A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  “That’s a very serious accusation, dear friend,” Archibald intervened, pointing at his tattooed forehead. “An accusation in front of a multitude of witnesses.” His lips curled into a smile, but it was at Ophelia that he directed it. Through him, the whole Web was witnessing the scene and she was part of the show.

  In the blink of an eye, Berenilde found her serene face again. Her chest, which was heaving in fits and starts, calmed down, along with her breathing. Her skin returned to being as white as porcelain. “An accusation? Have I even suggested a name?”

  Archibald peered deep into his punctured top hat, as if he found that hole more fascinating than all the people present. “I believed, listening to you, that this ‘angel’ was no stranger to you.”

  Berenilde looked up at Thorn for guidance. Rigid on the divan, he responded with a scathing look. From the depths of his silence, he seemed to be exhorting her: “Play the game.” This silent exchange had lasted but an instant, but it allowed Ophelia to realize how mistaken she’d been about Thorn. She’d long seen him as Berenilde’s puppet when, in fact, he’d always been pulling the strings.

  “I’m distraught by the death of my family,” Berenilde murmured with a weak smile. “I’m distracted with pain. What really happened today, no one knows and no one ever will know.”

  With her eyes of honey and face of marble, she was back onstage playing a part. Poor Jan, totally flummoxed, couldn’t make head or tail of it all.

  As for Ophelia, she really didn’t know what to think of all she’d just heard. By setting the policemen on Mime, and imprisoning Aunt Rosaline’s mind, and compelling that poor servant to jump out of the window, had the Knight been maneuvering to keep Berenilde here to stop her from going to that hunt? It was only a hypothesis. It was forever only hypotheses. That child was formidable. His shadow hung over every disaster, but one could never accuse him of anything.

  “So, we’ll consider the matter closed?” chirped Archibald. “A deplorable hunting accident?”

  At least one person was relishing the situation this evening. Ophelia would have found him hateful had she not got the feeling that each of his interventions was aimed at protecting Berenilde from her own state of mind.

  “Provisionally, at least.” All eyes turned to Thorn. These were the first words he had uttered since the start of their little meeting.

  “That stands to reason,” said Archibald, with a touch of irony. “If the inquest brings to light aspects that would suggest criminal goings-on, I don’t doubt that you will reopen the file, Mr. Treasurer. It’s right up your alley, it seems to me.”

  “As it will be up yours to compile your report for Farouk, Mr. Ambassador,” Thorn retorted, shooting him a razor-sharp look. “My aunt’s position at court has become precarious; can I count on you to defend her interests?”

  Ophelia sensed from his tone that it was more of a threat than a request. Archibald’s smile broadened. One by one, he lifted his shoes off the footrest and put his old top hat back on. “Would Mr. Treasurer be casting doubt over the zeal with which I will defend his aunt?”

  “Haven’t you already let her down in the past?” Thorn hissed between his teeth.

  Still inhabited by her alter ego, Ophelia wore a faraway, barely concerned look on her face. Yet she didn’t miss a scrap of what was being said and not being said. So Archibald had betrayed Berenilde in the past? Was that why Thorn hated him even more than the others?

  “You’re speaking of bygone days,” Archibald whispered, without dropping his smile. “What a tenacious memory! But I understand your concern. You owe your social advancement to the support of your aunt. If she falls, you could well fall with her.”

  “Ambassador!” protested Berenilde. “Your role is not to add fuel to the flames.”

  Ophelia watched Thorn, motionless on the divan, closely. Archibald’s comment didn’t seem to have affected him, but his long, gnarled hands had tightened around his knees.

  “My role, madam, is to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” responded Archibald, suavely. “Your nephew only lost half of his family today. The other half is still very much alive, somewhere in the provinces. And that half, Mr. Treasurer,” he concluded, calmly looking at Thorn, “was brought down by your mother’s misdemeanor.”

  Thorn’s eyes narrowed into two gray slits, but Berenilde laid her hand over his to calm him down. “For goodness’ sake, gentlemen, let’s stop stirring up all those old stories! We have to think of the future. Archibald, can I count on your support?”

