Lace and Blade 2

by Deborah J. Ross

  2. Gold

  Just after midnight, Jeanne woke up. The distant pangs of the church clock might have roused her, but she doubted they had. She left the bed and dressed hurriedly. Her hair, plaited for the night, she undid. It fell around her to her waist. Quickly she threw on a cloak, hooding herself within.

  Like a phantom she went through the house and down by a lesser stair. She had the key to every door. To unlock the narrow one between the lower rooms was simple. She crossed the open ground beyond unseen, save by a low-flying owl, a spider on the wall. Their witness proved, however, that not everything else lay asleep.

  Passing over the rough lawns below the garden and into the avenue where the wild trees began, Jeanne was conscious of the symphonies of crickets in the grass, hesitating their orchestra only to be sure of her, then resuming. A spray of fireflies made jewelry in sweeps of branches. Something squealed malevolently amid the undergrowth. But it was the voice of sex, not violence.

  Jeanne entered the woods.

  She knew the way, had taken it so often since living in the chateau, now and then by day, usually nocturnally. Yet long before she lived with her husband, Jeanne had known the way, even in the town, those nights after her father died, or the children at the school tormented her. She had known the way since her fifteenth year, when first he had shown her—but that was at their second meeting.

  Their first meeting had been momentary—his face suddenly at her midnight window, where the old tree craned outside the small crumbling apartment in which she and her ailing father lived. The moon had been slender then, and ivory white. Yet it gave enough illumination to show him, a boy perhaps three years her elder. He was thin and strong as a figure of burnished oak, tall for his young age, his face arresting as a note of music heard in silence. His eyes were the green gold of pirate coins in the museum, his long thick hair the pool-bright gold of newly gilded pages.

  Just a glimpse. But the image of him had been emblazoned on her eyes and mind. Then he was gone.

  She ran to the window and looked out. Tree, courtyard, street were empty. Then, and even by the morning, still she was certain she had not dreamed him.

  And, curiously, she promised herself she would see him again. But by the time she did, which was four years later, when she was fifteen and he, she judged, seventeen, she had lost her faith in him and in most other things, too. As if, while not thinking him a dream, yet his appearance to her could have meant nothing in her life. Or worse, a warning that all marvels, even when so shining, must immediately vanish, not being meant, ever, for her.

  Nevertheless, at fifteen the second meeting occurred. It took place at sunfall, when the sky was crimson. Also, it was on the evening she had realized her father must soon die.

  Jeanne had been desolate, for although she had really known of this surviving parent only strictness, mendacity and a harsh, cold intellect—cemented soon enough by crotchety and demanding invalidism—her father was all the anchor she had. Already she was schooling various unwilling and often nasty children, but this within inevitable limits. Bereft of any other duties or support, emotional or financial, she understood very well her future. She must throw herself on the adamantine bosom of the world, where tigers of hate and viciousness waited with bared teeth for timorous prey. Mingled in her sorrow and regret for her father was pure fright, and not a little despair.

  She was coming home from the chemist’s shop, where she had collected the latest tonics and palliatives needed for her father’s care. She was worrying as she walked the cobbled lanes, wondering how she could buy bread or milk the next morning, seeing most of the money had now gone on medicine.

  She looked up because a shadow fell across her feet, slanting from the royal red sunset.

  Raising her eyes, she saw a young man there, not twice her own arm’s length from her. He was tall and strong, his shoulders wider now than they had been in his boyhood. His clothes generally were quite good, not rich, but far better than her own. His shirt was very white too, and so close to him as she was, she could scent its cleanness, and his own, and with that, an alluring aroma of masculine youth and health so unlike the odour that now clung about her father’s rooms.

  Under the deep-dyed sky then, the young man’s golden hair burned. His eyes were like embers.

  “Good evening, M’mselle,” he said to her. “I think we have already met.”

  She had not heard him speak before. It was a blond tenor voice, itself very musical.

