A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  “I was looking for you, my dear girl. Where on earth did you lose your way?”

  “Who are these people, madam? Members of your family?”

  Berenilde’s parted lips revealed a glimpse of pearly teeth. She approached Ophelia to look at the photographs with her. Now they were standing side by side, the difference in height between them was notable. She may not have been as tall as her nephew, but Berenilde was a head taller than Ophelia. “Certainly not!” she replied with her delightful accent, laughing heartily. “Those are the former owners of the manor. They’ve been dead for years.”

  Ophelia found it a bit strange that Berenilde would have inherited their estate if they weren’t part of the family. She looked again at the severe portraits. A shadow deepened their eyes, from lid to brow. Makeup? The photographs weren’t sharp enough for her to be sure. “And the baby?” she asked.

  Berenilde’s smile became more reserved, almost sad. “As long as this child lives, this room will also live. I could cover it in dustsheets, remove the furniture, brick up the windows, but it would always remain looking exactly as you see it now. It’s certainly better this way.”

  Another trompe l’oeil? Ophelia found it a strange idea, but not that strange. After all, the Animists certainly left their mark on their homes. She wanted to ask what this power was that generated such illusions, and what had become of the baby in the photographs, but Berenilde stopped her short by suggesting that she sit with her in the armchairs. A pink lamp bathed them in a pool of light.

  “Do you like to embroider, Ophelia?”

  “I’m too clumsy for it, madam.”

  Berenilde placed a hoop on her knees, and her delicate hands, adorned with tattoos, serenely guided the needle. She was as smooth as her nephew was angular. “Yesterday, you defined yourself as ‘ordinary,’ today as ‘clumsy,’” she trilled mellifluously. “And that tiny voice that swallows every word you say! I’m going to end up thinking you don’t want me to like you, my dear child. Either you are too modest, or you are false.”

  Despite its cozy comfort and elegant tapestries, Ophelia felt ill at ease in this room. It felt as though she were violating a sanctuary in which all the toys looked accusingly at her, from the clockwork monkeys to the dislocated puppets. There was nothing more sinister than a child’s bedroom with no child. “No, madam, I really am very clumsy. An accident with a mirror when I was thirteen.”

  Berenilde’s needle remained suspended in midair. “An accident with a mirror? I confess that I don’t quite understand.”

  “I remained stuck in two places at the same time, for several hours,” muttered Ophelia. “Since that day, my body no longer obeys me as readily. I endured some physiotherapy, but the doctor predicted that I’d be left with some aftereffects. Some discrepancies.”

  A smile spread across Berenilde’s lovely face. “You’re amusing! You please me.”

  With her muddy boots and messy hair, Ophelia felt like nothing but a little peasant beside this dazzling society lady. In an impulse full of affection, Berenilde left her embroidery hoop balanced on her knees and seized Ophelia’s gloved hands in her own.

  “I can imagine that you’re feeling a little nervous, my dear girl. All this is so new to you! Don’t hesitate to confide your concerns to me, just as you would to your mother.”

  Ophelia refrained from telling her that her mother was probably the last person in the world to whom she would confide her concerns. And more than pouring out her feelings, it was concrete answers that she needed.

  Almost instantly, Berenilde released her hands, apologizing. “I’m so sorry, I sometimes forget that you’re a reader.”

  Ophelia took a while to understand what was making her uncomfortable. “I can’t read anything with my gloves on, madam. And even if I took them off, you could hold my hand without fear. I don’t read living beings, just objects.”

  “I’ll know better in future.”

  “Your nephew informed me that he works in a finance office. So who is his employer?”

  Berenilde’s eyes, as sparkling and exquisite as precious stones, widened. She let out a crystalline laugh that filled the whole room.

  “Did I say something stupid, madam?” asked an astonished Ophelia.

  “Oh, no, it’s Thorn who’s to blame,” said Berenilde, still laughing. “I recognize his style there, as economical with his words as with his good manners!” Lifting a flounce on her dress, she wiped the corner of her eyelids and became more serious again. “You should know that he doesn’t just work ‘in a finance office,’ as you say. He’s Lord Farouk’s Treasurer, the principal financial administrator of the Citaceleste and all the provinces of the Pole.”

