by Lee, Tanith
Peter nodded.
Ruth said, ‘It’s only an old dress.’
She shocked them. They were used to seeing her as a child but receiving the replies of a responsive adult. They did not know what to do.
Rachaela said, ‘All good things come to an end.’
Ruth glanced at Rachaela. She had never looked for anything good from Rachaela, and so did not hate her for providing nothing good.
Everyone left the table, and some of the old women took Ruth away to denude her of her finery.
It was three in the morning.
In the drawing room Rachaela approached Anna.
‘You should have reassured Ruth. She’ll see him tomorrow, for the usual piano lesson.’
Anna embroidered a peacock.
‘But she won’t, Rachaela. He won’t be teaching her any more. Jack has repaired and re-tuned the piano in the music room. Ruth can practise there.’
‘So he’s tired of the novelty already,’ said Rachaela. A warm pain lit up the centre of her body.
‘He doesn’t communicate easily,’ said Anna, as she had once said before. The last weeks have been something of a strain for him.’
‘You used him to seduce her,’ Rachaela said, ‘not literally perhaps, but fundamentally all the same.’
‘Ruth will have to be patient.’
‘For three years? Ruth is eleven. Three years will seem a very long time.’
‘Ruth is Scarabae.’
‘So you keep saying.’
‘It is a fact.’
Rachaela turned and went out of the room. The first thread had been pulled from the scarlet tracery. Now all the rotten fabric might come undone.
Rachaela the witness watched Ruth the betrothed.
The days grew very hot and the shut house was like an oven, burning colours coming in from its windows, an airless bath of dyes.
The Scarabae went to ground in their dyed rooms, lying in their chairs, hunted by their enemy the sun.
Ruth was on the heath a lot, and sometimes down by the sea, for she had at some moment discovered the steps to the beach. Rachaela watched her gathering treasures from the water’s edge, paddling in the waves, or seated under the standing stone drawing intently. Once or twice the great black cat was with her, sleeping by her side. Ruth showed a passion for the cat, predictable and unique. On one occasion she had garlanded its neck with daisies. She was like a lost maenad. The troop of bacchantes had moved on and left her behind.
At night, occasionally, Ruth played the piano in the music room.
She played angrily and with a quantity of wrong notes.
On most evenings after dinner she deserted those Scarabae in the drawing room, and went away to her bedroom presumably to paint or read. Did Anna give her books? She had left all her own behind.
The tempo of Ruth’s life was wrong. She had been accustomed to a routine which she herself might break, in truancy. But now there was no routine but idleness, and nowhere to play truant from or to.
The house had perhaps been enough at first, but then she had had Adamus. Now Adamus was denied her, and the house, not seen through his gleam, palled.
Rachaela watched this happen, she watched Ruth change. A stillness was coming over her. She was growing bored.
One night Ruth said to Anna, ‘Can I go to the town?’
‘The town? Oh, it’s a very long way.’
Familiar conversation.
This time Stephan interposed. ‘There’s nothing in the town.’
‘Shops,’ said Ruth.
‘There are shops now in the village.’
‘She can go with Cheta and Carlo.’
‘The walk’s too long,’ said Ruth. She was a child of buses and streets. She did not appear to want the wilds of the heath, empty of gravestones, burger bars and Woolworth’s.
‘Can I go to the cinema?’ said Ruth.
Rachaela had sometimes taken her, and sometimes perhaps she had got in by herself.
It’s too far, Ruth,’ said Anna, ‘too far for you to go-‘
Ruth looked at Rachaela, but Rachaela did not help her.
‘There’s nothing to do here,’ said Ruth.
‘You have your drawing and your music,’ said Anna, ‘and Alice was teaching you how to knit.’
Ruth was silent. She stared at Anna a long time, but Anna went on placidly with her embroidering, and Stephan stared into the space where the fire had been in winter.
Rachaela could suggest to Anna that she and Ruth take a hire car into the town, but Anna would refuse that, predicting that Rachaela would kidnap the child.
At some time some plan would have to be made, for Ruth was turning now, away from them. After all Ruth might have to make the night-walk across the heath.
