Page 30 of Chateau Reverie

‘Leander,’ Genevieve whispers again. The fingers of her left hand are pressing into the back of his neck, five half-moon nails scoring marks into his skin. He realises he has stopped moving, stopped kissing her; he stands there with his body aching and his mind spinning like a clock hand being wound, without rest or meaning. Reality—or what facsimile of reality is possible in this place—crashes over him. Didn’t Leander already know that this is what his mother wanted? Not a full day of the auction has passed, and Genevieve de Vienne has already nearly destroyed him.

It is not her fault. It is his. And so, when he unwraps her arms from his neck and steps back, he does so gently, with an apology in his expression. Genevieve remains pressed against the wall, wrapping her own arms around her torso, her face wilting.

‘Forgive me,’ he says. He has only apologised to her once before, but this feels like the hundredth time, the thousandth. ‘I shouldn’t have. . . I met you this morning.’

‘I wanted it,’ she replies. ‘I asked.’

Genevieve watches him. He watches her back. Her hand lingers over the door handle; he wonders if she will invite him inside. He wonders what he will do if she does.

‘You ought to sleep,’ he says, because he’s a coward. Because he is too frightened and too infatuated to do anything but run away. ‘It’s late, and we. . . I will see you tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ she replies hesitantly. ‘Of course.’

She waits for him to say something more. He doesn’t.

‘Farewell, then,’ she whispers.

She pushes down on the door handle. The door whines as it opens; she must hear it as a creaking hinge. Leander knows it is the Château sighing. His mother telling him, What a waste.

‘Good night, Genevieve,’ he says.

‘Good night, Leander,’ she replies.

Eleven

It was like this the first time.

They had known each other for years, but Genevieve learned to want Claire over the course of a moment. When they were first paired together, they were nine: Claire was the perfect candidate for a helpmate, an orphan of a bourgeois family, raised in a convent—educated enough to be refined, but not so genteel she threatened to outshine her employer. In their early years, they were inseparable, entangled like a parasitic plant around a tree trunk. It seemed that their closeness would never change its character, until it did. They were sixteen, and they had been asleep in their bed—they had always shared a bed, common enough for a young girl and her lady’s maid—and they had awoken at the same moment. Genevieve had looked at Claire. The sunlight from the window caught a lock of her hair, gilding it gold. She had smiled, and the gentleness of that smile, the tenderness—it had cut through something between them. Some cord they had long held taut.

Claire had leaned over and kissed her. It was as quick as that, as immediate as that. There was no thought in the action or the response. Her lips had been so soft, and Genevieve had been so astonished at first, but then astonishment gave way to willingness, to devotion; yes, they had known each other for years, but they had fallen in love over the course of an hour.

Claire is gone now, but Genevieve knows she is still prone to flights of fancy. She has always felt desire with the heat of a brand, has always known her heart can quicken at the briefest attentions. She knows loneliness intimately, feels the lacuna in her bed each night like something chiselled out of her, something hollow and hungry.

Genevieve knows she is a fool. She knows Leander is not a window to the past, is not some golden-haired memory made real again. Still, she falls into her room that night with her heart pounding and her skin prickling and the space between her legs aching, feeling ridiculous, feeling as if she will crack herself open like an egg and spill out onto the floor. She says, ‘Idiot!’ to herself in the mirror, and then ‘Idiot!’ again once more to be certain. Pulling all the pins from her hair, she unlaces her dress without calling for the maids—a great difficulty, but feasible, in the end—and lies naked on the mattress. She ought to be ashamed. She is not. She is frustrated and giddy, and she gets up to walk a circuit around the room four times in an attempt to calm herself. You met him this morning. You met him this morning.

She combs out her hair with trembling fingers. A lantern sits by the doors to the balcony, flame steady. Genevieve snuffs it, then stands in the darkness, toes pressed against the rug.

She wants—she wants—oh, how she wants.

Genevieve slides beneath the covers of the bed. They smell strongly of lavender. The pillowcase beneath her cheek is silk, and the white canopy ripples softly with the spring breeze from the open windows. She expects sleep to elude her, but it comes quickly, inexorably—and with the darkness, her thoughts finally still.

Orestes is waiting for him in the bird room. There is a wild twittering as Leander enters, a cacophony of song, joyous and desperate. Orestes snaps his fingers, and all the birds fall silent in their cages, as the moonlight presses its fingers against their golden bars.

‘I knew you would come here,’ Orestes says to him, with a half-mocking bow. ‘My brother, Leander, as tender a heart as always.’

He must’ve done something like this before, then. Freed the birds? Kissed another guest? Perhaps it doesn’t matter which. ‘Will you stop me?’ Leander asks.

‘I never have previously. I do not intend to now.’

Slowly, Leander goes to the birdcages and tries to open the doors. It takes time to fiddle with the delicate latches, which are wrought as thin and small as children’s bones. Orestes watches him with a pleasant smile, even going as far as to open the window for him.

Once all the birds have fled their cages and flown away, Orestes says, ‘They will return. They always do.’

Leander replies, ‘I know.’

One bird has failed to fly out the window; it is a parakeet in a bright shade of blue, and it hops on the sill, watching them with curiosity. Orestes reaches into his sleeve and pulls out a glass cricket, which he offers to the bird. It takes it from his palm and swallows, then immediately begins to choke.

Leander watches the bird die. He doesn’t do anything; there’s nothing to be done. It flaps its wings, an aborted attempt to take off, to find salvation in the sky; then it slumps sideways on the sill. Why did you kill it? Leander wishes to ask. But he knows why. Sometimes his brother still shows mercy.