The Betrayals(109)

You don’t understand, do you? You’d understand if you’d come. But you didn’t, did you? You didn’t even come to Aimé’s funeral. Was it too much bother? Too long a journey? Or were you too excited about staying at Montverre for the Midsummer Game, basking in the glory of being Gold Medallist? Do you even care that Aimé killed himself?

Because what you would have seen, looking into my eyes …

It was me. The man you know as Aimé Carfax de Courcy – the man you hated, and cheated, and kissed – is me. Claire. His sister.

Don’t tell anyone. You mustn’t tell anyone, ever.

I was such a fool. Such a weak, credulous idiot. I’d never been kissed before, you see. I thought it meant something big. Important. But it can’t have done. I spent that last night thinking about you, wondering if I could tell you, somehow, swear you to secrecy, sure that you’d never betray me. I lay on my bed, feeling your mouth on mine. Such a cliché, but it’s true. And all that time Aimé was waiting for me. Pacing, maybe. Struggling every second to hold on until I got to him. Thinking I was on my way to him, when I was lying there, dreaming of you … I’ll never forgive myself. Or you.

My fingers are still black from writing on your wall. It’s just as well I had to wear gloves for the funeral. I wish I could have seen your face. BASTARD. You deserved it. You deserved worse.

It’s over. I can never go back to Montverre. Aimé’s death was in the papers; now I’m stuck with being Claire. He killed me, too, in a way. I thought, if you were there … at least I’d know it was real, all that. Not some kind of de Courcy hallucination. What if it was really him, and I’ve been at home for the last two years, practising the piano and reading? I don’t know who I am. Help me.

If they find out what I did … I’ll be disqualified from playing the grand jeu, ever again. It’ll be a scandal. They’ll call me a hussy and a whore. They’ll say, the other scholars must have known. How did she keep them quiet? I hear her brother killed himself from the shame … And if you decided to fuel the fires … Do I trust you? You’ve always been jealous, prickly – if you wanted to ruin my reputation, for ever … It would be one way to make sure I never beat you again.

If someone else had found Aimé, before I got off the train … Or if I hadn’t come home at all … I was lucky. The blood, his body. The nightmares. Lucky.

No one can ever know.

For one night, I thought I was the Gold Medallist, and I thought you loved me. It’s like a fairy tale: a girl who gets everything she wants, and loses it all, because she had to lie to get it. Jewels that turn out to be glass, ground into white dust.

I didn’t sleep, after you left me. I made myself wait until the clock struck six, and then I went down to see if they’d put up the marks. I thought that was enough time for the office to have typed up the list, and I was right.

You know what it said. I won’t tell you how it felt. I won’t give you the satisfaction.

I’ve taken your diary. It was on your desk, when I came to find you. First I looked at it to see whether you’d really submitted the wrong game. I thought maybe it was a mistake. But you did it deliberately. As though it was a favour. I didn’t understand. I thought if I read all of it, your whole life, it would make sense. But it still doesn’t. It’s here now. Your handwriting makes me feel sick.

I think you never stopped hating me.

Dear Léo, I’m not dead.

Dear Léo, I’m dead.

I’m sorry.

I hate you.

Write. Write to me, to Claire. Send me a letter telling me how sorry you are, how much you loved Aimé. Then I’ll reply. That’s all you need to do. One letter, and I’ll come back from the dead.

Chapter 34





35: the Magister Ludi


This is the grand jeu. This – yes – is her Midsummer Game: not in front of the guests in the Great Hall but here and now, alone with Léo, the moment she has been waiting for. The pause, the absolute stillness before she leans towards him, the silently indrawn breath and the blood humming in her ears. This is not the ouverture, but the main theme, the perfect move that floods a room with energy. It gives her the same pure clarity of mind, the same certainty. The audience, the terra, the rest of Montverre – none of that matters. They’re irrelevant, left behind. Like her objections. The grand jeu is now, her heartbeat, his eyes on hers. It’s all she needs.

That pause. If she could stay there for ever, caught in that moment like a fly in a bead of amber, she would. But it’s over almost before she has time to think; and then she’s kissing him, and then it isn’t a grand jeu, nothing like it, it’s a kiss, imprecise and urgent and perfectly itself. She has never felt so human. It’s like kissing him ten years ago, but it’s different, too, of course: he is cleverer, gentler, humbler. At least, he is at first, letting her take control; but as she goes on kissing him – hungry, thirsty, helpless with desire and euphoria – he shifts his position and catches his hands in her hair, pulling until it’s on the edge of pain. Yes, she remembers this. Equals, opponents, rivals, lovers. This is how it was, this is the only way it could be. This is how she has always wanted it. And when he hesitates, drawing back to look at her face, she can see him seeing her. Finally she is visible – herself, her himself, the boy she was and the woman she is now, both and neither and whole. And as Léo sees her she sees him, and she has never encountered anything so beautiful.