In my dream, I’m in Avalon, and the baby cries in Viviane’s arms. She rocks and coos at him with an intensity that makes me uncomfortable. Behind her, the forest is burning. Huge flames that turn the trees red and gold. Give him to me, I say, knowing it’s a boy, for his mane of golden locks, his eyes. I try to snatch him, but with one flick of her hand, I am turned into stone. I scream, but all it does is echo in my head. My body has become my own prison.
The baby. I wake up, alone. No—I’m not alone—heart skipping, I jump out of bed, ready to defend myself with whatever I can find. A copy of Boisseau’s biography, battered, over-read—a poor weapon, with its dulled corners. Eventually, I realize that what I thought was a hooded figure stooped over my bed is the combination of both ball dresses hanging on the wardrobe’s door, flapping gently in the breeze of the open window. I collapse back onto the bed, wrapped tight around myself under the bedsheet, waiting for my eyes to stop playing tricks on me.
When I was a child, I used to set boundaries for my safety. If nothing touches the floor, you’ll be all right. If you can’t be seen, not even a strand of hair outside of the duvet, she won’t get you. I guess it was a way to make sure I felt I had some control, when in fact, my mother held all the power. She could decide to come in and scream at me for sleeping in the wrong position. She could pull me out of my bed in the middle of the night because I was a pig for not changing my bedsheets. I tried to find rules, explanations, safety protocols, but there was none. The bedsheets needed changing weekly, or daily, or on odd days, or when it rained, depending on her whim.
D’Arvor brings her back so strongly, as if its walls hold her spirit. She’s the one I wish I had been able to lock in a prison of air, far from me, and from here. Her dying didn’t solve anything, didn’t make me feel any better or freer. Who would I be had I had a better, healthier childhood? Would my gift be different? Can I allow Maxime to help me heal and finally believe in myself?
Marie-Laure’s words about Constance haunt me: She nearly drowned the boy. I refuse to think Constance would have been like my mother, that she could have abused a child. I felt her affection for the toddler; I have visited her head extensively through her works, for goodness’ sake. And now I’m questioning everything, doubting what I have believed for years.
Later, I wake up in the fetal position, a hand stroking my shoulder. I can see through the faded peach sheet that morning has arrived, but I can’t see who the hand belongs to.
Lila? I emerge on my guard, but less spooked now that I can see the room in the light of day.
It’s Maxime. My eyes adjust to the incongruity of having him sitting on my bed early in the morning. He is in a fresh white shirt and his hair is damp and he smells like expensive shower gel.
“Morning. Time to get up.”
I sit up, wishing he hadn’t found me at my most vulnerable, curled up like a little girl hiding from the world, with hair sticking in her mouth.
“Maybe knock next time you want to come into my room?” I ask, instinctively crossing my arms over my chest.
“Last time I checked this room still belonged to me,” he says, and I think he’s trying to joke. When I stare at him, deadpan, he adds, with a smile: “We have work to do. You’re late.”
“You mean the sculptures? I’m not doing that today. We need to talk.”
“What about? You already missed yesterday.” I feel him tense.
I wish we didn’t have to have this conversation here. Ideally, I would have been standing over him in a heavy silk dress with drooping sleeves, holding a sword, and he would be kneeling, head drooped in his knightly armor.
But I have to say it. I need him to be honest with me, and he hasn’t been. “I know the sculptures in the attic are forgeries. And I know you made them.”
So much happens in those few seconds he registers what I’ve said, some that I understand, much that I don’t. Then he says, slowly: “So we do need to talk. But not here.”
“Where then? You keep running away from conversations. Enough now.” I’m aware my chin is trembling. I won’t allow him to escape to Rennes or the gallery or wherever he disappears to. The workshop, a voice whispers in my head. Making his mesmerizing, dangerous creations. It makes me want to pull him to myself, skin against skin, to drink him in right here in the bed Constance might have slept in.
God, get a grip, Camille.
He smiles, perfect white teeth, his hair catching the early-morning light, his eyes hinting at shared lust, and I wonder if he’s seen it all pan out on my face. “I think we should take a little trip.”
The drive to the Val Sans Retour takes us along the narrow roads of Brocéliande, past villages of simple houses, made striking by the use of dark-red shale in their facades, the local building stone ran through with iron oxide. Everything else is so quiet, so green. Lush fields of maize and wheat stretch between patches of the forest; brown cows watch the world go by.
