by Tanith Lee
Through all this I had lain on my back, smiling, my eyes taking in the beams in the pointing ceiling, watching the light begin to return from the dead, the sky deciding if it would put on pinkness or only paleness. What sound could he possibly have heard? Some moan from me, perhaps, sprawled here with my shirt open and my breeches unbuttoned, a ludicrous shambles of some dream I had been having of a woman I wanted to possess.
“It was that rocking-horse,” said the carter, “creaking and bucking away. No one on it, unless it was you, monsieur, and you fell off. Well, then, here you are. I reckoned you’d been set on. Blood-stains on your shirt. But there’s a bite there, on your neck. That will be a rat, no doubt of it. The house is full of them, all rustling away behind the walls. Now if you’ll listen to me, you should go straight to a doctor with that bite. Nor you shouldn’t have brought a lady here.”
Still on my back, I took out some money, and tossed it to him. He caught it, but looked at me reproachfully.
As he watched me, I sat up and put my clothes to rights. The blood that spotted my shirt had dried to the colour of rotten plums in the half-light. It was the way Philippe’s blood had appeared to me. When I tried to rise, I fell.
The carter aided me down all the stairs.
It was true then. Not a dream. Not, not a dream. Antonina –
“And you have a fever, you’re burning,” the lugubrious carter congratulated me.
I had not collected my bequest. The carter, not I, closed the door of Philippe’s house with a senechal’s attention. Then, strong-armed, he put me into his cart, where I lay semi-conscious, euphoric. In this manner I was trundled home, to my landlady’s dismay.
I threw myself on my bed, clothed and stupid. Let them have the day, any who wanted it. Sleep, let me sleep. Tonight I would go back to her. And she would come to me.
Thinking of her, as she had been for me, all of it rushed up and overpowered me. Down I fell, through the abyss of the bed, past a grinning rocking-horse with the spectre of Philippe cavorting on its back, past Baron von Aaron in a waiter’s uniform, past pages of my books, my childhood, past all the hours of my life, seen as when drowning.
Unfinished, the manuscript lay on the table before the window. There was no need to write any more of it. Let me live it now, quickly through, to the last sentence. And there end. Amen.
When I woke again, it was very late. I wakened with the knowledge of having made a grievous error – oh God, the midnight bell was sounding from Our Lady of Ashes over the river. What had I done?
I must get up, find myself clean linen, run across the City to the house –
I remember I reached the table where the manuscript lay. Nothing else.
I woke again, as in a nightmare, somehow on the bed and dawn was returning. Someone must help me now. Some demon or angel. My head seemed full of the galloping of hoofs as I hurried about. But I was stronger. I could wash myself, I could look into the pitted mirror and even pick up the razor with a steady hand.
How long before I could be ready, how long before I could essay the stairs, the streets? My plan was already made. I must go directly to the house on Clock-Tower Hill. She had said, he was her servant, nothing else. The only impediment had been Antonina herself, when she was afraid of me, before she surrendered herself to the truth.
There was straw on the roadway. This meant that someone on that wealthy avenue was seriously ill. They had put it down to muffle the wheels and hoofs of passing traffic, but there was also a liveried man sitting in the gate, to make sure of proper silence, and perhaps to turn away visitors before they jangled the door bell. It was her gateway he was seated in, and he wore the banker’s livery.
I went up to him. “What is the matter? Is the Baron unwell?”
“No, monsieur. It is Madame who is very sick.”
I gaped at him, and he, more circumspectly, at me. I was dishevelled enough. The day, growing hot, beat down on us both.
“You say – she – Madame von Aaron – is sick.”
“Yes, monsieur. Monsieur, please don’t go up to the door.”
“But I – must – I will inquire of the Baron –”
“Very well, monsieur. I will see to it. Who shall I say?”
I swallowed, my throat seemed engorged and hurt me. I glared at the man haughtily. “Say Andre St Jean.”
“Very well, monsieur. One moment.”
