Thorn strode over to the foreman, forcing him to look up at him, and held out three of the ledgers he had just been going through.
“This ledger,” he growled, shaking the first one, “records the number of sandglasses made in your workshop every day of this year.”
“Indeed,” said the foreman. “But I don’t see . . .”
“This ledger,” Thorn interrupted him, this time shaking the second one, “records the number of sandglass-bed links carried out by Madam Hildegarde, also this year.”
“That’s correct, but I . . . ”
“And this ledger,” continued Thorn, shaking the third, “records the number of beds furnished with illusions, once linked to their sandglasses.”
“So?”
“So these figures don’t tally. Four blue sandglasses and four beds have got lost in transit, somewhere between leaving the workshop and being put into service.”
“Oh, that can be explained very easily,” the foreman said, still not dropping his half-smile. “That stock must still be lying around at the depot. Our illusionist casts his spell on the beds when he has the time, and we don’t sell sandglasses whose beds haven’t yet been treated by him.”
“You keep a register of the beds waiting to be treated by him,” Thorn said, rigidly. “I have, of course, taken them into account in my calculations, and the total still doesn’t tally. Four sandglasses and four beds have disappeared from your stock.”
For the first time, the foreman appeared to take Thorn seriously. From a pocket on his apron, he pulled out some spectacles that were as old as he was, and scanned the columns of figures. “Are you quite sure you’re right?” he asked, turning the pages. “Maybe some sandglasses got broken and were considered unusable. We keep a register of damaged stock.”
“I am absolutely sure. I searched to establish exactly when the discrepancy in your accounting occurred, and pinned it down to the date of May 23rd. See for yourself,” insisted Thorn, returning one of the ledgers to the foreman. “Under the number of sandglass-bed links carried out by Madam Hildegarde on that date, the number ‘9’ has been changed to ‘5’. The ink is different, so this correction was made after the event.”
“Would someone have falsified our accounts?” the foreman muttered, seeming not to consider it possible. “But, come on now, who would do such a thing?”
“A colleague, an intruder, you yourself, or Madam Hildegarde in person,” Thorn reeled off, without a second thought. “This factory is an open house, anyone can just come and go here without anyone else knowing.”
“But still . . . pilfering beds right under our noses.”
Thorn snorted in annoyance. “If you kept your books properly, with unique serial numbers for each sandglass and each bed, this error wouldn’t have been missed by you.”
Ophelia stared at Thorn in disbelief. How had he managed to pick up such a small anomaly in such a short space of time?
“The fact is, those sandglasses and those beds have left your factory after having been linked and before being treated by the illusionist,” Thorn recapped. “Our abductor planned to use them only for sending specific people to a destination of his or her choice. They would have modified the sandglass mechanism themselves to make any return impossible.”
“Four sandglasses, four beds, four people missing,” Baron Melchior summed up. “It doesn’t tell us where they are, but we shouldn’t have any other abductions to lament.” He smoothed his moustache, looking relieved, as if Thorn had just told him he no longer had to fear for his own life.
“But how could the abductor be sure his sandglasses would actually have their pins pulled?” asked Ophelia. “Giving one as a present is one thing. Being certain it will be used is quite another.”
“That wasn’t a hard bet to win,” countered Baron Melchior, tapping his frock-coat pocket, bulging with his own sandglass. “When an item becomes fashionable, up on high, you can count on the courtiers going to town on it. Starting with me.”
The foreman couldn’t stop rechecking the falsified ledger and comparing it with the others. He wasn’t smiling so much.
Frozen to the bone, Ophelia lifted her scarf over her nose and did her own tally of what they’d discovered so far. If she disregarded the particular case of Archibald, those who had disappeared were in the grip of extreme anxiety, so were susceptible to taking tranquilizers. After all, hadn’t each of them sought sanctuary at Clairdelune, precisely because they feared for their lives? They’d all received threatening letters. The writer had used them very effectively to put pressure on his victims: the more anxious they were, the stronger their desire to pull the pin on the blue sandglasses. It was a truly malicious manipulation.