  With a flick, he straightened up his top hat, uncovering his big, clear eyes. “I have something better to propose to you than support, dear friend. I propose an alliance. Make me the godfather of your child, and henceforth you can consider my whole family as your own.”

  Ophelia dived into a handkerchief so she could cough at will. Godfather to Farouk’s direct descendant? Here was a man who didn’t miss a trick. Taken aback, Berenilde had instinctively laid her hands on her stomach. Thorn, on the other hand, went white with rage and seemed to be battling a desire to make Archibald swallow his hat.

  “I’m not in a position to refuse your help,” Berenilde finally responded, sounding resigned. “So that is how it will be.”

  “Is that an official announcement?” insisted Archibald, again tapping his forehead tattoo.

  “Archibald, I make you the godfather of my child,” she declared, as patiently as she could. “Will your protection extend to my nephew?”

  Archibald tempered his smile. “You’re asking a great deal of me, madam. People of my own gender inspire me with the most profound indifference and I have no desire to introduce such a lugubrious individual into my family.”

  “And I have no desire to be your relation,” spat Thorn.

  “Supposing I bend my principles,” Archibald continued, regardless. “I would only accept to offer my protection to your little fiancée if she herself made the request.”

  Ophelia’s eyebrows shot up as she felt the force of Archibald’s twinkling wink. From having been continuously treated like part of the furniture, she no longer expected to be asked her opinion.

  “Decline his offer,” Thorn commanded her.

  “For once, I totally agree with him,” Aunt Rosaline suddenly broke in, angrily putting down her tea tray. “I will not permit you to mix with such an unseemly crowd.”

  Archibald looked at her with obvious curiosity. “So the lady’s companion was an Animist? I was deceived under my own roof!” Far from being offended, he seemed quite the opposite: agreeably surprised. He turned to Ophelia, clicking his heels, and opened his eyes wide, so wide that the sky seemed to take over his face. From their divan, Thorn and Berenilde were glaring at her to convey that they expected more than just idiotic silence from her.

  In Ophelia’s head, an alien thought now dominated all other thoughts: “Make your own choices, little miss. If you don’t seize your freedom today, it will be too late tomorrow.”

  Archibald continued innocently staring at her, as though that thought really hadn’t come from him. Ophelia decided that he was right, she must make her own choices from now on. “You are a man without morals,” she declared, as loudly as possible. “But I know you never lie, and it’s truth that I need. I consent to listen to all the advice that you care to give me.”

  Ophelia had looked Thorn straight in the eye as she’d said these words, because she was addressing him, too. She saw his angular body crumple. Archibald, on the other hand, couldn’t stop smiling.

  “I think we’re going to get on famously, Thorn’s fiancée. We’re friends from this moment onwards!” He tipped his hat at her, deposited a kiss on Berenilde’s hand, and left, taking the poor, disorientated gamekeeper with him. The cries and questions of the nobles burst through when the ambassador went through the antechamber door; calm returned as soon as Aunt Rosaline turned the ke
y.

  There was a long, tense silence during which Ophelia felt the general disapproval bearing down on her. “I’m staggered by your arrogance,” said an indignant Berenilde as she stood up.

  “I was asked for my opinion and I gave it,” responded Ophelia, as placidly as she could.

  “Your opinion? You’re in no position to have an opinion. Your only opinions will be those dictated to you by my nephew.”

  Stiff as a corpse, Thorn’s eyes didn’t leave the carpet. His chiselled profile was expressionless.

  “By what right do you publicly oppose the wishes of your future husband?” Berenilde continued, her voice icy. Ophelia didn’t need to think about the question for very long. Her face was in a dreadful state, one more clawing wasn’t going to stop her. “By the right that I granted to myself,” she said, with confidence. “From the moment I discovered that you were manipulating me.”

  In the clear water of Berenilde’s eyes there was a kind of eddy. “How dare you speak to us in that tone?” she whispered, choked. “You’re nothing without us, my poor girl, absolutely nothing—”

  “Be quiet.”