“Do you know that of the twelve thousand five hundred hectares of the forest today, ninety percent is privately owned?” Maxime asks. “So we’re always trespassing. It’s outrageous.”
“Well, you own part of it too,” I say.
He seems irritated at my comment. “Only the very edge. Hardly anything. Most of it is split between a dozen or so big owners.”
He is a focused tourist guide, pointing as we drive to the bridge where Lancelot and Guinevere met in secret, Merlin’s tomb, the Fountain of Barenton, which, he explains, is always cold, yet boiling, and is reputed to cure people of madness. Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, was one of them, and I think about that sculpture in the attic. I have dreamt of returning to these places since visiting them as a child, but I quietly listen to Maxime as I wait for the moment to resume our conversation.
Eventually, he parks just off the road in the village of Tréhorenteuc, and I follow him. It is early, and quiet, and I’m grateful for it. The many signs seem to indicate that this is quite the tourist motorway. We walk for a short while on a tarmac track between golden fields to the edge of Brocéliande.
“Morgane put a spell on this place,” I tell Maxime, knowing full well that he, like me, grew up on these stories. That these woods were the playground of his youth. But his silence and the looming presence of the forest, like an entity we’re about to beg for forgiveness, is unnerving, and I need to hear my own voice, the litany of the familiar legends. “She was a loner, socially awkward at the court—I guess they knew her magic had the potential to hurt, that she was conflicted, dangerous. Yet she met someone, literally a knight in shining armor, and they fell in love. When he went off to adventure, he promised to come back, and she waited. Surprise surprise, he forgot about her and, when she used her powers to locate him, which she hadn’t before because she trusted him, she found him here, making sweet bucolic love to another woman in the valley. Morgane didn’t want anybody else to feel like she did—as if someone had torn her heart out of her chest and stamped on it. She turned the cheating lovers into stones and cast a spell on the place, and made it so that anyone who is unfaithful in action or thought will remain trapped here.”
I realize I’ve stopped at the edge. It’s ridiculous—I hesitate, as if I don’t know what’s real anymore, what is a fable, which world I inhabit.
Maxime has walked in and is now standing over the threshold. “You know it was all party-party in here, though, jousts and banquets, hardly a hardship.”
“Until you tried to leave and either the dragon or the giant came for you.” I’m still not moving. “I fight with archives and gallery receipts, Maxime; I’m not so sure I’d be good against a club made of a whole freaking pine tree.”
I think about my lust for him, the urge to have him, to devour him and his whole universe. Anyone unfaithful in action or thought.
“But you’ve got nothing to worry about, right?” He gives me a knowing smile.
I shake my head and step over the threshold, telling myself that my love for him has been pure for almost thirty years. The stuff of courtly love. Unrequited. Unconsumed, from afar.
The forest is a rich embroidered universe of ferns, with bushes of broom and holly growing under the canopy of ancient beech and oak trees. Every so often, a fluttering magpie or robin crosses our path. A small stream runs through its heart, its stones stained with blood. It’s the iron oxide again, I tell myself, but it’s easy to imagine wounded lovers seeking rest here, their hearts quietly bleeding.
We stop to take in the sight of the Miroir aux Fées, a calm silver pond, mirror to the alder trees dipping their roots into its water.
“My mother used to tell us that blue dragonflies were fairies,” Maxime says.
“Or white butterflies,” I add.
And you’re the bridge, Camille.
We continue on the narrow path along the stream, which is hardly anything at this time of year, and soon we have to start climbing up the rock face, jagged like dragon scales. We emerge from the dense forest into a landscape of pine trees, yellow gorse, and purple heather, displacing pine needles as we walk. They wouldn’t have been there in Constance’s time, I remember, knowing they were planted after a great fire destroyed most of this area of the forest in the ’90s. Another reminder that her world isn’t my world. I’m here and she isn’t. She is deep underground in an unmarked mass grave. The world I’m walking through now has since been sculpted by time and fire and erosion.
Finally, we’re at the top, overlooking the valley and the forest, dense and deep green at our feet.
“Breathtaking.” It’s easier to forget my conflicts when the place seeps with so much beauty.
