Christelle Dabos

“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.”

“Poor man,” she said, amused, “if he fears ridicule, he’s not marrying the right person.”

“It’s a lime-blossom tea,” she said. “Apparently, it sooth—”
“Do you always speak so quietly?” he interrupted her, abruptly. “One can barely understand you.”
Ophelia maintained a silence, and then spoke even more quietly: “Always.”
Thorn frowned while seeming to search, in vain, for something worthy of interest in this slip of a woman, behind her heavy brown locks, behind her rectangular glasses, behind her old muffler.

It wasn’t in Ophelia’s nature to bother a man with questions, so she waited with all the patience in the world outside the cabin, frozen to the bone, creating clouds of condensation with every breath. She studied carefully the tense muscles at the nape; the bony wrists sticking out from the sleeves; the jutting shoulder blades under the tunic; the long, restless legs. This man was totally on edge, as though uncomfortable in this too-tall, too-thin body that was electrified by a constant tension.

“Still there?” he grunted, not bothering to turn round. Ophelia realized that he wouldn’t touch the herbal tea, so, to lighten her load, drank it herself. The hot liquid did her good.
“Am I distracting you?” she murmured, sipping at the cup.
“You won’t survive.”

“The more I see of you, the more my first impression is reinforced,” he grumbled. “Too sickly, too slow, too pampered . . . You’re not cut out for the place I’m taking you to. If you follow me there, you won’t last through winter. Just you wait and see.”
Ophelia held the look he was boring into her. A look of iron. A look of defiance. Her great-uncle’s words resounded in her memory and she heard herself replying to him: “You don’t know me, sir.”