A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia moved forward, tripping on bumps in the floorboards, banging into the corners of furniture. When she reached the sofa, she saw that Thorn’s pale eyes, bladelike flashes against a dark background, were following her every move. He was hunched over, forearms resting on thighs, but he still seemed just as big. Of his Treasurer’s uniform, only the golden epaulettes shone in the dark.

  “Did I wake you?” whispered Ophelia.

  “No. What do you want?”

  As frosty receptions go, it was definitely a frosty reception. Thorn’s voice was even more gloomy than usual. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see Ophelia, and, in a certain way, that reassured her. He’d clearly reconsidered his opinion of her since the previous time.

  “There are one or two things I have to speak to you about. It’s rather important.”

  “Do sit down,” said Thorn. He had a talent for turning what could pass as a polite formula into a despotic command. Ophelia felt around for a chair, but once she’d found one, had to give up on moving it. Made of velvet and fine wood, it was too heavy for her cracked rib. So she sat at a distance, her back to the sofa, obliging Thorn to move. He relinquished his hunched position with an annoyed snort, and sat on his official chair, on the other side of the desk. Dazzled when he turned on his reading lamp, Ophelia blinked. “I’m listening to you,” he said, in a hurry to get it over with. She didn’t have time to say a word before he cut in: “What’s happened to you?”

  Thorn’s long face had hardened even more, if that were possible. Ophelia had concealed all she could behind her glasses and her hair, hoping he wouldn’t notice the bruises, but it hadn’t worked. “A funeral ceremony ended badly. That’s what I must talk to you about.”

  Thorn linked his long, gnarled fingers on the desk and waited for her explanation. So stern was his demeanor, Ophelia felt as though in the dock, facing an implacable judge. “Do you know Madam Hildegarde?”

  “The architect? Everyone knows her.”

  “I delivered some oranges to her. She’d barely touched one when she fell to the ground. My guilt wasn’t even questioned and the policemen immediately threw me into the dungeons.”

  Thorn’s entwined fingers tightened on the desk. “Why didn’t my aunt phone me?”

  “Maybe she didn’t have the time or a chance to,” Ophelia replied, cautiously. “In any case, Madam Hildegarde didn’t die. According to her, she had a violent allergic reaction.”

  “An allergic reaction,” Thorn repeated, sounding skeptical.

  Ophelia swallowed and clenched her fists on her knees. The moment of truth had arrived. “She lied. Someone definitely did poison those oranges . . . with the aim of harming me, not Madam Hildegarde.”

  “You seem to have a very precise idea on the matter,” observed Thorn.

  “It was your grandmother.”

  At this announcement, Thorn moved not an inch. He remained hands linked, back hunched, brow furrowed, nose pinched. Ophelia had rarely felt so uncomfortable. Now she’d launched into it, she felt fearful. After all, why should Thorn trust her?

  “I read it by touching the basket of oranges,” she continued. “Your grandmother relieved me of it, but that was just to allow her to pour her concoction on to the oranges. Her hatred of me, as gauged through the tips of my fingers, is spine-chilling.” Ophelia watched for a flicker of emotion in Thorn’s metallic eyes—surprise, denial, incomprehension—but he seemed to have turned into marble. “She detests everything I represent,” she insisted, hoping to convince him. “A parvenu, a cause of shame, tainted blood. She doesn’t want me dead, she wants to discredit me publicly.” Ophelia jumped when the bell of the telephone rang out on the desk. Thorn let it ring, his eyes searching deeply into her dark glasses. “I said nothing about it to your aunt,” she stammered. “I’ve no idea whether or not she suspects the two-faced behavior of her mother. First I wanted to know what you felt about it,” she concluded, her voice fading.

  Thorn finally moved again. He unlinked his fingers, sat up straight in his chair, thereby gaining height, and consulted his fob watch. Ophelia was flabbergasted. Did he not take her seriously? Did he think he was wasting his time with her?

  “You want to know what I feel?” he said at last, not taking his eyes from his watch.

