The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (62 page)

He opened the door and she saw a figure at the end of the table, wearing a feathered mask that matched the brilliant blue-green of her dress—peacock feathers, sweeping up to frame her gleaming golden hair. Her mouth was small and bright, her face pale but delicately rouged, her throat swanishly long, her small fine hands still wearing her blue gloves. She reminded Miss Temple of one of those closely-bred Russian dogs, thin and fast and perpetually querulous, with the unsettling habit of showing their teeth at anything that set off their uninsulated nerves. She pressed the coin into the waiter’s hand as he announced her: “Miss Hastings.” The two women nodded to one another. The waiter asked if they required anything. Neither answered—neither
moved
—and after a moment he nodded and withdrew, shutting the door tightly behind him.

“Isobel Hastings,” said Miss Temple, and she indicated a chair on the opposite end of the table from the masked blonde woman. “May I?”

The woman indicated that she should sit with a silent gesture and Miss Temple did so, flouncing her dress into a comfortable position without her gaze leaving her companion. On the table between them was a silver tray with several decanters of amber-, gold-, and ruby-colored liquors, and an array of snifters and tumblers (not that Miss Temple knew which glass was for which, much less what the bottles held to begin with). In front of the blonde woman was a small glass, the size of a tulip on a stiff clear stem, filled with the ruby liquid. Through the crystal it gleamed like blood. She met the woman’s searching gaze, the shadowed eyes a paler blue than the dress, and tried to infuse her voice with sympathy.

“I am told that the scars fade within a matter of days. Has it been long?”

Her words seemed to startle the woman to life. She picked up her glass and took a sip, swallowed, and just refrained from licking her lips. She set her drink back on the tablecloth, but kept hold of it.

“I’m afraid you are…mistaken.” The woman’s voice was tutored and precise, and Miss Temple thought a trifle bereft, as if a life of constraint or routine had over time encouraged a certain narrowness of mind.

“I’m sorry, I merely assumed—because of the mask—”

“Yes, of course—that is quite obvious—but no, that is not why—no…I have not—I am here…in secret.”

“Are you an intimate of the Contessa?”

“Are you?”

“I should not say so, no,” said Miss Temple airily, forging ahead. “I am more an acquaintance of Mrs. Marchmoor. Though I have of course spoken to the Contessa. Did you—if I may speak of it openly—attend the affair at Harschmort House, when the Comte made his great
presentation
?”

“I was there…yes.”

“May I ask your opinion of it? Obviously, you are
here
—which is an answer in itself—but beyond that, I am curious—”

The woman interrupted her. “Would you care for something to drink?”

Miss Temple smiled. “What are
you
drinking?”

“Port.”

“Ah.”

“Do you disapprove?” The woman spoke quickly, an eager peevishness entering her voice.

“Of course not—perhaps a small taste—”

The woman dramatically shoved the silver tray toward her, some several feet down the table, clinking the glasses together and jostling the bottles—though nothing fell or broke. Despite the effect of this strange gesture, Miss Temple still needed to stand to reach the tray and did so, pouring a small amount of the ruby port into an identical glass, replacing the heavy stopper, and sitting. She breathed in the sweet, medicinal odor of the liquor but did not drink, for something about the smell made her throat clench.

“So…,” Miss Temple continued, “we were
both
at Harschmort House—”

“What of the Comte d’Orkancz,” the woman said, interrupting her
again
. “Do you know
him
?”

“Oh, certainly. We were just speaking,” replied Miss Temple.

“Where?”

“Just here in the hotel, of course. Apparently he has other urgent business and cannot join us.”

For a moment she thought the woman was going to stand, but she could not tell if her desire was to find the Comte or run away, startled at his being so near. It was the sort of moment where Miss Temple felt the strange injustice of being a young woman of perception and intelligence, for the more deeply her understanding penetrated a given situation, the more possibilities she saw and thus the less she knew what to do—it was the most unfairly frustrating sort of “clarity” one could imagine. She did not know whether to leap up and stop the woman from leaving or launch into a still more nauseating celebration of the Comte’s masculine authority. What she wanted was for the woman to do some of the talking instead of her, and to have an easy minute in which to sample the port. The very name of the beverage had always appealed to her, as an islander, and she had never before tasted it, as it was always the province of men and their cigars after a meal. She expected to find it as vile as it smelled—she found most liquors of any kind vile on principle—but nevertheless appreciated that this one’s name suggested travel and the sea.