How long before all the new toys paled? Surely already.
And the Scarabae had altered too. They no longer came to dinner in droves, but only in ones or twos, or only Anna and Stephan came. They no longer gazed on Ruth so intently. To the Scarabae-mind, Ruth had been fixed. She was safe and sound. The betrothal had set her in the precious mould, and now, although she was the apple of their eye, they were free to forget her. They looked at her, when they troubled to, in a fond pleased manner. But she was no longer the star about which they grouped.
Ruth had lost her princess status, now she was only a child in a house.
And the prince, he was gone too.
Had Ruth tried the tower door? Had she located the second door below the annexe and tried that too, to no avail? Had she written him some childish note and torn it up?
Rachaela followed Ruth.
She followed her along the winding corridors, past the furnaces of windows which did not open and which boiled the heat with ruby panes and scalding blue, so that to have their reflected lights touch one was to be scorched.
She waited at doorways, while Ruth moved around black burning rooms, thick with the honey-like smell of heated damp.
She observed Ruth try to force, as she had done, the locked doors. And watched her enter the room-worlds of the Scarabae: Alice in her sitting chamber; Eric carving a mask in a chamber whose garnet-petal window was screened by a milky blind. And Ruth held wool for Alice, and she attended while Eric carved. And later she came upon Peter and Dorian in the morning room under the vineyard Jezebel; even the green looked volcanic, and they were playing chess.
Ruth said, ‘Will you teach me to play?’
Dorian, who had betrothed her to the dark prince, said presently, ‘Perhaps sometime. Not now. We’re busy now.’ And Peter added, vaguely, ‘There’s a good girl.’
Rachaela heard Ruth listen to the tiresome sounds of the house, which worried at the ears like crickets. The clicks and rasps and shifts, the rising and falling of the sea that seemed to infiltrate the skull, turning it to one huge shell.
She pursued Ruth down into the kitchen, and in the cabbage-leaf gloom where it was so hot it was hard to breathe, three rabbits lay in their fur and stank.
Ruth looked at the rabbits. Perhaps for the first time she equated meat with a living animal. There was blood.
‘Does the cat catch them?’
The cat doesn’t catch anything now,’ said Cheta. ‘Carlo pots them with a catapult. One flick and the neck’s broken. Do you want to make the pie with me?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Ruth.
She minded the blood, evidently. It was not human.
Outside, Ruth tried to draw Adamus. This was clear from her struggles, the pages she tore up or crumpled. She could not capture him.
Rachaela watched Ruth lying in her blood-red bed, her agile hands playing her own body, the notes of its young and partly incoherent desire. In imagination what did Ruth see? Her father-lover sweeping her up, a night-ride, formless—for she did not know enough—consolidated by dreams and images from books, brought to a mad completion in the dark, for her body knew.
Her body was ready. And her body would have to wait. Ruth would have to wait. Three years, four. Anna ha
d explained.
All this Rachaela saw, following Ruth in her mind by day and by night.
Did mother and daughter work upon themselves jointly, each reaching the pitch of orgasm, the silent scream, to fall backwards into morbid loneliness, as one?
Maybe Ruth lay chastely in her bed.
Maybe Dorian was teaching her to play chess, or Stephan, or George.
Maybe she still made pies in the kitchen.
Rachaela had found only one drawing of Adamus blowing on the heath. The face bore a likeness but the body had not been able to form. The body had defeated Ruth.
Below on the beach, Camillo was cavorting, his white hair flopping like a flag. He was like a dog, running at the sea, and away.
Further off, above, Rachaela could see Ruth and the black cat. The cat rushed from place to place, perhaps chasing butterflies. From here it looked young and sleek, and Ruth ran after it to and fro in her 1910 dress, now and then clapping her hands.
Looking back, Rachaela saw Camillo was climbing up from the shore.
She watched him manage the perilous steps without a slip.
He glanced up and winked at her.
He came on to the heath. He saw Ruth.
‘Ugh,’ said Camillo. He spat on the grass. ‘That child thing.’
‘Why did you give her a mousetrap?’
‘To catch a rat,’ said Camillo. ‘Did I?’