  She thought she must hurry past him and away. But she had known him at once. Knew him utterly, as if she had seen him every day about this time, at just this spot. And his familiarity was devastating. Her excited heart scrambled and stuttered, so she would barely move.

  “May I carry your purchases? You must allow me to, we’re such old friends.”

  She said nothing, and he relieved her of the things quietly, not even glancing to see what they were. Was he a thief? Yes, but only of her unwanted drudgery and boredom. “Will you walk with me?” he asked, and held out his arm.

  No respectable woman would accept such an invitation from a stranger, even one who was well-known. She would be a fool to do so. Yet naturally, since he was not a stranger, was unlike any other, no human law, however obdurate, could govern such a situation. The street was also empty, as it seldom was at this hour. Above, a woman leaned idly to water some plants on a little balcony. But she took no notice of Jeanne or Jeanne’s sudden companion. Jeanne comprehended, with the heady delight of a slave released on holiday, that this woman would never see either of them. That none now could. Magic had happened as it always should, easily and fully. Both she and the golden man were invisible to all eyes but their own and each other’s.

  And so, they did walk together. And presently there came a twist in the lane, and a high wall and open gateway, through which Jeanne beheld a winding track, and on either side pine trees that towered up to mask the rouged sky as if with spiked black fans.

  Long after, (and by then she and he met consistently if irregularly) Jeanne perceived that she liked the track and the black trees so very much not solely because, as a rule, they were not to be found in the street, but because they reminded her of vague daydreams she had had for years. Perhaps these had been prompted by some unrecollected print seen in a book. The avenue of pines fascinated and drew her at once. Its balsam flavour was so thick on the evening air, and the track was both mysterious and enticing. It had no look of a primrose path to sin, but of an enchanted way that led to the heart’s lifting. It led too, when they took it, to a beautiful old house, of palatial and unusual style, white and pillared, with long, greenish windows. A deserted partial ruin, it had all the mythic quality of a palace under water. It represented not domestic homeliness but perilous romance. Maybe the original of this house had also been viewed formerly in some volume of prints. It was nothing like Jeanne’s own wretched dwelling in the yard. (Nor was it anything like the Little Chateau where, four years following, Jeanne would reside.)

  Here then they walked, Jeanne and the stranger. And beneath one of the pines at last, the ghastly medical parcel having disappeared from his grasp, (it reappeared later unimpaired in her own) the young man caught her lightly to him and kissed her, kissed her awake, into a new world of hope and ardour, desire and possibility.

  When finally she returned to the Scholar’s rooms, Jeanne learned she was only a few minutes later than she had planned. But obviously, in a magic realm and in the arms of a daemon prince, an hour might be an instant, a year less than a day.

  She did not quite suppose him a daemon. Not quite. Having no name for him—he never employed hers, if it came to that, and there indeed she was not Jeanne, but her own self—she coined a name for him. A golden coining, with a shadow’s edge. Angeval was her name for her lover. And for years they met, embraced, lay together and made a glory of love, if never to love-making’s fullest extremity. Despite her yearning for this, her demanding existence had made her prudent, which Angeval, daemon th
ough he might be, and without her ever speaking of it, honoured.

  Her body then he caused to blossom and her spirit to thrive. Through all the vileness of her father’s illness and rage, his grim death and dismal burial; through the horrors of the evil children; through poverty and misery—Angeval was with her, her guardian angel.

  And when Monsieur Carmineau appeared, her earthly saviour, there was never between Angeval and herself any hesitation or dismay. For their relationship was of another order, a mating made in heaven.

  Only five nights after Jeanne had dutifully lain down with her mortal husband, giving herself from kindness and practicality, and only glad to see him content, she left the Little Chateau on a coin-golden afternoon when Carmineau was from home, and met Angeval among the pines. Then, safe from any stricture, she and he at last lay down to consummate their union.

  Among the multitude of persons in the house, or workers about the park, not one saw this, or saw Jeanne. She had become invisible, as ever, as Angeval was for any but herself. Likewise, her long calls of ecstasy went unmarked. Or they were mistaken for the feral pleasures of the birds and beasts. Love was not blind. Love saw it all. And covered itself in a dome of glass, that shone so bright no other might see through it.