The woman did not stand, but after a poised second or two re-settled herself on her seat. She leaned forward and—as if reading Miss Temple’s frustrated mind—took up her delicate glass and tipped it to Miss Temple, who then took up her own. They drank, Miss Temple appreciating the ruby sweetness but not at all liking the burn in her mouth and throat, nor the queasy feeling she now felt in her stomach. She set it down and sucked on her tongue with a pinched smile. The masked woman had consumed her entire glass and stood up to reach for more. Miss Temple slid the tray back to her—more elegantly than it had been sent—and watched as her companion pulled the decanter from the tray and poured, drank without replacing the decanter, and then to Miss Temple’s frank surprise poured yet again. The woman left the decanter where it was and only then resumed her seat.

Feeling cunning, Miss Temple realized with a sly smile that her disapproval was misplaced, for on the contrary, the drunker and more free-speaking her quarry became the better her inquisition would proceed.

“You have not told me your name,” she said sweetly.

“Nor will I,” snapped the woman. “I am wearing a mask. Are you a fool? Are all of you people fools?”

“I do beg your pardon,” said Miss Temple demurely, repressing the urge to throw her glass at the lady’s face. “It sounds as if you have had a rough time of things today—is there another who has caused you annoyance? I do hope there is something I can do to help?”

The woman sighed tremblingly, and Miss Temple was again surprised—even dismayed a little—at the ease with which even a false kindness can pierce the armor of despair.

“I beg your pardon,” the woman said, her voice just over a whisper—and it seemed then that her companion was a person who very rarely in her life had need to say those words, and that she only voiced them now out of utter desperation.

“No no, please,” insisted Miss Temple, “you must tell me what has happened to make your day so trying, and then together we shall find an answer.”

The woman tossed off the rest of her port, choked for a moment, swallowed with difficulty, then poured again. This was getting alarming—it was not even time for supper—but Miss Temple merely wetted her own lips on her glass and said, “It
is
very delicious, isn’t it?”

The woman did not seem to hear, but began to speak in a low sort of mutter, which when combined with her brittle, sharp voice gave the effect of some circus marvel, one of those disquieting carnival automaton dolls that “spoke” through a strange breathy mix of bladders of air and metal plates from a music box. The sound was not exactly the same, but the spectacle was similar in the way the blonde woman’s voice was disturbingly at odds with her body. Miss Temple knew this was partially because of the mask—she had done a great deal of thinking about masks—and was oddly stirred by the movement of the woman’s coral-pink lips as they opened and shut within a proscenium of vivid feathers…the unsettling spectacle of her pale face, the puffed fleshy lips—though they were thin, they were still quite evidently tender—the glimpse of white teeth and the deeper pink of her gums and tongue. Miss Temple had a sudden impulse to shove two fingers into the woman’s mouth, just to feel how warm it was. But she caught her wandering mind and shook away that shocking thought, for the lady
was
finally speaking.

“I am actually most agreeable, even tractable, that is the thing of it—and when one is of such a temperament, one is
known
and thus gets no credit for being so, people take it as assumed and then want more—they always want more, and such is my nature, for I have always strived within the boundaries of polite society to provide what I can to anyone I can, for I have tried not to be proud, for I could be proud, I could be the proudest girl in the land—I have every right to be whatever I want, and it is vexing, for there are times when I feel that I ought to be, that I ought to be another Queen, more than the Queen, for the Queen is old and horrid-looking—and the worst part is that if I just chose to be that way, if I just did start ordering and screaming and demanding, I would get it, I would get exactly that—but now I wonder if that is really true, I wonder if it’s all gone on so long that no one would listen, that they would laugh in my face, or at least behind my back, the way they all laugh behind my back—even though I am who I am—and they would simply do what they are doing already, save more openly and without pretense, with disdain which I do not think I could bear, and my father is the worst of them, he has always been the worst and now he does not see me at all, he does not even attempt to care—he has never cared—and I am expected without question to accept a future chosen for me. No one knows the life I lead. None of you care—and this man, this vulgar
man
—I am expected—a foreigner—it is appalling—and my only solace is that I have always known that he—whoever he turned out to be—would prove the utter ruin of my heart.”

