Chapter Text
The music is bleeding from Verso’s fingertips when his father enters the room without knocking. Verso’s fingers slam down once, harshly, and the clanging discordance of the keys surprises his father enough to make him pause at the threshold, one foot over the sanctity of the door-frame.
“I surprised you,” Renoir says, in lieu of an apology.
“There is a reason I was not practicing in the dining hall,” Verso responds crisply. He has not looked away from his sheet music yet, mouth a thin white line. There is tension in his posture. He feels strangely vulnerable, in the same room that houses his childhood toys. A dusty train track piled in the corner. “I had not realised anyone else was home. I thought you were-”
“At the salon with your mother, yes.”
“It’s not like you to attend Council meetings.”
“I find myself recently motivated,” his father says, and finally Verso drags his gaze away from the piano to look at him.
Renoir looks haunted.
He has always cut a proud figure, although naturally slight. Draped in his dark layers and fine coats he stands out amongst the most glittering of crowds, and socialites and politicians fawn equally over his calm but assertive murmur. Here in the small room adjoining Verso’s quarters, however, he is stripped down to his vest and shirtsleeves, and Verso notes a new paleness to his cheeks. The veins on the back of his father’s hands - his Painter’s hands - seem in greater contrast than before. There is a shadow behind his eyes.
“What news?” Verso asks him, affecting composure as he takes the music sheets from the piano and stows them swiftly away.
“The Writers continue to swear ignorance,” Renoir sighs, rubbing at his face, “some more convincingly than others. We are unable to force the point without making some… bold moves.”
Verso looks back at the piano. The shining black surface reflects his face in a smeared, pale mess.
“Do we want to?” He asks. “Force the point, I mean.”
Here finally, a glint in his father’s eye. Aline Dessendre may wear her fury on her sleeve in the wake of the attack, but Verso has spied enough of Renoir’s paintings of late to know that revenge is not a foreign desire to the family patriarch. It is almost oppressive, the way Renoir has enfolded his children to him in the days and weeks following the fire, suddenly demanding to know where they were and who they were with at all times, whereas before he had been markedly more lenient than his wife.
Verso, in particular, chafes at the sudden lack of willful blindness that he has grown so accustomed - and reliant - on.
“They tried to kill you,” Renoir rumbles, like distant thunder. He approaches Verso finally and sets his hand on his shoulder. Verso very carefully does not shy away, but makes sure his music notes are hidden from view.
“They failed,” he points out instead, voice still painfully distant.
Renoir sighs. He hesitates, and then nudges Verso with the back of his hand so that he makes room on the piano bench, and takes a seat next to him. Verso is swamped with the smell of his father - fine cologne and turpentine and beneath the faint, oxygen heavy tang of Painting.
“Verso,” Renoir continues, voice lowered as if they are not the only ones in the small room, “it is clear something has weighed on you since the fire. I would not have you bear it alone. In this, at least, a father’s duty is paramount. It is bad enough that Clea has set herself on this warpath. I would not have you put yourself at greater risk by involving yourself.”
“No?” Verso asks, and knows he fails to hide his teeth when he turns a pale eye on his father. “What would you have me do, father?”
I shall add it to the list, he does not say, but it seems he does not need to, as he watches Renoir’s expression go stiff and cold.
It was something they had not yet discussed. The night of fire. Not the fire itself, the sudden stink of ash and burning wood. Or the moments afterward, when Verso raced into Alicia’s rooms to rescue her only to come upon one of the arsonists. Or the moments after that, when a sudden shock overcame the man’s face, before it bled of all colour and he burst into a cloud of black, stinking, ink -
Before all that, Verso and his father had argued.
It had followed a tenser than usual family dinner, where Aline had looked at Verso with pursed lips and then more meaningfully at her husband, who either failed to notice or pretended very well not to, his grip on his silverware tight. Only afterwards did he manage to corner Verso on his way up to his bedroom, the banister cold underneath his hand as Renoir looked down at him with his steady stare and said -
“It has been a while since your last painting.”
And after that, well.
They had argued.
Now they sit in mutual, gritted silence in the small game room. Verso has left the curtains drawn, so there is only the faintest of lights peering through, casting echoes on dust motes dancing through the air. There are scrawlings on the wall, low down, at a child’s height. Gestral text in the stages of creation. Every time Verso looks at it his heart thuds with a melancholy pain. Renoir’s proverbial grip on his children has gone taut with fear, and none more so than his grip on Verso, the prodigal son.