“And yet,” Ophelia thought, out loud, “I can’t really imagine the director of the Nibelungen using sandglasses. He gave them very negative publicity, and exhorted his readers not to use them.”
“Contradictory old Cousin Chekhov!” Baron Melchior sighed, with a bittersweet smile. “If you knew him privately, you’d know he’s an avid puller of the pin. Those most fiercely opposed to a temptation are sometimes its greatest adepts.”
“But Archibald wasn’t supposed to be the fourth target,” Ophelia reminded him. “When I read the pin, I saw that he’d appropriated someone else’s sandglass.”
‘Was it destined for me?’ she suddenly wondered, struck by the very thought.
Baron Melchior maintained a wary silence, and then let out a sigh so prolonged, it was as if his body was deflating like a balloon. “It was mine.”
“Yours?” Ophelia asked, amazed.
At that, Thorn did allow himself a raising of the eyebrows, which, briefly, relaxed his features.
“Mine,” confirmed the baron. “I had inexplicably mislaid a blue sandglass following my last visit to Clairdelune. Mr. Ambassador must have taken advantage of a moment of distraction to pick my pockets.”
“He may have saved your life,” said Ophelia. “But why would someone want to abduct you, in particular? The Provost of the Marshals, the director of the Nibelungen, and Count Harold all took political stances that were . . . well . . . somewhat extreme.”
Baron Melchior’s smile was joyless and couldn’t even raise his moustache. “You’re flattering me, but I’m not the saint you think I am, Miss Great Family Reader.”
Ophelia recalled how many times she’d seen him glancing anxiously behind him, as if he feared being attacked by his own shadow. Even now, he didn’t seem entirely at ease.
“Did you receive threatening letters?”
Baron Melchior suddenly looked away, and Ophelia was struck by the loneliness she caught in his eyes at that moment. It was the very same loneliness she detected in Thorn.
“Forgive me, Miss Great Family Reader. With all due respect to you, I can’t reply to that question.”
To Ophelia, it was as if he’d replied, “Yes.” She wanted to dig deeper, but Thorn stopped her with a look, clearly telling her to mind her own business. Ophelia’s scarf lashed the air like the tail of an annoyed cat. Why did everyone double-lock themselves into their own secrets? Wouldn’t it be so much easier for them, in the end, to trust one another?
“Take great care of yourself, please,” she whispered, ignoring Thorn’s grimace of irritation. “I think you’re in danger.”
Baron Melchior looked back at Ophelia, his moustache taut with perplexity. With the great distinction typical of him, he leant with both beringed hands on the knob of his cane and tilted a body as round as the full moon towards Ophelia.
“Danger is part of our life,” he told her, solemnly. “I’m fighting for a different future, and I believe you are, too, at your own level and in your own way. I will not abandon my post, just as you didn’t abandon yours. It’s up to us to see our choices out to the end, am I not right?”
Ophelia silently considered him, in that aquatic light, and couldn’t help but find him magnificent, in his own way. “Forgive me for persisting,” she said to him, gently, “but if you are a victim of blackmail, you really should talk about it to us. I myself also recei . . . ”
“That is enough,” Thorn cut in, fiercely. “If the minister has a statement to make, it’s to the Treasury that he will address it.”
Ophelia went quiet, rather shocked, and Baron Melchior also seemed ill at ease.
“Can we consider my sister to be in the clear?” he inquired, gently. “Really, the quantity of blue sandglasses you caught her with is her own business, isn’t it? Cunegond probably put in an order, in the usual way, like any of Madam Hildegarde’s clients. Of course,” he hastened to add, swiveling his spinning-top body round to Thorn, “Mr. Treasurer could check them, one by one, should he deem it necessary.”
Thorn pulled a legal notebook from an inside pocket of his coat. “We’ll see about that. The running of this workshop is under official scrutiny. It matters little whether Madam Hildegarde was or wasn’t the instigator of the abductions, she will have to face justice forthwith. From now until light has been shed on this affair, I order work to cease at this workshop. Sandglasses, of whatever color, are prohibited from sale and use until further notice.”
