Paper Confines

xvii. No Knight of Mine

PAPER CONFINES.
17. / No Knight of Mine

✶

       Colette had been sitting in Claude's bedroom for twenty minutes and could not take her eyes off the blue bergère glaring in the furthest corner. She also couldn't comment on it—how strange that would be—but the tap of her foot on the carpet had earned the occasional flash of Nadya's gaze, for whom none of Colette's nervous ticks seemed to pass without scrutiny. Every time she became aware of the fact she was tapping her foot, she moved on to chewing her lip, which made Nadya raise an eyebrow, which reverted Colette to her previous foot-tapping, and the cycle went on subtly enough that Claude said nothing about it. That or he allowed this unspoken exchange to go on because he couldn't be bothered to comment on it, or knew Nadya would berate him if he did. These sorts of things were meant to stew uncomfortably between the two of them. It was what they did best.

Upon entry, Colette had contemplated it hectically, as her brain—wrought with this stupid, insignificant recollection—scrambled for explanation to fill the suddenly re-opened wound. She wondered whether it was a staple of the Ravenclaw dormitories. The colour fit well enough. Only there was no bergère in Banks' bedroom, so that couldn't have been true.

Colette knew wealthier students often decorated their chambers with personal pieces; her own roommate, Rosalind Loriss, had used an undetectable extension charm to fit her mother's récamier next to their window (and Colette had spent all night fixing the dents that left). But Claude had a reserved tendency to keep his riches at home, and this chair was a shrieking statement if any inanimate object could speak: deep blue, velvet, with silk tassels dangling from the skirt, albeit that opulence was buried in an slovenly mountain of sketchbooks and loose parchment. It looked, otherwise, like the plum bergère Papa used to sit in as he read Colette the morning newspaper, a Perique cigar between his fingers. When Colette would hang upside-down on the opposite sofa, her feet perched on the backrest, her head dangling off the seat, giggling as she swatted the curling smoke with her hands.

It looked like the one Maman sat in when she asked her to leave.

Of course, of course Claude and his estate and his dittany fields and his vault full of gold would own the most abominably rich seat Colette had ever seen in her life. And of course her parents would own the same before it had all gone wrong—the shining token left to the dust in Megève. Her mother hadn't even brushed it clean before she sat on it and buried her head in her hands. And then the words: Lette, tu sais que nous t'aimerons toujours.

(You know we will always love you.)

What followed felt nothing like love. And Colette wished now she could say to her what she'd recited in the years since, with all her lonesome hours spent plucking daisies in the endless yard of Ottery St Catchpole: Mais pas comme avant.

(But not like before.)

"So, you take one—" Claude handed the device to Nadya— "And I keep the other."

"And we'll be able to hear you?"

Colette perked up, peering at the reflective tablet in Nadya's palm. She brushed over the ridges and made a sound of disbelief. "I guess we're about to find out if your mother is a genius or a madwoman."

"Both, I like to think."

"Well, you get it from somewhere."

"You think I'm a genius?"

"No."

"You think I'm a madwoman?"

"I think you're a karmic punishment."