Nineteen #4
Alys returned the smile for a glancing moment. She made no fuss over the fact that Clement had, on a whim, shown her one of the only secrets they’d ever kept from Ysabel. She directed her skittish gaze over to the statue of Mathé and let it rest there for a while.
“Hm. You have the same nose,” said Alys.
Clement had always thought so, and felt a bit silly thinking so.
Alys added, “Maybe you’re descended from them.”
“Or from the model the artist used, more likely. Which you’d know ab— Oh, Mathé’s piss.”
Their tongue had got away from them. They stopped short and blushed painfully again, this time all the way up to their cheekbones. It must have been visible. One couldn’t conquer one’s body in all ways.
Alys laughed. Even through the embarrassment, Clement was pleased to hear the sunshine and new strength in that laugh.
“Oh, you know that painting?” And that was almost playful. Clement gathered themself to play in return.
“It’s one of my favourites,” they confessed. “I’ve hunted it down every time they move it.”
The painting in question, an enormous work in vibrant oils which glowed in shades of pink and apricot across the expanses of bare flesh, had the coy title of A Warm Summer’s Day.
The model had posed for it in her youth, before she became a renowned actress and then—scandalously—Lady Tixerrant.
She’d acquired the painting, famously hung it in her bedchamber, and donated it to the Royal Gallery upon her death.
The Tixerrant family kept offering to buy it back; the gallery kept refusing.
The most the impressive social capital of the Tixerrants could manage was to have it occasionally moved to a smaller and more out-of-the-way room of the gallery, but Clement could have told them that this only made the painting stand out more boldly on whichever wall it was hung.
“I like it too,” said Alys. “Some other scholars kept leaving sketched versions of it in my library carrel for a while, and I couldn’t work out what the point was. Eventually I realised they expected me to be embarrassed. What do you like about it?”
That last delivered like a dart. The thing was, the model did look remarkably like her great-granddaughter Alys. Or vice versa. We know what you look like naked was the point of those sketches.
“I like her expression,” said Clement. “It’s very knowing. It’s as if she’s saying: Yes, I know what you’re thinking when you look at me, and the joke’s on you because I’ve had all those thoughts and worse.”
“And so you kept looking.”
“Well, she’d gone to all the trouble. It seemed a pity not to oblige her.”
Alys smiled wider. It wasn’t the inviting, laughing, mature look of the painting, but it was a bloodshot great-granddaughter to that look. An I might dare you look. A hot streak of wildness darted through Clement.
It was followed at once by guilt. Clement had briefly forgotten to be sad about Ysabel—it had been only two days—they shouldn’t be able to find things funny, or be so drawn and distracted by a girl—
With the effect of the breathing exercises still clinging, it was easier to form the rebuttal: Ysabel would want me to find things funny.
She’d insist upon it. And she’d hurl herself upon Clement’s bed and demand, delighted, to hear everything about this burgeoning, hopeless crush on Alys Tixerrant of all people.
“I’m feeling better, truly,” said Alys after a minute of easy silence. “But I won’t make you argue your way into keeping me company all day, as I suspect you might.” Her smile stayed and shone. “If you let me do something for you, in return?”
And so Clement found themself, not very long after that, walking into one of the largest houses they’d ever entered.
It was like a gallery in itself; every wall held a piece of art, every surface some kind of decorative object.
Clement wanted to stitch their arms to their sides in case they knocked something over.
They’d been admitted through the front door by an actual servant, though the intense class awkwardness of that had dissolved in how pleased the woman and Alys were to see one another.
Of course. Surely nobody had ever been displeased to see Alys—except, Clement thought with a tweak of entirely different guilt, when seeing her arrive as part of one’s Grand Exam group.
This was exactly the sort of polished and beautiful house they’d assumed the polished and beautiful Alys came from.
Though now that they were in it, they could see that Alys herself didn’t fit.
It was the way she held herself, and the lack of any fondness in how she looked at the lovely things.
The Caudotte family lived in a similarly busy house but were always pausing and touching and smiling and adjusting, always recalling a story attached to an item and telling it to one another like an incantation.
Alys’s father, a tall man with a gentle curve to his spine and greying fair hair, had the same sense of not-fitting, when they sat down to lunch.
If he noticed Alys’s bloodied eye, he didn’t comment on it.
He greeted Clement’s introduction with a polite nod, opened a book which he’d carried into the dining room, and read in silence while he ate.
Alys gave him the fond smile she hadn’t given any of the vases or paintings.
She didn’t speak either, or expect much conversation from Clement through a hot beef consommé, a wonderful cold tart of flaked fish baked with greens and creamy eggs in a buttery crust, and some sugared fresh berries.
It was restful. And delicious.
Lady Tixerrant was absent—at some sort of working lunch for one of her charity committees, Alys said. Perhaps Alys’s mother was the jewel for which this setting had been perfectly designed.
Once Lord Tixerrant had wandered back into the house and they were alone at the table, Alys held a cup of cooling tea pensively against one cheek and said, “Can I ask, Clement—after what Konrad said, about Ysabel manipulating him into using his magic—I mean to say, you knew her the best, after all—do you think she really meant it? What she said in the letter?” Her hand went to one of her robe’s pockets and she pulled it out, unfolded it, and slid it over.
“Which part?” Clement’s heart clenched at the sight of Ysabel’s familiar handwriting.