The Betrayals(41)
She raises her head with a jerk. Did she hear a noise outside? She thought so; but when she winds through the mess of books and boxes to open the door, the corridor is empty. She sags against the side of the doorframe. She has found herself listening too much, recently; raising her head at the slightest noise, wondering if the murmur in her ears is a voice or the rush of her own blood. As if someone is calling her, from a long way away. She finds herself straining her ears, trying to make out words in the sound of the wind, or the syncopated Morse of rain on the windows. Sometimes she’s heard footsteps, approaching her room; but then they stop, and if she wrenches open the door to see who it is, it’s no one. Not even a draught, or a drift of fine snow melting on the floor.
She doesn’t believe in ghosts – in spite of the rumours there’ve been here for years, about a phantom child sobbing in the walls. Nothing is haunting her except herself. It’s because she can’t work: her mind is undisciplined, spinning and sparking like a Catherine wheel. The energy she ought to be spending on the grand jeu is lighting on other things. Sounds, memories, the constant hot itch of knowing that Léo Martin is under the same roof. She refuses to admit the possibility that it’s the other way around, that Martin is the cause and not the symptom.
He walks down the steps from the archive as if she’s summoned him into being. Startled, she rocks back into the shelter of the archway. The movement catches his eye and he turns his head as he passes. For a heartbeat or less they hold each other’s gaze; and then he’s gone, running lightly down the lower staircase to the library with a patter of leather soles. She feels heat bloom in her face and scalp and armpits. Thank goodness he can’t see inside her head.
After his footsteps have died away the corridor is very quiet. The librarians have the day off on Sundays. There are probably a few scholars in the library below, poring over their books or gazing vacantly into space: some of them are keen, some are the usual misfits, bullied and miserable, who would rather seek sanctuary with a book than risk encountering their classmates in the Lesser Hall. But they’re quiet. From the thick, winter-muffled silence she could believe that she’s alone in the building. She looks around, listening; then she walks a few paces to the door of the archive and pushes it open. There isn’t anyone here, either. Pale light lies over everything, filtered by the snow that clings to the windowpanes. She shuts the door behind her and leans against it, breathing a faint scent of books and something spicy that might be cologne or scented soap. She walks down the aisle between the bookcases, glancing from side to side. One of the desks has been in use for months, since before the beginning of term, but the Magister Historiae – supposedly working on his magnum opus – hasn’t moved the books from their neat pile. The servants clean in here, so there’s no dust; but one day when she was at a loose end she slipped a long chignon-kinked hair between the pastedown and fly of the top volume, and she can still see the tiny glint where it catches the light. She has always despised those who couldn’t make progress. Now it gives her a pang of shame.
On the other side, a little further down, under a round window, is Léo Martin’s desk.
She approaches slowly, as if she is only going to look out at the weather. Anyone watching her from the doorway would think she was wool-gathering, wondering if more snow was going to fall. Her glance down at the papers on the desk looks like an afterthought, as if her curiosity is trifling, desultory. His handwriting gives her a little shock, like a sharp-edged stone under a bare foot. It hasn’t changed. She could put his diary side by side with this and not know the difference. She resists the urge to crumple the top page, and then the one underneath, working through until she reaches the leather panel of the desk. Instead she slides the first page aside with the tips of her fingers.
It’s difficult to see what he’s working on; it’s fragmented, full of false beginnings and crossings-out. Here and there he has written the same passage in parallel, Artemonian and classical; the versions have subtle differences, but they both trail off without concluding. In the margins of the third page he has written bugger this. She doesn’t smile. There’s something about the few legible movements which makes her pause and bend closer, as if proximity to the paper will help her understand what she’s reading. She turns the pages, uncovering more notes: old roughs, this time, but with something strange and sketchy about them, as if they’re faked. Then, with a shock, she recognises them.
The Danse Macabre. He’s trying to recreate the Danse Macabre.
And he’s got it wrong. She curls her hand into a fist, resisting the furious impulse to grab a pen and correct his workings. How could he? It’s like a garbled poem, a scratched gramophone record. Can’t he see that it doesn’t work? In fairness, she knows he can – why else would he give up in a scrawl of obscenities? – but that’s not the point, what he’s written is an insult to the grand jeu. When she suggested he work in the archive, she imagined some anodyne course of study – not this, not … Why on earth is he doing it? How dare he? And this game, this one …
There’s a movement in the corner of her eye, and she glances up. The library door. Martin, coming through it. She draws in her breath without knowing what she’s planning to say.
But before she can speak he pushes past her, barging her out of the way. She lurches into his chair and her hip explodes with pain. ‘Hey—’ she says, a breath as much as a word, ‘what the—’