Red Grow the Roses

by Janine Ashbless

  ‘Show me,’ she’d murmured, her eyes huge and commanding despite her delicate stature. Then: ‘Is this what I look like?’

  It was a very fair likeness, he’d told her, flushing.

  ‘Then you’ll paint me. Tonight.’

  That was not how it was supposed to happen. He didn’t paint after sunset because the light was no good, and he chose his own models – working girls usually, unless he was on commission for a society portrait. His models sometimes made him uncomfortable with their coarse humour and their brash laughter, and he tried to be stern with them and deliberately scorned their sly offers to see to his other needs at the end of a long afternoon’s sitting – for a consideration, of course. He laboured under too much dignity to stoop to that, imagining in horror how they might gossip and laugh about him between themselves if he did succumb. But there’d been something about this woman that was almost bewitching, and he’d ended up telling her his studio address and had waited there for her that evening, watching the street. She’d called herself Roisin; a suitably Celtic name for such a fey and ethereal women, he’d thought. He’d assumed she was a demimondaine, having been seen out with neither escort nor bonnet nor gloves, but she didn’t sound or behave like any of the mistresses he’d met. An actress who’d lingered too long in the role of Ophelia, perhaps, he’d mused: many actresses were half-crazy on laudanum and gin. But he already had an idea for using her as a model for the fair maid Elaine, burning up with unrequited ardour for Lancelot.

  She’d tapped at his door without ever appearing on the street below and when he’d admitted her to his studio she’d drifted around it like a ghost. Her clothes were decades out of date, he’d noticed, but the final detail had escaped him until she’d paused in front of an ornate mirror that he’d used as a prop for his version of The Lady of Shalott. ‘I cannot tell what I look like any more,’ she’d whispered. ‘So you must paint me a portrait.’

  That was when he’d realised that she cast no reflection at all. It had been a long time before his hands had steadied enough for him to pick up the charcoal and begin to sketch.

  She’d sat for him for hours that first evening while he roughed out sketches from different angles and decided on the composition that suited best. Not once did she stir, except to blink. Once he’d got the basic outline down on canvas he’d shown her and she’d seemed pleased. As he’d shrunk back into the sofa she’d straddled his lap and kissed him, peeling his clothes open delicately to eat her way down his slim body, all the way to that part of him that stood stiff with fear. She’d been like milk in her pallor, he’d thought, except for that red hair: milk and blood that washed his senses clean away.

  For weeks he’d drawn and painted nothing but her: not as Elaine but as Calypso, as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, as Melusine and Medusa. At the same time he’d worked on her portrait, applying every tiny brushstroke as precisely as possible, trying to capture the luminous pallor of her skin, the multitudinous strands of russet and chestnut and copper in her hair, the depths of her dark-blue eyes. In turn Roisin had been obsessed by him, returning to feed every night. He’d grown weak and pale and daily more afraid that she wouldn’t leave him time to complete any of the works that burned in his fingertips. One night he had thrust her roughly away as she tried to mouth yet again at a prick that was raw with overuse, shouting that he needed to work, that she had to leave him alone.

  She’d killed him and returned him to unlife. Partly out of fury, partly out of desire to give him what he asked for: time. Partly, perhaps, because she feared she would lose him otherwise. And then, while he was still a neonate only weeks into his new existence, she had forgotten him.

  He remembers trying to reclaim his life, to pretend that nothing had changed – and the time his model Clara broke a lamp and cut her hand, and he’d come within a hair’s-breadth of rape and murder before he even realised what he was doing. He’d fled, out here, to the asylum. It had been easy to purchase a lease upon a suite of the best rooms whose barred windows looked out upon the wild green sea of the rushes, whose heavy door could be bolted from the outside and never opened. He’d refused to see his father after the first visit and the only things that crossed his threshold went on a tray pushed through the flap in the door. Thirst – an unending burning thirst for warm blood – had pushed him to raving.