“Yes. It’s not bad.” Maxime stops next to me, his hands in his pockets. Standing at the edge of the rocky outcrop, I’m even more aware of how unsuitable my shoes are—the soles of my faithful brogues are so smoothed by use, they offer no grip whatsoever.
I turn to him, trying to find a better place to plant my feet. “So, what’s the deal?”
He laughs. “What a question. What deal, Camille? I deal in many things.”
“I gather. So here’s what I want to know: why you keep messing me about, when and how you started making the most beautiful, amazing, incredible sculptures I’ve ever seen. And most importantly, what your plan is for them. And exactly what part you’re expecting me to play. No more lying, Maxime.”
I’m too hot and bothered to be looking at him. Next to me, he opens a bottle of water with a great crack as the seal breaks. The thought comes—a quiet alarm—that there’s only a very low, innocuous cord separating me from the edge and a plunge into the valley. If I were to fall or, say, be pushed, my body would bounce on the sharp rocks like one of those crash test dummies, pierced and bruised in all the wrong places. I would land in the river below, a corpse joining all the other doomed lovers.
“Let’s sit down.” I try to keep my voice businesslike.
We drop down next to each other on the rocks. The path we followed to get here is invisible, drowned in thick trees.
Then Maxime says: “I was hoping you’d figure it out.”
“You could have told me straight.”
“I needed to trust you first. And…if I could fool you, with your gift, I knew I could fool anyone. I worked very, very hard to cover my tracks.”
“Thanks,” I say. “You very nearly did. But not quite.”
He nods. “So, to answer your questions. I’m not messing about. I’ve never been more serious about anything, Camille. Firstly, I want all those fuckers who will be at the ball to fall over themselves to buy one of our sculptures. I want the word to spread, then to go public with the rest of them. I want them to sell for millions, to make the headlines of the art world.”
“Why?”
“I told you. I want the world to finally acknowledge Constance’s worth. I want justice for her.”
“So…it’s all a noble endeavor? Nothing to do with the money?” I can’t help but let my sarcasm drip.
“All right,” he sighs. “You’re right. We also desperately need the money.”
“Is this what it’s all been about then? D’Arvor’s leaky roof?”
He looks at me like I’ve disappointed him. “You make it sound so crass. But yes, in case you haven’t noticed, rich people need money too. Especially when they’re broke.”
“Broke?”
“My father spent it all, and continues to do so. We’re in debt, about to lose everything. D’Arvor is a money pit. Whatever we throw at it, it hardly makes a difference. If it all weren’t so personal, we should have put it on the market a long time ago.”
“What? No—”
“You wanted the truth,” he says, and I see in his eyes how vulnerable he has made himself just now.
“Okay. Well, I don’t think the sculptures you made, even as brilliant as they are, will make enough money. There are only four, and you know Sorels aren’t selling as well as Boisseaus, and—”
“There are only four for now. And Night Swimming would sell for much more. It is the key to getting the whole business going. You’re the first to know that, after that near-miss at Courtenay. I’m so glad that random fluke came to light, by the way, that you were so vocal about it; it enabled me to work out what I had to do.”
I stare at his profile, stunned, as he brings the bottle to his lips. “You’re—you’re making a fake Night Swimming?”
He seems shocked at my use of fake. “Well, yes. You asked for one, didn’t you? They’ve already got it wrong once, so…there’s clearly an appetite for it, and together we can give them something better than they ever bargained for. Something there really can’t be any doubt about.”
I’m unable to speak for a few seconds, so I turn my eyes to the valley, the sparrow hawks circling and swooping. Reality is shifting, boulders threatening to topple, tree roots losing their grip, and I need time to adjust. Was this the Night Swimming I was meant to find all along? Not Constance’s, but Maxime’s? Will it hold the key to something about me, finally? About my future, how I should live this life, what place I can find in this world whose gates I have pressed my nose against for so long?
“Can I see it?” I ask finally.
“It’s not ready yet. But yes, of course. Moreover, I’ll need your input.” Then, seeing the doubts on my face, all my internal turmoil, he says: “Camille, nothing has changed. The plan is still the same. You will simply help me make the sculptures perfect, from the inside.”
“Jesus, Maxime. No, it’s not. We’re talking about a whole bloody forgery business. Cheating the world about the work of my most beloved artist.”
