A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia was rooted to the spot. He was there. The man who was about to devastate her life was there. She wanted neither to see him nor to speak to him.

  Agatha grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her through the throng of relatives. Drunk on all the noise and rain, and barely conscious, Ophelia passed from face to face before finally collapsing onto the breast of a polar bear. Dazed, she didn’t react when the bear muttered an icy “good evening,” from up there, way above her head.

  “The introductions are over!” her mother shouted hoarsely in the midst of the polite applause. “To your carriages! No point us catching our death.”

  Ophelia allowed herself to be shoved into a vehicle. The whip cracked the air, and the carriage moved off with a jolt. A lantern was lit, casting a reddish glow on the passengers. The rain seemed to be battering the windowpanes. Squashed against the door, Ophelia focused on that beating rhythm of the water, long enough to recover her senses and emerge from her torpor. She gradually became aware of the animated conversation going on around her. It was her mother, who talked enough for ten. The bear, was he there, too?

  Ophelia pushed up her glasses, still flecked with raindrops. First she saw her mother’s huge beehive bun, which flattened her onto the carriage seat, then the Doyenne’s crow nose, right in front of her, and finally, on the other side, the bear. He was staring determinedly through the door window, responding from time to time to her mother’s jabbering with a laconic nod of the head, but without bothering to exchange a glance with anyone.

  Relieved not to be in his line of sight, Ophelia was prepared to take a closer look at her fiancé. Contrary to her initial impression, Thorn wasn’t a bear, even if he seemed like one. A voluminous white fur, spiked with fangs and claws, covered his shoulders. In fact, he wasn’t that bulky. His arms, crossed on his chest, were tapered like swords. On the other hand, as slender as he was, this man had the stature of a giant. The top of his head was pressed against the ceiling of the carriage, forcing him to bend his neck. He was even more towering than Cousin Bertrand, and that was saying something.

  Ancestors alive, thought a shocked Ophelia, that will be my husband, all that?

  Thorn had an attractive carpetbag balanced on his knees, a contrast to his animal-skin clothing that lent him a touch of civilization. Ophelia observed him surreptitiously. She daren’t stare too hard at him, fearing the he would sense this attention and suddenly turn to her. In two glances, however, she got an impression of his face, and what she had glimpsed made her flesh creep. Pale eyes, sharp nose, light hair, scar across temple, the whole profile was full of disdain. Disdain for her and her whole family.

  Taken aback, Ophelia realized that this man was also getting married against his will.

  “I have a gift for Mrs. Artemis.”

  Ophelia shuddered. Her mother suddenly went quiet. Even the Doyenne, who had nodded off, half-opened her eyes. Thorn had uttered this sentence reluctantly, as though speaking to them pained him. His pronunciation of each consonant was hard—it was the accent of the North.

  “A gift for Artemis?” stammered her mother, disconcerted. “But of course, sir!” she said, pulling herself together. “It will be a signal honor to introduce you to our family spirit. You doubtless know of her observatory by repute, yes? If it would please you, I propose we go there tomorrow.”

  “Now.”

  Thorn’s response struck with the snap of the cabman’s whip. Her mother turned deathly pale. “The thing is, Mr. Thorn, it wouldn’t be acceptable to disturb Artemis this evening. She no longer receives visitors after dark, do you see? And,” she added, proudly and with a friendly smile, “we have planned a little meal especially for you . . . ”

  Ophelia’s eyes darted from her mother to her fiancé. A “little meal,” that was quite a euphemism. She’d requisitioned Uncle Hubert’s barn for her Pantagruelian banquet; organized the slaughter of three pigs; ordered Bengal lights from the hardware store; packaged up several kilos of sugared almonds; and planned a costumed ball to last until dawn. Rosaline, Ophelia’s aunt and godmother, was completing the preparations at that very moment.

  “It can’t wait,” declared Thorn. “Anyhow, I’m not hungry.”

  “I understand, my son,” the Doyenne suddenly conceded with a crumpled smile. “You must do things properly.”

