A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  “In due course,” he grunted.

  Thorn was uncomfortable, which only put Ophelia into an even worse mood. He wasn’t behaving as usual and it made her nervous. “Do you have so little confidence in me, to do all this hiding from me?” she persisted. “And yet I think I’ve shown plenty of goodwill up to now.”

  With her croaky voice, Ophelia felt pathetic, but her reproaches caught Thorn off guard. His stern features had all loosened due to the surprise. “I am conscious of the efforts that you make.”

  “But it’s not enough,” she muttered, “and you’re right. You can keep your no-go world. I’m far too clumsy to be entrusted with Dragon’s claws.” Shaken by a coughing fit, Ophelia removed her hand from the register.

  Thorn contemplated the inky imprint left by the little glove for a long time, as though hesitating to say something. “I will teach you,” he suddenly declared. He seemed as embarrassed at saying these four words as Ophelia was at hearing them. No, she thought. Not that. He has no right.

  “It would certainly be the first time you went to such trouble,” she said, reproachfully and looking away. Increasingly disturbed, Thorn opened his mouth, but the ringing of the telephone stopped him short.

  “What?” he muttered, on answering it. “Three o’clock? Fine. Yes, good night.”

  As he was replacing the receiver, Ophelia gave a final, totally pointless, wipe with her handkerchief to the vast ink stain imprinted on the desk. “I’d better go back. Could I borrow your wardrobe, please?” With Mime’s livery over her arm, she was indicating the mirror on the still-open door. She needed to leave before it was too late.

  Deep down, she knew it was already too late.

  As she leant towards the mirror, Ophelia saw Thorn’s lofty figure approaching stiffly. His face had turned dark and thunderous. He hadn’t appreciated the turn their conversation had taken. “Are you coming back?” he said, gruffly.

  “Why?” She couldn’t stop herself from being on the defensive. In the mirror, she saw Thorn’s reflection frowning hard enough to distort his scar.

  “Thanks to your ability to travel through mirrors, you could keep me informed of the situation at Clairdelune. And,” he added more quietly, taking a sudden interest in his shoes, “I think I’m starting to get used to you.” He had said this last sentence in the neutral tone of an accountant, but Ophelia started to shake. Her head was spinning. Her vision was blurred.

  He didn’t have the right.

  “I’ll lock the wardrobe when I’m receiving visitors,” Thorn continued. “If the door is open, it means you can enter here in total safety, at any time of the day, or of the night.”

  Ophelia stuck her finger into the mirror as though it were dense water and, suddenly, she caught sight of the two of them. A small Animist swallowed by her too-big coat, looking sickly and dazed. A Dragon, huge, edgy, brow furrowed by constant mental tension. Two irreconcilable worlds.

  “Thorn, I must be honest with you. I think we’re making a mistake. This marriage . . . ” Ophelia stopped just in time, realizing what she’d almost said: this marriage is but a plot of Berenilde’s; she’s using us for her own ends, we mustn’t enter into her game.

  She couldn’t reasonably announce that to Thorn without having proof of what she was suggesting. “I know we can no longer turn back,” she sighed. “The future you’re offering me simply doesn’t appeal to me.”

  In the mirror, Thorn’s jaws had tightened. He, who never attached any importance to the opinion of others, seemed humiliated. “I had predicted that you wouldn’t last the winter, and you’ve proved me wrong. You deem me incapable of one day offering you a decent life; would you permit me, in turn, to prove myself?”

  He was speaking in small bursts, his teeth clenched, as if this matter demanded an enormous effort from him. As for Ophelia, she didn’t feel at all well. She had no desire to reply to him.

  He didn’t have the right.

  “Could you send a telegram to my family to reassure them?” she stammered pathetically.

  Ophelia noticed a spark of anger in the reflection of Thorn’s eyes. For a second, she thought he was going to send her packing, but, instead, he agreed. She immersed herself entirely in the wardrobe mirror and stepped out into her sleeping quarters, at the other end of the Citaceleste. She stood still in the cold darkness, lost inside her coat, her stomach so knotted she felt nauseous. From Thorn she’d been ready for anything. Brutality. Disdain. Indifference.

