Had she ever not lived in Hell?
Margaret had not been aware of the maid leaving until suddenly she returned, bobbing respectfully and said, in a low, ginger murmur, “The master is waiting for you at dinner, my lady…”
Margaret tore her eyes and thoughts from the damson trees. “Yes, thank you…Send my regrets, and say that I overtaxed myself in my walks this morning. I will see Rupert at supper.”
“Very good, my lady,” said the maid in a tone that belied her doubts that it was. She bowed again and withdrew, and as Margaret took her eyes from the door they slid across the upright figure of her ball gown in the corner. For a moment she stared at it, little sparks of anger hissing just behind her heart, and wishing she could have the satisfaction of taking the hateful thing in her hands and tearing it, tearing it long and slowly in two from top to bottom as God must have had the satisfaction of tearing the temple veil.
She was afraid that Rupert would come for her and that she would have to face him before she was ready. But he did not come, and as the hours dragged by in agony she almost wished he had, so that the ordeal would have been finished. She felt like a prisoner waiting for her execution, trapped within her own room, going over and over again the words that she meant to say. She had been right, there was a third option, another way out.
She stopped once before the mirror. Never mind, Margaret. You were never pretty anyhow—never very witty, never much, hardly missed.
The hours crawled by. She could not bring herself to read, to sleep, to do anything of worth. Her only companions were the screaming sense, the storming sense, that lay over the whole house, and the sputtering, smouldering fire of her own determination.
Yet it was with an odd calm that she heard the clock downstairs chime six. She rose, put off her frock and replaced it with her black taffeta, and stepped out onto the landing.
The evenings were coming swift now. The glass dome of the atrium was darkened to bluestone and flint, speckled with stars. The lights in their sconces were lit; she moved through the tendrils of their smoke and the pools of their glow, quite alone, as alone as she had ever felt before. They were beautiful, the lights: they looked each like broom-blossoms to Margaret, perfect and saffron, burning away against the gloom.
The Rupert that Margaret found waiting for her in the dining room was the same cool, mocking thing she remembered. But her senses, sharpened by her dream-like horror of him, made him stand out doubly real against the shadowy dark panelling of the room. Tall, powerful, wrought out of iron, he turned toward her as she entered and she felt a shudder of despair go through her body.
“Margaret, my sweet,” he purred, and, going over to her, took her hand but did not kiss it, only showed her to her chair. She could feel his eyes on her, peeling back her skin. “Sioned told me you were unwell this afternoon. Did you rest well?”
“I kept to my room,” said Margaret, unwilling to lie. “It is quiet there.”
It was uncanny how he kept an eye on her all throughout the meal. She ate mechanically, though with perfect poise, but was preoccupied both with his constant gaze and how she was to tell him…
At last she could stand the silence no longer. With an introductory sniff, raising her eyes from her plate, she asked in a half-interested, detached tone, “Your letter said you went north this morning. How was the ride?”
One dog-tooth showed out of his crooked smile. “Not altogether bad,” he replied. He gave her the platter of mutton roast. “The northerly tracks are little more than cow-paths and wretched after a rain. Witching Hour is in need of a wash, but he is indefatigable. A little rotten track doesn’t deter him.”
Margaret gave a painful, forced smile and ate her mutton. The watchful silence continued a few minutes more, then, stirred to breaking it once more, still with that odd calm, Margaret said,
“Rupert?”
He looked at her directly but did not say a word.
It was worse that he was silent. Her words seemed to fall into the quiet like drops of glass, drops that shattered on the ear. “Rupert, I’m not going with you tomorrow.”
There was no sound, it seemed, in all that screaming, storming, silent house but for the enormously hollow, unbearably mocking rhythm of the clock in the entryway. Margaret felt swallowed up in Rupert’s gaze. His pale eyes did not waver—his whole face did not change from its careful, attentive lightness—but she knew the mocking glint was gone from behind them. She did not know how long that horrible moment lasted, but she was glad for one thing: Rupert did not press her. He had sketched her nature well enough to know she was in earnest.
