Chapter Thirteen #2
Arm in arm, we passed out of the breakfast room and into the corridor beyond.
Aside from a pair of housemaids gossiping together at the other end of the hallway, the area was empty, a thin burgundy runner muffling the tread of our slippers.
Rain glossed over the lancet windows, turning the cliffside beyond into a watercolor wash of gray, the stained glass traceries atop them subdued as if with nightfall.
“The other maidens aren’t aware that you’ve marked their mirrors,” I said after a minute, breaking the quiet.
Beside me, Marie-Louise turned her head, catching me in the lantern-sweep of her stare once more. “They are incurious. They see only what they wish.” She tilted her chin to the left. “Unlike you and I.”
I tried not to shudder at the comparison, her mouth curling with an approving smile as she said it, as if in me, she’d glimpsed a shade of herself—a kindred spirit.
“How long have you been watching them?” I asked, deliberately ignoring the remark.
The Owl blinked but gave no reply, continuing to observe me wordlessly, her hip bumping gently against mine as we walked.
She seemed untroubled by the quiet; her mannerisms reminded me of those of a shy child, clinging to the skirt of her caretaker, content to spy on the conversations around her without weighing in.
It was unsettling—and beyond that, it would not suit my purposes in seeking her out.
Pressing on, I ventured, “Since last summer?”
She twitched, her arm flexing against mine—a confirmation. “Will you tell them?” she asked, her voice meek. “The other maidens?”
I gazed down at her. “I’m not sure yet.”
The answer, though unsatisfactory in my opinion, seemed to placate her; her eyes darted away from mine, drinking in the features of the corridor.
For a moment, I found myself watching her watch the space around us, fascinated and disturbed in equal measure by the seemingly insatiable hunger of her stare.
Her sight seemed a completely different sense than my own; it was like promenading with a small alien creature.
“You were sitting alone at breakfast,” I heard myself say seconds later. “You did not wish to eat with your friends?”
She looked back at me. “I do not have friends,” she answered flatly. “Even the ones who are loyal to me have no love for me.” Her expression creased with a vague, detached sort of sadness, her snub nose wrinkling. “They obey only because they know I would see their dissent.”
I did not expect the pluck of sympathy within me, and yet it stung me all the same.
Abruptly, I recalled Verne, my hometown: the way even the walls of my parents’ house, my very birthplace, seemed to hold themselves apart from me after the arrival of my blessing, as if hesitant to get too close.
Didn’t I know what it was like to be lonely? To be feared?
Swallowing, I forced the memories down. “What of the girl I replaced—Ophelia Lear?” I said once I’d gathered myself. “Did you see anything of her last summer?”
Marie-Louise lifted a brow. “Miss Lear is whom you wish to inquire about?”
I returned her perplexed expression. “Did you expect me to give another name?”
The Owl’s lashes fluttered, as white as goose feathers. I slowed my pace, awaiting her reply, but as if deciding something, she turned abruptly away from me, peering straight ahead. “I watched Ophelia many times,” Marie-Louise said after a pause. “She never noticed me—not like you.”
My pulse sped. “And?” I prodded. “What did you witness?”
“Nothing much that interested me,” Marie-Louise replied, and my heart sank again.
“Most of the hours she passed in her room, she spent reading. Occasionally, she would write at her desk—always by candlelight, I remember, even during the middle of the day, which I found odd. Sometimes she would pen a message and then burn it, as if she were afraid of anyone else reading what she’d put down on paper. ”
I frowned, attempting to quell my disappointment.
Correspondence, reading…Those were the pastimes of a proper lady, the kind of silkwitch I would have expected a man like Reginald Lear to have raised—not the rebellious, headstrong girl Eliot had described to me.
Unless…I recalled the loose stone in the floor, the poem hidden beneath it, and my interest sparked.
Perhaps Ophelia’s notes had been of a private nature, delicate enough that she’d rather destroy them than risk their reaching the wrong eyes.