“You’ll always know, though. It won’t change who she is for you. It’s only those—sheep, those cretins, that will come and eat from the palms of our hands. Camille, you and I know the art market doesn’t exist for love’s sake. It is power, privilege. The art is a commodity like any other. Wouldn’t it be amazing if it played in our favor? Plus Constance’s reputation would soar. The value of her real pieces would soar with it. She would be in pride of place in all the best museums of the world. Further along the line, we could build her a museum at D’Arvor if you wish. In the orangery, perhaps. A place she deserved a long time ago.” He pauses, his hand relaxes, finds my chin, tenderly lifting it so I am forced to look at him. “You and I want the same thing. We are two sides of the same coin. If you were to work with me at the gallery to sell the sculptures we can make, we’d own the art world.”
“And what if you—we’re found out? Forgery is a crime. We could go to prison.”
“We won’t be found out. Not with your gift. Plus the sculptures are good, aren’t they?”
“They’re extraordinary,” I concede, dizzy.
“You’re extraordinary, Camille. And I very nearly fooled you.”
“You’re making Night Swimming,” I repeat, unable to compute what is happening. I stand up, thinking I should walk away. I’m literally poised at the edge of the cliff, about to fall. Or fly. Then I think of Lila’s note. “Was Constance really sectioned at the end of her life? Is it all true?”
He hesitates; then I see him opt for the truth. “Yes. She was sent to an asylum near Rennes.”
“I checked all their records,” I say. “I conducted such thorough research. She wasn’t there.”
He looks sad now. “Sadly, she was. We—well, my family at the time—had the power to make it unofficial, let’s say.”
“You locked her up? Left her there to die?” The thought is so horrible I can’t bear it. My heart splinters like Morgane’s.
I go to storm away, but my foot slips, and I stumble, losing my balance. In a flash, Maxime’s hand catches me, holds me securely on the ground, and I regain my composure. We are standing centimeters away from each other, staring into each other’s eyes. His hand keeps hold of my wrist.
“No. Whatever my family did—I’m not them, Camille. Didn’t you listen? I love her too. Unlike the rest of them, I reel from that injustice.”
“But why did they lock her up? What happened?”
“I don’t know.” He seems genuinely bereft. “I always assumed she was suffering, perhaps a mental health condition that nobody would have known how to treat at the time. Frédéric told you about my grandfather nearly drowning…” I nod. “But I want to repair what they did. I want the same thing you do.”
“By making a Night Swimming that isn’t hers?”
“Night Swimming is the key. You said so yourself, in your articles: it was her last letter to the world. Together we can make sure that it makes an impression. That the world remembers her, celebrates her like we both do.”
“There must be another way,” I say.
He shakes his head. “That’s what you’ve looked for all your life, isn’t it? It’s only right if you are the one bringing it out into the world. Those bastards I saw at Courtenay, watching and judging your every move. Waiting for you to fall. You deserve to show them you were right. They should fear you, queue to eat from your hand. Camille, you are the key to it all.”
Then he pulls me to him and kisses me. The birds quiet, the wind stops, the river stills. His lips burn on mine like a spell that can’t be broken.
When I pull away, both of us panting, he says, “Ever since I met you, I knew. There are no limits to what we can do together. We can protect, create, influence, even rip this reality apart. It’s together that we’re the most powerful.”
I take a moment to let his words sink in, turning my head away as I feel I might melt under the intensity of his gaze, the intensity of this moment I didn’t even dare to dream up quietly. Maxime offering me, what—to be with him? Live at D’Arvor, as his partner?
“What about Lila?” I ask.
His eyes. “Lila and I have been over for a long time. We broke up officially last night. She broke up with me, to be honest. I was only staying with her out of obligation. I knew she had nowhere else to go; I couldn’t do that to her. So now, as you see, I’m all yours. If you’ll have me.”
Another sparrow hawk soars from the valley, in his claws a wriggling mouse, fighting for her life.
“Are you in, Camille? Can I trust you?”
Suddenly I am the hawk, seeing us from above, in the Val Sans Retour, two lovers of stone: Maxime, the Arthurian knight kneeling at my feet, and me—I am a different Camille, long dark-red hair floating in the breeze, and my features are hard like the dagger in my boot, my fingers bony and strong and ready to strangle small birds and squirrels. My heart is bleeding into his, and his into mine.
“Yes,” I say.