Christelle Dabos

It wasn’t the simple need to gather information; it was returning to one’s roots. Her distant ancestors had witnessed the breaking up of their world. But had they just lain down and died, for all that? No, they had invented a different life for themselves.

Ophelia tucked the locks of hair flopping over her forehead behind her ears, to uncover her face. The glasses on her nose grew clearer, shedding the grayness that had been building up for hours. She was experiencing her very own Rupture. She still felt sick with fear, but she knew now what she still had to do. She had to take up the challenge.

“Well?” she asked, as Agatha was savoring her little moment.

“Mr. Thorn!”

Ophelia shuddered behind the coils of her scarf. Thorn? She was already allergic to the name. It rang hard on the tongue. Rough. Almost aggressive. A hunter’s name.

“Charm is the strongest weapon given to women, you must use it without scruples. A mere trifle is enough, a timely wink, a radiant smile, to have a man at one’s feet. Look at Charles, putty in my hands.”

Drunk on all the noise and rain, and barely conscious, Ophelia passed from face to face before finally collapsing onto the breast of a polar bear. Dazed, she didn’t react when the bear muttered an icy “good evening,” from up there, way above her head.

Ophelia bit her scarf to stop herself from smiling. This man from the North had just mortally offended her mother; all things considered, he was exceeding her expectations.

“If, by chance, you should ask me for my opinion . . . ” she muttered.

“No one is asking you for it,” cut in the Doyenne, with her little smile.

In other circumstances, Ophelia wouldn’t have insisted. She valued her tranquility too much to debate, argue, stick up for herself, but this evening, it was the rest of her life that was at stake. “I’m giving it to you anyway,” she said.

Thorn’s eyes, gray and cold as the cutting edge of a blade, flashed at her once again. “Ophelia,” he added, without smiling.
Coming from this sullen mouth, and hardened by the Northern accent, her name seemed to slice the tongue.

To read an object requires forgetting oneself a little, to leave room for the past of someone else. Traveling through mirrors, that requires facing up to oneself. One has to have guts, y’know, to look oneself straight in the peepers, see oneself as one really is, plunge into one’s own reflection. Those who close their eyes, those who lie to themselves, those who see themselves as better than they are, they could never do it. So, believe me, it’s no run-of-the-mill thing.

“You don’t cut much of a figure like that, dear girl. You hide behind your hair, behind your glasses, behind your muttering. Of your mother’s whole brood, you’re the one who’s never shed a tear, never howled, and yet I swear, you were definitely the one who got into the most scrapes.”

The great-uncle kneeled, with some pain, at the foot of the bed on which Ophelia had remained slumped, her feet deep in her unlaced boots. He seized her elbows and shook her, as though better to imprint each syllable on her memory. “You have the strongest character in the family, my child. Forget what I said to you last time. Here, before you, I predict that your husband’s will is going to shatter against yours.”