A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  “So, what’s going on here?”

  Ophelia recognized Thorn’s hard accent.

  “Oh, sir has come down?” stammered the secretary. “Sir mustn’t worry, it’s just a little ruffian I’m about to kick on his way.”

  Behind the glass, the silhouette of the secretary was replaced by the tall, thin one of Thorn. When he opened the door and lowered his sharp nose down to Ophelia, for a moment she feared he didn’t recognize her. She raised her chin to look directly back at him.

  “Insolent!” exclaimed the secretary. “That’s too much, I’m calling the police.”

  “It’s my aunt’s messenger,” Thorn rasped through gritted teeth. The secretary’s face fell and then adopted a mortified expression. “As sir can see, I’m utterly embarrassed. A regrettable misunderstanding.”

  Ophelia shivered. Thorn had placed a large, freezing-cold hand on the nape of her neck to push her into a lift, at the back of the office. “Switch off the unnecessary lights, I will be receiving no one else for today.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My appointments for tomorrow?”

  The secretary donned thick spectacles and flicked through a notebook. “I had to cancel them, sir. As he left, Mr. Vice President handed me notification for you to attend the Council of Ministers, at five o’clock this morning.”

  “Have you received the chef’s inventory of cellars and storerooms?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I need that report for the Council. Get hold of it.”

  “The storerooms, sir?” They couldn’t have been next door, since the secretary didn’t seem keen on the prospect of going there. He bowed, nevertheless. “Certainly, sir. Goodbye, sir.”

  With an endless sequence of bows and “sir”s, the obsequious secretary departed.

  Thorn pulled back the gate of the lift. Ophelia was finally alone with him. And yet they exchanged not a word or a look as the lift slowly gained altitude. The Treasury had been established in one of the Citaceleste’s many turrets. The distance between stops from the office to Thorn’s study seemed interminable to Ophelia, so oppressive was the silence in the lift. As much as she blew her nose, sneezed, coughed, stared at her shoes, Thorn said nothing to put her at ease.

  The lift stopped in front of a vast corridor with as many doors as a piano has keys. Probably a Compass Rose. Thorn pushed open a double door at the end of the corridor. As the saying goes, it’s the job that makes the man, not the man that makes the job. When Ophelia saw the Treasury, she wondered whether that wasn’t particularly true in Thorn’s case. The study was an austere, cold room that allowed for not the slightest eccentricity. The office furnishings were reduced to a large desk, a few seats, and filing cabinets in the four corners of the room. No carpet on the floor, no pictures on the paneling, no knickknacks on the shelves. Of all the gas lamps, only the one on the desk was lit. The somber atmosphere of the wood wasn’t brightened up by any colors, apart from the book bindings all along the shelving. Abacuses, maps, and graphs served as decoration. In fact, the single frivolous touch was a threadbare old sofa, placed under a bull’s-eye window.

  “You can express yourself here without fear,” said Thorn, after locking the doors behind him.

  He took off the uniform with the epaulettes. Now he was just in a simple jacket, buttoned over an impeccably white shirt. How come he wasn’t cold? Despite the cast-iron radiator, it was freezing cold in the study.

  Ophelia pointed at the bull’s-eye window. “What does that window look onto?” She put her hand to her neck. Her voice was rusty as an old gate. Between the sore throat and Mime’s mutism, her vocal cords had suffered. Hearing it, Thorn had arched his scarred brow. That was the only movement animating his long, rigid face. Maybe she was imagining it, but Ophelia found him even stiffer than usual.

  “The outdoors,” he finally replied.

  “The real outdoors?”

  “Indeed.”

  Ophelia couldn’t resist the temptation. She perched on the sofa, like a little girl, to press her nose against the porthole. Despite its double thickness, the glass was as cold as ice. Ophelia looked down below and saw the shadows of the ramparts, arches, and towers. It was breathtaking. There was even an airship landing strip! With her glove she wiped the condensation from the glass. As she glimpsed a patch of night sky through a lace of frost and icicles, she held her breath. Strange whirlwinds were leaving colored trails in the midst of the stars. Could they be the aurora borealis? Mesmerized, Ophelia wondered how long it was since she’d last seen the sky.