  “Please.” Ophelia was almost imploring him. Thorn wound his watch, put it back in his uniform pocket, and, totally unpredictably, violently swept everything off his desk with his arm. Quill-holders, ink pots, blotters, letters, even the telephone, were all sent spinning to the floor with a deafening clatter. Ophelia gripped the armrests of her chair with both hands to stop herself from running away. It was the first time she’d seen Thorn succumbing to an outburst of violence, and she feared it would be directed at her next.

  And yet, with his elbows on the desk, hands pressed together, finger to finger, Thorn didn’t seem at all like someone who had recently been angered. Now uncluttered, the desk displayed a nasty dark stain: the contents of the ink pot Ophelia had knocked over the previous time. “I’m pretty annoyed,” said Thorn. “Somewhat more than that, even.”

  “Sorry,” whispered Ophelia.

  Thorn clicked his tongue with irritation. “I said I was annoyed, not that you had annoyed me.”

  “So you’ve decided to believe me?” murmured Ophelia, with relief.

  Thorn raised his eyebrows in surprise, his long scar following suit. “And why wouldn’t I believe you?”

  Caught off guard, Ophelia stared at the writing materials piled up on the floor. Such chaos looked wrong in the middle of the perfectly ordered world of the office. “Well . . . it would be understandable that you’d give more credit to your grandmother than to a person you hardly know.” She cleared her throat and added, “I think you’ve snapped the cable of your phone.”

  Thorn looked at her closely. “Take off your glasses, please.”

  Surprised by this unexpected request, Ophelia did as she was asked. Thorn’s thin figure at the other end of the desk got lost in the blur. If he wanted to assess the damage for himself, she wasn’t going to stop him. “It’s the policemen,” she sighed. “They don’t hold back.”

  “Did they discover your true identity?”

  “No.”

  “Did they make you suffer other things that I can’t see now?”

  Ophelia put her glasses back on clumsily, terribly embarrassed. She hated it when Thorn put her under interrogation like this, as though incapable of dropping his role of Treasurer. “Nothing serious.”

  “On second thought, I correct what I said,” continued Thorn in a monotone voice. “You are partly responsible for my annoyance.”

  “Oh?”

  “I asked you to trust no one other than my aunt. No one. Does one really have to dot every ‘i’ for you?”

  Thorn’s tone was so exasperated that Ophelia was flabbergasted. “How could I have suspected your grandmother for a second? She was kinder to me than any of you.”

  All of a sudden, Thorn went so deathly pale that his skin was the color of his scars. Ophelia realized too late what she’d just said. Some truths are better left unsaid. “And she lives under your own roof,” she stammered.

  “You will often have enemies under your own roof. Try to get used to the idea.”

  “So you didn’t trust her from the start?” said Ophelia, shocked. “Your own grandmother?”

  A sound of mechanical bellows invaded the office, followed by a resounding click. “The dumbwaiter,” explained Thorn. His long legs extended like springs. He went over to a wall, lifted a wooden shutter and retrieved an aluminum coffeepot.

  “May I have some?” Ophelia asked, impulsively. She could no longer survive without coffee since living in the Pole. She noticed too late that there was only one cup, but Thorn let her have it with no objection. Coming from him, she found the gesture very gracious.

  “I
, too, have been made to pay by that old vixen,” he said, pouring her some coffee.

  Ophelia looked right up at him. With her seated and him standing, it was enough to give you vertigo. “She had it in for you, too?”

  “She tried to suffocate me under a pillow,” said Thorn, languidly. “Luckily, I’m tougher than I look.”

  “And . . . you were young?”

  “I’d only just been born.”

  Ophelia’s eyes fell into her cup, brown and steaming. “That’s monstrous.”

  “It’s the fate generally reserved for bastards.”

  “And no one said anything, did anything against her? How can Berenilde still even tolerate that woman in her home?”

  Thorn reopened the shutter of the dumbwaiter, this time to collect some tobacco. He sat back down in his chair, looked for his pipe in a drawer, and started filling it. “You’ve seen for yourself how talented that old lady is at deceiving those around her.”

