A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia soon realized that leaving the great Family Opera House wasn’t going to be easy. Much as she kept showing her room key to the liftboy, proving that she lived at Clairdelune, he just didn’t want to know. “I only take respectable people on board, little mute. And that one,” he said, pointing a disdainful finger at Aunt Rosaline, “looks to me like she’s overdone it on the champagne.”

  Bun held high with dignity, she was clasping and unclasping her hands while mumbling disjointed sentences. Ophelia was starting to think that they’d be spending the night in the foyer when a guttural voice, with a strong foreign accent, came to her aid: “Let them on board, my boy. These two are with me.”

  Mother Hildegarde was approaching with small steps, making a solid-gold walking stick ring out on the parquet floor. She had lost weight since her poisoning, but that didn’t stop her flowery dress from being too narrow for her extreme stoutness. She had a cigar in her mouth, and had dyed her thick, salt-and-pepper hair black, which certainly didn’t make her look any younger.

  “You are requested not to smoke in the lift, madam,” the liftboy said, stiffly. Mother Hildegarde stubbed out her cigar, not in the ashtray he held out to her, but on his honey-­yellow livery. The liftboy stared at the burnt hole with a look of devastation.

  “That’ll teach you to address me respectfully,” she sniggered. “These lifts, it’s me that manufactured them. Try to remember that in future.”

  She settled down inside the lift, leaning with all her weight on her stick and smiling proprietorially. A little boudoir with padded walls, this lift was more modest than the one the opera group had gone up in. Carefully, Ophelia pushed Aunt Rosaline inside, hoping to goodness that she wouldn’t break their cover, and then bowed as low as her cracked rib would allow. It was the second time Mother Hildegarde had come to her aid. She was disconcerted when the old architect responded to her bow with a booming burst of laughter. “We’re even, kid! A rower with no oar—just what I needed not to die of boredom at that opera. I was splitting my sides right up to the intermission!”

  The liftboy lowered the lever roughly, clearly mortified to have such an unrespectable woman on board. Ophelia, on the other hand, felt a certain admiration for Mother Hildegarde. She might have the manners of an innkeeper, but at least she shook up the conventions of this ossified world.

  When they arrived at Clairdelune’s central gallery, the Mother tapped her on the head with familiarity. “I’ve helped you out twice, my boy. I ask for just one thing in return: that you don’t forget it. People here have short memories,” she added, turning her little black eyes on the liftboy, “but me, I remember on their behalf.”

  Ophelia was really sorry to see the old architect walk off with little taps of her stick. She felt so vulnerable this evening, she was ready to accept anyone’s help. Gently, she led her aunt through the gallery, avoiding meeting the eyes of the policemen who stood to attention along the walls. It would probably take years before she’d be able to walk in front of them without feeling nervous.

  Clairdelune was unusually quiet. Its countless clocks were showing quarter past midnight; the nobles wouldn’t come back down from the tower before the small hours of the morning. In the service corridors, however, there was a party atmosphere. Maids, lifting their aprons so they could run, were tapping each other and shouting, “You’re it!”, and then running off in fits of laughter. They didn’t even glance at little Mime as he helped Madam Berenilde’s companion up the stairs.

  Having reached the top floor of the castle and, right at the end of the big corridor, Berenilde’s fine apartments, Ophelia finally felt safe. She got her aunt to stretch out on a divan, wedged a round cushion under her head, unbuttoned her collar to help her breathe more easily, and managed, with perseverance, to get her to swallow a little mineral water. The smelling salts Ophelia wafted under her nose had no effect. Aunt Rosaline let out some loud sighs, her eyes rolling between her fluttering eyelashes, and then finally dozed off. That, at least, is what Ophelia supposed. Sleep, she willed her aunt, sleep and then wake up for good.

  As soon as she was slumped in a squat armchair, close to the radiator, Ophelia realized that she was totally exhausted. Gustave’s suicide, the Dragons’ visit, that interminable opera, Aunt Rosaline’s delirium, Freya’s clawing, the unused station, Archibald’s smile, and that rib, that blasted rib that never let up . . . Ophelia felt as if she now weighed double whatever she had the day before.