The woman drank off her fourth glass of port—and who knew how many she’d consumed before Miss Temple’s arrival?—grimaced, and reached at once for the decanter. Miss Temple thought of her own father—craggy, full of rage, impossibly distant, only arbitrarily kind. Her only way of understanding her father was to consider him a natural force, like the ocean or the clouds, and to weather sunny days and storms alike without being personally aggrieved. She knew he had fallen ill, that he would most likely not be living once she returned—if she ever did return—to her island home. It was a thought to prick her conscience with sorrow if she let it, but she did not let it, for she did not really know if the sadness was any different from that she felt at missing the tropical sun. Miss Temple believed that change brought sorrow as a matter of course. Was there particular sadness in her father’s absence—either on account of distance or death? Was there sorrow in the fact that she could not for certain say? Her mother she had never known—a young woman (younger than Miss Temple was now, which was a strange thought) slain by the birth of her child. So many people in the world were disappointing, who was to say the lack of any one more was a loss? Such was Miss Temple’s normal waspish response to the expression of sympathy at her mother’s absence, and if there did exist a tiny deeply set wound within her heart, she did not spend time excavating it for the benefit of strangers, or for that matter anyone at all. Nevertheless, for some reason she could not—or chose not to—name, she found her sympathies touched by the masked woman’s jumbled ranting.

“If you were to see him,” she asked kindly, “what do you guess the Comte d’Orkancz would advise you to do?”

The woman laughed bitterly.

“Then why don’t you leave?”

“And where am I to go?”

“I’m sure there are many places—”

“I cannot
leave
! I am
obliged
!”

“Refuse the obligation. Or if you cannot refuse, then turn it to your advantage—you say you ought to be a queen—”

“But no one will
listen
—no one
imagines
—”

Miss Temple was growing annoyed. “If you truly want to—”

The woman snatched up her glass. “You all sound the same, with your prideful
wisdom
—when it only serves to justify your place at my table! ‘Be free! Expand your perceptions!’ A load of mercenary rubbish!”

“If you are so assailed,” replied Miss Temple patiently, “then how have you managed to come here, masked and alone?”

“Why do you think?” The woman nearly spat. “The St. Royale Hotel is the only place I
can
go to! With two coachmen to make sure I am delivered and collected with no other stop in between!”

“That is ridiculously dramatic,” said Miss Temple. “If you want to go elsewhere,
go
.”

“How can I?”

“I am sure the St. Royale has many exits.”

“But then what? Then where?”

“Any place you want—I assume you have money—it is a very large city. One simply—”

The woman scoffed. “You have no
idea
—you cannot know—”

“I know an insufferable child when I see one,” said Miss Temple.

The woman looked up at her as if she had been struck, the port dulling her reactions, her expression tinged with both incomprehension and a growing fury, neither of which would do. Miss Temple stood and pointed to the somewhat isolated swathe of red drapery on the left-hand wall.

“Do you know what that is?” she asked sharply.

The woman shook her head. With a huff, Miss Temple walked over to the curtain and yanked it aside—her ingenious plan momentarily crushed by the flat section of wall that was revealed. But before the woman could speak, Miss Temple saw the indented spots in the painted wood—that it
was
painted wood and not plaster—where one could get a grip, and then the deftly inset hinges that told her how it opened. She wedged her small fingers into the holes and pried up the wooden shutters to reveal a darkened window, the reverse of the golden-framed Dutch mirror, offering the two of them an unobstructed view of the lobby of the St. Royale Hotel and the street front beyond.