Or perhaps it is a fakery like the mirror windows and the drapes. Perhaps it goes nowhere. I have never seen the fire lit.
My rooms are connected to each other by a tall gilt doorway. There is a small toilet through a panel by the bed, and the door from the boudoir leads to a hallway. That is all I know. The door to the hallway is always locked, and no one has entered or left by it since I arrived.
The servants do not use the doors. They have their own clever system and I never see them, even during the day when they bring me luncheon or tidy one of the rooms. Every night, I go to sleep determined to doze lightly and to wake at the smallest sound, but in the end I sleep like a rock, and in the morning my clothes are cleaned and the lamps have all been trimmed and there is breakfast waiting for me. I have discovered how they do it: when I move from the bedroom to the boudoir or vice-versa, the door will click shut behind me, locking. I can rattle and hammer as much as I please, but it will not open until it wants to, and when it wants to, the room beyond is always empty of anybody. I will find dishes of pastries and bowls of fruit, cups of thick cream, freshly starched petticoats, little pots of tea, and sometimes a new volume of poetry or tales. But the one who brings me these gifts is always gone.
Of course I looked for the secret panel that lets them in, and of course I found it. Two rooms can hold only so many secrets, and for only so long. But alas, the panel is locked from the other side. I pried at it until my fingers bled, and the next day there were bandages and a greasy brown salve on my nightstand.
I had half a mind to throw them across the room, another half to break my toes against the wall and scream until I was hoarse. I would have, had I thought it might help. But there is no use being childish. I have searched every nook and every cranny for a way to escape. I have left desperate notes, and shouted to be released, and I have cried all my tears away. No one is listening. I have nothing to do now but go mad. I feel I am accomplishing that, at least. I am becoming like the batty old dowagers at court, wandering from room to room or sitting half lost in the heaps of their finery with nothing to do but mutter and glance about disapprovingly.
Sometimes I write on the paper provided. Often I stare at my own reflection. It is poor company. During the first several days I would peer at the false windows and pretend I was speaking to Mama, would imagine the dry click of my sobs was her soft tutting and the swing of the clock hands were her fingers, running through my hair.
“Do you think we will get out?” I would say to the glass, and then I would answer in a lovely, foolish voice: “You will get out, Aurélie. You are clever and you are brave.”
I have stopped doing this. Not even the dowagers were quite so mad.
Last night I thought I heard Delphine crying. “Aurélie?” she wailed, somewhere faraway, and I sat straight up, listening until my ears rang, but I heard nothing more. I got out of bed and pressed my ear to the door. I woke on the floor nine hours later, and now I think that perhaps I dreamed it.
Today, I rise at my usual hour and dress behind the silk screen. I don’t know why I bother anymore. Perhaps I will never see anyone again, and I might walk about in a sheet like a Roman princess. Perhaps I will die down here, an old spinster far underground, by then utterly delusional.
I am already having the strangest dreams. Flashes of teeth and butterfly wings, folding open and closed. Delphine with her hair grown wild and vast, tangled with silver forks and toy rocking horses. Mama, pulling a bullet from her breast.
Breakfast is waiting for me in the boudoir when I am finished. Hot rolls and butter, honey in a crystal dish, and a bundle of glossy black grapes. The grapes taste of ashes. All the fruit here does. I wonder if Father grows them in little jars in a laboratory. Havriel said they sealed the palace, closed it up against the blood and ruin of the revolution, so I doubt they are coming from Lyon, as they used to. I pluck a few grapes and eat them. I sit down and butter a roll. The silverware makes soft clinking noises in the silence.
It is different down here, the sound of silence. On the surface, silence is a vast, full thing. It is alive, pulsing with the movement of the sky and the world and the stars. Here the silence is closed and tight. Everything is louder, every breath and every step. It makes it difficult to breathe and difficult to step, and perhaps that is the point. I throw down the roll after two bites and go to the writing table.