  Ophelia blinked behind her glasses. She, on the other hand, didn’t understand. What was this behavior all about? Thorn was proving to be so coarse that he made her seem like a paragon of good manners. With his fist he hit the little rectangle of glass behind him, separating the driver from his carriage. The vehicle screeched to a halt. “Sir?” asked the cabman, nose pressed to the glass.

  “To Mrs. Artemis’s,” ordered Thorn, with that hard accent of his. Through the back window, the cabman looked questioningly at Ophelia’s mother. Shock had turned her white as a ghost and caused a slight trembling of her lip. “Drive us to the observatory,” she said, finally, her jaw tense.

  Gripping the strap on her seat, Ophelia felt the vehicle doing a U-turn to go back up the hill it had just hurtled down. Outside, cries of protestation greeted the maneuver; they came from the carriages carrying the rest of the family.

  “What’s got into you?” screeched Aunt Mathilda through a door. Ophelia’s mother lowered her window. “We’re going up to the observatory,” she said.

  “What d’you mean?” asked an affronted Uncle Hubert. “At this hour? And what about the feast? The celebrations? Our stomachs are rumbling in all directions, over here!”

  “Eat without us, feast yourselves, then all go home to bed!” instructed her mother.

  She closed her window again to curtail the outcry and signaled to the cabman, whose questioning face was again pressed to the back window, that he could go on. Ophelia bit her scarf to stop herself from smiling. This man from the North had just mortally offended her mother; all things considered, he was exceeding her expectations.

  As their carriage set off again under the flabbergasted gaze of the family, Thorn leant against the window, focusing solely on the rain. He no longer seemed willing to continue the conversation with the mother, and even less to start one with the daughter. His eyes, tapered like flashes of metal, didn’t alight for a second on the young lady he was supposed to be courting.

  With a satisfied gesture, Ophelia pushed away a dripping lock of hair that was plastered to her nose. If Thorn deemed it unnecessary to make any effort to appeal to her, there was some hope he wouldn’t expect any such effort in return either. The way things were going, the engagement would be broken off before midnight.

  With lips pursed, her mother no longer bothered to fill any silences; her eyes glinted with rage in the half-light of the carriage. The Doyenne blew out the lantern and, with a sigh, fell back to sleep, shrouded in her great black mantilla. The journey promised to be long.

  The carriage took a potholed mountain road that twisted and turned on a pinhead. Queasy from the jolting, Ophelia focused on the landscape. At first she was on the bad side of the carriage and saw only jagged rock on which the first snows had appeared. A turning later, and her view plummeted into the void. The rain had stopped, swept away by a west wind. This had blown a scattering of stars between the clouds, but down below, at the bottom of the Valley, the sky was still glowing red in the dusk. Forests of sweet chestnut and larch had given way to fir trees, whose resinous scent swept over the cab.

  Thanks to the darkness, Ophelia could look less guardedly at the bent-in-three figure of Thorn. The night had cast a bluish glow on his closed eyelids; Ophelia noticed another scar that cut through his eyebrow and glowed white against his cheek. So this man actually was a hunter, in the end? He was certainly a bit thin, but she had recognized in him the same hard look that Augustus’s subjects had. Rocked by the jolting of the carriage, she would have thought him asleep if it hadn’t been for the annoyed furrow in his brow and the nervous d
rumming of his fingers on his case. She turned away when Thorn’s eyelids suddenly let through a gray glint.

  The cabman had pulled up. “The observatory,” he announced.

  The Observatory

  Only twice in her life had Ophelia got the chance to meet the spirit of her family. She couldn’t recall the first, the occasion being her baptism. At the time, she was but a mewling shawl that had sprinkled the Doyenne with tears and urine.

  The second time, on the other hand, had left a vivid impression on her. At fifteen, she had won the reading competition organized by the Society of Sciences, all thanks to a shirt button. It had led her back more than three centuries and revealed the escapades of its owner in the smallest detail. Artemis herself had given her the top prize: her first reader’s gloves. The very same gloves, now threadbare, that, this evening, she was nibbling at the seams as she got out of the carriage.