  ~o0o~

  Tonight, as Jeanne sped into the labyrinth of the chateau woods, foxes glided in front of her across gold-lit glades, pausing to stare from wolfish faces. Nightingales whirred in the beech trees. Once a large black animal bounded over her path. She had no notion of what it was—absurdly, she was reminded of Petit. Whatever, it had no care for her and she felt no fear of it. Natural things, though, did see her—and presumably also Angeval. And it was, besides, as if these creatures would reveal their benighted activities only to ones as clandestine and lawless as themselves.

  Presently there came a twist in the woodland. Jeanne saw the high wall, the open gateway. If any other living thing went in and out of that door, she had never known. Certainly, birds sang about the white ruin, sometimes a fish would rise in the pool there, jewelsmithing a silver ring or a golden one, depending on the hour or the light. Once, when she had been lying in Angeval’s arms, a leopard-spotted snake had coiled across her outflung hair. She had not feared it.

  Next second, he stepped on to the track.

  Ever since Jeanne had become wealthy, so had her lover. That was, he was not adverse now to displaying wealth. To his inordinate beauty was therefore added a suit of finest silk, a shirt ruffled and trimmed with lace. The garments came from an earlier era, but so did Jeanne’s, as she had found once she entered the pines. She never questioned it, thinking their clothing better fitted to the ruin and its gardens than what either of them had worn before.

  She did not run to him but stopped still, transfixed, dazzled, lost. This had never altered, her amazement every time on seeing him.

  And so he moved towards her and reaching out, caught her about her waist.

  “I look into your eyes,” he said, doing so, “and their light puts out the moon.”

  “It seems a year since we met,” she said. “Or only one minute.”

  “Both. Neither. Come closer. We’re only half-met still. Better. Is it better?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  She felt the warmth of his hands, the hardness of his body pressed to hers, burning through her dress, filling her with flame. But he was the lamp, she the moth. She wanted no other thing than to dash herself against and within his fire, and be consumed.

  This too had never—could never change.

  When he lifted her off her feet and carried her away, through the pine shadows and the ormolu brilliance of the moon, as if under endlessly alternating pillars of swimming ebony and orichalc, she lay in his arms and gazed up into his leopard’s face. Soon he lay her down on a bank of thick turf, where asphodel was blooming, and wild violets, filling the air with an uncanny perfume as her body crushed them.

  He was beside her in a moment. His hair brushed her face and neck, her breasts, as he bent to kiss her thirstily. His mouth had the taste of clear water and was of a perfect heat. The scent of him drugged her.

  They did not talk now, said nothing. Their mouths, their hands, bodies said all. To the roots of her bones, shores of her blood, she experienced the feather caresses of his fingers and his lips. His unspeaking tongue yet spoke a language, which it wrote in mantras of lust and longing on her skin. The costly and historic garments, real or illusion, were stripped from them. The joining of their flesh became the only sanity. The earth spun through the night, as if it had left its moorings on some sullen coast and now sailed among the oceanic galaxies. It seemed to her as if they flew, he and she, one on another, a curious duality, curving and rushing, their outflung fiery wings scattered with stars, while a thousand golden moons shattered at their impact, worlds ended, and again began.

  ~o0o~

  They did not separate until the moon was down behind the ruined house, and dawn kindling in a cinnamon thread. By then, they had said over to each other those prayers by which lovers worship. And drunk cold champagne from a bottle lifted out of the pool.

  He had wound violets in her hair. She had held his hands away from her and kissed him until he groaned. Their second love-making had been savage and animal, the third tender, the fourth slower than a serpentine dance.

  When she went away, she looked back at him only once, and saw him standing in the fading night, a statue of marble, the flawless ashes now of gold. On leaving, she would only ever turn one single time. No need for more. In her mind, his acts and words of love, the sense of him, were fastened firm as vines. Dew was on the grass like splatters of crystal. The sun was rising. But she never doubted it would.