  Suddenly, her throat tightened, and it wasn’t just due to her illness. She was thinking of all those starry nights back in her little Valley that she’d never taken time to contemplate.

  Ophelia would have forgotten all about Thorn, behind her, if the shrill ring of a telephone hadn’t snatched her from her thoughts. He gave her a quick look to urge discretion, and answered the call. “Yes? Brought forward? Four o’clock, I’ll be there.”

  He put the ear trumpet back on the phone’s hook and returned to Ophelia. She expected an explanation, but Thorn just leant on his desk, arms crossed, as though he were the one expecting something. So she rummaged in her uniform’s pockets, placed the seal on the desk, and cleared her throat to help her voice. “Your ruse didn’t please your aunt. And, to be perfectly frank, I didn’t particularly appreciate it, either,” she added, thinking back to the waiting room. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to phone Clairdelune?”

  Thorn’s large nose emitted an annoyed snort. “The lines in Citaceleste aren’t secure. And it wasn’t my aunt I wanted to speak to.”

  “In that case, I’m listening.” Ophelia had spoken more curtly than intended. No doubt Thorn had a good reason for prompting this meeting, but she wasn’t feeling herself. If he beat around the bush for too long, he’d pay the price.

  “That disguise makes me feel uncomfortable,” Thorn declared, checking his watch. “Remove it, please.”

  Ophelia fiddled nervously with the button on her collar. “I’m only wearing a shift under my livery.” She instantly felt ashamed for having revealed her prudery. This was exactly the kind of conversation she didn’t want to be having with Thorn. In any case, he wasn’t a man to be stirred by such things. Indeed, he impatiently snapped shut the cover of his watch and, with his eyes, indicated a wardrobe behind the desk. “Take a coat.”

  Do this, do that . . . In some respects, Thorn took after his aunt. Ophelia went around the solid-wood desk to open the door of the wardrobe. Inside there were only clothes belonging to Thorn, all excessively austere and inordinately large. Having no choice, she took a long coat off its hanger. With a quick look, she reassured herself that Thorn wasn’t watching her; he conspicuously had his back to her. Courtesy? Irony? Indifference?

  Ophelia unbuttoned her livery and pulled on the coat. She frowned on seeing her reflection in the mirror inside the door. She was so small and the coat so big, she looked like a child in adult clothing. With her chapped lips and inflamed nose, she really looked a mess. Her dark curls, badly tied in a bun, fell around her cheeks, emphasizing the paleness of her skin. Her gray-tinted glasses didn’t even conceal the dark rings shadowing her eyes. Ophelia looked so pitiful, she felt her attack of prudery was even more ridiculous.

  Too tired to remain standing, she sat in the desk chair. It had been made to measure for Thorn; her feet no longer touched the ground. “I’m listening,” she then repeated.

  Leaning on the other side of the large desk, Thorn pulled a small piece of paper from his jacket pocket and slid it across the writing folder to Ophelia. “Read.”

  Taken aback, Ophelia rolled up the coat’s flapping sleeves and seized the rectangle of paper. A telegram?

  MR. THORN TREASURY CITACELESTE, POLE

  NO NEWS FROM YOU SINCE YOUR DEPARTURE

  YOU COULD REPLY TO MOTHER’S LETTERS


  ANGERED BY YOUR SILENCE AND INGRATITUDE

  COUNTING ON ROSALINE TO WRITE TO US—AGATHA

  Staggered, Ophelia read the message several times.

  “It’s rather annoying,” said Thorn, flatly. “Your Doyennes have committed a blunder in revealing this address to your family. I must absolutely not be contacted at the Treasury, particularly by telegram.”

  Ophelia raised her chin to look him straight in the eye, from the other side of the desk. This time she was well and truly furious with him. Thorn was responsible for her letters. Because of him, she had felt forgotten by her parents, while they had been worried. “What are these letters my sister is talking about?” she asked, accusingly. “You’ve never delivered a thing to me. Did you even send those that we entrusted to you?”