  An icy wind made her coat flap. Ophelia remained still, her breath taken away by the amazing vault of the white dome, whose long telescope was poking the night in the eye. Artemis’s observatory was not only a center of research in astronomy, meteorology, and rock mechanics, it was also an architectural marvel. Set in a mountain rock-face enclosure, the palace incorporated a dozen buildings specifically to house the great instruments, from meridian circle to equatorial telescope, astrograph to magnetic pavilion. The pediment of the main building, stamped with a black-and-gold sundial, looked down from its lofty heights over the Valley, where the town’s night-time lights twinkled.

  This sight was even more impressive than Ophelia had remembered. She offered her arm to the Doyenne, who was struggling to alight from the carriage. This was more a man’s duty, but Thorn had commandeered the carriage seats to open up his case. With eyes set deep under stern brows, he did what suited him, not remotely concerned about these women whose guest of honor he was.

  On the terrace of the observatory, a frantic scientist was running in pursuit of his top hat as it rolled between two rows of columns. “Excuse me, learned father,” shouted out Ophelia’s mother, holding down her fine feathered hat with one hand. “Do you work here?”

  “Absolutely.” The man had abandoned his top hat to turn his wide forehead, which was being whipped by his quiff, towards her. “A splendid wind, isn’t it!” he enthused. “Absolutely splendid! It cleared the sky for us within half an hour.”

  Suddenly, he frowned. Enlarged by his lorgnette, his suspicious eye bounced from the three women to the carriage, parked outside the main entrance, in which Thorn’s huge shadow was busy unpacking the case. “What is it? What do you want?”

  “An audience, my son,” the Doyenne chipped in. She was leaning with all her weight on Ophelia’s arm.

  “Impossible. Absolutely impossible. Come back tomorrow.” The scientist held up his cane to the night sky, pointing at the clouds that were dissolving in the wind like spiderwebs. “First clear night sky for a week. Artemis is up to her eyes in work, absolutely up to her eyes.”

  “It won’t take long.” Thorn had blurted this assurance while extricating himself from the carriage, a casket under his arm.

  The scientist pushed away the quiff flapping over his eyes, to no avail. “Were it only to take a fraction of a second, I repeat, it’s absolutely impossible. We’re right in the middle of an inventory. Fourth edition of the catalog, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica. It’s absolutely a priority.”

  “Six!” marveled Ophelia to herself. She’d never heard “absolutely” repeated so many times in one go.

  Thorn scaled the entrance steps in two long strides and stood to his full height in front of the scientist, who instantly took a step back. The wind was making the light hair of this great scarecrow stand on end and tugging on the laces of his fur, revealing the grip of a pistol at his belt. Thorn’s arm stretched out. This sudden movement made the scientist jump, but it was a simple fob watch that Thorn had just brandished under his nose.

  “Ten minutes, not a second more. Where can I find Mrs. Artemis?”

  The old man indicated the main dome with his cane; there was a slot cut into it, like a moneybox. “At her telescope.”

  Thorn clicked his heels across the marble without a backward glance, without a word of thanks. Red-faced with humiliation under her bulky feathered hat, Ophelia’s mother lost none of her fury. So she took it out on Ophelia when she skidded on a patch of ice, nearly pulling the Doyenne down with her. “And you, are you never going to grow out of your clumsiness? You cover me in shame!”

  Ophelia felt around on the flagstones for her glasses. Once she’d put them back on, she saw her mother’s voluminous dress in triple. The lenses had cracked.

  “And that man who doesn’t wait for us,” grumbled her mother, gathering up her skirts. “Mr. Thorn, slow down!”

  With his little casket under his arm, Thorn ignored her, entering into the hall of the observatory. He continued at marching pace, opening all the doors he came across without ever knocking. With his stature, he towered over the troupe of scientists dancing up and down the corridors while commenting loudly on their constellation charts.