  He remembers the evening he had a visitor, unannounced. The bolts had grated back to admit a tall man, very well-dressed, with a foreign look to his complexion but perfectly well-spoken. He’d explained his name was Reynauld, that he knew all about Wakefield’s condition, and that he was here to help. Wakefield, crouched in a corner as he had been most of the day, banging his forehead dully off the plaster for the faint sense of relief it gave him, had been too stunned to realise what was strange about his visitor.

  ‘Gwendolyn, my dear – would you join us?’ he’d said.

  The cell door had opened for the second time and a young woman had walked in, bringing Wakefield scrabbling to his feet. He’d dimly judged her a servant of some sort because although her skirts were full she didn’t wear a proper crinoline. Her dress was neat and respectable though, her gloves clean, and her large brown eyes had moved to Reynauld with simple, direct trust. When she’d divested herself of her grey bonnet she’d revealed dark hair neatly parted down the centre and drawn back into a bun. But it was only when the scent of her body – that warm, delicious scent part new-baked bread, part sex, part saffron – reached Wakefield and made his mouth run with water, that he’d realised that he hadn’t been able to smell Reynauld at all. And though he could faintly hear her heartbeat, it was the only one audible in the room.

  ‘You can’t bring her in here,’ he’d rasped, choking on fear and hunger and arousal. ‘Please. My blood-mania …’

  ‘Lesson One,’ Reynauld had answered, unperturbed, signing the girl to sit in an armchair: ‘You don’t have to harm anyone.’

  She’d looked Wakefield full in the face with a faint, complacent smile and slipped the buttons of her fitted woollen jacket. The tiny pearl buttons of the white blouse beneath had followed suit. Under that she was uncorseted and wore no shift: her stunningly big, firm breasts had emerged through the trimming of white lace to reveal for his inspection brown nipples with areolae the size of teacups. For a moment Wakefield had thought that he might actually black out. He’d been faintly aware that he was half-crouched, his erection straining painfully against the fabric of his trousers, his teeth bared in a rictus snarl. If he’d been himself he would have felt utterly ashamed, but as it was the only thing stopping him hurling himself on the girl was the tall cool presence at her side, one hand on her shoulder. There’d been an indefinable something about Reynauld that chilled the hottest appetite.

  ‘Please, do come and feed. Not the throat – never the throat or the insides of the thighs where the arteries are, never on a joint or over a bone. Your bites are self-sealing unless you strike a major blood-vessel. Choose soft tissue. Her breasts will do very well: she will enjoy it greatly. And she does have magnificent breasts, don’t you agree?’

  They were breathtaking.

  Dazed, nearly drooling, Wakefield had stumbled forward to kneel before her and sink his teeth into one of those irresistible orbs. As the blood flooded his mouth he’d lost all sense of himself and his surroundings, his head full of a black rushing wind, his body – even the red-hot column of his cock – lost somewhere far away. He wasn’t aware of anything but the delirious pleasure of the warm liquid in his throat.

  It is after all the most primal of instincts: to suck.

  Then, slowly, as his overwhelming thirst abated, he’d become aware of his surroundings once more. Aware that the girl was shifting beneath him, moaning sweetly, her hips undulating. Distracted, he’d lifted his head, but as she’d cupped and hefted her bosom he switched immediately to the other breast she offered him so eagerly.

  ‘See,’ Reynauld had murmured. ‘She’s more than willing to suckle you.’ Pulling up the girl�
�s many layers of petticoats and skirts, he’d revealed for Wakefield her plump stocking-clad leg, then her glossy pubic bush. She’d been wearing no drawers. ‘Stroke her quim.’

  He’d obeyed, dizzy with shock, easing his fingers into that pelt to find whorled skin and heat and moisture – slippery as marsh-mud, slippery as oil paint – delving into that complex mysterious furrow until she tensed and heaved beneath him, crying out shamelessly in what was obvious even to him as her orgasmic crisis. And he’d tasted it too, in the blood he was sucking from her swollen teat: that first rush of a sharp flavour he was unable to compare to anything else until years later when he first smelled lime zest. The taste of her climax.