  He didn’t have the right to fall in love with her.

  The Orange

  Ophelia contemplated her buttered bread without appetite. All around her, the servants’ hall was buzzing with gossiping and giggling. She felt as if the merest clink of a cup was reverberating on the surface of her skull.

  Since she’d returned from the Treasury, several days ago now, she couldn’t get to sleep anymore. And yet it wasn’t for lack of exhausting herself at work. On top of his usual duties, Mime now served as a page turner. Berenilde had ended up accepting the part of Isolde for the Spring Opera, and she didn’t miss a single rehearsal in the music room. “I’m going to be more demanding of you than ever,” she had declared to Ophelia after learning of the disappearance of the letters. “No one here must doubt that you could be anything other than a valet to me.”

  In truth, Ophelia didn’t care. She had just one desire: to get Thorn out of her head. He had had the poor taste to turn a conventional marriage arrangement into a soppy little story, and she hadn’t forgiven him for that. In her eyes, he’d just broken a tacit agreement. Cordial and dispassionate relations, that’s all she aspired to. Because of him, an unease hovered between them that hadn’t been there before.

  As Ophelia was trying to swallow down her coffee, a slap on the back made her spill half of it over the table. Fox straddled the bench and shoved his watch under her nose, knocking into a colleague as he did so. “Get a move on, sonny. The funeral ceremony’s about to begin!”

  Madam Frida, an elderly cousin of Archibald, had been struck down by a heart attack at the last Clairdelune ball, after an excessively boisterous dance. This morning she was being buried in the family vault.

  As Ophelia indicated to Fox to go on ahead, he squinted at her while frowning with his enormous red eyebrows. “So what’s up with you? You never say a thing anymore! Well, yes, you’ve never been chatty, but before, you’d speak to me with your eyes, or hands, or scribbles, and we understood each other. Now, I feel like I’m alone, waffling to a wall! It’s starting to really worry me.”

  Ophelia looked at Fox in astonishment. He was worried about her? She jumped when a basket of oranges landed right in the middle of her buttered bread. “Can you deliver that for me?”

  It was Gail, the black-monocled mechanic. As usual, she was swimming in her soot-covered overalls and hiding her face behind a cloud of dark hair.

  “Bloody hell!” swore Fox. “Where d’you get those oranges?” Like all exotic fruit, oranges were only ever seen on the nobles’ tables. Archibald owned a private orchard on the distant ark of LandmArk. Ophelia knew that a Compass Rose provided access to it, spanning thousands of kilometers with no regard for the basic laws of geography, but only the steward possessed the key.

  “To my knowlege, the LandmArk orange grove also belongs to Mother Hildegarde,” said Gail in a grating voice. “It’s her home, after all.”

  “Exactly as I thought,” sighed Fox, scratching his side-­whiskers, “you helped yourself in the master’s larder. Out of the question that I touch stolen fruit. Ask me whatever you like apart from that.”

  “I’m not asking you anything. I’m talking to the new guy.” Gail rolled her single eye over to Ophelia. An eye so blue, so bright, so sparkling that the black curls that cascaded over it didn’t manage to obscure it. “Deliver that to my boss, will you? She’ll be at the funeral of the old lady and I know you have to go, too. Promise it won
’t cause you any problems.”

  “Why him?” grumbled Fox, scowling. “Why not you, for example?”

  Ophelia was wondering the same thing, but the thought of finally meeting Mother Hildegarde didn’t displease her. She was a foreigner, like her, and yet she’d succeeded in making herself indispensable to all the important people in this world. The elevation of the Citaceleste into the sky, the air currents for the dog sleighs, the distortions of space, the strong rooms, the concept of the sandglasses: there wasn’t a thing here that didn’t bear her trademark. Her stroke of genius had been to combine her power over space with the Mirages’ illusions. Ophelia had a lot to learn from her.

