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 Château d’Apre when she was elected as Magister Ludi; she was sure then that she’d live and die at Montverre, and the château 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.
She goes back to the trunk of papers. She is letting herself get distracted. Somewhere in here … Come on. Where is it?
She draws out an exercise book. On the front is scrawled, A. Carfax de Courcy, and underneath that, Tempest. She hasn’t looked at it for years. She opens it at random: pages of notes in Artemonian, and longhand comments. Link back, prefigure, L says too overwhelming? Next there’s a page in classical notation and opposite it an annotated graph, analysing the arc of the movement. The distant, sober part of her notices that it’s a feinted septime, which is arcane, for a second-year – but then, if you’re a de Courcy, you learn grand jeu moves in the nursery. A is for artemage, B is for botte secrète … She and Aimé learnt Artemonian at the same time as the alphabet, and spent days squabbling over who’d used the last of the coloured pencils and gold ink decorating their ‘Gold Medal’ games. When he was eleven, Aimé spent a whole month composing fugues, hunched over the jangling piano like a little old man. She begged and begged for a turn, but he refused to let her have even an hour at the keyboard; one day, after trying to drag him away, she barricaded the door so that he couldn’t get out, crying with fury. Later, when they were both big enough to play on the Auburn Mistress, they argued about that too, bickering like two rival lovers competing for favours. Small wonder, she thinks, that the de Courcys go mad.
She turns another page. There’s a paragraph of dense writing; at the bottom, halfway through a sentence, the pen has left a long trail as if the writer’s hand was knocked away from the paper. Underneath, Léo Martin’s handwriting says, I’ve had enough, going to bed, see you tomorrow.
She flips forward again. It’s familiar, of course, like a map of a country she’s visited. The melodies intertwine in her head; her fingers twitch, picking out silent bars of Beethoven. And it’s good. It would have got sixty-five, at least. If it had only been submitted …
She takes a deep breath. There’s no point getting angry. Not now. The point is that it’s promising. A game that no one here has seen – except Léo Martin, but he won’t be here for the Midsummer Game. So if she were to use this … not as it is, obviously. But with eight weeks’ work … Yes. She can imagine how it will go – the motifs she wants to emphasise, the subtle intricacies she can introduce, the movements which need to be pulled back from adolescent excess. She can transform it from a competent sixty-five to a Midsummer Game. She closes her eyes and imagines herself on the silver-outlined terra of the Great Hall, her arms raised. How long has she been dreading it? Before, she always loved that moment immediately after the ouverture, when you feel the weight of the audience’s gaze, when you wear their attention like a cloak. She used to love the anticipation. She’s missed it. But with this game … Relief leaps inside her. She breathes out, and her bones feel soft and light. She’s been afraid so long, but now … She can do it. In two months she can present a Midsummer Game. There won’t be anything to be ashamed of. She won’t have failed.