"Why did you call that man Alexander?" Celia asks.
"That's a silly question."
"It's not his name."
"Now, how might you know that?" Hector asks his daughter, lifting her chin to face him and weighing the look in her dark eyes with his own.
Celia stares back at him, unsure how to explain. She plays over in her mind the impression of the man in his gray suit with his pale eyes and harsh features, trying to figure out why the name does not fit on him properly.
"It's not his real name," she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. It's one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants. Like Prospero is for you."
"You are even more cleaver than I could have hoped," Hector says, not bothering to refute or confirm her musings about his colleague's nomenclature. He takes his top hat from it's stand and puts it on her head, where it slides down and obscures her questioning eyes in a cage of black silk.
---
"I have had affairs that lasted decades and others that lasted for hours. I have loved princesses and peasants. And I suppose they loved me, each in their way."
This is a typical Tsukiko response, one that does not truly answer the question. Isobel does not pry.
"It will come a apart," Tsukiko says after a long while. Isoel does not need to ask what she means.
"The cracks are beginning to show. Sooner or later it is bound to break." She pauses to take a final drag off her cigarette. "Are you still tempering?"
"Yes," Isobel says. "But I don't think it helping."
" It's difficult to discern the effect of such things, you know. Your perspective is from the inside, after all. The smallest charms can be the most effective."
"It doesn't seem to be very effective."
"Perhaps it is controlling the chaos within more then the chaos without."
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