Page 6
Primidi
Dawn: Arrival
Noon: Explanation of bidding and luncheon
Afternoon: Entertainments Diverse
Sunset: Banquet
Duodi
Dawn: Breakfast
Noon: Luncheon
Afternoon: Entertainments Diverse
Sunset: Banquet and dancing
Tridi
Dawn: Bidding and announcement of results
Guests are not permitted to leave the grounds of the Château without explicit permission from the Auctioneer. Any contravention of rules shall be met with a Penalty.
She has never seen a schedule laid out only by the position of the sun. Much of the events are typical of a Court party: she imagines that the entertainments might include games, ballets, and concerts. She has a great fondness for ballet, in particular; it is more than once she has dreamed of taking to the stage herself, even though such a thing would have been, and always will be, utterly impossible.
She has the schedule folded away in her pocket by the time the maidservants return, bearing buckets of steaming water and packets of lavender. They offer to wash her, but Genevieve dismisses them and sets about the task herself. She rubs her skin with the sponge until it is flushed pink. In the mirror above the bath, she can see that the harsh sun on the mountaintop has caused the return of her freckles, once painstakingly faded through months of using parasols. Beneath them, her skin is as stubbornly olive as it has ever been, making her look more like a convent girl than a noblewoman. There are still calluses on her hands from needlework; she can never get rid of them, no matter how much she scrubs at them with a pumice stone. The steam of the water has flattened her hair to its natural straightness, and she pulls it in a dark curtain over her face so that she can no longer see herself.
The maidservants have intuited that her hair requires curling. They are waiting with the iron hot once she emerges from the bath. They lace her stays, do their best to arrange her breasts to give them the appearance of fullness—‘A lost cause,’ she tells them, with a soft laugh, and they do not even smile in response—and then comes the cornflower-blue gown and the straw bonnet. Her grey eyes are framed with kohl and her cheeks and lips rouged.
‘I should like to explore the grounds,’ Genevieve says, as she slips her feet into her mules.
‘Of course, mademoiselle,’ one of the maids replies. ‘Shall we accompany you?’
Yes, Genevieve wishes to say. Come with me, please. I am a stranger here, and I am frightened to be alone.
But Genevieve cannot rely upon these women any more than she can rely upon herself. They will not soothe her as her grandfather does when the memories come: they will not take her hand and hum a song to her, tell her it is all in the past. Were she to see something that wasn’t there, were she to panic, they would likely watch in silence and then scurry off to inform the Auctioneer of the fragility of their charge.
‘There is no need. Thank you. I would prefer solitude.’
‘Very well,’ they chorus, and they curtsey like marionettes all connected to the same strings.
Three
Leander wanders the labyrinth.
The Château is whispering to him through the movements of the leaves. This place is fond of tugging at him, whining at him, like a dog begging for scraps. It cannot speak words, it never has, but still Leander can sense its curiosity. Leander, Leander, why do you wander? Usually, during auctions, he is absconded inside. His exploration of the gardens and the mountainside are limited to the periods between events, when his mother loosens her grip upon him. Those are the rare moments when Leander sometimes feels contentment: foraging in the forest for food untainted by the Company’s power or playing music in the fields on the mountain’s southern face. When the dream of this place, the nightmare of it, feels like solace rather than cruelty.
Leander walks further into the maze. He can’t clearly remember doing so, but he knows that he has wandered through these hedges a hundred times, a thousand times. That’s how memory works here: everything instinctive, everything déjà vu, never clearly recalled but still familiar.
Leander turns a corner in the hedge maze, spinning on his heel to turn the porcelain into powder beneath him. As he brushes white dust from his coattails, he hears a footstep in the pathway parallel to this one, on the other side of the hedge. Another guest, he supposes—they should have all arrived by now. Leander presses his face against the greenery, wondering whether the Château will oblige him; in a rare moment of indulgence, it seems to share his curiosity. The leaves part, just enough that he can see through to the other side.
The guest is a woman in a pale blue dress, petite and delicately featured, dark-haired and freckled. Her eyes are wide, a gloomy sort of grey that tends to black. Her skin is tanned from sunshine and a natural warmth. She is humming a tune to herself, smiling up towards the sky, and she takes each step very daintily, with an exhausting purpose and precision. Her beauty, her measured grace, her seeming nonchalance—it’s so jarring, so incomprehensible, that Leander is immediately infuriated. It’s like watching someone dance their way by his cage while he rattles the bars.
He walks in time with her, the hedgerow between them, feeling foolish for continuing to watch her, not knowing why he is doing so. He wonders what wish this beautiful woman has that caught his mother’s attention. Lady Reverie has always chosen guests who long for things more deeply than most: those whose longing consumes them, destroys them, drives them to madness. It is the most human thing in the world to want, she once told him. It is what I find so pleasing about you, my son. What I find so fascinating.
Leander can’t allow himself to feel sympathy for this guest. He has no secrets of his own, and so to win the auction he will have to steal one: he has known that from the very moment he received his invitation.