‘Ruth is the hope of the family,’ said Rachaela. ‘But she’s no longer their darling. She won’t wait for years.’
‘Sugar for the horse,’ said Camillo. ‘Poor horse. All those miles and not even an apple.’
Rachaela stared away at Ruth. The cat had lain down among the gorse tangles. Ruth kneeled there, stroking it.
‘She looks like a normal little girl with her pet,’ said Rachaela. ‘From here.’
‘Vixen,’ said Camillo, ‘the Devil’s beast. Do you know what she’s done?’
‘No, Camillo. What?’
‘She has a hammer. She went to the room with the dresses and broke the lock. She took out her red dress. She keeps it in her red room. I saw.’
Rachaela thought of the hammer missing from the attic, the hammer with which she had tried to break the window of Adamus’s tower.
‘She likes dressing up,’ said Rachaela.
‘The betrothal dress,’ said Camillo.
Ruth sat by the cat. She seemed to be talking to it, animatedly, as she had talked to Emma when she was... a child.
‘The cauldron’s boiling,’ said Camillo.
Rachaela gazed at him.
‘What will happen?’
‘Poor horsey and no sugar.’
‘What country were you in?’ she asked. ‘The horse, the woods and the snow, the burning town.’
‘Russia,’ he said.
‘I thought it might be. What was the year?’
‘1703.’
‘Now you tell me the truth,’ she said, ‘and I believe you.’
‘That’s not the truth,’ said Camillo, ‘only an answer. Better learn the difference.’
‘1703,’ she said, ‘so now you would be almost three hundred years old.’
‘Unbearable,’ he said. ‘I remember my childhood and my youth. But all the rest of it is nothing.’
‘Will Ruth,’ she said, ‘live as long as you?’
‘If you believe it. Longer.’
‘No I was wrong,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe it at all.’
Anna had come to dine, no one else, besides Rachaela and Ruth.
Cheta cut and served the pie.
Ruth began to eat. Suddenly she spat the mouthful back on to her plate—Rachaela was reminded of Camillo spitting on the grass—and threw down her knife and fork.
‘It’s bad,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s horrible.’
Rachaela, not eating, watched.
Anna hesitated.
‘Cheta,’ she said, ‘when was the rabbit caught?’
‘Yesterday morning, Miss Anna.’
‘There’s no reason the meat should go off in that time. It’s better for a little waiting.’
‘It’s bad,’ repeated Ruth savagely.
‘Don’t be a silly girl,’ said Anna. ‘Do you think I would allow you to eat anything that was tainted? See, I’m eating it.’
‘You’d eat anything,’ said Ruth.
Anna said, reasonably, ‘Of course I would not, Ruth.’
‘Yes you would. You drink blood. You go out in the twilight and catch things and drink their blood.’
Anna looked startled, offended.
‘Whatever put such a foolish idea—’
‘You’re vampires. All the Scarabae.’
‘Nonsense, Ruth. You don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘You drink blood,’ Ruth said again, obstinately, almost proudly.
Anna was like something in a net. Her usual composure had deserted her as it had momentarily when Rachaela had spoken of sexual things. Obviously the drinking of blood was sexual, it had nothing to do with food. Probably Anna had never done such a thing. Adamus was the one in whom the sorcerous gene had surfaced.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Anna. ‘I would never have expected such behaviour of you.’
‘You drain the rabbits in the kitchen! Old Dorian chews the bones! Alice knits with bones!’ sang Ruth, standing up in a sort of frenzy, ‘Livia makes bone necklaces. Jack has brown stains on his hands, they’re old blood-stains, and George rinses his teeth in blood.’
‘Ruth. That’s enough—’
‘Miriam and Unice drink blood in teacups and pretend it’s tea. Stephan drinks blood before dinner. When you die you’ll all go to hell.’
‘Ruth!’ Anna’s voice rose with a cold and hard authority, and Ruth’s skittishness faltered. ‘You are a naughty and ignorant little girl. You may leave your dinner, since you don’t like it, and go up to your room.’
