Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [150]
“Don’t worry,” said another voice, behind him, this time. “She is still with us.”
He turned to discover Reginald and Geraldine. They had a way of looking all around them, but not in the same time at the same direction, that reminded Brentford of a clockwork armillary sphere and that made him feel dizzy and ill at ease, just as when they talked very quickly to each other in some language no one understood. He also suspected them of changing sides and playing each other’s part at times. But of this, he had no proof.
“We also wanted to thank you,” they said, finally standing still.
They claimed to be over fifteen, but were rather small, in a frail elfin way. Brentford crouched in front of them, holding their hands. Well, some of them, at least.
Thank me, he thought, almost bitterly—when he had taken them away from their enchanted castle, only, maybe, to serve his own ends?
“You do not miss home?” he asked.
“This is home,” said Reginald.
“Without Grandmother, we would not have been safe forever on the Island, anyway,” added Geraldine thoughtfully.
Brentford got up, his hands on his knees. It was only now that he realized how vulnerable they were.
“Do you think we will go over well with the people here?” she asked.
“When you show us to all of them, that is,” her brother added.
Brentford felt embarrassed.
“I am not showing anyone to anyone else.” He tried to reassure them, not even reassuring himself.
“Should we remain hidden, then?” Reginald insisted.
Brentford sighed. They were right. Chances were that the people would see in these little wonders some sort of dubious entertainment. He did not want this refoundation to turn into a freak show, whatever the circusstances. The idea came to him that they could appear in public one at a time. This could be done, just wedging a mirror at a certain angle, with the surroundings matching properly. He would have to ask Molson, if he still was around.
“Do not worry,” he said, “we’ll work things out.”
The twins looked at each other dubiously.
“Where is Gabriel?” asked Geraldine, with an almost imperceptible pout.
“I wish I knew,” sighed Brentford.
He found himself in the central corridor (where, he observed with relief, someone had stopped that damned cold wind), but soon perceived, in one of the adjacent rooms of the Memory Palace, Bob Dorset’s effigy of the Polar Kangaroo. It had been found earlier in the day in the basement of the Hôtel de Police, when the Gentlemen of the Night had finally condescended to surrender and, a waving luminous starched shirt as a flag, had come out of the building with champagne bottles and cigar boxes. As Paynes-Grey had predicted, their resistance had not been long. They had never worried Brentford much, anyhow. You could always count on the Police when it came to siding with the winner. One of the first moves of the Gentlemen of the Night had been to send an emissary to Brentford with the Kangaroo as a little present and as a token of goodwill. Probably because they knew (they knew everything) that Brentford and Gabriel had made a little tune for it as a present to Bob, as a souvenir of the time (it seemed eons away) when they had been together in a band called the Black Harlequins. Brentford, upon receiving the statue, had immediately ordered it to be installed in the Blazing Building.
He now approached the statue almost respectfully. So this was the creature to whom, unknowingly or not, Douglas Norton had entrusted the protection of the d’Ussonville dynasty and, by the bye, the continuity of what remained of the Seven Sleepers’ dream. Bob’s version of it was impressive, to say the least, worked down to the most minute details, such as the ice crystals tangled in the fur, just as if it had recently been out on the icefield. Maybe it was its muscular bulk, maybe its sparkling glassy eyes, maybe it was the canines showing through the bare chops of its wolf head, but this depiction radiated something eerily powerful. It was part of the myth that images