“Margaret, my dear,” he said at last, gently, as much in earnest as she was, “go to bed.”
The calm was gone. The clarity was gone. In total numbness, like an enchanted doll, Margaret rose from the table, put aside her napkin, and left the room. She was almost to the top of the stairs when a sconce, overfilling, dropped hot wax on the back of her hand and sent a jagged crimson streak of pain into her brain, clearing it for one moment. She had been certain he would kill her. He was not one to let anything stand in the way of his ambition. She stopped at the head of the stair and looked back down into the well of darkness.
Does he mean to murder me in my sleep?
Rupert was a killer if he had to be, she knew that, but she did not know what kind of killer, and that made it worse. Completely mazed she went to her room, found herself alone there, and began pacing, trying to rally her wits.
She had not expected to live out the interview. That had been her tertium quid, her way out—and Rupert had not given it to her. She passed a stiff, shaking hand across her forehead, feeling her nails drag at her skin, as if to rip the cobwebs from her brain. What was to be done? She had thrown the dice back in the devil’s face and the devil had not flinched. Horribly, acutely, through all the numbness of shock and despair and uncertainty, she felt she was in Rupert’s hand still, playing along with his little game, helpless to break free.
She had the strong desire to cross the dimly lit room, ball up her fist, and put it through a pane of glass.
Instead she passed into the washroom and began undressing once more, mechanically, drawing a bath for herself. Sitting on the cold edge of the tub, watching the water fill it—watching the water shake and roil with its own movement and the lights darting fish-like in it—she thought suddenly of the Channel, and of the Tyrrhenian Sea. She ought to have long been in Naples by now. The sun would still be warm, and Rupert would not be there…One hand slipped into the water and, as it flowed around her, the water-sensation, the silvery voice, of the wind and the panpipe came to her. A headache was coming on, and the thoughts of her earth seas and Naples and the beauty of the fells, all thoughts of places that shut her off and would not let her share their beauty, only added to her agony.
What is wit? she thought. What is cunning, what is beauty, what are love’s pleas and hate’s rages? They all come to dust, and the devil is by far a better player at them than I.
She got into the bath presently and sank up to her neck in the water, feeling it close her in its warm embrace, and she thought that never in the history of mankind had any convert to Christianity felt so keenly the water’s symbol of being buried in the earth.
There were still two hours until a reasonable retiring time when Margaret finished her bath. Her body was clean but the ache of straining was still present. She needed to sleep, and sleep a sleep of death, before the hard knots of anxiety unwound in her muscles. But it was far too early to retire, so she sat in her nightgown and robe of velvet Tyrian purple and put herself to an idle game of chess with the little white and crimson morse-ivory chess-pieces on their board of obsidian and mother-of-pearl.
A storm had come up during her bath, an idle storm, as idle as the game she played, and it filled her room with a gentle, melancholy music that seemed to speak her mind better than her own words. She moved her pieces, and moved Rupert’s—Rupert was red, devil-red, and unaccountably winning though s
he moved his pieces for him—with the light and the shadows chasing each other in smudges across the board.
She jumped and cursed as much as she knew how when a sudden knock disturbed her. Picking up her castle where it had fallen and reasserting its threat on Rupert’s knight, she turned in her chair and called out.
It was Rhea who entered, sweeping in, Margaret noticed, without the marked deference that a maid should give to a lady of Margaret’s potential station. The lack of gesture stung.
“I’ve come to take the ball gown,” said Rhea, “and give it the last touches for tomorrow. I will have it boxed for the journey.”
“That will not be necessary,” said Margaret icily.
Nothing changed in the maid’s face—she was as careful as her master—but behind that pool-dark, pool-deep pair of eyes Margaret felt a hostile spirit. “Nevertheless, I will take the gown.”
“Do,” said Margaret. And burn it behind the kitchen wing.