“Such a measure won’t make you popular, Mr. Treasurer,” sighed Baron Melchior. “You’re going to deprive a lot of people of their little treat.”
Thorn signed the writ, tore it from his notebook, and handed it to the foreman. “As for you, you are remanded in custody.”
“Me?”
“Madam Hildegarde is away and you are her deputy,” Thorn said, as if that explained everything.
The old man seemed increasingly confused, and Ophelia felt a surge of compassion for him. Indifferent, Thorn took the ledgers from his hands without further ado, entrusting them to the cross-eyed policeman, who squinted at them, clearly wondering what he was supposed to do with them.
“From now on, these are case exhibits. If Madam Hildegarde wants these documents back, she will have to submit an official request to the Treasury.”
“Thorn. Please.” Unable to bear it any longer, Ophelia had tugged on his coat sleeve to make him look at the foreman, who was swaying to and fro, eyes glued to his writ, as if the ground were giving way beneath him.
“Oh, you, no point fainting over it!” Thorn said, annoyed. “It’s an order of provisional detention, not a conviction. You will be released as soon as Madam Hildegarde has been heard, and the inquiry has established that you are not compromising public safety. If Madam Hildegarde is the model employer you claim she is, she will volunteer to face justice, in your place.”
“Well I never,” the foreman exclaimed, scratching the gray hair under his cap. “It’s my wife who’s going to give me a right telling-off, you know. And my artisans, what are they going to do while I’m away?”
Thorn’s eyes flashed like lightning. “They can employ an accountant worthy of the name and sort this place out. For your information, you have fourteen spent bulbs, twenty-three beds that aren’t perfectly aligned with the rest of their row, and I find it absurd that there is a different number of steps between each landing of your stairway.”
Ophelia raised her eyebrows. She had no idea what was going on behind Thorn’s massive forehead, but he was definitely not his normal self. As for herself, she wasn’t remotely inclined to count the steps, as they all trooped back up to the workshop. With her hurt arm folded on her stomach, she just wanted to be sure not to tumble down them a second time. As long as she didn’t know who had pushed her earlier on, she wouldn’t feel at ease. If all of Thorn’s days resembled the one she’d just lived through, she understood why he had such shadows under his eyes.
Ophelia still felt too anxious to think about resting, and was exasperated when, once they’d reached Mother Hildegarde’s administrative office, Thorn pointed, in an authoritarian way, at a chair for her to sit on, as if dealing with an unruly child.
“I must get on with an in-depth inspection of the accounts. You don’t move from here, you touch nothing until I have finished. As for you,” he said, addressing the policemen, “confiscate all the sandglasses in the workshop, including those in the process of being made.”
The policemen clicked their hobnailed heels in time as they marched through the workshop, like soldiers off to battle. Baron Melchior followed them, begging them, on behalf of the Ministry of Elegance, above all, not to ill treat anyone.
Thorn’s mood was so terrible, Ophelia didn’t want to worsen it. She sat down, frustrated and with nothing to do. A glance at the clock revealed that only eighteen hours remained before the Web severed its link with Archibald. Ophelia still didn’t know where he was, and she no longer had a single lead, a single clue.
It was a dead end, once again.
While Thorn combed through the books, she examined the room. It would have looked like any old accounts office, with its metal filing cabinets, cash register, and three telephones, if it hadn’t belonged to Mother Hildegarde. Every storage space proved much bigger than it logically should have been. Thus, on several occasions, Ophelia saw Thorn’s long arm buried up to the elbow inside the tiny drawers of the desk. There were also still lifes on every wall surface, and they always featured, without exception, baskets of oranges. Ophelia had never known anyone else so obsessed with one fruit.
“And me, Mr. Suretreat . . . Treaterer . . . Treasurer?” stammered the cross-eyed policeman, after a while.
Loaded down with the ledgers Thorn had entrusted to him, he had remained in the office and was twitching his handlebar moustache as if fighting the need to scratch his nose.