  3. Azure

  She had met Monsieur Carmineau one morning in winter. Oddly, perhaps, it was on the following night she first encountered Lalise.

  Two hours after dawn, Jeanne had been crouching over the schoolroom stove, which as ever the caretaker allowed to remain unlit. Clouds of smoke had already doused the area. Coughing, she had drawn back, hands, face and gown blackened, when the door opened.

  The school was run by a pair of religiously-minded ladies who had forgotten most of the teachings of Jesus Christ in their wizened and murderous efforts to serve him. Its supposed charitable function, which was to instruct the offspring of the poor, was carried out by six or seven malnourished young women, of whom Jeanne was one. Regularly viperishly berated, and often unpaid by the benefactors, these girls were also simple prey for their charges. Having little to lose, and rating literacy far below the skills of knife and fist, most of the pupils were sly and venal, also violent. The rest were weaklings who preferred, in the interests of self-preservation, to obey their stronger peers.

  Jeanne turned to the opened door in misgiving. The children, when they bothered or were forced by their dangerous relatives to attend, seldom arrived before eight o’clock. Now and then, however, one would appear before the hour, generally on some repulsive mission.

  To her surprised relief then, Jeanne saw what was, to her, an elderly gentleman standing in the doorway.

  Monsieur Carmineau had come to the school only in order to help present a donation. He was one of a party that included the mayor, but had lost his way during a very irksome and unwished-for tour of the premises, fetching up at Jeanne’s particular room by sheer accident.

  The moment he saw her, nevertheless, as he later informed her through his lawyer, he had been much taken with her delicacy and superiority of person, indicative of her total unfitness for such thankless work. In short, his aging body, (this he did not convey) leapt in a (to him) startling flush of enthusiastic sexual resurgence having to do with the female form. He felt twenty again. And though not such a fool as to think anyone else thought him twenty again, he set about wooing Jeanne. He used those means common in such cases. Had she not been of a decent if unelevated family, he would have set her up as his mistress. Or perhaps not. For he had a sentimental, large-hearted streak.<
br />
  At the time, Jeanne had only been further harassed by appearing as a sooty cursing harpy before the poor old fellow, who seemed madly flustered. She privately grieved she had shocked him. Going home, she learned that very evening that she had indeed, if not in the manner imagined. The lawyer had called, on the pretext of a ‘patron’ who would find her nicer employment.

  Jeanne’s father was by then, of course, some years underground. No one else was there to bully or advise. She played the game presented as best she could. She knew the game’s nature, though did not get so far as to guess her ‘patron’ might prefer marriage. The lawyer having taken his leave, in a stunned trance she reviewed what her life might become. Better surroundings, enough to eat, warm winter clothes, some luxuries—best of all, an end to her service at the school. But in trade for these, the indenture of her freedom and personality, trammelled though they already were, to an old man. Enslavement, if under different rules, not entirely dissimilar to her serfdom when with her father.

  ~o0o~

  Taking no supper, Jeanne paced the dank apartment, watching icy rain fall beyond the windows. She pondered then if she should go out, invisible as always when on such a quest, and seek her golden lover. Among the pines, it was always summer. But events had exhausted her, and instead she sought sleep. Whatever outcome might ensue from Monsieur Carmineau’s attention, tomorrow she must return to hell, (the school).

  Angeval had never entered these sordid rooms. The nearest he had ever approached had been the tree outside, and that only on the first occasion.

  Near midnight, something woke Jeanne from her gloomy stupor.

  She opened her eyes to see only the wall, but someone spoke to her from the bed’s foot.

  “Get up, you bitch. You’re late. I will meet you in the street.”

  Jeanne flung about. She was unsure if what she had heard had been the tones of a woman or a man. The voice was low and dark.

  What she saw—and there was only the slightest instant to see it—was a slender male form, a tide of dark hair, the glint—surely it was?—of a sword. Then the vision had gone.