  Since Ophelia’s glasses were turning blue, Berenilde gently confirmed: “Yes, my dear, your future husband is the chief treasurer of the realm.”

  It took Ophelia some time to digest this revelation. This shaggy, rude hulk of a man as a top-ranking official—it defied the imagination. Why had they gone and betrothed a simple girl like her to such an individual? It was as if it weren’t actually Ophelia being punished, but Thorn.

  “I can’t really envisage my position within your clan,” she admitted. “Leaving aside children, what are you expecting of me?”

  “What on earth do you mean?” exclaimed Berenilde.

  Ophelia took refuge behind her impassive, ingenuous mask, but inside she was surprised by this reaction. Her question wasn’t that incongruous, surely? “I ran a museum on Anima,” she explained, quietly. “Are they hoping I’ll resume that work here, or something similar? I don’t want to sponge off you, not make my own contribution.”

  What Ophelia was mainly trying to negotiate was her autonomy. A pensive Berenilde turned her lovely limpid eyes towards some picture books in a case. “A museum? Yes, I can imagine that that might be an amusing occupation. Life for women up here can be boring—we’re not entrusted with important duties, as is the way where you’re from. We’ll discuss it further once your position at court is sufficiently established. You’re going to have to be patient, my sweet child.”

  If there was one thing Ophelia wasn’t impatient for, it was, indeed, joining this nobility. All she really knew about it was what her forebear’s journal had told her—We spend our days playing cards and walking round the gardens—and that didn’t appeal to her. “And how does one establish it, this position at court?” she asked, rather concerned. “Will I have to attend social events and pay homage to your family spirit?”

  Berenilde returned to her embroidery. A shadow had crossed the clear pool of her eyes. The needle piercing the hoop’s taut canvas was less lively. For some reason, which escaped Ophelia, she had upset her.

  “You won’t see Lord Farouk other than at a distance, my dear. As for social events, yes, but not right now. We’ll wait until your marriage at the end of the summer. Your Doyennes requested that the traditional year of betrothal be strictly adhered to, so we could get to know you better. And,” added Berenilde, with a slight frown, “it will allow us time to prepare you for the court.”

  Feeling uncomfortable due to the surfeit of cushions, Ophelia shifted to the edge of the armchair and contemplated the muddy toes of her boots, poking out from under her nightdress. Her doubts were justified: Berenilde wasn’t revealing to her what she was really thinking. She raised her head and let her attention wander through the window. The first glimmers of daylight were piercing the mist with golden arrows and casting shadows at the foot of the trees.

  “This park, this bedroom . . . ” Ophelia whispered, “so they’re just visual effects?”

  Berenilde lifted the needle, calm as a mountain lake. “Yes, my dear girl, but they’re not my doing. The Dragons don’t know how to conjure up illusions; that’s more a specialty of our rival clan.”

  A rival clan from whom Berenilde had still inherited an estate, noted Ophelia to herself. Maybe she wasn’
t on such bad terms with them? “And your power, madam, what is it?”

  “What an indiscreet question!” Berenilde gently chided, without looking up from her embroidery hoop. “Does one ask a lady her age? It seems to me that it’s more the role of your fiancé to inform you about all that.”

  Since Ophelia was looking disconcerted, she let out a sympathetic little sigh and said: “Thorn really is incorrigible! I guess he leaves you in a fog, never bothering to satisfy your curiosity.”

  “Neither of us is very talkative,” commented Ophelia, choosing her words carefully. “I fear, however, with all due respect, that your nephew doesn’t hold me very close to his heart.”

  Berenilde grabbed a cigarette case from a pocket in her dress. Moments later, she was blowing a tongue of blue smoke between her parted lips. “Thorn’s heart . . . ” she murmured, rolling the “r”s. “A myth? A desert island? A desiccated lump of flesh? If it’s any consolation to you, my dear child, I’ve never seen him enamored of anyone whatsoever.”