Rhea dropped her eyelids and moved to take the dress away. Some of the over-sheet slipped off as the maid moved it, and Margaret saw again the startling crimson of the gown. Crimson. She, dressed in crimson like one of the crimson pawns on the chess board—one of Rupert’s pawns. Her stomach twisted.
Rhea departed, gown in her arms, and with the door shut once more the room was filled with the tinselly rustle of the rain and, when Margaret roused herself to think, the harsh click of a chess-piece set down. She played with a strangely renewed vigour, as if to beat Rupert by means of proxy, as if the genius of the chess game on this stormy night that was the threshold of winter, the threshold of a new moon, might cast its power over them and let—oh, God, might let—Margaret win.
But something went awry. The stars were wrong, or providence unhappy, for as the clock began chiming downstairs that it was time to turn in, that the hour was late, she found herself looking down on a helpless stalemate. Their pieces were useless, unarmed but for little daggers, circling each other like dogs. A confused rage welled up in her, blinding her. Her throat tightened and her eyes were blurred suddenly by unreasoning tears. Heedless, she jerked out her arm, sending the pieces flying with a choked cry of anger. They fell somewhere, far away, thumping with white and crimson noises across the carpet.
The blow was strangely relieving. She leaned on the table, panting, crushing her eyes shut to kill the tears, and somehow found herself again. When her vision cleared she saw, not white and crimson, but darkness and a few small points of sullen golden candlelight. How dark everything had grown! She straightened, staring blankly about her. The last notes of the clock died away. The storm broke against the windowpanes. The curtains were drawn, but the racing, fitful silver light of earth still made it through the storm-clouds and chinks in the fabric; in desolate patterns the light showed up on the floor, broken by the windward leaves that plastered against the glass and stuck there, forlorn. She laughed softly, genuinely, and like a madman. This was something the fells could share with her: this was something she understood. She put aside her heavy robe and stood in the middle of the floor in her nightgown, the strings of the neck draped in her transfixed hands, watching the way the light played on the glass and the floor, the way the wind bore the rushing shadows of the leaves around her. The nightmare taste of white and crimson was clearing away. She breathed deeply, shakily, and breathed in the far-off mountain thunder. It echoed inside her, loud and empty, and she distilled some strength from it.
The thunder was hushing away, the storm dropping to a blowing rustle that was more wind than rain, and she was just turning to the knowledge that she must sleep when of a sudden her bedroom door flung open and harsh yellow light split the darkness. With a cry Margaret started back and recovered, blinking through the broken gleam to see Rupert’s face.
For a moment he was a mere wild silhouette, framed in the black doorway and fierce yellow light, his head up, his hand gripping the knob as if to strangle it. Then she saw he was in his shirtsleeves, dishevelled and disreputable, hair racked upward into disarray. He was clearly drunk. Her stomach clenched within her.
“You are coming, Margaret,” he ground out low and dangerous. “You are going to come at my biding and do what I say. There is an end to it.”
She swallowed. Her dry throat caught on the taste of crimson. “Go back to bed, Rupert,” she said in as soothing a tone as she could muster with her heart beating wildly in her chest. “You are drunk.”
He swung into the room, steady and fast on his feet, and had her by the wrist before she could pull away. She knew better than to struggle in that grasp. She had tried it before to no avail. She held still as death, staring up into the storm-lashed paleness of those wide, furious eyes.
“I am sober when I am drunk,” he hissed. The scent of his breath was scarlet. “All other times I am beset by this strange sense of conscience.” His eyes lowered, fixed, unfocused. His hand loosened a little on her arm and the fingers gently worked the skin as if to atone for the pain they had inflicted. His body shuddered. “There is a dark art at work inside me.” His eyes lifted to hers. “Will you release me?”
She met those eyes, those hateful, pale blue, beautiful eyes. That odd, unreasoning calm in the face of terror, a calm that was oddly white, washed over her. Her voice came as if from a long way off. “What you call darkness and I call darkness, Rupert, are two completely different things.”