  “So no one knows what she made you suffer?” asked Ophelia, astonished.

  Thorn struck a match to light up the bowl of his pipe. The flame highlighted his angular, tense features, evidence of a strained mind. As soon as he stopped interrogating, his eyes became evasive. “No one,” he growled. “Just as is happening to you today.”

  “Without wishing to offend you,” Ophelia gently insisted, “how can you actually know what happened? You’ve just told me you were a newborn.”

  Thorn shook his match and silvery smoke rings rolled out of his pipe. “I have a very good memory.”

  Behind her glasses, Ophelia’s swollen eyelid half-opened in surprise. Remembering events that occurred during the first months of one’s life—she didn’t think it was even possible. On the other hand, such a memory would explain Thorn’s brilliance at accounting. Ophelia took a sip of coffee. The bitter liquid warmed her inside. She would have liked a little sugar and milk, but she couldn’t be too demanding, either. “And your grandmother, does she know that you remember it?”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not,” grunted Thorn between two puffs on his pipe. “We’ve never spoken of it.”

  Ophelia saw him once more, rebuffing his grandmother when she’d welcomed them on the perron. She had to admit that she’d misjudged the one as much as the other, that day.

  “I thought that, with age, she’d got out of her murderous little habits,” continued Thorn, stressing each consonant. “The trick she’s just played on you proves the opposite.”

  “What should I do, then?” asked Ophelia.

  “You? Nothing.”

  “I don’t think I can look her in the face as though nothing happened.”

  Beneath Thorn’s furrowed brow, in the shadow of his eyelids, the metallic flashes hardened. There was lightning in his eyes. Ophelia found it almost worrying.

  “You will no longer have to look her in the face. I’m going to send that woman away, very far from Citaceleste. Didn’t I tell you that I would take my revenge on all those who went for you?”

  Ophelia quickly took refuge behind her cup of coffee. Suddenly, she had a big lump in her throat. She’d just grasped that she really was important to Thorn. It was neither an act nor just empty words. He expressed his feelings rather crudely, certainly, but he was terribly sincere.

  He takes this marriage much more seriously than I do, Ophelia thought, and that thought wrenched her stomach. Much as he wasn’t the easiest man to deal with, she had no desire to make him suffer or to humiliate him by refusing to give herself to him. Well . . . maybe that had crossed her mind in the early days, but she’d reconsidered her position since then.

  She was lost in the contemplation of the bottom of her empty cup for so long that Thorn ended up unhooking his pipe from his mouth and pointing at the coffeepot. “Have some more.”

  Ophelia needed no persuading. She poured herself a full cup of coffee, and sat further back in her seat, trying to find a bearable position. Remaining seated crushed her ribs and made breathing uncomfortable. “I have another urgent problem to put to you,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Your grandmother aside, I’ve made a second enemy.”

  Thorn’s pale eyebrows collided. “Who?”

  Ophelia took a deep breath and, without stopping, told him about Gustave’s blackmail. The more she spoke, the more Thorn’s body was lengthening. He stared at her, utterly perplexed, as if she were the most unlikely creature nature had produced.

  “If Berenilde hasn’t lost her child before the Spring Opera, I’m done for,” she concluded, fiddling with her gloves.

  Thorn sat back in his chair and passed his hand over his silver-­blond hair, flattening it even more. “You’re severely testing my nerves. You certainly have a talent for getting yourself into a fix.” Pensive, he blew out all the smoke through his large, hawkish nose. “So be it. I’ll take care of that, too.”

  “How?” breathed Ophelia.

  “Don’t worry about the details. You simply have my word that that butler will do you no harm, not to you, not to my aunt.”

  Ophelia downed the rest of her coffee in one gulp. The lump in her throat wouldn’t go away. Thorn was going to help her beyond all expectations. She felt perfectly ungrateful to have treated him with such disdain up until now.