“You, don’t distract me,” grumbled Thorn, depositing a load of extra notebooks on top of his pile.
If Ophelia had, initially, felt gratitude towards this policeman, who had, after all, saved her life, now he made her feel ill at ease. It wasn’t his crossed eyes that bothered her, but the way he stared so intently at her, without kindness, as though looking at some strange creature on the shelf of a cabinet of curiosities.
Ophelia got up from her chair and pressed her nose to the glass panel that allowed one to see the workshop from the office. Following Thorn’s orders, the policemen were throwing all the sandglasses into large canvas sacks. The old artisans watched them doing so without protest, but with perhaps just a dazed look in their eyes. As for the foreman, his wrists were already in handcuffs.
Only Gail was moving amid this inactivity, banging her palm on a table. She was shouting at Baron Melchior, and Ophelia could clearly read the word “innocence” on her lips. Would they remain friends after all this? Ophelia had the unpleasant feeling of finding herself on the wrong side of the fence, as though justice was the real guilty party. In the end, weren’t Mother Hildegarde’s employees the victims, more than the accomplices, in this affair?
Ophelia turned resolutely towards Thorn, banging her knee on the chair as she did so. “The Treasury is currently the owner of the ledgers, isn’t it?”
“I refuse.”
“Excuse me?”
Thorn’s lightning response had thrown Ophelia. He was flicking rapidly through the pages of an address book, instantly memorizing Mother Hildegarde’s list of contacts.
“You were going to ask me permission to carry out a reading,” he said, without looking at her. “I don’t give you that permission. End of story.”
Ophelia couldn’t believe her ears. “Not even if that reading could establish the identity of the abductor? Not even if it could save lives and jobs?”
Thorn closed a drawer with an exasperated shove. “If you read the falsified ledger, would you be able formally to identify the author of the aforementioned falsification, dated the twenty-third of May?”
“No,” Ophelia had to admit. “When I penetrate a person’s state of mind, it’s rarely kind enough to reveal their name, face, and the date they came into contact with the object. But I can try to piece together an identity from a range of clues.”
Thorn opened another drawer and had to extend the desk’s piston lamp to see the back of it. Warily, he armed himself with a handkerchief to pluck several moldy oranges out of the drawer, and they instantly gave off a ghastly smell.
“Do you have the remotest idea of the number of people who might have circulated in this office and handled that ledger since May? Am I supposed to consider as guilty all those of whom Miss Great Family Reader thinks she has ‘pieced together the identity’? You are proposing evidence to me that is inadmissible by law,” he replied, instead of Ophelia, with no patience whatsoever. “It is objectivity and facts we need right now, not suppositions that will make us waste precious time.”
Ophelia wasn’t particularly proud, but she had rarely felt so humiliated. She felt it even more because she knew, deep down, that Thorn was right. The more layers of “experience” an object had been through, the less precise the evaluation of it. The pin of a sandglass and an accounting ledger, those were two totally different readings. And right now, human lives were at stake.
“I just wanted to make myself useful,” she said.
“You already have been, more than enough if you ask me. I am just looking forward to the wedding being over and you leaving the Pole with your whole family.”
In the workshop, someone must have switched on the radio, as a crackly voice started to sing: “Why sleep when I can dance at the ball? Why go to bed when I can play cards? It’s my, my, my splendid miracle coffee!”
Ophelia felt a powerful rumbling, the nature of which she didn’t understand, rising up the length of her body. Her stomach began to vibrate, her lungs to fill, her temples to throb, her eyes to mist up. Despite her blocked nose, she forced herself to breathe deeply to stem this rising tide, but the dikes finally gave way and her voice burst forth from her body in an uncontrollable flood:
“A lot has happened to me since you made me your fiancée. I’ve received an unbelievable number of death threats, and almost as many indecent proposals. I’ve been imprisoned, disguised, tricked, insulted, enslaved, infantilized, booed, subjected to hypnotic manipulation, and I’ve seen my aunt losing her mind, before my very eyes. And yet, I’ve never been as afraid as I am right now. I’m afraid for my family, I’m afraid for myself, I’m afraid for Berenilde, I’m afraid for Archibald, too. And for all of that, Thorn, it’s you I have to thank. So could you, please, stop speaking to me as if I were the cause of all your problems?”