And leaving his post, he went in and around out of my sight, presumably to a side door. I waited a few minutes, expecting to be turned away, to make some scene there on the pavement before the house, having a picture of running to a window and smashing through it.
Was it a plague, the ancient one called the Death? Had we both caught it, she and I, in the house near to the Obelisk where they had burned the corpses centuries ago? Only a hundred years ago, it had returned, that plague. Cloaked death had stalked the City. The crematory chimneys had turned the day sky black, the sky of night into blood, with their ceaseless smokes – so many of the writers of the day had left accounts of it in their journals.
“Please come with me, monsieur.”
The doorman was back. He took me up to the front door, which had now opened. Inside, another man led me over the polished floor, into the side-parlour where I had been shown previously, and there left me.
Would it happen again? She, coming in, telling me she was afraid I had had to wait. And then would I fall on her like a wolf, unable to control either lust or terror? Why did you shut up the house this way? Oh, to be free for you, only for you, she would answer me.
The blinds were down. The room sank in a dull parchment shade. Even the little clock had left off ticking. My hands shook, I paced about. Then the door opened. I turned to it with a stifled shout. The Baron entered.
He looked more frightened than I, that was the first, the only thing I really noticed.
“It is very good of you to call,” he said.
I stared at him. We had both gone mad. Dispense with these ramblings then.
“Tell me what has happened –” I cried.
“I regret – an illness, an hereditary ailment. We had hoped –”
“Doctors,” I said, “who is attending her?”
“The most capable physicians, of course, monsieur, I assure you. And among our own household, the use of herbal medicine is not unknown – but in any event –” he broke off. He said, with sudden and sinister calm, “You should not be optimistic, Monsieur St Jean.”
I clutched one of the chairs. I said, “What do you mean? You’d let her die –”
“Oh monsieur, please. You do astound me.”
“Let me see her at once! Where is she? I’ll search your house – throw me out and I’ll return with the City police. You are not a citizen, Baron. An alien – they can deal with you –”
“Please, monsieur, these threats, these outcries, are uncalled for, and wasteful of your strength.”
“You say to me she’s dying –”
“I tell you there is no hope at all.”
I stood there staring. I stared, but saw nothing, and when he poured the cognac for me and put it in my hand, I drank it down, though it might well have been poison. What did I care for that?
“I will tell you, Monsieur St Jean, what it would be best for you to do. Go away now, and come back, perhaps in the early evening.”
“I must see her,” I said. I took his arm, his hand, imploring him. “Please, for God’s sake –”
“Tonight then, if you wish,” he said. “It’s not possible now.”
“You expect me to go, and leave you to get on with killing her –”
He was so serene now before my ranting. He said to me, “But she has told you my place, has she not?” He withdrew his hand from my grasp, gently. He put his own hand upon my shoulder. “Now do as I say, monsieur. It is beyond any of us, but I’ll assist you as best I can, for as long as I can. You have my sympathies.”
I laughed. This was what I should have said to him.
&nbs
p; “I love her,” I said. How vapid, such words. “If you must kill someone, then here I am.”
“I know you love her. I have nothing to do with any killing.”
Without knowing what I did, I walked towards the door. I could dash up the stair, and fling open all the doors – the commotion of that might finish her, if what he said was a fact. But it was all a surreality. She could not die.
Out in the hallway, I gazed up at the curving stair, and for a moment I seemed to hear the piano being played, above in the salon, but the music only rang through my head.
“There, monsieur,” said the kindly placid cuckold. “Now do as I say. Return this evening, or I’ll send for you if there is any improvement. But that is of course unlikely. It is improbable.”
As he finished speaking, an awful, unearthly, etheric cry tore through the house. The shock of it threw me round on him again, almost taking him by the throat – “What in God’s name –”
“That is her dog, monsieur. Howling. The dog knows, monsieur.”