  She would have liked to melt into the armchair’s velvet. She couldn’t get Thorn out of her head. He must have felt terribly humiliated because of her. Mustn’t he already be starting to regret getting involved with such an ungrateful woman? The more she pondered on all this, the more angry Ophelia was with Berenilde for organizing this marriage. That woman thought only about possessing Farouk. Couldn’t she see that she was making them suffer, Thorn and her, for her personal gain?

  I mustn’t let myself go, reasoned Ophelia. I’ll make some coffee, watch over Aunt Rosaline, take care of my cheek . . .

  She was asleep before she’d even finished going through all she still had to do.

  It was the click of the doorknob that roused her from sleep. From her armchair, she saw Berenilde come into the room. In the pink light of the lamps, she seemed at once radiant and drained. Her curls, free of all their pins, cascaded around her delicate face like a golden cloud. She was still wearing her stage costume, but the lace collar, colored ribbons, and long, silky gloves had got lost along the way.

  Berenilde looked at Aunt Rosaline, slouched on the divan, then at Mime, sitting beside the radiator. Then she locked the door to cut them off from the outside world.

  Ophelia had to make two attempts at standing up. She was rustier than an old automaton. “My aunt . . . ” she said in a hoarse voice. “She’s not at all well.”

  Berenilde responded with her loveliest smile. She came towards her with the silent grace of a swan gliding on a lake. Ophelia then noticed that her eyes, normally so limpid, were clouded. Berenilde smelt of brandy. “Your aunt?” she repeated, gently. “Your aunt?”

  Berenilde didn’t lift a finger, but Ophelia felt an almighty slap twisting her head from her shoulders. Freya’s scratch throbbed painfully on her cheek. “That’s for the shame that your aunt brought on me.” Ophelia hadn’t even had time to recover when a fresh slap propelled her face in the opposite direction. “And that’s for the ridicule that you, forgetful little rower, didn’t spare me.”

  Ophelia’s cheeks were burning as if actually on fire. She saw red. Grabbing a crystal carafe, she threw the water in it at Berenilde’s face. She stood there, utterly stupefied, while her makeup ran from her eyes in long, gray tears. “And that should freshen up your ideas,” said Ophelia in a subdued voice. “Now you will examine my aunt.”

  Having sobered up, Berenilde wiped her face, gathered her skirts, and knelt beside the divan. “Madam Rosaline,” she called, shaking her shoulder. Aunt Rosaline stirred, sighed, mumbled, but nothing she said was intelligible. Berenilde lifted her eyelids but didn’t manage to catch her eye. “Madam Rosaline, can you hear me?”

  “You should go to the barber, my dear friend,” replied the aunt.

  Leaning over Berenilde’s shoulder, Ophelia was holding her breath. “Do you think someone might have drugged her?”

  “How long has she been like this?”

  “I think it came over her just before the performance. She was totally herself all day long. She had a little stage fright, but not to that degree . . . She seems not to differentiate anymore between the present moment and her memories.”

  Berenilde got up with difficulty, exhausted. She opened a little glass-fronted cupboard, poured herself a glass of brandy, and settled in the squat armchair. Her wet hair was dripping down her neck. “It would seem that your aunt’s mind has been imprisoned in an illusion.”

  Ophelia thought she’d been hit by a t
hunderbolt. “If Madam Berenilde loses her baby before this evening, I’ll have no reason to attack your relation.” Where had she heard those words? Who had said them? It wasn’t Gustave, was it? It felt as if her memory were thrashing about inside her head to make her remember something essential. “The Knight,” she muttered, vaguely. “He was in the lift with us.”

  Berenilde raised her eyebrows, and then studied the play of light through her glass of brandy. “I know that child’s trademark. When he locks a consciousness within those strata, one can only escape from the inside. It grabs you from behind, it seeps into you, it overlaps with reality, and then all at once, without warning, you’re trapped. Without wishing to be a killjoy, my dear, I doubt whether your aunt has a strong enough mind to get herself out of there.”

  Ophelia’s vision became blurred. The lamps, the divan, and Aunt Rosaline all started swirling around as if the world would never know stability ever again. “Release her,” she said, in the ghost of a voice.

