Archibald retrieved his top hat from Victoria’s head and spun it around on his finger. “I’ve already spoken to you about Augustine, my great-grandfather. And the little fling he had with old Hildegarde. Do you remember?”
Ophelia looked at Archibald with amazement. She was still crouching in front of the cat, her hand suspended mid-stroke, not noticing that now he was scrapping with her scarf. “You and Madam Hildegarde? You would be her . . . ”
“Great-grandson, yes,” giggled Archibald. “Oh, it’s a scandal that was carefully hushed up. I wouldn’t have known about it myself had I not suddenly started performing magic tricks. It started last year, one afternoon when I was particularly sleepy, the day after a wedding—I’ll spare you the details. I went into my bathroom; I landed instead in the courtesans’ thermal baths. Just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “from one end of Citaceleste to the other. And then I had the same experience again, and I set about creating transits more and more often. Give me a door, an enclosed space, and I’ll summon a shortcut for you. That’s how, one day, I came across an authentic Compass Rose. It was concealed in a fold within space and I . . . it’s hard to describe . . . I sensed its presence, do you see? Don’t ask me how it works, but if I turn a key in the lock of a door close to a Compass Rose, abracadabra, there we are! Any key of any door. It’s a pretty far-fetched power that old Hildegarde passed on to me, that one, but I adore it.”
While trying to separate cat and scarf, Ophelia had greatly to stretch her imagination to superimpose her memory of Mother Hildegarde on the man standing before her.
“And you’d never been aware of something so obvious before then?” Aunt Rosaline cut in, with her usual pragmatism.
Archibald tapped the teardrop tattoo between his eyebrows. “It’s the severing of the link with the Web that released my other family power. It was hibernating within me, patiently waiting for its time to come. And you, Madam Thorn?” he asked, point-blank. “What have you been up to these past two years?”
Ophelia opened, and then closed her mouth. Archibald had learnt to master a new power, Fox had become a trade unionist, but she, what had she spent her time doing? She’d remained imprisoned in an interminable parenthesis. No. It was even worse than that. She’d gone backwards, slipping into her old skin of solitary adolescent. She’d even put on weight, to top it all.
“I read,” she finally replied.
“Right, enough of the small talk,” Gail interrupted them, brusquely. “There’s a more pressing question to be settled.” She finally lifted her nose from the itinerary table and shook away the dark curls hindering her view. Her differently colored eyes, one black as night, the other blue as day, were inordinately enlarged by her binocular magnifying glasses. They may have been different, but they expressed the same cold rage as they looked deep into Ophelia’s glasses.
“Does God exist?”
THE DESTINATION
Time seemed to be holding its breath inside the Compass Rose. Ophelia, still tugging on her scarf to free it from Twit’s claws, looked from Gail to Fox to Archibald to Aunt Rosaline, who all suddenly appeared to expect her to answer their every existential question.
“Before going any further,” said Archibald, casually sitting on the itinerary table, “you must understand what has brought us all here. We’re investigating the death of old Hildegarde. Apart from Thorn, you are the only person still alive to have witnessed her final moments. You’re also the only one to know what was really behind that business of the GOD letters, in which she was implicated.”
The word “GOD” echoed around the Compass Rose, which had the resonance of an ancient cathedral. That single mention made Ophelia remember Baron Melchior and his deadly blackmail; Mother Hildegarde sucked into her own pocket; the corpses in the Imaginoir; the fingers sliced off by Thorn.
Oh yes, she knew exactly what it was all about. She still had nightmares about it.
“And then there was Farouk’s breakdown,” Archibald continued, cheerily, as though telling a good joke. “The entire court witnessed his inexplicable behavior, and the way you brought him back to reason. You alone. With but a few words.”
“Your Book is but the start of your story, Odin. It’s up to you alone to write the ending.” Ophelia remembered that, too, very clearly. Except that they weren’t her words; they were God’s words, uttered a very long time ago.
“Farouk hasn’t been the same since,” continued Archibald. “Lackadaisical and head-in-the-clouds, yes, but when it comes to the future of his family, he’s showing himself to be almost . . . how can I put it? Almost concerned.”
“Except it’s the Mother we’re talking about here,” Gail said, losing patience. She walked around the table and pressed her magnifying lenses against Ophelia’s glasses. Ophelia noticed that Gail had sewn—rather badly, in fact—an orange motif onto her flapped Russian hat. The orange was Mother Hildegarde’s emblem. “Listen to me carefully, my dear. The Mother knew her days were numbered. She knew that something else exists, something not very pleasant, something bigger than the family spirits, something beyond all that.” Gail thumbed over her shoulder to indicate the entire Compass Rose. “The Mother tried to talk to me, to prepare me, but me, I didn’t listen to her. I just wanted to stay hidden in my corner. I was scared of ending up like the rest of my clan.”
An abrupt silence followed these words, a silence inhabited by the deceased souls of all the Nihilists. Ophelia had wondered why Gail seemed so annoyed with her, but now she understood that it was against herself that her anger was directed.
“You broke my monocle,” Gail grumbled. “For that, you owe me an apology. And me, I owe you thanks. Without it, I couldn’t hide what I really am from others for long. It was the kick in the pants I needed. The Mother was like a family to me, and I’m tired of behaving like an ungrateful brat. So, I want you to tell me right now, face-to-face: does God exist, and is it because of him that the Mother is dead?”
“Yes.”
Ophelia’s response produced an immediate effect. Gail let out a volley of swearwords, Fox pushed his magnifying lenses up onto his forehead, Archibald burst out laughing, and Aunt Rosaline pursed her lips. Only Victoria continued to scratch away at her drawing with her pencil, unperturbed.
Ophelia straightened up her glasses, skewed by Gail. Before disappearing, Thorn had advised her to speak to no one of what she knew, but she didn’t have the right to stay silent any longer. “Do you remember the Carnival Caravan?”
“The circus troupe?” Fox asked, surprised. “The one we visited with your little brother?”
“God was travelling in their midst, passing himself off as a Metamorphoser.” Ophelia cleared her throat. The memory of what she’d witnessed that night, in Thorn’s cell, still gave her the sensation of having swallowed sand. “He is much more than a Metamorphoser. God can reproduce the appearance, voice, and family power of all those whom he has approached. That’s why he wanted to provoke a meeting with Mother Hildegarde—he coveted her mastery of space. And that’s why Mother Hildegarde had entrenched herself in a non-place, behind a security cordon; she knew that whoever tried to cross that line would become more dangerous because of her. And that’s not all,” she continued, after another throat clearing. “God is the creator of the family spirits and, as such, considers himself the parent of us all. He imposes his law on us without our knowledge, with the help of men and women he calls ‘the Guardians.’ Oh, and a final detail,” she hastened to add, with a tense smile. “Thorn’s claws had no effect on him.”