The eyes hardened into glass. The lips parted, revealing the teeth on edge as if they were fangs. The hand on her arm remained light. She did not see it coming, for he had the knack of hiding his thoughts behind the glassiness of his eyes: of a sudden he snapped her forward, his free hand behind her head, and bit her lip with the violence of his kiss. She gave a muffled shriek of pain and kicked, hurting herself more than she hurt him. She forgot that it was no use to fight. Instinct to protect herself clawed at her mind and she clawed at him, writhing in his unforgiving grasp. The long angry whine of tearing fabric filled the air. Renewed thunder boomed overhead. Lightning lashed across them, lashed across Rupert’s down-turned face, turning it into a snarling mask. She tasted blood. She tasted her own blood. The sweet scents of wine and blood and tears mingled and, with an upsurge of rage, Margaret somehow found his hand and she bit it to repay him. She bit as deeply as her jaw would allow and revelled high and viciously in the cry of pain he gave.
He picked her up around the waist and hurled her through the air with surprising force. She fell with a shriek, her fall cushioned by the mattress of her bed. Something was in her mouth. She spat it out. It was too dark to see what it was. She pulled herself together lest Rupert should come after her.
He stood his ground. He clutched his bleeding hand to his chest and watched her coldly, rigidly. His worst anger, his cold anger, rested on his brow. The thunder growled and fell away. The light flickered and broke up around him. Only the sound of her heavy breathing filled the room.
“Good night, Margaret,” he said quietly, and with a silent tread he left the room, shutting the door with a little click behind him.
“Oh!” cried Margaret, bursting into heedless, furious tears. “Oh, you worthless, p-pitiless, filthy creature! I despise you! I d-d-despise you! I despise you!” Her raging words fell into sobbing—furious, terrified sobbing. She crumpled into the bed-sheets and sobbed mingled tears and blood; with every hysterical gasp she smelled her own blood, tasted it, felt the cut agony of her own broken lip. She held the torn neck of her nightgown close in a grip that even Rupert could not have pried loose. Through the broken, jagged images of pain and his face, the horror lashed her with the thought: what if he had? He was a man who could kill, a man who would get his own way. The sound of tearing fabric screamed and screamed in her memory, the heat of his touch seared her arms. If he truly wanted her, as he said he did, what was stopping him? The thread that she had taken for granted which held Rupert back seemed suddenly horribly thin.
In the last raging throes of agony she reared back, strangling the bed-sheets in her hands, an
d let loose one long agonized scream, wrenching it out of the depths of her soul. In her own ears it was blood-curdling. She screamed that single scream until she no longer had breath, and then she fell, like a bird which has suddenly lost all wind, plummeted into a pit where even the shadows seethed. Her body was cold. She knelt in her thin gown in the fireless, cheerless, empty room, listening to the silence and her own sobbing breath, shivering as with a fever.
No one came at the sound of her scream. She knelt and waited, expecting someone to come to her, but no one came. She felt like a child lost in the dark, woken by nightmares that no one cared to chase away.
You have always been alone...
…You have always been alone…
…You have always been alone.
The echo of her scream died away into the empty depths of her soul. The house, mockingly, was silent—pressing silent, like a pillow smothering her. She knew he would not come back, but that knowledge did not serve to comfort her. Did she dare sleep? Did she dare close her eyes? Her hand fumbled on the coverlet and her mind, child-like, pitiful, fumbled into her past.
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should—if I should—”
With shuddering breath and shaking body, Margaret stole from the bed and crept corpse-cold across the floor. Her hand slid against the wood of her door, found the cold knob, and closed tightly over it. With infinite care, trying desperately not to make the latch rattle in her own shaking hand, she worked the knob over and eased the door open.
There was a single light in the hall, just at the head of the stair. Otherwise the hall was empty and silent, and if she took the greatest possible care, she thought she could steal past Rupert’s door without him hearing her. After the scare he had given her, he would not expect her to be walking the halls at this hour. But Skander had called her a force to be reckoned with, and though in her tortured, flogged, horrified brain she felt no spark of heroic defiance, she reeled blindly on.
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