “What benefit can our families hope to reap from our union if I’m considered not up to it? You’re affording me an importance I don’t have . . . ”

  She let an angel pass before finishing, and watching for Thorn’s reaction: “ . . . or you’re keeping something important from me.”

  The metallic eyes became more piercing. This time, Thorn didn’t look at her over his shoulder, from above and afar. On the contrary, he looked at her very closely while rubbing his ill-shaven jaw. He made a face when he noticed that Ophelia’s scarf, which hung down to the ground, was flicking back
and forth like the tail of an annoyed cat.

  “The more I see of you, the more my first impression is reinforced,” he grumbled. “Too sickly, too slow, too pampered . . . You’re not cut out for the place I’m taking you to. If you follow me there, you won’t last through winter. Just you wait and see.”

  Ophelia held the look he was boring into her. A look of iron. A look of defiance. Her great-uncle’s words resounded in her memory and she heard herself replying to him: “You don’t know me, sir.”

  She placed the cup of herbal tea back on its tray and, slowly, calmly, she closed the door between them.

  Several more days went by without Ophelia coming across Thorn again, whether in the dining room or at the turn of a gangway. Their exchange had left her perplexed. In order not to worry her aunt unnecessarily, she had lied to her: Thorn was too busy to receive her, they’d not said a word to each other. While her godmother was already cooking up new romantic strategies, Ophelia nibbled at the seams of her gloves. On what kind of chessboard had the Doyennes placed her? The dangers evoked by Thorn, were they real, or was he just trying to terrify her in the hope that she’d go back home? Was her position at court really as assured as her family believed it to be?

  Plagued by her aunt, Ophelia needed to be alone. She shut herself inside the airship’s lavatories, took off her glasses, pressed her forehead to the freezing porthole, and stayed like that for a long time, her breath leaving an increasingly dense veil of condensation on the glass. She could see nothing outside, due to the snow encrusting the porthole, but she knew it was night-time. The sun, driven away by the Polar winter, hadn’t shown itself for three days.

  Suddenly, the electric bulb flickered feverishly and the floor started swaying under Ophelia’s feet. She left the lavatories. All around her, the airship was screeching, groaning, and creaking while gearing up for mooring, right in the middle of a snow-storm.