Surprise had extended Thorn’s brows in one go, and his facial scar, pulled by this sudden movement, seemed ready to burst.
Ophelia was as stupefied as he was. Her voice, lips, hands, legs continued to shake, and she even felt a tear might escape her. She hadn’t the faintest idea what was actually happening to her, but knew she’d best get a grip immediately. This was no time to make a scene.
Thorn was looking at her so fixedly, one might have believed that his great body had been jammed. Only his jaws were half-opening and closing without a sound, as if he wanted to say something without knowing what that something was.
The cross-eyed policeman was so fascinated by the spectacle that he didn’t notice that the pile of ledgers in his arms was teetering more and more, about to collapse at any moment.
It was in the middle of this uncomfortable silence that the voice of the radio presenter rang out from the workshop wireless: “ . . . tonight, in a sanitarium close to the seaside resort of Opal Sands, which Citaceleste is now hovering over. The nurses are deaf to our questions, but we detected anxious murmurings among them. The outcome of this delivery is looking more than doubtful. Let’s be clear, dear listeners, the number-one favorite in the Pole isn’t as young as she tried to make out, and the way she fled the court fooled no one. But no problem—if you don’t come to the court, the court will come to you! Because this event is important, ladies and gentlemen. This baby, presuming it makes it into the world safe and sound, is the first direct descendant of our Lord Farouk for three centuries. But does that guarantee it a bright future? Nothing is less sure when one knows our Lord’s aversion to children. Stay tuned, dear listeners! Tittle-Tattle, your favorite program, will keep you informed as soon as we know more.”
Ophelia had shot up like a spring. Berenilde was giving birth! She was giving birth and already, journalists were lying in wait behind the door of her room.
Thorn instantly regained control of his movements and speech. He opened the glass door separating workshop and office, and addressed all the policemen: “Requisition all that is transportable and have an airship on standby. Six volunteers will stay here to go through the factory with a fine-tooth comb. If you find anything at all of interest—a cuff link, a footprint, a feather from a pillow, whatever—you cable the Opal Sands sanitarium. I will be away only as long as is strictly necessary.”
Thorn had spoken in a detached, almost mechanical way, but Ophelia wasn’t fooled. He had compulsively pulled his fob watch out of his coat, and only then remembered that it had stopped. For someone who never forgot anything, this absentmindedness alone betrayed great inner turmoil. Tittle-Tattle, with its macabre dramatizing, had had its effect.
“Your master key?” she asked, trying to calm the twitching of her scarf.
“No Compass Rose serves the sanitarium, and going via the station access will waste time,” Thorn stated, categorically. “The airship is our quickest option. I’ll get us a safe passage.”
Thorn picked up the telephone, and spoke to the operator as though to a policeman under his command.
“I’m going ahead,” Ophelia decided. “Security checks or not, there’s no law in the Pole that forbids people from passing through mirrors.”
She went over to the office’s wall mirror and leant with both hands against her reflection. Not entirely convinced, she concentrated on a mirror in the sanitarium waiting room, in which she’d already reflected herself. The mirror wouldn’t let her pass though it; the destination was too far away. Ophelia was more disconcerted, however, when she encountered the same resistance on trying to access her hotel room. Citaceleste was hovering above Opal Sands; the distance wasn’t that great, surely? Her anxiety increased as she tried ever closer destinations: the room at the airship landing stage, the hall of mirrors near the main square, the last lift they’d taken. She didn’t even manage to access the mirror in the hall of the factory, just a few yards away, although she was sure that, on entering, she’d reflected herself in it.
“Well?” Thorn grumbled, putting the receiver down. “You’re still here?”
“I don’t understand,” stammered Ophelia, staring at the shocked face of her own reflection. “I can’t pass through mirrors anymore.”