The Betrayals(61)

‘I agree. It’s bloody awful.’

We both smiled at the same time. I looked down, flipping through my book without seeing it. There was a sharp, light feeling in my chest. ‘One of the third-years said we’re going to be studying it all term. Imagine.’

‘Ugh.’ There was a different sort of pause: easier, like all those evenings we spent working in the library last term. Suddenly he yawned. ‘I’d better go to bed now, but maybe tomorrow …? What are you doing after the Quietus? We can destroy the Bridges of K?nigsberg together. And there’s something I wanted to run past you, an idea I was playing with. When you have time.’

‘Sure. Come and find me.’

He didn’t say goodbye, just touched his forehead in a sort of salute and shut the door behind him.

Maybe I am glad to be back, after all.

Chapter 18





19: the Magister Ludi


Please don’t. Please … She looks up from the page and she can hear her voice as she might have said it, as she would say it now if she wasn’t biting her lip to stop herself. She shuts the diary with a snap, flattening Martin’s words against one another. It’s her own fault that he’s inside her head: she is doing this to herself. If she had any sense she’d burn the ledger, along with the two copies of the Danse Macabre and the other papers she’s stolen from the archive. If anyone found them … She tells herself that she is exaggerating the danger. She could explain. Yes. She is Magister Ludi, she has a right to borrow whatever she wants for private study, and so what if she sometimes forgets to let the archivist know what she’s taken? And as for how personal papers found their way into the library at all – well, how would she know? Perhaps her brother might have had a hand in it. There’s no need to destroy Martin’s diary. It would be neurotic. But then, it’s neurotic to pore over it like this, torturing herself. And it would be safer to get rid of everything …

You were late. What happened? She might as well not have closed the ledger, because she can still see the page in her mind’s eye, as clear as a photograph. Family business … That last New Year, her brother was euphoric, scribbling and composing for whole days, singing into the night until she staggered wearily back to her own bedroom, too tired and resentful even to worry. At first she’d thought he was simply happy: when he’d first seen her he’d swung her round in a flamboyant embrace that became an impromptu polka, saying her name through joyful laughter. And for a little while the atmosphere was intoxicating, like a proper holiday, the sort that they had never had. They played pranks on each other and the housekeeper; when she wasn’t there they ran wild, alone in the crumbling chateau like the orphans they were. I almost asked him if his family had been pleased about our seventy … She bites her lip. If Martin had asked, what would the answer have been? The truth? She still remembers how the mere number seventy became a kind of joke between her and Aimé: they’d say it to each other, at breakfast, at dinner, at random times of day, writing it on scraps of paper, in chalk on a door, in gravy on a plate, as though it was a shared triumph, shouting it back and forth along the damp corridors and giggling until they hardly knew which of them had earnt it. They played music together, drank musty antique wine, tried to pretend that the vacation would go on for ever.

Then, gradually, he became … strange. Perhaps she did, too. Even now she winces at the thought of it. His energy and hers sparked and exploded; his nightmares seeped into hers. The old de Courcy rottenness … But it was Aimé who struggled, who shouted in his sleep and cried out as if he was drowning. Montverre would have been bad enough, full of scholars who thought the de Courcy blood was a joke, an easy target; but the shadow of lunacy must have seemed even darker at home, under the disintegrating roof of the chateau, where it had already stolen their parents. Both of them were afraid – had always, she thinks, been afraid – but it would have been the basest treachery to say it aloud. Even to think the word madness was to invite it in. No help. No doctors. Doctors took you to the insane asylum. So she watched him, and perhaps he watched her, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if he thought she was trying to poison him. What would Martin have said, if he’d seen Aimé laughing so violently he gave himself a nosebleed? Or smashing a whole cupboard of cut glass, ‘to see the maths on the floor’? Or, oh God, white and silent at the thought of the term ahead, watching her fold his shirts into the trunk? She told herself that he was fine, really, that he’d calmed down, he was ready for another term; but he was dreading it. And if she hadn’t treated him like a child, shamed him into saying that yes, of course he was all right, he’d be fine …? If she hadn’t—

She catches her breath. Stop it. It was years ago. It’s gone, it’s past help. She shuts the door on her memories, ignoring the seep of red over the sill. This is pure self-indulgent hysteria. She should be working on the Midsummer Game, not wasting time re-reading Martin’s juvenile outpourings, narrowing her eyes at handwriting that’s become more familiar than her own brother’s. She only has months – weeks – before she’ll have to stand in the Great Hall to perform a grand jeu, and so far she has nothing. This is no time to wallow in guilt and self-pity and nostalgia. But she can’t concentrate; there’s a strange gravity-levity inside her, like a ball of mercury expanding in a surge of heat. Martin has been back at Montverre for nearly a week now, and he hasn’t spoken to her beyond a nod and smile when they’ve passed in the corridor. She flinches from seeing him alone, but she wants to get it over.