“I would have you talk to me, Verso,” Renoir says now.
Although he is the softer of Verso’s parents, it is not in his nature to be vulnerable. A trait he, perhaps regrettably, passed on. Perhaps, Verso wonders, perhaps if he had died, his father would find a way to break through that perfect shell that he recognises and hates so much in his son. But Verso is still here, and the Dessendre Manse still stands resolute, if a little charred, and Verso cannot tell him what is wrong, because he knows more than anything else he has ever known that his father could not save him from this particular fate.
“You would have to listen to me, for that to happen, papa,” he says instead, and stands to leave.
Distance is better, he thinks, if the alternative is War.
—-
Verso is not an expert at following his own advice.
The fear of losing his family, any of his family, sits and curdles in him weeks after the fire, and he has taken to joining Alicia’s chaperon Mathilde when they go to fetch her from the Collège Sévigné after her classes. Paris may be newly secular, and freshly free of many of its nuns and brothers, but Verso would happily name Mathilde a Saint for the way she respects the peaceful silence between them as they wait beside the carriage. She seems perfectly content to people-watch, hands folded neatly over her stomach, as if blissfully unaware of the many stares Verso attracts, if not outright from recognition, than purely due to the wealth on display in his fine coat and the grandeur of the Dessendre family carriage.
A teacher ferries his sister out to them personally - Verso wonders if this was an arrangement made by his parents, as previously Alicia was free to come and go of her own accord - and he affords her a cordial nod before loading Alicia inside the carriage.
“You smell funny,” Alicia says, wrinkling her nose as the carriage takes off, instead of saying hello, or, thank you brother for picking me up personally from school, you honour me with your presence.
“Mademoiselle!” Mathilde snaps.
“You smell funny,” Verso says, at the same time.
The woman glowers side-long at him, equally unimpressed as he makes a funny face at his sister and she giggles in response.
“How was school?”
“Boring,” she answers easily, already unbuttoning her strict blouse at the throat and wrists so that she can breathe easier, “any news of the Writers?”
“Don’t concern yourself with that,” Verso says quickly.
“Then don’t concern yourself with my school,” Alicia snips back, easy as breathing, and kicks his knee a little, ignoring Mathilde’s pained: “Mademoiselle!” as she does. “I want to know.”
“You’ll have to ask Clea then,” he says, perhaps a bit meanly, “as she has taken it upon herself to investigate.”
Alicia grimaces and looks out the window instead, watching the busy streets.
“She won’t tell me anything. She won’t even tell me what she discussed with Gustave.”
Verso blinks at her, confused for a moment. Then an image flares to mind, the night of the Gala, catching Clea’s purposeful stride as she made for the far end of the hall where the wallflowers gathered. Watching her corner a well-groomed young man in a bright blue suit and an expression that begged for a swift and painless death.
“Monsieur Koechlin?” He asks Alicia now.
“Yes. I danced with him and we talked about his books. They sounded fascinating. I was hoping to write to him but when I asked Clea for his address she told me off.”
“I imagine so,” Verso says. “He’s a Writer, Alicia. You’re mad to try and court his friendship, now of all times.”
A mullish expression overcomes his sister’s face. “He’s nice,” she protests.
Verso recalls again coming to rescue Clea from her own pursuit, catching the gaze of the young Writer in his garish suit. He seemed pleasant enough, certainly, with his common brown hair and browner eyes. Verso had twinged with empathy, even, when the man’s father had arrived to similarly ferry him away and Monsieur Koechlin’s expression had flared briefly with long-suffering. But Verso knows as well as any how easy kindness is to fake, and he won’t have his little sister falling prey to it.
“He’s dangerous,” he presses instead, ignoring the hurt when Alicia’s expression goes all cold the way it does when she is speaking with their mother, or Clea, like she is actively learning to keep her own emotions hidden from them, “or at least he is until we can determine who was involved in the fire. Until then, you need to keep yourself safe, Alicia.”
“What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” She sours, now refusing to look at him and instead staring hard out the window, arms crossed.
“It burned,” Verso tells her, perhaps unkindly, and they don’t speak again until the carriage is arriving at the manse, the wheels scraping on the gravel as it pulls alongside the garden for them to depart.
