❧ @alienored
𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: some private dressing room, i guess ...
𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞: late july, mid-afternoon ??
𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬: delivering a pretense for Unhinged Aliénor™ as requested / is it marital discord when you aren’t married anymore
Her presence was no gentle glow. Indeed, never had it been—always, from the first moment in which they stood toe to toe, she had raged white-hot. Charles allowed that she might have entered the world with a tempered disposition befitting the cherubic features into which she would grow. If such an Aliénor had existed, Charles never knew her. She surely became kindling for the firestorm his Aliénor would set in Paris. Years passed, yet he still invariably became possessed in her smoldering presence and compelled to draw nearer. Her ire seared; the moodiness which seemed to engulf her inflicted upon his psyche blistered welts, each laid and interlocked like the crosshatch pigments of an artist’s sketch. Seemed, as it were. He learned soon enough that her fire was not some quickmatch rage which could be set off. She was not consumed for she wielded it. It was her. She was an artist, too—her tools, not charcoal and vair brushes, but malice and spite. The dainty exterior she presented to the world concealed an iron cage and, within it, her true essence. She resembled not a household hearth, not a lantern upon the wall, not even the desperate fires of a war camp … Aliénor was a circle of hell cast into the world of man. At least one angel had sculpted her as such. Charles suspected, too, that she had been made to ensconce an inferno of perdition reserved specially for him.
He wondered what he had done to earn such a thing. Sometimes, it was rueful wonder. It was, in other instances, prideful. His wonder was always short-lived in either case, for he understood that divine fortune was no unconditional gift.
Today, she set up a happy purgatory in her dressing room. Sunlight streamed from a window on high, and it painted her flaxen hair into locks of gold with its afternoon warmth. Aliénor sat with a familiar item in hand—a case, open to reveal its convex mirror as an ivory scene faced toward the door. He noted the carved figures. A woman crowned her stooped lover while frolicking onlookers flanked the scene. Its irony had been as loud and indelicate when she received it as it was now. Floral designs, lilies and irises interwoven as fleurs-de-lis, etched into a delicate border. He need not examine the mirror closely to know it had been produced by a fine French artisan’s hand. All the best ivory dressing sets were and, besides, he had commissioned this one himself. She kept a matching comb and gravoir somewhere now out of sight. Aliénor’s current occupation was not restyling her hair for the evening. Charles lingered in the doorway as he strained to hear the sounds of her whispers while she sat, eyes trained intently upon the glass, lips moving in silent murmurs.
“What wicked things do you spit upon my name this day, woman?” he asked, both announcing his presence and playing his long-held part to her madness. “You cannot utter prayers of goodwill or optimism, although my whisperers tell me you have been—” The sentence hung as Charles strode across the small room to her side. Bending at the waist, he leaned close. The mirror reflected them as a pair, and he gave her features a cursory glance before settling his gaze upon himself. “In much conversation with fellow travelers of all sorts.” His eyes moved to hers. The mirror reflected them as they were: placid and inscrutable, heavy-lidded, soulless.
“You conspire with no one but your king and devils themselves, no?” Wavering between jovial teasing and a sober taunt, he adds, “I have felt it, you know, in my marrow—that you have some machination underway, some mischief to scathe me—since we embarked upon this journey.” Their eyes, blue as blue, met on the mirror’s rounded plane. “I would rather you lay hands upon me than simply wish me misfortune.”