  She stiffened when Gail leaned over the table until nose to nose with Mime’s face. She spoke in such a low voice that Ophelia could barely hear her in the midst of the general hubbub. “Why you, hey? Because I’ve not stopped watching you since you got here. You feel as if you don’t fit in, and you’re absolutely right. Know why my boss is called ‘Mother,’ and not ‘Duchess’ or ‘Countess’? Because she’s not one of them. She’s the mother of folk like you and me. Bring her these oranges, she’ll understand.”

  Under Ophelia’s flabbergasted gaze, Gail sauntered off with her tomboy swagger, hands in pockets. “Don’t fit in?” What did she mean by that?

  “Well, didn’t understand a word of that, me,” declared Fox, combing his fiery mop. “Known her since she was a young thing, that woman, but don’t think I’ll ever understand her.” He let out a dreamy, almost admiring, sigh, then shook his watch in front of Ophelia. “We’re less and less early. Lift your bum off this bench!”

  The funeral ceremony of the late Madam Frida was held at the Clairdelune chapel, right at the back of the estate, beyond the fir-tree forest, beyond the Plate-of-Silver pond. As soon as she set foot inside, following a procession of nobles clad in black, Ophelia sensed a change of atmosphere. Seen from outside, the chapel looked like the ruin of a small, unpretentious fortified castle, which added a romantic touch to the gardens. Once past the large door, one entered a dark and disturbing world. The marble tiling made every step, every whisper echo right up to the vaulted roof. Imposing stained-glass windows were lashed by fake rain and lit up by fake lightning. Each flash allowed a glimpse of the glass images between the lead borders: a chained wolf; a water serpent; a hammer struck by a thunderbolt; an eight-legged horse; a half-dark, half-light face.

  With basket of oranges under arm, Ophelia cast an anxious look around the chapel, which was packed with the high society. How was she going to recognize Mother Hildegarde?

  “Key, if you please,” a policeman posted at the entrance said to her. Ophelia tugged on her chain and presented him with her key. To her great astonishment, he then gave her a black umbrella. It was so heavy, it took her breath away. The policeman was distributing them to all the valets he was in charge of. They then held them aloft over the heads of their masters, as if to protect them from invisible rain. Was this whole performance part of the funeral ceremony? Ophelia felt sorry for the family. It couldn’t be easy to mourn in such a ludicrous scenario.

  Ophelia spotted Berenilde and her mother. Aunt Rosaline wasn’t with them—only valets were authorized to attend the funeral. “Why these oranges?” asked Berenilde, unashamedly beautiful in her mourning dress. “Did I ask for any such thing?” Ophelia tried to explain to her, with the help of much gesticulating, that she had to deliver them to someone in the crowd. “We don’t have time,” decreed Berenilde, “the ceremony is about to begin. What are you waiting for to open your umbrella?”

  Ophelia hastened to obey, but there were crystal pendants dangling from every rib of the umbrella. That explained its weight. Burdened with Gail’s basket, Ophelia would have ended up dropping everything on the floor if Thorn’s grandmother hadn’t, yet again, come to her aid. She relieved her of the oranges, much to Berenilde’s annoyance.

  “You’re too good to this boy, Mother.”

  The grandmother must have only half-grasped this warning as her wrinkled face broke into a contrite smile. “It’s really that I’m too greedy, my dear. I adore oranges!”

  “Don’t touch those, we don’t know where they’ve been lying around. Let’s get going,” continued Berenilde, taking her mother’s arm, “I’d like to sit close to Odin’s altar.”

  Lifting her umberella as high as possible to make up for her shortness, Ophelia followed close behind them. Too bad, Mother Hildegarde would have to wait. She threaded her way as best she could through the other umbrellas, a strange forest of black mushrooms, until they reached the benches reserved for those close to the deceased.

  Recognizable by his tattered top hat, Archibald was slumped in the front row. Ophelia had never seen him looking so serious. So he had been affected by the death of Madam Frida? Just for that, he went up in Ophelia’s esteem.

  The ambassador was surrounded by his sisters and an impressive cohort of aunts and cousins. It was the first time Ophelia saw the Web in its entirety, because the members of the clan didn’t all live at Clairdelune. The predominance of women in this family was notable. She spotted Fox, who was standing behind the third row of benches, holding his umbrella above Lady Clothilde. Archibald’s grandmother was a little hard of hearing, so she was holding her ear trumpet in the direction of the harmonium, frowning like a music critic despite the fact that no one yet sat at the keyboard.

