The Betrayals(110)

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t … I don’t know. I give up.’ What has she become, to be so unmanned by a kiss and a look? A few moments ago she was torn between laughing and crying; now she feels sober and still and joyous, trembling on the brink of something she doesn’t understand. ‘I’m mad. We’re mad.’

‘Obviously.’

‘I must be. I walked out of my own Midsummer Game.’

‘Ssh.’ For a split second she bridles; then he shakes his head at her and gestures towards the door. A knock. They wait, frozen.

‘Magister? Are you there?’

She doesn’t answer. Of course they’ve sent a servant to find her. Léo watches her. She holds her finger to her lips.

Finally she hears footsteps retreating. She breathes silently, once, twice, before she relaxes.

‘They’re looking for you,’ Léo says. ‘Don’t you want to go?’

‘No.’

‘You can’t hide for ever.’

‘I know that.’

He nods. That knock has changed the feeling in the air; he looks older, sadder, as if he’s about to tell her to leave. He says, ‘I’m sorry about your game, I shouldn’t have—’

She takes hold of his arms and kisses him, again. She takes pleasure in cutting him off, in biting his tongue when he tries to go on speaking. He winces and she pushes closer, feeling his bones against hers. She takes hold of his shirt and drags it out of his trousers. Her palms meet the skin of his back. The warmth of it makes her shiver. He catches his breath. But he doesn’t move to take off her gown; perhaps he’s remembering when she pushed him away, ten years ago. She pulls away long enough to tug it over her head. Then, as if she’s given him permission, he tears at her shirt, suddenly urgent.

She’s read about all this. She’s never done it. He pauses, as if he’s overheard her thought.

‘Are we mad enough to do this?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’





36: Léo


The door closes. On the other side of it he hears her footsteps clicking on the stone staircase, growing fainter. He puts his forearm over his eyes to block out the sun. He must look like a madman, flat on his back on the floor, his arm across his face. He can smell the perfume he bought her, the ghost of a burning incense-tree on his skin.

Before she left, she told him to wait half an hour before he followed so that no one would see them emerging together from the library. He didn’t reply, only smiled and checked his watch in an obedient gesture. She nodded – the Magister Ludi back in charge – and left him to it. Now that he comes to think of it, it’s funny she didn’t insist that he left first, instead of leaving him alone in the Biblioteca Ludi. Perhaps she trusts him. The thought brings another bubble of happiness into his throat. How absurd this all is. Someone he loved has come back from the dead. It’s crazy. Everything he thought he knew has turned out to be a practical joke; the world has exploded with sparks and stars and fleshy exuberant flowers as though it’s been touched by a god. Later he’ll be furious with her for her deception – he can feel it already, a cloud gathering on the horizon – but for now it’s all sunshine and springtime, sheer disbelief shot through with gold threads of happiness. Absolution. Ten years of guilt, gone. Now he can begin again. Forget politics, he’ll go back to the grand jeu.

He sits up and starts to fasten his clothes. Twenty minutes to go. He’s lost a cufflink and has to kneel and peer under the desk for a glint of gold. Red-gold with tiny rubies: one of Chryse?s’ rare gifts, presented with such nonchalance he wondered if she’d stolen them from another man’s bedside table. He hooks it out with a ruler, cocooned in a roll of dust. When he gets to his feet his head spins, not unpleasantly; it’s as though he’s had a couple of cocktails. What wouldn’t he give for a Martini and a cigarette? But the craving isn’t unpleasant: it would make this moment perfect, that’s all. He shoves his hands into his pockets and sits on the desk, letting his gaze wander around the room. You could spend a fortnight here, reading continuously, and hardly scratch the surface. Right now he can’t imagine anything better. It’s as if the grand jeu – it was practically his birthright, his first love – has come back to him, at the same time as Carfax. He wants to write a game about resurrection. The phoenix. Fire. The ideas are flooding into his head. It makes him reach for the nearest sheet of paper and a pencil.

He pauses. The paper he’s picked up is scrawled with notes. He recognises the theme – an elaboration of the Tempest’s first motif – and the handwriting. It’s been ten years since he last saw that writing, but he’d know it anywhere. It gives him a jolt of wordless pain followed by sudden euphoria, as his brain says, dead, not dead. Carfax’s, Claire’s. Has he really never seen her writing before? It seems crazy, when she’s been helping him for months, but it’s true. As he racks his brains, he realises how careful she must have been not to let him see her own work, to let him make his own corrections. She wouldn’t even fill in his diacritics for him. And suddenly he realises why she took all those files from the archive. The handwriting, her handwriting – even on Léo’s own fair copy, because she wrote in his diacritics for him, didn’t she? She must have stolen them in case someone saw them and started to wonder … Surely she could have bluffed it out? But for a few seconds he has an inkling of what it must have been like for her, trying to erase every trace, constantly on guard. No wonder she wasn’t pleased to see him.