  Berenilde spun around. Thorn had issued this order in a voice full of thunder. He unfolded his big body from the divan and gave his aunt a look so piercing it made her blanch.

  “It so happens that her opinion does have importance. What exactly did you say to her?”

  Berenilde was so shocked he was attacking her that she was struck dumb. Ophelia decided to reply in her stead. She raised her chin to meet Thorn’s scarred eye, right up there. The dark shadows around it were scary and his pale hair had never been so badly combed. He had been too tested today for her to unleash her full fury on him, but she couldn’t postpone this conversation. “I know about the Book. I know your true ambitions. You’re using the marriage to take away part of my power and fortify yourself with it. What I regret is not having heard about it from your mouth.”

  “And what I regret, personally,” grumbled Aunt Rosaline, giving her back her mended glove, “is not understanding what you’re wittering on about.”

  Thorn had taken refuge behind his watch, as he always did when a situation was out of his control. He wound it up, closed the cover, reopened the cover, but it changed nothing: the timeline had been broken. From today, nothing would ever be as it was. “What’s done is done,” was all he said, in a neutral tone. “We have other fish to fry right now.”

  Ophelia wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she felt even more disappointed in Thorn. He’d expressed no regret, come up with no excuse. She suddenly realized that a small part of her had continued secretly to hope that Berenilde had lied to her and that he had nothing to do with this scheming.

  Exasperated, Ophelia pulled on her glove and helped her aunt clear away the tea things. She was in such a nervous state that she broke two cups and a saucer.

  “We no longer have any choice, Thorn,” Berenilde sighed. “We must present your fiancée to Farouk, and the sooner the better. Everyone’s soon going to know she’s here. It would be dangerous to hide her from him for any longer.”

  “Isn’t it even more dangerous to just spring her on him?” he muttered.

  “I’ll ensure that he takes her under his wing. I promise you it will all go well.”

  “But of course,” hissed Thorn, scathingly. “It was just so simple, why didn’t we think of it sooner?”

  In the little kitchen, Aunt Rosaline exchanged an astonished glance with Ophelia. It was the first time Thorn was being so insolent to Berenilde in their presence.

  “Will you no longer trust me, then?” she asked, reproachfully.

  Heavy steps approached the kitchen. Thorn bowed his head to avoid banging it on the lintel, too low for his height, and leant against the door frame. Busy drying up, Ophelia ignored his eyes boring into her. What was he expecting? A kind word? She didn’t want to look him in the face anymore.

  “It’s Farouk that I don’t trust at all,” said Thorn in a hard voice. “He’s so forgetful and so impatient.”

  “Not if I stay by his side to bring him to reason,” declared Berenilde, standing behind him.

  “You’ll be sacrificing what independence you have left.”

  “I’m prepared for that.”

  Thorn didn’t take his eyes off Ophelia. Concentrate as she might on drying a teapot, she could still sense him out of the corner of her glasses.

  “You keep drawing her closer to the epicenter that I, personally, wanted to keep her away from,” he complained.

  “I can’t see any alternatives.”

  “Please, do just carry on as if I weren’t here,” said Ophelia, riled. “It’s not as if it concerns me, after all.” She looked up and, this time, couldn’t avoid Thorn’s eyes bearing down on her. She discovered what she’d feared seeing in them. A profound weariness. She didn’t want to feel sorry for him, to think about those two little dice.

  Thorn came right into the kitchen. “Leave us for a moment,” he asked Aunt Rosaline, who was putting the tea service away in a cupboard. She gritted her long horse’s teeth. “On the condition that this door remains open.”

  Aunt Rosaline joined Berenilde in the sitting room, and Thorn pulled the door to as much as possible. There was only a gas lamp in the kitchen; it projected Thorn’s skeletal shadow onto the wallpaper as he stood, at full height, before Ophelia.

  “You knew him.” He’d whispered these words very stiffly. “It’s not the first time that you’re meeting him,” he continued. “As your real self, I mean.”