Verso holds his hand out to assist the others in climbing down. Mathilde takes it with a demure thanks. Alicia does not.
She jumps out of the carriage and onto the stones in her little shoes, already loosening more of her stiff clothing as she goes. Soon she’ll be back in trousers and a men’s blouse, lounging around the library or climbing in the garden like she was still a girl of nine and not nearing an age where she is to be formally presented to society.
Now, however, she is still Verso’s little sister, who stops beside him with a glare and sniffs pointendly.
“You still smell,” she says sourly.
“I’ve bathed,” he tells her, exasperated and confused.
“Not like that,” she tosses her head, already loosening her tight hairdo from all its pins and combs, so wild red curls tumble down her back. “You smell like Paint, but different.”
“Paint?” Nonplussed, Verso blinks at her. He hasn’t painted in months.
“But different,” she insists, and storms off into the trees.
—
“What is your interest in Gustave Koechlin?” Verso asks, standing at the door of Clea’s atelier.
It is far humbler than their parents’, and smells more of clay and earth than the sharpness of turpentine. There are no towering canvases and ladders lean-to against the walls. Only display pillars and tubs of clay and water, and Clea’s bare legs, where she has rucked her long skirts up about her thighs so she can better peddle the potter’s wheel. Her dark hair is unbound, pouring down her back and to the ground like a river of churned chestnut butter.
His sister pauses in her work, and then slowly turns to look at him, expression cool.
“What is your interest in Gustave Koechlin?” She counters calmly.
“Mutual.” He assures her.
“With Monsieur Koechlin?”
“With you,” he clarifies, refusing to be baited into genuine annoyance.
“Is it?”
As a child he had idolised Clea’s strength of will, which had manifested in the girl’s plainly unflappable countenance. As a teen, it had driven him mad, unable to respond to her prods and teases with anything other than embarrassed, impotent rage. Now as an adult Verso has his own means of navigating polite - and impolite - society, and he employs them now as he moves further into the room and takes a seat on one of the free stools with a carefree air.
“Yes. Alicia was asking about him today. I’m concerned.”
That seems to satisfy Clea’s immediate suspicion. She sighs hard and goes back to her clay. Verso has heard it often said that clay must be moulded with care and attention, but he has only ever seen Clea’s fingers work with sharp, calculated violence.
“The girl has no sense. It is clear Koechlin’s family is closely intertwined with the Writers Council. The man himself has an open invitation to join, although he has not accepted it, yet.”
“Why?”
Clea sends him a withering glare.
“We don’t know. By all accounts the man’s a savant of their craft. Although everyone has been fairly vague as to specify how, when we have tried to ask. Only that he is good enough that even those hoarding old men would sacrifice a space for him, if he will only take it.”
Verso wants to ask who Clea means when she refers to we. He knows his father has disapproved of her involvement in the investigation, but if she is ignoring him, he wonders who she has supporting her aims, in the end.
“You think he’s involved?” He says instead.
“I think he’s a way in,” she corrects. “I spoke to him at the Gala. He knows something, I am sure of it. And he seemed breakable enough.”
“‘Breakable’,” he huffs, “Clea, you sound as if you’re about to start putting people in fetters.”
She looks up at him then, and her eyes are cold in a way he’s never seen them before.
“The longer those behind the attack are out there, the better their next attempt will be. I do not intend to give them the luxury of time.”
“The arsonists are dead.” Verso reminds her. “Quite explicitly. I had to burn my clothes.”
“Our parents are not here, Verso,” she snaps, “do not play the pacifist with me. I know what ends I would go to to protect my family. Do you?”
“Do not insult me, sister.”
“You insult yourself.” She spits back, and her thumbs drive hard, mean holes into her work, like she is gouging out a pair of eyes.
Verso bites his tongue, at first. And then he sighs heavily, and rubs at his eyes.
“If we sharply question every Writer that crosses our path we will end with more enemies than we started. I only wish to avoid more chaos.”
“Until you have suggestions, rather than complaints, I will keep to my own council.”
“A softer approach,” he pleads.
“Are you volunteering?” She looks at him sharply, but he knows, from the look in her eye, he finally has her attention.
He wasn’t, actually, volunteering. But now it seems an inevitability, with Clea so apparently close to violence.
“As if father would let me anywhere near him,” he scoffs, mostly for show, carefully watching the way a thought travels through Clea’s expression until it settles, in her mouth, as a decision.