‘I want to see Adamus!’ shouted Ruth. In her voice there was a raw shrill edge. Never had Rachaela heard a refusal bring Ruth so near hysteria, but then never had Rachaela refused Ruth anything she so much wanted.
‘When Adamus is ready, he will see you,’ said Anna, ‘but I doubt he would want to see such a nasty, foul-tongued little brat.’
‘Yes he would,’ Ruth said. ‘He likes me. He wants to marry me.’
‘Forget about that,’ said Anna, ‘I have told you, you’re too young for marriage and must wait. Tonight’s outburst has proved it.’
‘You’re bad,’ said Ruth, as she had said of the rabbit. Her face, like Anna’s, was steely now. ‘You stop him from seeing me.’
‘He doesn’t want to see you. He has his own affairs to attend to. You are a child, Ruth, and must act as one. Go to your room as I told you to.’
Ruth moved away from the table. She glanced once, without any emotion, at Rachaela. Rachaela might have been another furnishing. Ruth said, ‘I’ll go to my room, but you’re still bad. You’re wicked and you’ll go to hell.’
Anna rose like ice and darkness.
Ruth went out of the room.
Anna sat down and sipped from her water glass. She said to Rachaela, ‘You have never curbed her.’
‘Yes,’ said Rachaela, ‘but not her spirit. It’s that you’ll have to fight now.’
‘I shall have to fight no one. She’ll see sense.’
‘There is no sense,’ Rachaela said. ‘She wants her father, her lover-husband. You’ll have to produce him for her or you’ll have trouble.’
‘I’m not his keeper.’
‘Oh, but you are. You and Scarabae. You can make Adamus do what you want. But not Ruth.’
‘We shall see.’
Rachaela shrugged. She did not touch the rabbit-pie.
Anna ate in silence.
Should Rachaela take the opportunity, go to the blood bedroom and confront Ruth now? No, for Ruth was not yet ripe. Things were grim but not yet grim enough. Ruth must come to hate Adamus before Rachaela could get a grip on her, sub
tract her, whisk her away.
❖
In the morning Rachaela woke with a strange tension in her body, as if she had lain all night like a coiled spring, awaiting some event.
She bathed and dressed, and went down without breakfast, through the empty drawing room and dining room and out through the conservatory, bursting with huge yellow and maroon flowers, into the garden. In the morning light the dark yew tree was sprinkled with lemon tufts, the green poplar glittered. The cedar looked blue, and on fire with the climbing roses. The oaks were closed with greenness. Rachaela heard the insistence of the sea, too loud now to be a voice in the head.
By the moon dial, the black cat was lying curled on the grass and Ruth knelt beside it. She did not touch the cat. Hearing Rachaela’s step, the girl raised her head.
‘He won’t wake up,’ she said.
Rachaela looked at the cat. There was no looseness of relaxation in its posture, it appeared hard and stiff. A low hot wind went by, and lifted the long fur like a fringe.
She walked over to the cat and touched its head and back. The body was vacant.
‘I’m sorry, Ruth. I think it’s dead.’
Ruth said, ‘No.’
‘I’m sorry. I think it was very old. I remember it when I was here before. It’s died in its sleep, very gently.’
‘I don’t want it to be dead.’
‘No, I know. It was a lovely cat.’
‘I don’t want it,’ said Ruth. She began to stroke the cat roughly, fiercely. ‘Wake up.’
Rachaela left her, and went in search of Carlo. She found him out of doors in his mufflers and sunglasses, not far off, weeding around the perimeter of the grass. Perhaps he had been keeping an eye on them, Ruth and she together.
‘Carlo, Ruth’s found the cat and I’m afraid it’s dead.’
Carlo straightened up.
He left his hoe and trowel and went across the lawn and around the trees to Ruth. Rachaela followed. She remembered him coming like that, unspeaking, for Sylvian.
Carlo bent over the cat and prodded it carefully.
‘He’s asleep,’ said Ruth. Carlo did not speak, but he picked the cat up by the scruff of its neck, then let the head fall again. ‘Don’t,’ said Ruth.
Rachaela said, ‘He can’t feel it now.’ She added, ‘They may burn the body. The Scarabae burn their dead.’
