Tuesday July 16th. I find myself obliged to curb my enthusiasm somewhat. The ambassadress has gone traveling, leaving us in the hands of her countless guests. I feel as though we have been completely forgotten. We spend our days playing cards and walking round the gardens. My brother has adapted to this life of leisure better than I have—he is already besotted with a duchess. I will have to bring him into line since we are here for purely professional reasons.
Ophelia was flummoxed. This journal and Agatha’s gossip didn’t match up at all with Augustus’s sketches. The Pole now appeared to be a highly refined place. Was Thorn a card player? He was a court gentleman, he must play cards. That’s probably all he had to do with his days.
Ophelia slipped the little travel journal into a felt cover and thrust it to the bottom of her bag. Behind the reception counter, she opened the lid of a writing case to get out the inventory register. Several times already, Ophelia had forgotten the museum keys in a lock, lost important administration documents, and even broken unique exhibits, but if there was one duty that she had never neglected, it was the keeping of this register.
Ophelia was an excellent reader, one of the best of her generation. She could decipher the life of machines, layer after layer, century after century, through the hands that had touched them, used them, been fond of them, damaged them, patched them up. This ability had allowed her to enrich the description of each piece in the collection with a hitherto unequalled level of detail. Where her predecessors confined themselves to dissecting the past of a former owner, two at a pinch, Ophelia went back to the birth of an object at the hands of its maker.
This inventory register in some ways told her own story. Custom dictated that she hand it to her successor in person, a procedure she would never have imagined carrying out so early in her life, but no one had yet responded to the request for applications. So Ophelia slid a note under the binding addressed to whomever took over at the museum. She replaced the register in the writing case and locked the lid with a turn of the key.
Moving slowly, she then leant with both hands on her counter. She made herself breathe deeply, and accept the unavoidable. This time, it really was over. Tomorrow she wouldn’t open her museum, as she did every morning. Tomorrow she would depend forever on a man whose name she would end up sharing.
Mrs. Thorn. Might as well get used to it from now on.
Ophelia grabbed her bag. She looked around her museum for the last time. The sun was coming through the rotunda’s glass roof in a cascade of light, wreathing the antiquities in gold and casting their dislocated shadows on the tiled floor. Never had the place seemed as beautiful to her.
Ophelia dropped the keys off at the caretaker’s office. She hadn’t even passed under the museum’s glass canopy, which was swamped by a carpet of dead leaves, when her sister shouted out to her from the door of a carriage: “Get in! We’re off to Goldsmiths’ Street!”
The cabman snapped his whip, even though there was no horse hitched to his carriage. The wheels took off and the vehicle tore along the river, guided only by the will of its master, from the height of his perch.
Through the back window, Ophelia observed the bustle of the street with a new clarity. This valley, in which she’d been born, seemed to be slipping away from her as fast as the carriage was crossing it. Its half-timbered facades, its market squares, its lovely workshops were all already becoming less familiar to her. The whole town was telling her that this was no longer her home. In the russet glow of this late autumn, people were leading their daily lives. A nanny pushed a pram while blushing at the admiring whistles of workmen up scaffolding. Schoolchildren munched their roast chestnuts on the way home. A messenger rushed along the pavement with a parcel under his arm. All these men, all these women were Ophelia’s family, and she didn’t know half of them.
The burning breath of a tramcar went past their carriage with a jangling of bells. Once it had vanished, Ophelia gazed at the mountain, criss-crossed by lakes, that overlooked their Valley. The first snows had fallen, up there. The summit had disappeared under a gray shroud—one couldn’t even make out Artemis’s observatory. Crushed under this cold mass of rocks and clouds, crushed under the dictates of a whole family, Ophelia had never felt so insignificant.
Agatha snapped her fingers under her nose. “Right, trouble, let’s get straight to the point: your whole trousseau has to be revised. You need new clothes, shoes, hats, lingerie, lots of lingerie . . . ”
“I like my dresses,” Ophelia said firmly.
“Oh, be quiet, you dress like our grandmother. Holy curler! Don’t tell me you’re still wearing this old pair of horrors!” Agatha said, grimacing as she took her sister’s gloves in her own. “Mommy’s ordered you a load of them from Julian’s!”
“They don’t make reader’s gloves in the Pole, I have to be thrifty.”
Agatha was impervious to this sort of reasoning. Smartness and elegance were worth all the money in the world. “Pull yourself together, in Heaven’s name! You’re going to straighten that back for me, hold that tummy in, show off that top a little, powder that nose, rouge those cheeks, and for pity’s sake, change the color of your glasses—that gray is so sinister! As for your hair,” sighed Agatha, lifting the brown plait with her fingertips, “if it were up to me, I’d shave it all off and start from scratch, but sadly we no longer have time. Quick, get out, we’re there.”
Ophelia went around as though leaden-limbed. To every petticoat, every corset, every necklace that was presented to her, she responded with a shake of the head. The dressmaker, whose long Animist fingers shaped fabrics without thread or scissors, shed tears of rage. After two fits of hysterics and about ten shopkeepers, Agatha had only managed to convince her little sister to replace her mismatched boots.
Ophelia was just as recalcitrant at the hairdresser. She wanted to hear nothing of powder, plucking, curling tongs, or the latest style of ribbon.
“I’m certainly patient with you,” fumed Agatha, trying her best to lift Ophelia’s heavy locks to reveal her neck. “You think I don’t know all that you’re feeling? I was seventeen when they betrothed me to Charles, and Mommy two years younger when she married Daddy. See what we have become: radiant wives, fulfilled mothers, accomplished women! You’ve been overprotected by our great-uncle—he did you no favors.”
With her vision blurry, Ophelia looked at her face in the mirror of the dressing table before her, while her sister struggled with the knots in her hair. Without her unruly locks and without her glasses, now lying on the comb tray, she felt naked. In the mirror she saw Agatha’s auburn head resting its chin on her own head. “Ophelia,” she whispered sweetly, “you could be attractive if you just tried a little.”
“What’s the point? Attractive to whom?”
“But Mr. Thorn, of course, you twit!” said her exasperated sister, giving her a tap on the neck. “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.”