  It took Ophelia a while to understand that he was talking about Archibald. She pushed back the wave of hair falling over her glasses like a curtain. “No, indeed. I’d already met him by accident.”

  “The night of your getaway.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he knew who you were for all this time.”

  “I lied to him. Not very well, I’ll admit, but he never made the connection between Mime and me.”

  “You might have informed me.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Maybe you had reasons for not telling me about this meeting?”

  Ophelia’s neck was aching from looking up at Thorn. She noticed, in the lamplight, that the muscles along his jaw had tightened. “I hope you’re not alluding to what I think you are,” she said in a subdued voice.

  “Should I deduce that he didn’t dishonor you?”

  Ophelia was exploding inside. Well, that really took the cake! “No. You, on the other hand, have humiliated me more than anyone has.”

  Thorn raised his eyebrows and breathed in deeply through his big nose. “You’re annoyed with me because I concealed things from you? You, too, lied to me by omission. It would seem that we both got on the wrong track from the start.” He’d come out with that in a totally dispassionate tone. Ophelia felt increasingly baffled. Did he really think he could sort out their differences as easily as he filed away his Treasury cases? “And I’m not accusing you of anything,” he added, unperturbed. “I just recommend that you don’t trust Archibald. Protect yourself from him, never remain alone in his company. And I can’t recommend strongly enough the same caution with Farouk. Be constantly escorted by someone when you’re obliged to frequent him.”

  Ophelia didn’t know whether to laugh or get really annoyed. Thorn seemed serious. She sneezed three times, blew her nose, and continued in a snuffly voice: “Your concern is misplaced. No one really notices me.”

  Thorn went quiet, pensive, and then leant forward, one vertebra at a time, until he could grasp Ophelia’s hand. She would have pulled away had he not straightened up almost instantly of his own accord. “You believe that?” he asked, sardonically.

  And as Thorn left the kitchen, Ophelia realized that he had slipped a piece of paper into her hand. A telegram?

  MR. THORN TREASURY CITACELESTE, POLE />
  CONCERNED BY YOUR SILENCE ARRIVING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE—FATHER MOTHER AGATHA CHARLES HECTOR DOMITILLA BERTRAND ALPHONSE BEATRICE ROGER MATHILDA MARK LEONORA, ETC.

  The Mirror Visitor

  “Always lower your eyes in the presence of Lord Farouk.”

  “But don’t let that stop you from standing up straight.”

  “Speak only if you are specifically invited to do so.”

  “Show yourself to be as frank as a whistle.”

  “You have to deserve the protection afforded you, Ophelia, so show humility and gratitude.”

  “You’re representing the Animists, dear girl, so allow no one to lack respect for you.”

  Bombarded with the contradictory recommendations of Berenilde and Aunt Rosaline, Ophelia wasn’t really listening to either. She was trying to soothe the scarf, which, half mad with joy and half with anger, was coiling itself round her neck, her arms, and her waist for fear of again being separated from its mistress.

  “I should have burnt that thing when your back was turned,” sighed Berenilde, shaking her fan. “One doesn’t make one’s entrance at the Pole’s court with a badly behaved scarf.”

  Ophelia picked up the parasol she’d just dropped. Berenilde had decked her out in a veiled hat and a vanilla-colored dress, as light as whipped cream, which reminded her of childhood outfits worn when her whole family went on summer picnics. This getup seemed infinitely more incongruous than her scarf on an ark where it never reached more than minus fifteen degrees in spring.

  Their lift gently came to a halt. “The Family Opera House, ladies!” the liftboy announced. “The Lifts Company would like to inform you that a connecting service awaits you on the other side of the foyer.”

  The last time Ophelia had crossed the Opera foyer’s glimmering parquet floor, she’d been wearing a valet’s livery rather than a lady’s dress, and carrying an oar instead of a parasol. She felt as if she had swapped one disguise for another, but one thing hadn’t changed: her rib was just as painful.

  A new liftboy, tugging at his elastic-strapped hat, came to meet them. “Your connection awaits you, ladies! Lord Farouk has made known his ardent desire to receive you.”