"Could… could Elvira have been unfaithful?" Cordelia could bear the silence no longer.
Leo's dead eyes sprang into life. "Possibly," he said curtly. "But what has that to do with murder?"
"Nothing… nothing, of course. I'm sorry."
"Poison!" he spat suddenly. "Of all the vile instruments, A weak, cowardly, woman's weapon!"
Cordelia had no urge to defend her sex at this point. She didn't know what to do or say. Leo was completely unapproachable. Every line of his body held her away. She was the bearer of ill tidings, and messengers always suffered. But her heart ached for him and she longed to touch him, to offer him some comfort, but she knew there was nothing she had that was strong enough to overcome his grief and anger. Not even the power of her love.
"Leave me!" It was a curt order and he didn't look at her as he issued it.
Cordelia melted away, down the hill, blending with the glittering butterflies of the court strolling under the sun, between the fountains.
Leo spun on his heel, his eyes blinded with tears as he retreated into the cool seclusion of the maze. He wanted to scream his rage and grief to the skies but instead he paced the narrow alleys between the high laurel hedges, slamming one hand into the palm of the other in a futile expression of his despair.
He blamed himself. He should have known. All their lives, he and his twin had been inextricably bound together. They had understood each other's thoughts before they were spoken. As small children, even when apart they had occasionally had uncanny flashes of knowledge about the other's doings or feelings. When Elvira had been sick of scarlet fever, Leo had been at school, but the night when the fever hit its peak, the moment when his twin had hovered between life and death, he had woken and found himself staring into a strange internal landscape. A dark tunnel with a soft warm light at the end. He had struggled, finding it hard to breathe, as he'd fought to refuse the invitation of that light. His whole body seemed to be at war, wrenched from side to side by opposing forces, and then the light had receded and he'd woken fully, drenched in sweat, as exhausted as if he'd been fighting a pitched battle for many
hours. He had fought that battle against death hand in hand with Elvira across the distance that separated them. But when she lay dying at her husband's hands, he'd been frolicking in Rome and had experienced not a twitch of unease.
How could he have abandoned her? How had it happened, when had it happened, that the spiritual tie between them had loosened and flown apart?
Tears poured unrestrained down his face as he moved deeper and deeper into the maze. Tears of guilt and of unspeakable grief. They had both known that they were drawing apart, that the connections of twinship were giving way to the independence of their separate lives. They had accepted it, acknowledged it. But now Leo felt again, for the first time since Elvira's death, that old spiritual connection. Now he knew that he had truly lost a part of himself, and he felt that loss in his blood, in his bone, in his sinew.
At the first birdsong of the dawn chorus, as the king's hunting party were leaving for the boar hunt, Amelia had nudged her sister awake. Sylvie opened her eyes and sat up all in the same movement. "Where are we?" She gazed bemused at the strange bedchamber with its blue velvet hangings and gilded ceiling. A fresh, fragrant breeze blew through the long open windows.
"In the palace, stupid," her sister whispered, sitting up beside her. "We're going to meet the king."
Sylvie's mouth opened on a round O as memory flooded back. "With Cordelia." Only in the presence of others did they give their stepmother the courtesy title of Madame.
"Yes, and not with Madame de Nevry." Amelia stuffed the pillow against her mouth to stifle the excited giggles bubbling irrepressibly from her chest. "Change places, Sylvie." She wriggled over her sister.
"We can't do that here," Sylvie protested. "What about the king?"
"He won't know," Amelia said matter-of-factly. "No one ever does." She shoved against her sister, pushing her over to the other side of the bed.
Sylvie continued to look doubtful. The trick they played in the nursery and schoolroom at home was all very well, even when their father was their dupe, but to play it in the king's palace, in front of the king, was very different. "What about Cordelia?"
"She won't know either," Amelia stated, hiding her own doubts now under a show of bravado. "No one will know, 'cept us. Like always."
Had Sylvie been able to persevere in her doubts, she would have won over her sister; however, the door opened to admit their governess, still in dishabille, and the nursery maid.
Louise brandished the two hair ribbons and without so much as a morning greeting had labeled each twin while they were still in bed and she thought she could be certain which was which. She gave orders to the nursery maid through compressed lips and communicated with the children with little pushes and pinches, lacing them into their gowns as if they were insensate dolls, scraping back their hair, thrusting pins into the tight braids, retying the ribbons until they both felt as if their scalps were about to split.
When their little corsetted bodies were clothed in the formal, heavy brocaded gowns over stiff damask petticoats and wide swinging hoops, their governess shooed them ahead of her into the small salon next to the bedroom. She sat them side by side on a slippery chintz sofa, their feet on footstools so that they were in no danger of sliding off, and told them dourly not to move a muscle. They were to wait there until the princess came to fetch them for their state visit to the dauphine.
Amelia glanced at her sister, whose mouth turned down with dismay. The hands on the pretty gilded clock on the mantel meant nothing to them, but they knew it was still very early and Cordelia had said the previous day that she would come for them at eleven in the morning. The dauphine was not an early riser.
Louise instructed the nursery maid to watch them and make sure they didn't ruffle so much as a hair, and went off to her own chamber to dress.
"Are we to have no breakfast?" Sylvie asked timidly as her stomach grumbled beneath the stiff panel of her bodice.
"I don't know, madame," the nursery maid said. She too was hungry and lost in this vast palace. There was no kitchen attached to the children's apartments, and she slept on a thin mattress in a small closet in the corridor outside. She didn't know how to order food or fuel or water and felt as powerless to look after her own wants as any prisoner in the Bastille.
Louise returned in half an hour, a suspicious pink tinge to her cheekbones, her pale watery eyes as usual slightly yellow and bloodshot. She glared at the little girls.
"Are we to have no breakfast, madame?" Amelia this time inquired.
"We're very hungry," Sylvie added.
Madame was hungry too, but she was no more au fait with the workings of Versailles than the nursery maid. Supper had been brought to them the previous evening without any effort on her part. But how to initiate the production of a meal was beyond her. She wasn't about to admit that to her charges, however, let alone to the anxious nursery maid.
"You will wait," she declared loftily. "A little self-denial is good for the soul."
The children's dismay increased as they understood that their governess hadn't the faintest idea how to feed them. For four interminable hours, they sat side by side on the sofa, not daring to move a muscle, while their governess took nips from her silver flask to subdue her own hunger pangs, and dozed in between whiles. The nursery maid tidied the salon and the bedchambers, then stood miserably by the door. From beyond the closed double doors came sounds of life: hurrying footsteps, murmured voices, the occasional shout. There were smells too, food smells. In the courtyard below their window, horses clattered over cobbles, iron wheels clanged, military voices bellowed, trumpets sounded. Everyone, it seemed, in this vast place, was oblivious of the four newcomers huddling in a small salon on an outside staircase.