Page 27 of Chateau Reverie

‘Yes.’

‘It likely shattered.’

‘I know,’ Saliha Sultan replies, voice hollow. ‘But I saw. . .’ Her gaze drops to the wooden doll lying on her skirts. ‘I could not help it. That is his soldier. His little soldier. He never goes without it. And now it is here. . . It is here.’ She gasps, folds over herself. ‘It is here.’

An unspeakable cruelty from Leander’s mother—but then again, perhaps it was meant as a kindness. Lady Reverie has never understood the difference between nostalgia and grief. Both she and Saliha Sultan are mothers, after all, as much of a mother as the Lady can be; she might have meant the toy as a gift. It doesn’t matter, either way. Saliha Sultan has eaten much of the food from the Company, and so now her memories are leaking out into the space around them, providing fodder for the Château’s grand entertainments. The same thing will happen to Genevieve, soon enough.

‘She is in no condition to search for it,’ Genevieve murmurs to him.

‘Search for what?’ Leander asks. ‘It is destroyed, no doubt.’

‘No matter, then. We ought to take her to her rooms, where she might rest.’

Little point in that, when Saliha Sultan faces penalty, but Leander can’t refuse her. Not when Genevieve is looking at him like that, face lifted in supplication, lips parted, her absurd feather headdress falling softly over her dark hair as if she is one of the doves in the mural.

He reaches down and takes hold of Saliha Sultan in both arms, sweeping her up off the floor. It’s a testament to the woman’s condition that she doesn’t complain, but Genevieve squawks as if he has lifted her up, instead.

‘You intend to carry her?’ Genevieve asks in a high voice.

‘Would you rather I didn’t?’

‘No,’ she says, altogether too defensively. ‘No, of course you must. I. . . Yes. I shall follow behind you.’

Leander turns and ducks out of the room. In his arms, Saliha Sultan’s head lolls; her eyes stare unseeing at the ceiling. She is resigned, then, to her fate. Perhaps that is for the best. Soon enough, the Château shall take her, and then she will be simply another memory that Leander has lost.

Ten

Saliha sits propped up on the pillows of her bed, staring vacantly at the opposite wall. She has taken her hairpin out, a knife-shaped thing of filigreed silver and glittering sapphires. She rolls the blade idly between her palms; Genevieve fears she will hurt herself with it, but she does not know how to prevent her from doing so.

‘Shall I leave, madame?’ Genevieve asks softly. ‘Stay?’

Leander is waiting outside. He had carried Saliha Sultan inside as easily as Genevieve might have carried a kitten, although Genevieve does not want her thoughts to linger too much upon the flex of his arms beneath his jacket and the broadness of his shoulders. She is hardly envious of Saliha Sultan’s unfortunate position—how could she be? And yet. No matter; now he has left them inside the bedchamber, Saliha and Genevieve both, with nary a word of comfort for either of them. Genevieve knows he remains outside only because she did not hear him walk away.

Saliha Sultan does not respond to her. This suite, the Venus Room, is decorated in a rich palette of scarlets and plums; the burnished-gold knobs of the door and the cabinets are all shaped, mortifyingly, to resemble miniature breasts. On the ceiling, a soft pink fresco of Venus herself observes them, rising out of a giant oyster whose centre is boldly yonic. It is too crude for Genevieve’s taste, but she must admit there is more subtle beauty here, too—in the cracked pearlescent tiling that forms the floor, and the velvet curtains shimmering faintly with metallic thread.

Genevieve takes a hesitant step back, as if to leave the room. At the movement, Saliha Sultan makes an animalistic noise, part fury, part terrible grief, and she throws her hairpin at the opposite wall. It lodges in the purple wallpaper, sinking partway in with a curious softness; and then, grotesquely, a gush of scarlet blood spurts out the wound.

Gasping, Genevieve manages to duck out of the way of the blood, leaving her clothes unsullied. Saliha Sultan does not fare so well. Crimson stripes her face and hair, a fine misting of red blushing her cheeks.

Saliha Sultan blinks at the wounded wall, then looks down at the bedsheets, now coated in blood. ‘I feel sick,’ she says.

Genevieve’s blood is roaring in her ears. She is frightened, she thinks hollowly, shocked by the wound in the wall, but that fear feels curiously inconsequential. When she speaks, her voice sounds distant, as if it is not her own. ‘Would. . . Would you like a ginger lozenge?’

‘A ginger lozenge,’ Saliha echoes, and then she laughs hollowly. ‘Why not.’

Gingerly, Genevieve steps back towards the bed and gives her the remaining lozenge from her pouch. As Saliha Sultan places it on her tongue, Genevieve goes over to inspect the wall. The hairpin is lodged there, and there is still blood welling slowly around it. She takes hold of the hairpin, whispers, ‘Forgive me’—to the Château itself? Perhaps—and pulls the pin out.

Another spurt of blood follows, splashing over Genevieve’s hands. Meanwhile, the black hole left by the pin remains there briefly, and then the wallpaper begins to slowly stitch itself together. As it does so, there is a moment when the whole house shakes slightly, the chandelier above them wavering and the floorboards creaking. Genevieve almost falls over, but she catches herself on the wall just in time.

A nightmare, she thinks. This is a nightmare, merely.

She goes to Saliha Sultan and offers her the hairpin.

‘Keep it,’ Saliha Sultan says. ‘I do not need it anymore.’

Genevieve tightens her grip around the pin. ‘But,’ she says, and then, ‘I do not know how to help you.’

She wants to help. Genevieve always wants to help. Each person in need whom she meets, each desperate guest frightened and alone, seems another way to reach for salvation. Another way to scrub away her guilt.