  The Treasury’s clock chimed six in the morning. “I must return to my room,” said Ophelia, putting her cup down. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  Thorn got up and held open the mirrored door of the wardrobe for her as though it were an ordinary door. Ophelia didn’t have the heart to leave like this, without a friendly word for him. “I . . . I thank you,” she stammered.

  Thorn raised his eyebrows. He suddenly looked all stiff and starchy in his uniform with its epaulettes, too confined by his big, thin body. “It’s a good thing that you opened up to me,” he said, gruffly. There was a brief, awkward silence, and then he added, between his teeth: “I may have seemed a bit cold, earlier—”

  “It’s my fault,” Ophelia cut in. “Last time I behaved unpleasantly.” Thorn’s lips convulsed. She couldn’t tell whether it was an attempted smile or an embarrassed grimace.

  “Put your trust in only my aunt,” he reminded her.

  Ophelia was sad to see how much credit he gave Berenilde. She was manipulating them like puppets and he was playing her game without even realizing it. “In her, I don’t know. But in you, no longer any doubt about that.”

  Ophelia thought she was doing the right thing by saying that to him. Unable to play the loving couple, she at least wanted to be honest with Thorn. He had her trust, he should know it. But she did wonder whether it wasn’t a mistake when the gray eyes abruptly turned from hers in the sternest way.

  “You must go, now,” he muttered. “I must tidy my office and mend the telephone before my first appointments of the day. As for what you spoke to me about, I’ll see to it.”

  Ophelia merged into the mirror and resurfaced in her room. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t at first notice that the gramophone had started playing again in her absence. She stared, baffled, at the record blaring out its brass-band music.

  “Here you are at last!” sighed a voice behind her. “I was starting to get a bit worried.”

  Ophelia turned around. A little boy was sitting on her bed.

  The Threat

  The Knight was wearing striped pajamas. Licking what remained of a lollipop, he raisied his round glasses towards Ophelia. “You shouldn’t leave your key on the door. You don’t know the trick of pushing it with a pin from the other side, then? First you slip a piece of paper under the door, then, once the key has fallen, all that remains is to pull it towards you. If the space under the door is wide enough, it works every time.”

  With arms dangling in her big black coat, Ophelia wasn’t listening to a word the Knight was saying to her. The presence here of this little Mirage was a disaster. Tot
ally calm and expressionless, he tapped the bed to invite her to sit beside him. “You don’t look very well, miss. Make yourself comfortable. The music doesn’t bother you too much?”

  Ophelia remained standing. She was so traumatized that she’d forgotten her pain. She hadn’t the remotest idea of what she was supposed to say or do. She was even more thrown when the boy awkwardly pulled out a bundle of envelopes from under his pajamas.

  “I had a quick look at your personal mail. I hope that doesn’t bother you—I’m often told off for being too curious.”

  The letters that had disappeared. How on earth had they ended up in the hands of this child?

  “Your mother’s very worried about you,” commented the Knight, randomly picking out a letter. “You’re lucky; my first mom is dead. Thank goodness I have Madam Berenilde. She’s extremely important to me.” He looked at Ophelia with his placid eyes, enlarged by his thick glasses. “Have you thought about Gustave’s proposal? You have until this evening to honor your part of the contract.”

  “Are you behind this?” asked Ophelia, in a weak voice.

  Unruffled, the Knight pointed at the gramophone, which was blaring out its brass-band music. “You’ll have to speak up a bit for me to hear you, miss. If you don’t kill the baby,” he continued, calmly, “Gustave will set the policemen on to you. Personally, I don’t have much influence on them. He does.”

  The little boy noisily crunched the rest of his lollipop. “You absolutely mustn’t kill Berenilde, just the baby. A nasty fall should suffice, I think. It’s essential that it dies. It could take my place in Madam Berenilde’s heart, you understand?”

  No, Ophelia didn’t understand. That a little ten-year-old body could contain such a sick mind, it was beyond her comprehension. It was the fault of the place, of the nobles, of all those clan wars; in this world, children had no chance of developing a sense of right and wrong.