  Ophelia went with the flow, nose behind scarf. All she could see of Thorn were pieces of a fragmented silhouette. He stood so tall in his shaggy fur that, from the back, he could be mistaken for a polar bear. She was thoroughly relishing the situation. This man’s attitude was so offensive, it seemed almost too good to be true. As Thorn started going up a spiral staircase, Ophelia offered the Doyenne her arm again to help her up the stairs.

  “May I ask you a question?” she whispered to her.

  “You may, dear girl,” said the Doyenne, smiling.

  A scientist sweeping down the stairs like a whirlwind knocked into them without apologizing. He was tearing his hair out and screaming like one possessed that he’d never got his calculations wrong and he wasn’t about to start this evening.

  “How many insults must our family endure before thinking of reconsidering the betrothal?” asked Ophelia.

  Her question cast a chill. The Doyenne withdrew her hand from Ophelia’s proffered arm. She repositioned her black mantilla on her head so that all that remained visible was her beak of a nose and a deeply wrinkled smile. “What are you complaining about, dear girl? This young boy seems totally charming to me.”

  Perplexed, Ophelia looked at the black and shriveled figure of the Doyenne, who was heaving herself laboriously from one step to the next. So did she not care, either?

  Thorn’s gloomy voice reverberated around the rotunda he’d just entered: “Madam, your brother has sent me to you.”

  Ophelia didn’t want to miss the audience with Artemis. She hurried to get through the metal door on which still swung this sign: DO NOT DISTURB: OBSERVATION IN PROGRESS.

  She blinked behind her broken glasses as she entered into the darkness. She heard what sounded like a fluttering of wings in front of her; it was her mother, increasingly enraged, who’d taken out her fan to refresh her thoughts. As for Thorn, she only made out his fur spiked with claws once the wall lamps gradually came on.

  “My brother? Which one?” This hoarse whisper, sounding more like the scraping of a millstone than a woman’s voice, had rebounded across the whole metal framework of the room. Ophelia searched for its source. She scanned the gangways that spiraled up around the dome, then looked down again, along the copper cylinder whose focal range was almost six times her height. She found Artemis bending over the lens of the telescope.

  She saw her splintered into three pieces. She must take care of her glasses as soon as possible.

  The spirit of the family slowly tore herself away from the spectacle of the stars, unbending each of her limbs, each of her joints, until she stood taller than Thorn himself, much taller. Artemis studied at length this stranger who had disturbed her contemplation of the galaxy, and who didn’t even blink under the intensity of her scrutiny.

 
; A few years had passed since she was fifteen, but Ophelia felt as disturbed by Artemis’s appearance as she had that day she’d handed her the top prize. It wasn’t that she was ugly; in fact, there was something formidable about her beauty. Her auburn hair escaped at her neck in a loose coil and rippled over the marble flagstones, around her bare ankles, like a river of molten lava. The graceful curve of her figure put even the ark’s most beautiful young girls in the shade. Her skin—flesh so white and supple that, from afar, it seemed liquid—flowed over the perfect structure of her face. By an irony of fate, Artemis didn’t value the supernatural radiance that Nature had bestowed upon her and that was the envy of so many coquettes. Thus she only had men’s clothes tailor-made to fit her great height. That night, she was wearing a red velvet frock coat with simple knee breeches, leaving her calves bare.

  It wasn’t her mannish ways, either, that made Ophelia feel uncomfortable—a trifling annoyance when compared with such splendor. No, it was something else. Artemis was beautiful, but it was a cold beauty, indifferent, almost inhuman.

  The slit of her eyes, between which one could glimpse two yellow irises, expressed nothing while she studied Thorn at length. Not anger, not boredom, not curiosity. Just a waiting.

  At the end of a silence that seemed to last an eternity, she broke into a smile that was devoid of all emotion, neither kind nor unkind. A smile that had but the shape of a smile.

  “You have the accent and manners of the North. You are of Farouk’s lineage.” Artemis leant backwards in one long, graceful movement; the marble surged up from the flagging like a fountain to furnish her with a seat. Of all the Animists who populated the ark, no one was capable of such a feat, not even the line of blacksmiths, who could twist metal with just a press of the thumb.