Page 53 of Chateau Reverie

It bodes badly that Orestes is being so forthcoming. It means he expects Leander to forget the conversation imminently. How many times have you told me this? Leander wants to ask. But it’s a pointless question. It will only make things worse. He cranes his neck to meet his brother’s gaze: Orestes’s expression is solemn, and solemnity doesn’t suit him. He wears it like an ill-fitting belt, squeezing him too tight.

‘The auction is our mother’s solace,’ Orestes says. ‘The Lady is eternal. Eternity is the loneliest place of all. You see, Leander: Lady Reverie does not despise humanity. She adores it. The Château is an extension of her, a limb or a child, and for each century this place has existed, for each guise it has taken in myth—an island of lotos-eaters, a court of faeries, a heavenly garden in the sky—for each auction, she has become more enamoured with the real world. The tragedy and the romance and the joy of mortality: the meaning and the ending of it all. Whatever primordial essence she was born of has denied her those things. Instead, only her guests can show her. And so she has devised a place, a method, in which she can witness all these wonders with perfect clarity. It is why she keeps you here, above all else. You are perfect to her. The most human a human has ever been.’

‘Why would she think that about me? What have I done to deserve her obsession?’

‘It was your wish,’ Orestes says, smiling gently. ‘The wish you made when you first came here. Your secret was inconsequential. When she saw your dream, she knew she would dedicate herself to seeing it come true.’

Leander swallows. You were lonely, Orestes had said. So lonely. You were desperate to find someone who could share your solitude.

‘Love, Leander,’ Orestes says, with pity glittering in his gemlike eyes. ‘You wished to fall in love. And so our mother has kept you here, all these years, until she could find you someone who would see that wish fulfilled.’

Claire is lost.

In her confused fugue of grief and regret, she has simply walked to a random door on the ground floor and opened it. She had hoped to find somewhere quiet. Instead, she is back in the curious room where she spoke with Madame Kramarov the day before. It has changed. Its marble floor has soft green moss growing between each tile, and the walls have become overgrown with lichen, as if the Château has forgotten where ought to be inside and where ought to be out. But the portrait is still there. A young man, blond, smiling, with ink on his fingertips. And beside him, her arm linked in his, a young woman: her face younger, brighter, but still recognisable. She has green eyes and rings on her fingers. She looks happy.

Below the portrait, leaning against the wall, is an empty wheelchair.

Claire leans against the wall beside the portrait and presses her fingernails into the frame. ‘I am sorry,’ she says. She is not certain whom she is apologising to.

Something glints in the light on the floor before her. She goes to pick it up: it is Madame Kramarov’s necklace. Chaim, for life. For growth. For something real. Claire cradles it in her hands and then slowly tucks it into her pouch.

She feels something dark in her throat, in the centre of her chest. Something heavy and writhing. Something she has swallowed down for years now, because it was not the sort of thing Genevieve de Vienne should permit herself; but Claire Marchand has always had a temper, and now that temper is no longer bound.

Claire is grieving, yes. She is grieving Genevieve and the other guests; she is grieving Leander and all the lies she has ever told.

But now she is angry, too.

Claire returns to her rooms. She is undressed, and then the servants leave with instructions to awaken her an hour before dawn, so that she will have time to comport herself before the bidding. Once the maids are gone, she finds herself crying, but more out of frustration than out of anything else, frustration and a sort of marvellous release, as if every unshed tear she has accumulated in the past years are now leaking out of her. She paces around the room, tugging at the diaphanous sleeves of her nightgown until the fabric frays. When she glances at the mirror now, she sees Claire’s grey eyes, Claire’s own dark hair. Claire’s scattered freckles from a childhood tending to vegetables in the convent garden. Her hands still have calluses from stitching buttons and grinding flowers to make rouge. She still has small, star-shaped scars from burning her fingers on curling irons.