  As she fell back, gasping and heavy-lidded, he released her breast to look down at her open sex. For the moment his need for blood was slaked and now another appetite demanded satisfaction. ‘May I?’ he’d asked hoarsely, squeezing the ridge of his trapped erection.

  ‘I think she’d be most disappointed if you didn’t,’ Reynauld had answered.

  So he’d freed his prick and pulled Gwendolyn’s unresisting body to the edge of the chair and draped her legs up over his shoulders in order to bring his ram to bear on the portals of her citadel. It was almost the first time he’d ploughed a living woman, and after Roisin she’d felt feverishly hot and padded like a cushion, her wet grip wringing his seed from his bulging scrotum in racking spasms of release. She’d climaxed for a second time too, under his assault, and he’d tasted it as he bit her.

  ‘Remember this,’ Reynauld had said as Wakefield slumped to his knees on the rug. ‘We must bring them pleasure, not terror. We take what we need, but we ourselves are a gift to the living. Immortal guardians who confer our own blessing, in a balance of mutual joy.’

  But Wakefield, despite the erection that thrust up unquelled from his loins, had at that moment been feeling nauseous: the same queasiness he’d felt so often after a model left him alone in the studio and he’d finished masturbating ferociously, spurting all over the costumes they’d worn for the sitting until his balls were empty and his head ringing. It was, he imagined, a spiritual nausea. He didn’t believe the wonderful vision of the promised land that Reynauld described.

  ‘Who are you, to try to tell me?’ he’d groaned. ‘I’d like very much to believe you, but I fear I do not, sir. This thing that I am – whatever that is – it is no blessing, but an offence against God Himself and against Nature.’

  ‘Which leads us,’ Reynauld had said with a certain relish, unbuttoning his own trousers and easing out into view an engorged member of intimidating proportions, ‘to Lesson Two.’

  * * *

  There are habits of mind too deeply ingrained to conquer. In the months that followed, Wakefield had established himself as a divinity among the inmates of the asylum, accepting that much of Reynauld’s dictum. He had no desire to leave and took from them only what he required, without causing particular harm. That was when he’d started growing roses in the exercise yard, and under his hand the first unlooked-for bloom of the new variety had emerged. But he never embraced his new state. As the years passed and he grew no older his family ceased to visit. He bore the loss as one he deserved. Even when the asylum closed he did not leave. He remains, venturing out only on special occasions, still trying the best he can to remain an upright gentleman.

  See now, and pity him if you like: Wakefield is a fly caught in amber, a man trapped beyond his time; a rose pressed between the pages of an old book, still bearing in its withered petals the remnants of its old colour and a fugitive hint of perfume.

  4: Seven for the Seven Stars in the Sky

  Jacqueline was marching to war. She counted off her weapons in her mirror while the hired limousine crept through the city streets. Jimmy Choo shoes, silver, five-inch heels: check. Versace evening dress, silver, low-cut and backless but tasteful: check. Diamond necklace that Leon had bought her on their third anniversary, the one that hung above her pushed-up breasts like a cascade of waterdrops about to run down a golden ravine: check. Perfect make-up, pillar-box-red lips and smouldering dark eye shadow: check. Louis Vuitton purse: check.

  Divorce papers in the purse: check.

  Jacqueline had had enough. Enough of being a trophy wife. Enough of a husband who stayed away from home for a week or more at a time, not telling her where he was. Enough of the jewellery and the goddamn roses he always brought her on his return, as if that made up for anything. Enough of Leon’s turned back, rumbling gently as he snored and she stared at the ceiling. Enough of their great big bed where only the miniature schnauzers tussled. Eight years of marriage, she reminded herself, and in the last six months they’d had sex only once.

