Masque Read Online Free

it.’
    â€˜Well, my boy, no one is asking you to, yet.’ His smile was strained and his hands kept wiping at the hem of his robe. He thought I didn’t notice. ‘Come. Let’s get down there and do what we are paid for. Make sure that horrid foreman is not stealing more cement.’
    â€˜Ug, how I loathe him. I would happily kill him for cutting corners on that fountain. And those looks he gives me!’ I grinned, nearly lipless, luckily invisible, ‘And they say that I have got an evil face.’
    We took the winding stair down to the street. I approved of the gilt wood and lush carvings of stylised, almost feminine animals lining the banister. My fingers traced the outlines of lionesses, graceful, dashing gazelles.

RAOUL
    1.
    I’m not used to failure yet, or to the complexity of fulfilment and desire. I never knew that I could get something I thought I wanted, be satisfied with it for a while, and then discover that the chocolate was bitter beneath the bright foil. Perhaps my brother should have denied me more often; perhaps he should have allowed the nurse who played the role of my mother sometimes, to inhabit that state more fully, to allow both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.
    It has only just occurred to me that all three of us grew up with one dead parent. We’ve all lived with ghosts. My father survived, just barely, until I was sixteen. I was a late arrival; the product of a third wife, a pretty young thing purchased from her parents to warm the bed of a man sixty years her senior. I was the unexpected pregnancy which killed her. She wasn’t bought for breeding. Her narrow pelvis could not spread. It is difficult to know that your first act on earth slaughtered your mother.
    Now we all are orphans.
    Still, it was a happy childhood. I lived with my nurse on the Brittany coast while my brother lorded it over Paris, preserving our fortune by investing in shipping and pretending to philanthropy by spreading coppers to the arts. I knew, even then, that he had a mistress, a dancer. Well, he was forty years old and unmarried. He needed distraction.
    I was well educated in the subjects I loved: art, music and seafaring. Maths and history fell by the wayside. I rarely made it all the way through novels. I have since learned that because authors put what they know in their books, and since only so many things can happen to us (humanity is limited), a novel could have told me the story I would live before it happened. I would have known the structure of the terror anyway, known how to act to save her. I might have discovered what she was. At least, if I’d still failed, I wouldn’t have had to meet it as though I’d invented the emotions I suffered.
    I have slogged my way through many stories since; I have the time after all. I keep seeing her, my perfect image of her, dressed in the robes of Persephone, lodged in the underworld, her lips bleeding pomegranate seeds which glisten in the gloaming dark.
    I remember the first time I saw her. We were almost still children, exactly the same age: fourteen and a day. She was a wild, ragged thing, swathed in white silk that had been quite fine the week before when her patron, the Countess, purchased it in Paris. Heaven only knows how she soiled it so quickly. It would be very like Christine to drench herself in delicate silk and then go rolling down the sand dunes to play in the waves.
    Her father, the genius, was standing beside the Countess (she shaded him with her pink lace parasol – I think she was a little in love with him) playing gypsy reels on his lovely honey-coloured violin. It sang nearly as sweetly as Christine did, dancing there, dark as Salomé, twirling her red brocade scarf like an airy harem veil.
    The old man was tall, a little stooped, his hair slate grey. He played with his eyes closed, his spare body swaying, seduced by the music. The Countess was taller than he was. Slim. Blonde. About thirty-five