It was not until I had left the house, not until I was on the hill again, that I comprehended what I had all this while known. It was I who was the murderer. In the blissful whirlpool of adoring, death-wishing delirium, I had never thought I might be the poison. Or had she foreseen – was it that which made her hold me off? That fear which finally brought her to me?
I had no strength now. None. But I would return in the evening, duly as he said. Come back and die with her.
The dim piano continued to play within my skull, and now and then the dog howled there, or voices spoke to me, as if into my ears. The borders between unconsciousness and waking, between dream and reality, had long since given way.
Above the door of the Cockatrice, the sign of the scaled, snake-headed cockerel turned its look on you and blasted you to a stump. Then you went inside to the damp and greasy cave, where sometimes only the spits turned, or coloured lanterns were lit in the ceiling, so it became hell. Today it was gloomy.
They had all avoided me, the intellectual riff-raff of the tavern. I was a plague-carrier, I was accursed, and they knew it by instinct. No one I had ever known well was present. I guarded my corner like a wounded dog, and nobody drew near. A meal was served me I did not eat, and wine. Sometimes I wrote a line or two on pieces of paper I had found in my coat pockets. Generally I slept. Time had stopped. The day would not move, it sat there on the sills of the slit-eyed windows. The bells, the clocks, they continually kept striking the same hour, three o’clock, over and over. When would I be done with it?
Then I woke and there was a new shadow running with the spilled wine from the bottle. The windows had pulled closer and day been shoved out. I poured the last glass and took a mouthful. The room was unusually silent, and two men in black were before me by the table. How long had they been there? Were they there now, or did I conjure them?
“Are you real then?” I said, with a flippancy that oddly stirred me.
“You are to come with us,” one said to me.
In the cock-snake’s cave, eyes glittered out on us. We were an event.
“Sergeant Death, are you arresting me?” I said. “Who sent you, and why must I go with you?” My heart had stopped, I could not feel it beat. “From von Aaron? Is she dead?”
“We do not belong to the Baron. But that is the house. Get up, monsieur.”
“Or will you make me?” I said.
“If necessary.”
“It will not be.” I put down the glass. My heart flickered, it had only been sleeping. I did not feel as I had done. I was alert, I was expectant. What had happened? Oh she was alive. That must be so. She was alive. She had sent them for me. Yes, they were hers, these creatures white-faced in their black. “We’ll go then,” I said. “as quickly as you like.”
I went out jauntily with the death’s-heads, one on either side. Plainly, I was a prisoner on my way to execution. Yes, the silken rope about my neck, the dagger of pleasure driven through and through.
People turned to look at us on the streets. The infernal escort, the happy condemned. They did not prevent me when I whistled a popular song of the City, or when I plucked a spray of flowers off a bush growing in a wall, and insanely twirled it. Sometimes I spoke to my guards. I asked them if they had had difficulty in finding me. Not much, they said, my haunts were known. Now one spoke, now the other, but each seemed to have use of the same voice.
From a height, I glanced behind me once, and saw the river, a scimitar of pure metal, white-hot, as the City lapsed in the shallows of the dying afternoon. A boat or two moved on the water, the brotherhood of Charon was out early.
Then they took to the alleys, avoiding the Observatory Terrace, and going around at the back of the tall four-faced clock on the hill, not wanting me to be seen by the influential or the fashionable of the district.
My excitement increased. Sex and anguish were mingled in it, doubt and nervous delight. Most of the straw was swept from the street. No man sat to bar the gateway of the house. I hurried up the steps and rang the bell, and they came on behind me, the two black dogs who had hunted me and brought me soft across the City in their mouths.
The door was opened. I burst in, then stood looking about as if I owned the property.
“If you will go up to the salon, monsieur,” said the domestic.
I ran up the stair. I had not felt the paving stones under my feet throughout our walk here. Twirling the flower-spray, I thought, None of them either conducts me or follows me. I am to go there alone. Something pristine in that. Only the purified accolyte may enter the presence of the high priest.