  Berenilde stamped her feet, annoyed. “Are you listening to me, you fool? Your aunt is lost in her own meandering thoughts, and there’s nothing I can do to stop that.”

  “Then ask the Knight,” Ophelia stammered. “He can’t have done this without an ulterior motive, can he? He must be expecting something from us—”

  “You can’t bargain with that child!” Berenilde interrupted her. “What he does, he never undoes. Come on, console yourself, my dear. Madam Rosaline isn’t suffering and we have other things to worry about.”

  Ophelia stared at her in horror as she sipped her drink in small gulps.

  “I’ve just learnt that the servant who was pretending to be you at the manor has thrown herself out of a window. An episode of ‘temporary insanity,’” explained Berenilde, with obvious irony. “The Knight has uncovered our secret, and wants us to know it. And then this hunt is starting in a few hours!” sighed Berenilde, exasperated. “All this is truly regrettable.”

  “Regrettable,” Ophelia repeated slowly, incredulous. An innocent girl had been murdered due to them, Aunt Rosaline had just been sent on a journey of no return, and Berenilde found that regrettable? Ophelia’s glasses darkened as if night had suddenly fallen on them. A night haunted with nightmares. No . . . all of this was just a misunderstanding. That little servant wasn’t really dead. Aunt Rosaline was going to stretch, yawn, and resurface.

  “I confess that I’m starting to lose patience,” sighed Berenilde, while contemplating her streaked makeup in her hand mirror. “I wanted to respect tradition, but this betrothal is really dragging. I can’t wait for Thorn finally to marry you!”

  As she was putting her glass to her lips, Ophelia snatched it out of her hands and smashed it onto the carpet. She unbuttoned her livery to throw it far away. She wanted rid, once and for all, of Mime’s face, which masked her own expressions, determined that her anger be out in the open.

  When Berenilde saw her as she was, thinner under her shirt, skin covered in bruises and blood, glasses bent, she couldn’t stop herself from raising her eyebrows. “I didn’t realize that the policemen had beaten you up that much.”

  “How much longer are you going to play with us?” cried Ophelia, losing her temper. “We’re not your dolls!”

  Sitting comfortably in her chair, hair and makeup awry, Berenilde didn’t lose her cool. “So this is how you behave when driven into a corner,” she murmured, looking at the broken glass on the carpet. “What makes you think that I’m manipulating you?”

  “I’ve overheard some conversations, madam. They enlightened me on certain things you made very sure not to inform me of.” Exasperated, Ophelia held out her arms, hands lifted, fingers fanned. “These are what you’ve wanted from the beginning. You’ve got your nephew betrothed to a reader because up there, somewhere in that tower, a family spirit wants someone to decipher his Book.” Ophelia was at last offloading her thoughts, like a cotton reel unwinding as it falls. “What worries everyone at the court is not our marriage, but that you should be the one who gives Farouk what he desires the most: someone able to satisfy his curiosity. Then you would be forever impossible to topple, wouldn’t you? Free to make all the heads you don’t like roll.”

  Since Berenilde, her smile frozen on her lips, didn’t deign to reply, Ophelia brought her arms back down. “I have bad news, madam. If Farouk’s Book is made of the same material as Artemis’s Book, then it isn’t readable.”

  “It is readable.” Her hands crossed on her stomach, Berenilde had finally decided to lay her cards on the table. “It is readable even to the extent that other readers have already done so,” she continued, calmly. “Your own ancestors, my dear. It was a very, very long time ago.”

  Behind her glasses, Ophelia was staring wide-eyed. The last entry in her forebear Adelaide’s journal came back to her like a slap in the face: Rudolf has finally signed his contract with one of Lord Farouk’s solicitors. I am not allowed to write anything more—it is a professional secret—but we will meet their family spirit tomorrow. If my brother puts on a good show, we will become rich.

  “To whom am I contracted? To you, madam, or to you family spirit?”

  “You understand at last!” Berenilde sighed, stifling a yawn. “The truth, my dear, is that you belong as much to Farouk as you do to Thorn.”