  She must have looked really angry because Thorn lost his composure. “It’s not me who inadvertently mislaid all those letters,” he protested.

  “So, who is playing at intercepting our correspondence?”

  Thorn lifted and then closed the cover of his watch. Ophelia was starting to find it annoying, his forever checking the time like this.

  “I don’t know, but that person is skillful. Control of the postal system is part of the remit of my position. Without this telegram, I would never have been alerted to these disappearances.”

  Ophelia tucked a curl of hair, which was bobbing against her nose, behind her ear. “Do I have your permission to read it?” The phrase could have been confusing, but Thorn understood immediately what she was getting at. “I’m not the owner. You don’t need to seek my permission.”

  In the shade of her glasses, Ophelia raised her eyebrows. How did he know that? Ah, yes, Aunt Rosaline and she had talked about it in the airship, at the second-in-command’s table. Behind his haughty demeanor, Thorn was quite attentive after all. “You were the last person to touch it,” she explained. “I can’t avoid reading you in the process.”

  The idea didn’t seem to appeal to Thorn. His thumb opened, closed, reopened, reclosed the cover of his fob watch. “The stamp on the telegram is authentic,” he said. “I doubt it’s a fake, if that’s what concerns you.” Thorn’s eyes, like two slivers of metal, shone strangely in the light of the desk lamp. Each time they were turned on Ophelia, as they were now, she felt as though they were trying to penetrate her very soul. “Unless, of course, it’s my word that you’re questioning,” he concluded in his hard accent. “Would you not rather be seeking to read me?”

  Ophelia shook her head. “You overestimate me. A reader doesn’t penetrate the depths of people’s minds. What I can capture is a fleeting state of mind, what you’ve seen, heard, felt at the very moment of handling the object, but I assure you it remains superficial.”

  Arguing had never been Ophelia’s strong point. The cover of Thorn’s watch was now relentlessly going click click, click click, click click. “Someone is messing with my correspondence,” she sighed, “I no longer want to run the risk of being manipulated.”

  To her great relief, Thorn finally put his watch back into his jacket pocket. “You have my permission.”

  As Ophelia was unbuttoning her protective glove, he was observing her with the distant curiosity peculiar to him. “Can you read absolutely everything?”

  “Not everything, no. I can read neither organic matter nor raw materials. People, animals, plants, minerals in their crude state are all beyond my scope.” Ophelia looked at Thorn over the top of her glasses, but he asked no further questions. When she took the telegram with her bare hand, she was instantly traversed by a mental turmoil that took her breath away. As she had expected, Thorn wasn’t truly calm. On the outside, he was a slab of marble; on the inside, one thought immediately led to another, at such a pace that Ophelia was incapable of intercepting a single one. Thorn thought a lot, and he thought very fast. She’d never read anything like it in anyone else.

  Going back in time, she soon detected the astonishment that had hit him when he had discovered the telegram. He hadn’t lied, he knew nothing about the stolen letters.

  Ophelia delved further into the past. The telegram went from Thorn to an unknown person, and from an unknown person to another unknown person. They were all employees of the postal service, all preoccupied with the petty concerns of daily life. They were cold, they had sore feet, they wanted a better wage, but not one of them showed the slightest curiosity about the message destined for the Treasury. Ophelia couldn’t go back further than the hands of the telegraphic operator who transcribed into letters the sound signals from a receiver.

  “Where’s the telegraphic station?” she asked.

  “In Citaceleste, near the airship hangars.”

  Thorn had taken advantage of this reading to tidy his papers, sitting at the other end of the desk, which he normally kept for visitors. He was classifying, stamping, filing bills.

  “And where does she receive the signals from?”

  “When it’s a telegram from another ark, like this one, she receives it directly from North Wind,” he said, not looking up from his sorting. “It’s a minor interfamilial ark, dedicated to airmail and the postal service.”

  As ever when Ophelia asked him questions, Thorn replied reluctantly, as though forcing himself to remain patient.