Claire despises the Château, despises the Company, despises herself, this Claire-Genevieve chimera she has become: a shattered-glass girl. She will never be entirely herself, nor entirely someone else. Leander is correct. Becoming Genevieve will not bring her back. It will only destroy what pieces of her, the real her, still remain. Those jagged pieces of Genevieve still lodged in Claire’s chest, cutting her open, keeping her alive.

Who had she been? Who was she now? Claire Marchand had been a good maidservant: capable, canny, determined; pretty but not beautiful. She was sometimes a little too outspoken, a little too short-tempered, considering her station. By contrast, Genevieve de Vienne was beautiful: sweet, retiring, polite—in public, quick to bow to the whims of others, to flee a crowd, to apologise for perceived fault. But in private she blossomed, golden and joyous, shining like the stars and laughing like a bell. Every morning at Versailles, Genevieve would pull the chamber curtains open, even though that should have been Claire’s work. Then she would grin at the sky as if she wanted to take the sun between her teeth and bite.

Why do you do that? Claire had once asked her.

We must smile at the world, she replied. Otherwise, how can we expect it to smile back?

Genevieve, dear Genevieve. Has Claire become more similar to her now, after years of wearing her face, or is she merely imagining it? Love returns in brief glimpses of memory, indistinct and yet perfectly clear. Genevieve is sitting on the bed in the moonlight with her chemise down to her waist, blushing and self-conscious, biting her lip in desire as Claire removes her own clothes. Genevieve is listening to Claire reading in English and giggling, twirling a lock of Claire’s hair around her finger. Genevieve is watching Claire licking icing off her fingers; Genevieve always eats with utter propriety, and she takes great delight when Claire flaunts rules that she cannot. Genevieve is alive, so happy and bright and present, singing softly to herself as she powders her cheeks, smiling at Claire in the mirror as she laces her corset.

‘Bring her back,’ Claire says to the empty room—snarls at it. ‘For God’s sake, bring her back to me.’ But even if the Château can hear her, it will not respond. Claire looks at the mirror again and tells her hair to turn to gold and her eyes to become blue. She wishes to unearth Genevieve’s grave and climb into it, take her place, rot inside until green shoots with emerald leaves burst from the dirt. She wants to set this house on fire and dance through the flames.

She is hungry, she is tired. She folds herself into the bed and takes deep gulps of lavender-scented air. Still, the tears and the fury will not go away. Claire falls asleep with the salt of them on her lips, as if she is drowning in seawater.

She is awakened, mere minutes later, by the sound of a mandolin.

Twenty-One

Claire takes up the lantern from the desk, but she does not light it. The moon is bright enough to see by.

The clock on the wall reads midnight. The door to the balcony is half open—did she leave it that way? It swings softly in the evening breeze, the hinges too well-oiled to make a sound. The gauze curtains flutter, and Claire’s breathing comes slow and steady, despite the roiling anticipation in her stomach.

She goes to the balcony. Below, Leander sits at the fountain’s edge, playing his music. The birds have flown away: his audience now is the fountain’s lion, descended from its perch and lying rapt before him. The moonlight reflects off the polished marble of its fur, its upturned nose, the gilded edge of the balcony.

As Claire reaches the railing, Leander’s music stutters, then stops. He puts the glass mandolin down beside him. He looks up at her, and she looks down at him.

There is Genevieve in him, she thinks, in the gold of his hair and the lightness of his eyes. But for the first time, perhaps, she sees him without that haze of memory clouding her vision. She has cried herself clean. Leander Sterne is no one but himself. He is gazing up at her in awe, with barely held restraint, his fingers tightening around the edge of the fountain. He wants her. He fears her. Claire has never been feared before. Genevieve’s desire was all comfort and safety. This is not safe. She does not want it to be.

Claire is still holding her lantern. She raises it so he can see, and she tells herself that if the Château owes her anything—if it understands anything, if it can see her now—that it will do her this one favour in service of her final night as a guest of the Company.