  Ophelia positioned herself with her umbrella behind Berenilde and her mother, a row further back. Clearly visible to all, at the far end of the chapel, the coffin had been placed at the foot of a statue of a giant seated on a throne. Ophelia looked at it with curiosity: was that “Odin’s altar?” Gripping her umbrella with both hands to stop the pendants swinging, she glanced, intrigued, at the walls of the nave. Between the stained-glass windows, other stone statues, wide-eyed and stern-featured, supported the vaulted ceiling with their arms.

  The forgotten gods.

  This chapel was a reproduction of the churches of the old world, from the time when humans believed they were ruled by all-powerful forces. Ophelia had never seen one anywhere else, apart from in old illustrations. On Anima, baptisms, marriages and funerals were all celebrated very simply, at the Familistery. The people over here certainly had a sense of decorum.

  The hum of murmuring from the benches ceased. The policemen, lining the walls in a guard of honor, stood to attention. The solemn music from the harmonium rose to fill the entire chapel. The master of ceremonies had just appeared at Odin’s altar. He was an elderly, bewigged man, clearly deeply upset, with the mark of the Web on his forehead. Ophelia recognized the widower of Madam Frida.

  “A thread has snapped!” he declared in a quavering voice. He fell silent and closed his eyes. Moved, Ophelia thought for a moment that he couldn’t find his words, but then realized that all the members of the Web were collecting their thoughts. The silence continued, disturbed only by a cough here, a yawn there from guests on the benches. Ophelia was finding it increasingly hard to hold her umbrella straight. She hoped her basket of oranges wasn’t too heavy for Thorn’s grandmother; she’d rested it on her knees and was clinging to the handle to stop it spilling onto the flagstones.

  When Ophelia saw all of Archibald’s sisters blowing their noses, overcome by the same emotion, she understood that the family weren’t collecting their thoughts. The ceremony was actually continuing, but without words. The Web didn’t need them, they were all linked to each other. What one felt, everyone felt. Ophelia looked again at Archibald, in the front row, whose profile was all she could make out. A provocative smile no longer lit up his face. He’d even combed his hair and shaved his cheeks for the occasion.

  This family were united by a bond of which neither Ophelia nor any clan in the Pole had the slightest conception. A death wasn’t just the loss of a loved one. It was a whole part of oneself disappearing into oblivion.

  Ophelia felt ashamed for having ent
ered this chapel without a single thought for the woman lying inside the coffin. Forgetting the dead was like killing them a second time. She focused on her only memory of Madam Frida—that of an old lady dancing rather too fast—and concentrated on it with all her might. It was all she could do for them.

  The umbrella seemed less heavy to Ophelia, the time less long. She was almost startled when the widower thanked those assembled and they all stood up. Each valet closed his umbrella and hung it by its curved handle on the back of a bench. The shaking of all those pendants sounded like a shower of crystal rain.

  Ophelia copied them and, with a bow of the head, thanked Thorn’s grandmother as she returned her basket to her. While Berenilde was busy conveying her condolences to Archibald’s family, she took her chance to go in search of Hildegarde. She had to find her before the chapel had emptied.

  “Benches at the back,” Fox whispered in her ear. “Don’t hang around in her company, son, she hasn’t got the best reputation.”

  As soon as Ophelia spotted an old woman sitting in the back row of benches, she knew, without any hesitation, that this was Mother Hildegarde. She was a perfectly hideous relic. With her thick, salt-and-pepper hair, swarthy complexion, tacky spotted dress, and cigar planted in a smirk, she stuck out among the pale nobles surrounding her. She swiveled her small black eyes, sunk like marbles in her big face, to scrutinize all these toffs with a kind of impertinent irony. Mother Hildegarde seemed to derive great pleasure from seeing people turn away as soon as their eyes met hers, and then calling out to them by name in her guttural voice.

  “Are you satisfied with your new shortcut, Mr. Ulric?”

  The person in question mustered a polite smile and hurried off.