“Did you ever glimpse her with a lover?” I asked.
Marie-Louise’s nostrils flared, a husky wheezing sound escaping from her throat.
It took me a moment to realize it was a laugh.
“Ophelia cared nothing for men—or women,” she said dismissively.
“Many of the other maidens tried to befriend her last summer, at the start of the competition, but she rebuffed them all.” Her lips quirked with another smile, thin-lipped and secretive, as if the memory of Ophelia’s rejection pleased her.
“Miss Dabos is the only one amongst them who had moderate success in her endeavors, I believe.”
A jab through my chest, like a spade shoved deep; I stiffened and then, hastily, relaxed again, aware of Marie-Louise’s side pressed flush against mine, able to detect my reactions. “Sybil and Ophelia were friendly?”
The Owl hesitated, her gaze arching back toward me. I did not flinch when her eyes met mine, careful to keep them empty and my expression clear of emotion. “Miss Dabos was interested in Ophelia,” she said cautiously. “As you are interested in her.”
Her stare crawled over me. I could feel the skin of my arms breaking into goose pimples and prayed that she could not—that she remained unaware of the disquieting effect her words had on me.
I understood now why Eliot had told me that some of his fellow Weavers found Marie-Louise’s gift disturbing; under its force I felt trapped like a spider beneath a glass, horribly seen, and horribly known.
“The rest of the maidens will not admit it, but they are all of them glad Ophelia perished before she could claim victory last year,” Marie-Louise continued, and the sensation faded.
“They resented her for the apathy she showed to Mr.Noé, and competition in general, despite the fact that we all knew his hand as good as belonged to her.”
I frowned at the certainty in her statement, as if she were merely citing an accepted truth. “You did not hold out any hope for yourself?” I questioned. “Yours is a formidable Wit.”
Marie-Louise briefly faltered, a hitch in her steps like a quiver through the air. “Mr.Noé is frightened of me,” she answered after a pause. “No man wishes for a wife he cannot tame.”
Her shoulders tensed, the motion noticeable only because I was standing so near to her, her movements vibrating through me as though they were my own.
“Mother still thinks my dower will fetch me a husband, but I know the cloisters will take me,” she said. “There are no mirrors there.”
She uttered the words with a sort of dreamy foreboding, staring blearily ahead of herself as if she could see her future waiting for her—as if she had already resigned herself to its embrace.
Unbidden, an image sprang to my mind: the pale, delicate creature beside me confined like a mole in a cellar, her moonlit eyes eternally peering, useless, into the dark.
Though I couldn’t articulate why, the picture made me deeply sad.
We’d reached the end of the corridor. Both of us dipped our heads as we passed by the pair of Alaire maids, falling momentarily silent, then lifted them again as we crossed over the threshold.
We paused at a split in the hall—one branch continuing straight ahead, the other veering right.
Turning toward me, the Owl blinked. “What business do you have with Ophelia Lear?” she asked.
“You have only just arrived at Fortblanche—it is a bit morbid to be turning already toward such a grim past, no?” Her head was cocked to the side; her tone, for the first time, containing an undercurrent of something like suspicion.
Meeting her stare, I smiled at her. “I suppose you shall just have to watch and find out.”
I dropped her arm, stepping to the right.
“I will not tell the other girls of our conversation—or your spying,” I said, “so long as you promise to keep your eyes open on my behalf. Any additional information you discover about Ophelia, I trust you will bring to me.”
Marie-Louise’s expression was still creased with contemplation, but after a moment, she nodded—and, satisfied, I started down the corridor. I’d made it only a few steps when I heard the high-pitched warble of her voice calling after me.
“It was Ophelia’s brother, I believed you would ask me about,” the Owl said. “Eliot Lear.”
I did not look back at her, though my stomach flipped. “Why would you assume that?”
But she didn’t answer, and when I turned around, she hadgone.