  Leon might look the part – oh, he certainly did, in fact: he was a former rugby international and he’d not let himself go downhill since retirement. A big bluff guy with a broken nose and a head of bristly hair, he still looked more like a jobbing builder than a successful businessman with his own chain of sportswear stores and a column in the Sunday papers, not to mention a lucrative sideline in rental property management. But his sexual interest in her had died off in the last couple of years. Jacqueline might have tolerated a readjustment of their relationship – one couldn’t expect the libido of someone in his forties to match that of a younger man, and besides she suspected he might be taking steroids – if there had been something to fill the gap: children, or a passionate hobby in common, or a close social circle. But there was nothing of the sort, and she’d been left to grow bored and frustrated and resentful.

  Hadn’t Mummy and Daddy warned her that she’d have nothing in common with this man, when she announced her engagement to him? That he was too old, and not the right sort? Well, she’d taken no notice of them then, at eighteen. But she knew they’d nod sagely now and murmur, ‘Well, darling, you can’t say we didn’t foresee this.’ Knowing that only made the sting of failure worse.

  It hadn’t always been like this, of course. In the beginning their love-life had been hectic, and even after years of marriage, when they’d carved out their own comfortable but separate social ruts, he’d still been enthusiastic between the sheets. She remembered so much of their time together fondly. The occasion she’d given him a hand-job under his coat at the theatre during a Royal Premiere Performance, his cock a hot sticky bar of opportunism, and he’d had to fake a coughing fit to cover up the groan of his orgasm. The night he’d smuggled her on to the international pitch before the world rugby cup final and fucked her up against the post of the upright, her skirt up around her hips, his trousers round his ankles; they’d left her knickers there for the groundsmen to find in the morning, she recalled. Leon had always had a bit of an exhibitionist thing going, and she’d never minded that. On their last holiday together on their yacht they’d anchored in the Mediterranean just in sight of Mykonos, and under that perfect sky he’d stripped off her bikini and stood her with her hands on the brass rail of the stern and fucked her from behind with consummate appreciation. No one else was there: just the sky and the darkly rocking waves and the sun glinting off the brass and the varnished woodwork, just the smell of salt and sun-cream mingling with the sea tang of her pussy, and the lap of the waves echoing the slap of his thighs and balls on her out-thrust rear.

  She’d had no notion then that anything was about to go wrong between them. Was this how it was bound to end? she wondered. Had it been inevitable that he’d tire of her, of the posh blonde bird who’d seemed such a novelty all those years ago? All she knew was that in the last year or so something had changed.

  She watched the neon-lit streets crawl past. She wanted out of this humiliating marriage before it was too late: before she lost her own looks, before the tabloid newspapers came falling through the letter-box with the pictures of Leon caught in a Nazi-themed spanking session or some similar degrading honey-trap, and she had to face the paparazzi with the shreds of her dignity wrapped about her and play the hurt-but-unbowed wife to the cheating slimeball.

 
Because Jacqueline was pretty certain that Leon was up to something.

  Convinced at first that he had a mistress – because what else would explain the lost days and the plunge in his sexual appetite at home? – she’d hired a private detective to follow him, but it had turned out to be nothing so simple. When he was away from home, she’d found out, Leon was staying in an apartment he owned in the city centre. His regular haunts consisted of a kick-boxing club and a tae kwon do school, plus a very exclusive private club called the Pleiades which the detective could discover next to nothing about. He’d visit the club, then usually spend a few days at his apartment, staying in and not receiving visitors.

  So he’d taken up kick-boxing: a little ambitious at his age, she thought, but not out of character. He was a very physical man. It explained the bruises and the cuts she often saw on him – although since he’d taken to wearing pyjamas she was less familiar now with the state of his body. The club worried her more. All research into its function and clientele seemed to hit a brick wall. As a private club it had of course complete control over whom it allowed as members, and it didn’t advertise on the Internet. From his surveillance the detective had only been able to report that the customers were all top end, and always wore evening dress. Hollywood chic was de rigueur. But she assumed lap-dancing, at the very least … and probably something much less palatable. With pole-dancing bars open at lunchtime in the respectable heart of the City, would Leon really go to such lengths for anything that mundane?