The salon was full of the last flare of sunlight, its blinds raised. All the dazzling brilliance centred in one flaming entity, before the fireplace.
Antonina stood there.
It was not Antonina.
A man in a white satin coat, all in white but for the long black loosely-curling hair that was the Freedom mode of Paradys for both male and female. Her black brows, perhaps a little more thickly accented, her heavy-lidded eyes, heavily and blackly fringed, blackly burning in the pale triangle of the face that was larger and cut with a bolder hand, and as hard now as white granite.
He looked at me, out of a different distance, for he was some inches taller than I. He said nothing, did nothing, only the left arm, leaning on the mantle, the left hand with a pair of white kid gloves in the long fingers – her hand exactly, grown a size or two, a man’s hand, elegant, ringless – that gave a little flick, a little omen of gesture.
I cannot say how long this moment lasted, while he looked at me, and I at him, seeing her, losing her.
Gradually I became aware that von Aaron stood to one side, and two other men with him, advisers or lawyers, or merely witnesses. But even then, I could not look away, look at them. My arms had fallen to my sides. They weighed on me like lead. The boom of my heart shook me. And the black eyes went on burning into my skull. That was all there was.
Then the Baron spoke soflty, maybe even timidly, from the wings.
“Monsieur St Jean. I can’t prepare you. The news is bad. My wife – we lost her a few hours ago. I see that you already knew it. Well. This gentleman –” He did not go on, I sensed him slip away again, only his mute gaze on us.
Then the man in white spoke to me.
“I am her brother. Perhaps that is obvious to you?”
“Yes, quite obvious.”
He nodded, as if I had done something clever, a clever trick.
“And you,” he said, “what are you? In my eyes, what are you? It chances,” he said, in his exact and musical voice, “that I arrive here and find this. Her husband,” he did not glance aside, “will do nothing, but, Andre St Jean, I am not insensible to my sister’s honour, or to the cause of her death.”
She could not die. I could not proclaim as much.
The light and the dark came with the crashings of my heart, ocean on to rocks.
Well, let him get on with it.
“What d
o you say now?” he said.
I shrugged, and let the spray of flowers fall to the floor as I did so.
“I will give you my name,” he said. “It is Scarabin. Anthony Scarabin. You got hold of a certain ring, I believe. A ruby scarab. Yes, well you will give it back, I will take it back tomorrow, after I’ve finished with you.”
“You mean to kill me,” I found I said. “Will it be so easy?”
“Nothing,” he said, “easier.”
He moved from the hearth. He walked across to me, and with his gloves slapped my cheek, so lightly, it might have been an idle caress. He smiled. Her mouth, changed. And the skin, fine and fresh as hers, but more dry, and roughened by shaving.
“What will you have?” he said.
“Whatever suits you.”
“Pistols, then. That is the vogue in your city, I think. Pistols at dawn. Can you come by a gun? How splendid. Will six in the morning be convenient?”
“Most inconvenient. I’m not by choice an early riser.”
He raised one of the black brows at me. Cold, as once she had been.
“Don’t play,” he said. “Answer me.”
“I will accommodate you,” I said.
He said, “The choice place, I hear, is the wood below the Observatory. Bring your seconds,” he said, “I shall have mine.”
No one else spoke a word. There was not a noise in the house. Only the sunlight seemed to scrape faintly, as it crept down the windows.
What next? I need only turn and leave the room. It had all been arranged, and now there were things to do besides. How mundane this was. I had not predicted the deadly ordinariness of death.
I would not request that they let me see her body. There was no body. All that remained of her was here, was him, this other.
I felt neither exhilaration nor fear. As I walked from the salon, I heard him give a contemptuous little wordless sound, like a note or a chord of music, low down in the register.
Don’t play, answer me, he had said that before to me, on Sacrifice Hill. He would know that I remembered him. But then, on that former occasion, when I would have held out the ring, he turned and was gone to his hunting. All this had had to come between. Besides, then, he had only been a demon.
