The Betrayals(78)
She has reached the top of the stairs. She puts the bottle on her washstand, bends over the basin and splashes her face. It’s too dark to see her reflection, although a slice of starry sky shimmers on the surface of the water. She’s feeling sick. But at least the night’s events seem to have receded – or, rather, grown less convincing, as if a half-open door has turned out to be trompe l’oeil. She’s glad to be drunk. She drags her gown over her head, then stops. Undressing further is too much trouble. She sits on the bed, and the world bounces and resettles. Gingerly she leans back, breathing deeply, and when she closes her eyes oblivion floods up around her.
She wakes with a raging thirst. It’s still night-time; she couldn’t swear to it, but she’s pretty sure she’s only slept for an hour or so. When she gets up and drinks – from the ewer, because for some reason, fumbling about in the dark, she can’t find her tooth-glass – it satisfies her thirst, but she discovers that the alcoholic languor has passed, and she’s wide awake. Her brain is humming like a machine. The papers she was looking at this evening quiver in her mind’s eye, sparkling with anxiety. How many corners of the library has she mined, fruitlessly, for ideas? And she hasn’t come up with anything. Pages and pages of her notes thrown away, crumpled, still half blank. The prospect of the Midsummer Game grows closer every night, every hour: what if she has nothing to perform? Would they sack her? Could they sack her? Maybe not; but then, no one has ever failed before. And the humiliation … She’s a de Courcy. It might send her mad.
She tells herself she’s failed before. She’s been humiliated before. It’s not reassuring.
She walks to the window, vaguely surprised by her inability to hold a straight line. The muscles of her scalp throb, as if they no longer quite fit the shape of her skull. She looks out and up, to the infinite, impersonal stars.
Could she run away? There’s nowhere to go. She sold the Chateau d’Apre when she was elected as Magister Ludi; she was sure then that she’d live and die at Montverre, and the chateau was too full of memories of Aimé, too much of a reminder that the de Courcy line ended with her. She has never regretted it, until now. At a pinch she might go back to live with Aunt Frances. But she can imagine her life there too clearly: the stagnant, stale Sundays, the long weeks of doing good works, the slow-growing claustrophobia. She wouldn’t be Magister Dryden, she would be Claire, Miss Claire Dryden, for ever. She has chosen her life, and it’s here. It’s the grand jeu. It’s the path to God.
She closes her eyes, listening to the silence. The clock chimes.
Léo Martin wanted to help her. Wants to help her. It would be so easy to let him. Would he expect her to let him kiss her, afterwards?
Something flickers in her head. A memory, a thought. A veil slipping. Her eyes fly open. The starlight tingles on her face like a gust of snow.
Her keys. Where are her keys? She stumbles back to her bed and rummages in the shadows, searches the pocket of her gown by touch. She pulls out the jangling ring and runs it through her hand like a rosary. Here is the big, knobbly key to the Biblioteca Ludi. It’s forbidden to be in the main library alone, but the Biblioteca Ludi is hers, and yes, her fingers find the smaller key, rusty with disuse, that opens the back door to the staircase. She’s never used it – never been there at night – but there’s nothing to stop her. Nothing, that is, except the dark and the fear that her hand might, in spite of itself, throw her lamp to the floor in a splash of flame. Neurosis. Hysteria. She clenches her hand on her keys and gets to her feet, refusing to let her mind race ahead of her down the starlit corridors. She is not going to go mad tonight; but just in case, she leaves the lamp behind.
She is still drunk. She must look like a puppet, shambling hurriedly along. Doesn’t matter. Who cares? Well. If Léo Martin is still awake. If he sees her like this, looking like a scholar … An imitation of a man, in her trousers and shirt. Hair sagging on her neck.
She unlatches a door, steps out into the cloister that runs along the outside edge of the building, and through the little back door to the Biblioteca. Here are the library stairs: opposite her is the locked door to the library itself, and the Biblioteca Ludi is above her head. She clings to the handrail as she makes her way up, in case the world starts to tip again, but it stays steady. She opens the door to the Biblioteca Ludi and stands still, smelling dust and spring dampness. The window throws a fuzz of silver across the floor and the bookcases, the piles of pamphlets and papers. As she goes to the far corner, her foot catches a tower of magazines and she hears it slither over with a sigh.
She kneels down and pulls the metal trunk out from under the lowest shelf. It’s lighter than normal because Martin’s diary is in her desk. She takes it over to the window, where the light is strong enough for her to make out what’s written on the papers. Exercises, exam papers, essays, old games: the Potato, the Chartres Cathedral, a pastiche of the Four Seasons. They’re all mixed up. She takes them out and dumps them, first on the desk and then, when the pile gets too high, on the floor. First-and second-year exam papers. None for the third year, of course. The Danse Macabre. Two copies – the first labelled Aimé Carfax de Courcy, the second Léonard Martin, both scrawled all over with corrections. She bites her lip, staring down at them. If he knew she had them – well, he suspects, doesn’t he? But if he knew why … Was she being overly careful, to take those for the sake of a few words and a few diacritics? It’s too late now, anyway. If it hadn’t been for Martin it would have gone unnoticed that she’d abstracted them from his file – but naturally the first name Martin looked up in the archive was his own. Why on earth can’t she get him out of her head? She was fine before he came, she was untouched, untouchable, she was master of herself and the grand jeu.