  Ophelia recalled the unusual eloquence with which he had spoken of his aunt to her. “He holds you in very high esteem.”

  “Yes,” said Berenilde, cheering up and tapping her cigarette case on the edge of a sweet tin. “I love him like a mother, and I believe that he, in turn, feels a sincere affection for me, which touches me even more as that doesn’t come naturally to him. For a long time I despaired of his ever knowing any woman, and I know he’s annoyed that I rather forced his hand. Your glasses often change color!” she suddenly said, amused. “It’s entertaining!”

  “The sun’s rising, madam, and they adjust to the light.” Ophelia looked at Berenilde through the grim gray that had appeared on her lenses, and decided to give her a more honest explanation. “As they do to my mood. The truth is, I was wondering whether Thorn wouldn’t have hoped for a woman more like you. I fear I’m the polar opposite of such a desire.”

  “You’re afraid, or you’re actually relieved?” With her long cigarette pinched between two fingers, Berenilde studied the expression on her guest’s face as though indulging in a particularly amusing game. “Relax, Ophelia, I’m setting no trap for you. Do you really imagine that your feelings are unfamiliar to me? You’re forcibly promised to a man you don’t know and who turns out to be as warm as an iceberg!” She stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of the sweet tin while shaking her little curls into a blond waltz. “But I disagree with you, my child. Thorn is a man of duty and I think he just got stuck on the idea of never marrying. Right now you’re jostling him out of his little routine, that’s all.”

  “And why didn’t he want to? Honoring one’s family by starting one’s own, isn’t that what everyone normally aspires to?” Ophelia used a finger to push her glasses back up her nose, while chuckling inside. It was actually her saying that!

  “He was unable to do so,” Berenilde gently corrected her. “Not wishing to offend you, but why else would I have looked so far afield for a wife for him?”

  “Does madam desire to be served anything here?” It was an old gentleman that had just interrupted them from the door of the room, amazed to have found them in this part of the manor. Berenilde casually threw her embroidery hoop onto the cushion of a chair. “Some tea and orange biscuits! Have them served in the little sitting room, we’re not staying here. What were we saying, my dear child?” she asked, turning her big turquoise eyes back to Ophelia.

  “That Thorn couldn’t get married. I must admit, I can’t quite understand what could stop a man from taking a wife, if that’s his wish.”

  A ray of sunlight decided to enter the room and planted a golden kiss on Berenilde’s delicate neck. The little curls clustered at her nape gleamed.

  “Because he’s a bastard.”

  Ophelia blinked several times, dazzled by the light emerging beyond the windowpanes. Thorn had been born to an adulteress?

  “His late father, my brother, had the weakness of character to frequent a woman from another clan,” Berenilde explained to her, “and, as ill luck would have it, the family of this slut has, since then, fallen into disgrace.”

  The perfect oval of her face had contorted at the word “slut.” This is more than disdain, Ophelia thought, this is pure hatred. Berenilde held out her lovely tattooed hand for her to help her up.

  “It was touch and go whether Thorn would be banished from the court along with his harlot of a mother,” she continued in a more composed voice. “With my dearest brother having had the brilliant idea of dying before he’d officially recognized him, I had to use all my influence to save his son from disaster. I succeeded rather well, as you can see for yourself.”

  Berenilde shut the double door with a resounding bang. Her pinched smile softened. Her demeanor turned from bitter to sweet. “You keep examining the tattoos that my mother and I bear on our hands. Be warned, my little Ophelia, that they are the mark of the Dragons. That is a recognition to which Thorn can never lay claim. There isn’t a female in our clan who would accept to marry a bastard whose parent was disgraced.”

  Ophelia pondered on these words. On Anima, a relation who brought the honor of the family seriously into disrepute could be banished, but between that and condemning a whole clan . . . Thorn was right, the customs here weren’t gentle.

