In the distance, the chiming of the bell. The sheep in the fields begin their twilight chorus, the mournful chorus for the passing of the day. Out at sea, the sun is sinking slowly down beyond the horizon, as every day for centuries. And in the palace, the slow and steady business of lighting the candles will now begin. The yellow flames dancing up along the stone walls and grey corridors.
The legend of Mélisande holds that she dreaded the dusk. Miette does not know if this is true. They say that Mélisande feared the night. The ringing of the Angelus bell, the closing of the gates in a rattle of wood and metal and chain – all this made her think of the grave where the worms and spiders dwelt. Mélisande turned to the west, or so Miette’s nurse told her, to the setting sun and the shore, as if looking for that first ship, long departed, which had brought her as a child-bride to Allemonde from who knows where. As if hearing, still, the cries of the sailors and the gulls. An echo of a memory of happier times? Miette glances down and sees the tips of her satin slippers are stained with the first touches of the evening dew brushing the grass.
She shivers and pulls her cloak tight around her with her slim, strong arms. Deep in the folds of cloth, she presses the tip of the knife against her thumb, softly at first, then harder until her skin is pierced, then withdraws her hand. A single, red pearl of blood hangs suspended, like a jewel in the twilight.
There are beads of perspiration at the nape of her neck now beneath the canopy of her hair, worn long in remembrance of her mother. The mother who never held her. Although an inconvenience, the braids are a symbol of the connection between them. Brushed, plaited, smoothed. Though everyone tells Miette she is more her father’s daughter. She is quick to temper, black moods threatening, easily frustrated.
Vengeful.
Beneath the trees, Miette shifts slightly from foot to foot, feeling the cold seeping up from the earth and the roots into her young bones. She does not know how long she has been waiting, entombed in the green embrace of the wood. Long enough for dusk to fall, it seems both an eternity and a moment. Eighteen years, in truth, and although she has been biding her time, all these minutes and hours and weeks, Miette feels panic rising in her throat, nausea, sour and bitter. She wills herself not to lose her nerve. Not now, not at the moment she has been planning for so long. Waiting for.
Pas maintenant.
Red is the colour of dying. What else could it be?
The violent rays of the setting sun through glass, flooding the chamber crimson. The petals pulled from a rose, strewn on the cobbled stones of a garden no longer tended. The colour of the damaged struggling heart. Blood dripping through the fingers.
To steady her nerves, Miette sends her thoughts flying back to the castle. She remembers herself at seven or eight years old, carried on Yniold’s shoulders. Laughing, sometimes. Content, sometimes. But, quick, the darker memories come. Her past unfolds in her memory like the decaying slats of a paper fan. Older, eleven or twelve, tiptoeing alone down dusty corridors. Or, later still, hidden beneath the covers in her cold chamber, hands over her ears, trying not to hear her father shouting or Yniold weeping. Fear or humiliation, the sound was the same.
A bird flies up out of the trees, the abrupt beating of its wings upon the air mirroring the rhythms of her own anxious pulse. Miette narrows her eyes, sharpens her ears. In the distance, now, she can hear something. The subtle snap of twigs on the path, the rattling of rabbits seeking cover in the undergrowth, the shifting of the atmosphere. Someone is coming.
Him? The man who is her father, though she feels no love or duty to him? Is it he?
Miette stiffens. She has imagined this scene so many times. The single strike of the knife, an act of revenge. An eye for an eye, a blade for a blade. She has imagined how Golaud, wounded, would reach out his hands to her, as once Mélisande had reached for the baby daughter she could not hold. How he would ask her forgiveness.
And, even now, she could give it. Absolve him for his sins. Absolve herself for what she has done.
‘Je te pardonne. Je te pardonne tout.’
That hour has not yet come. Miette waits, holding her breath, wishing the deed could be over. Or need not to be done at all.
The light from a lantern, jagged and uneven, is getting closer. Miette can distinguish the sound of breathing above the twilight sighings and whisperings and chitterings of the forest. The rattle of an old man’s chest as Golaud walks out of the darkness, out of the cover of the trees and into the glade, following the well-worn path to La Fontaine des Aveugles – the Fountain of the Blind Men – to the place where Pelléas fell.
He moves slowly, pain in every step. Miette watches him and feels nothing. His body is failing him. He is old. His wounds, from war or the hunt, sing loud in the damp evening air. The scars, beneath the velvet of his robes, remind of hunting accidents and the memory of metal and spear. The crumbling of sinew and bone, eating him away from the inside out, grief or regret or anger? For eighteen years she has asked herself the same question, and received no answer. But she does not pity him. She cannot. She thinks only that he must be called to account. In Yniold’s absence, his lack of will, it falls to her.