“Then father need not know,” she says carefully.
Verso raises his eyebrows. She matches his gaze and they stare silently at each other for a moment, a contest of polite wills.
“Do not pretend for a moment,” she says finally, “that you would not leap at the chance to get away from this place without their shadowing you.”
“And you have the means to make that happen?” He says, instead of asking her what she thinks she knows, what she has observed, when he did not know she was watching.
“Verso,” she says firmly, “you are an eligible bachelor of a good family. It would be strange if you were not mingling with your peers. If father wants assurances of your protection while you do so, I need only promise them. He will believe me. I am, after all, the only capable person in this damned house.”
“If you do say so yourself,” Verso huffs, although he is smiling, and something like hope is sparking in his chest. “What are your terms?”
“Everything.” She says simply. “I want to know everything, Verso. Who he is, what he does, where he goes, who he knows. He is the Writers Council’s missing piece. I want to secure him before they do. In exchange, you’ll be able to travel to and from the house without one of father’s men attached at your hip, or worse, one of mother’s.”
There is still reluctance lingering on the edges of Verso’s acquiescence. He is happy enough to wine and dine the Writer at Clea’s request, that enough is easy to do. It will be far more difficult to carry out his own goals in between, under the guise of satisfying both his father’s - and now his sister’s - expectations.
But if Verso has learned to be good at anything, it is lying. So he gives his sister a confident smile, and agrees.
—
Aline has taken to checking in on her children before she retires each night. Like most of the changes recently, Verso chafes at it, but he finds he cannot be angry for long when each time his mother raps gently on his door and he answers, he sees a soft relief dawn on her like a sunrise.
He has just seen her off for the night with a kiss to each cheek and a swift, but warm embrace. Finally he is alone - really alone - and with his curtains drawn and his lamps un-lit, he enjoys the dark solace of his room. He had hoped by now to have found his own residence elsewhere. He had been eyeing a studio in the dix-neuvième, and had built up a convincing argument to drip-feed his parents in advance of his interest, but the fire had swiftly nipped that particular dream in the bud. As soon as the last of the ashes were swept away and the ink scrubbed from the floor, the walls of the Dessendre bower seemed to close in around him even tighter than before.
His previous liaisons, masked artfully as romantic overtures to various well-hidden socialites, were impossible now with his parents having almost his every move monitored. Instead he was forced to snatch his opportunities like a starved dog for scraps - such as earlier, when Alicia had been at school and his parents at the salon meeting with the Council, and Clea on her warpath, afforded the type of freedom only the first-born could afford. The piano in the dining hall was too risky, still. Staff would certainly be about, pretending they were not listening and watching. His old game room, then. Still decorated with the toys and games of his youth, and the piano he had learned to play on, once upon a time, growing dust and disuse in the corner.
He had cleaned it up himself, and re-tuned it the way his father had taught him. And only when he was absolutely certain there was nobody there to listen, did Verso allow himself to relax and play.
And then his father had barged in, and Verso had slammed the keys as hard as possible to disturb the growing music, and only flinched a little when his father paused as a glazed expression came over his face, only to disappear a moment later without the old man being any wiser.
Now as he lies on his bed in the dark, Verso stares up at the dark canopy above him and wonders if locking the door would have done any good, or if even that barrier, too, would have been broken down beneath his father’s desperate, frightened hands.
He cannot help but recall Renoir’s frightened shouts, near screams, as the chaos had unfolded in the children’s wing of the manse that frightful night. Verso, drenched in the ink that had once been a human and Alicia, huddled under her writing table and sobbing with fear. Verso had never seen his father so displaced, emerging into the scene, staring at Verso with more fear than recognition, as if he was gazing upon the Beast of Gévaudan and not his own son. And his mother, close behind him, still in her pluming nightgown, paint-stained up to her elbows.
Her screams, he can still hear, like they had shredded his very heart.
Now, thankfully, he has silence. Only the gentle ticking of the clock on his desk to lull him into an uneasy slumber. Tonight, it will be unsuccessful. Verso waits for an hour to pass, and then another hour, until he is absolutely certain everyone has settled to their own rooms. Then he rises to his knees and reaches up, to where he has cut a slit into the fabric canopy of his bed and pulls out the music sheets stowed hidden within.
He does not need to light a lamp to read them.
In the dark, the notes glow.