  The sonorous chime of a grandfather clock rang out in the distance. Berenilde, deep in her own thoughts, suddenly seemed to return to reality. “The croquet game at Countess Ingrid’s! I was about to forget all about it.”

  She leant her long body, supple and smooth, over Ophelia to stroke her cheek. “I won’t invite you to join us, you must still be tired from your journey. So, take tea in the sitting room, rest in your bedroom, and use my lackeys as you please!”

  Ophelia watched Berenilde set off with a swish of her dress, along the gallery with the ghostly sheets. She wondered what on earth a lackey could be.

  The Getaway

  Mother, Father.

  The goose quill remained long suspended over the paper once it had scrawled these two little words. Ophelia simply didn’t know how to continue. She’d never had a talent, whether speaking or writing, for expressing what affected her closely, for defining precisely what she felt.

  Ophelia looked deep into the flames in the hearth. She’d settled herself on the fur rug of the little sitting room with, in lieu of a writing case, a tapestry footrest. Nearby, her scarf had coiled up lazily on the floor, like a three-colored snake.

  She returned to her letter, first removing the strand of hair that had fallen onto the paper. It seemed even more of a challenge with her parents. Her mother had an overpowering personality that allowed room for nothing but herself; she spoke, she demanded, she gesticulated, she didn’t listen. As for her father, he was but the feeble echo of his wife, always reluctantly agreeing with her without looking up from his shoes.

  What Ophelia’s mother would like to read in this letter was an expression of profound gratitude, and the first bits of court gossip, which she could then repeat to her heart’s content. Ophelia wasn’t, however, about to write either. She was hardly going to thank her family for having sent her to the other side of the world, onto such a diabolical ark . . . As for gossip, she had none to tell, and that was the very least of her worries.

  So she made a start on her letter with the usual questions: How are you all? Have you found someone to replace me at the museum? Is great-uncle getting away at all from his archives? Are my little sisters working hard at school? Who’s Hector sharing the room with now?

  While writing that last sentence, Ophelia suddenly felt peculiar. She adored her brother, and the thought of him growing up far away from her, of her becoming a stranger to him, made her blood run cold. She decided that that was enough with the questions.

  She moistened her quill in the ink pot and had a brainwave. Should she tell them a little about her fiancé and how she was getting on with him? She hadn�
��t the faintest idea of the person he really was. An ill-bred lout? An important official? An evil murderer? A man of duty? A bastard disgraced from birth? There were too many facets for just one man and she didn’t know to which, in the end, she would soon be married.

  We arrived yesterday, the journey went smoothly, she slowly wrote instead. In that she wasn’t lying, but she wasn’t mentioning the most important things: Thorn’s warning on the airship; their solitary confinement in Berenilde’s manor house; the strife between clans.

  And then there was the door at the far end of the park, through which they had arrived the previous day. Ophelia had returned to it and found it locked. When she had asked a servant for the key, he had replied that they weren’t allowed to give it to her. Despite the bowing and scraping of the staff and the exquisite manners of Lady Berenilde, she felt like a prisoner . . . and she wasn’t sure she could write that.

  “Done!” proclaimed Aunt Rosaline.

  Ophelia turned around. Sitting at a little writing desk, bolt upright on her chair, her godmother placed her quill back on its bronze stand and folded the three pages she’d just blackened with ink. “You’ve finished already?” asked Ophelia, amazed.

  “I certainly have—I had all night and all day to think about what to write. The Doyennes are going to hear all about what’s being plotted here, trust me.”

  By leaving her quill hovering over her letter, Ophelia let a star-shaped inkblot fall right in the middle of a sentence. She pressed a blotter on it and got up. Pensively, she looked at the delicate mantel clock that marked the seconds with a crisp tick-tock. Soon 9:00 P.M., and still no news from either Thorn or Berenilde. Through the window, blackened by the night, one could no longer see the park; due to the light from lamps and hearth, the little sitting room was reflected in it, as though in a mirror.

  “I fear your letter will never leave the Pole,” she muttered.

  “Why do you say such a thing?” asked Rosaline, appalled.