  Shocked, Ophelia thought back of the mysterious casket handed to Artemis to seal the alliance between the two families. What had this box contained? Jewelry? Precious stones? No doubt something less valuable. It couldn’t cost that much, a girl like Ophelia.

  “No one asked my opinion. I refuse.”

  “Refuse, and you will anger both of our families,” Berenilde warned her in her velvety voice. “If, on the other hand, you do what is hoped of you, you will be Farouk’s protégée, sheltered from all the nastiness of the court.”

  Ophelia didn’t believe a single word. “Some of my ancestors have already read his Book, you say? I suppose if I’m needed today, then their attempts weren’t conclusive.”

  “The fact is that they never succeeded in going far enough back into the past,” said Berenilde with a joyless smile. Aunt Rosaline moved on the divan. Heart thumping, Ophelia leant over her, but was immediately disappointed: her aunt was still wittering between her long teeth. Ophelia considered her waxen face for a moment, then returned to Berenilde, frowning. “I don’t see why I would offer a better service, or why you’re marrying me off to meet your ends.”

  Annoyed, Berenilde clicked her tongue with impatience. “Because your ancestors had neither your talent nor that of Thorn.”

  “Thorn’s talent?” questioned Ophelia, taken aback. “His claws?”

  “His memory.” Berenilde settled into her chair, stretching her tattooed arms on its armrests. “A formidable and implacable memory that he inherited from his mother’s clan, the Chroniclers.”

  Ophelia raised her eyebrows. Thorn’s memory was a family power? “If you say so,” she stammered, “but I don’t understand what his memory and our marriage have got to do with this reading.”

  Berenilde burst into laughter. “They’ve got absolutely everything to do with it! Have you been told about the ceremony of the Gift? It enables family powers to be combined. This ceremony takes place at marriages, and only at marriages. It’s Thorn who will be Farouk’s reader, not you.”

  It took a considerable time for Ophelia to take in what Berenilde was telling her. “You want to transplant my skills as a reader onto his memory?”

  “The alchemy promises to be effective. I’m convinced that the dear child will work wonders!”

  Ophelia looked at Berenilde from the depths of her glasses. Now that she’d got her anger out of her system, she felt horribly sad. “You are contemptible.”

  Berenilde’s harmonious features collapsed and her beautiful eyes widened. She clasped her hands around her stomach as if a blade had just stabbed her. “What have I done fo
r you to judge me so harshly?”

  “You’re asking me that question?” asked Ophelia, amazed. “I saw you at the Opera, madam. You have secured Farouk’s love. You’re carrying his child, you’re his favorite, and will be for a long time to come. So why, why involve Thorn in your schemes?”

  “Because he’s the one who decided it should be like this!” Berenilde defended herself, shaking her wet hair. “I only organized your marriage because he expressed the desire for it.”

  Ophelia was sickened by this display of dishonesty. “You’re lying again. When we were on the airship, Thorn tried to persuade me not to marry him.”

  Berenilde’s lovely face looked distraught, as if the thought that Ophelia might hate her was unbearable to her. “Do you really think he’s a man who would allow himself to be manipulated in that way? The boy is much more ambitious than you seem to think. He wanted the hands of a reader, I found him the hands of a reader. Maybe he thought, on seeing you for the first time, that my choice wasn’t the most inspired one. I’ll admit having my own doubts about you, too.”

  Against her will, Ophelia was starting to feel shocked. In fact, it was much worse than that. She felt as if a pernicious chill were now entering her blood, slowly rising in her veins, and, finally, reaching her heart. When she had declared to Thorn that she would never fulfill the role of his wife, he had proved to be so accommodating . . . Far too accommodating. He hadn’t lost his cool, he hadn’t sought to argue about it, he hadn’t behaved as a rejected husband would behave. “How naïve I’ve been!” Ophelia whispered. For all these past weeks, it wasn’t her that Thorn had strived to protect. It was her reader’s hands.

  She collapsed heavily onto a stool and stared at Mime’s patent shoes, on her feet. She’d said to Thorn, looking him straight in the eye, that she trusted him, and, like a coward, he had looked away. She’d felt so guilty for rejecting him and so grateful that he hadn’t repudiated her!