  Ophelia was seriously wondering whether he thought her mind too slow. The fact is that she couldn’t rival the frantic workings of his brain. “Like you, I believe this telegram is authentic,” Ophelia declared while re-buttoning her glove. “And I also believe you’re being honest. Forgive me for having doubted you.”

  At that, Thorn did look up from his bills. He clearly wasn’t used to such politeness as he found nothing to say and remained stiff as a scarecrow. It could have been because it was the end of the day, but his light hair, which he always combed back, now fell over his forehead, casting a shadow over the scar on his eyebrow.

  “That doesn’t resolve the mystery of the letters’ disappearance,” added Ophelia, embarrassed by the silence. “My presence in the Pole is no longer much of a secret. What do you suggest?”

  “We know nothing of the interceptor or the motive,” Thorn finally said. “So we won’t change our strategy. You will play the mute valet at Clairdelune, while a servant pretends to be you at my aunt’s manor.” At which he unscrewed the globe from the lamp, exposing the bluish flame, and burnt the telegram without further ado.

  Ophelia took off her glasses to massage her eyelids. Her reading had intensified her headache. Even if she’d only skimmed the surface, Thorn’s accelerated thoughts had made her feel dizzy. Did he live with that all the time?

  “This masquerade is becoming absurd,” she whispered. “In any case, what does it matter to us if I’m discovered after our marriage rather than before it? Being married won’t make me less vulnerable to the family’s outrageous behavior, to petty acts of vengeance and other conspiracies.” Ophelia coughed to clear her voice. She was becoming increasingly hoarse. At this rate, she’d end up truly voiceless. “I think we should stop being so cautious and I should stop hiding,” she concluded. “Come what may.”

  She put her glasses back on with a resolute flourish. Doing so, her elbow knocked an ink pot, spilling its contents over the fine, glossy wood of the desk. Thorn got up and swiftly saved his bills from the black tide, while Ophelia rummaged in the pockets of her livery, folded on the chair, to pull out all her handkerchiefs. “I’m so sorry,” she said, wiping the mess. Then she noticed that she’d smeared ink on Thorn’s coat. “I’ll take it to the dry cleaner’s,” she promised, even more embarrassed.

  Gripping his bills, Thorn looked at her without saying a word. When Ophelia’s eyes met his, right at the top of the tall, thin body, she was surprised not to detect a trace of anger in them. Thorn mainly seemed disconcerted. He ended up looking away, as if he were more at fault than Ophelia. “You’re mistaken,” he muttered, putting his papers away in a dr
awer. “When I’ve married you, if everything works out as I’m hoping, our situation will be very different.”

  “Why?”

  Thorn passed her a sheaf of blotting paper. “You’ve been living at Archibald’s for a while, perhaps you’re more familiar now with the particularities of his family?”

  “Some of them, yes.” Ophelia laid the blotting paper wherever ink was still spreading on the desk. “Is there something else I need to know about them?”

  “Have you heard talk of the ceremony of the Gift?”

  “No.”

  Thorn looked exasperated. He would have preferred a “yes.” This time he started going through the registers stored in a cabinet, as though he wanted at all costs to keep his eyes focused on something. “A member of the Web is present at every marriage,” he explained in his voice of eternal gloom. “By a placing of hands, they forge a link between the couple that enables them to be ‘twinned.’”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” stammered Ophelia, who had stopped wiping the desk.

  Thorn again seemed irritated. “That soon, you will have taken part of me and I part of you.”

  Ophelia’s entire body shuddered under the big, black coat. “I’m not sure I quite understand,” she whispered. “I’ll make you a gift of my Animism, and you of . . . of your claws trick?”

  Hunched over his cabinet, nose deep in an accounts register, Thorn grunted a reply that was more a clearing of the throat. “This marriage will at least have the advantage of making you stronger, no? You should feel pleased.”

  For Ophelia, this was one sarcasm too many. She threw all the blotting paper onto the desk, went over to the cabinet, and placed her ink-stained glove on the page Thorn was busy reading. When he lowered his razor blade eyes onto her, she defied him with her glasses. “When were you intending to tell me about this?”