Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘It sounds very good,’ said Hilary.

  ‘It sounds hugely fattening,’ said Michael, and grinned. ‘Carve away, Tobias. Afterwards, the ladies will go on to Varanno, while I remain here. Sister Hilary will telephone here to confirm their safe arrival. That is all right?’

  ‘That is very all right, Herr Devlin. I or my wife will take the call and tell you.’

  ‘Then,’ said Michael, ‘shall we find the beef and plum dumplings?’

  The BMW approached Varanno as night was stealing across the plains, veiling the Carpathian Mountains in a purple haze.

  There were no sun-splashed childhood memories for Catherine at Varanno, only great pools of despair and cold desolation. You found yourself stepping into them without warning, plunging fathoms deep into icy blackness. The cousins always spoke of Varanno with affection and pleasure, but for Catherine Varanno was a shadow place, dark and sad, and the shadows were not the purple and violet shadows of twilight: they were garnet-coloured, crimson and black . . .

  It had not always been dark. When Pietro was at home, Varanno was filled with light, as if the whole house shone for him. He was at the centre of everything, not because he tried to be, but because he was there. The Family liked to visit Varanno when Pietro was at home; Ladislas and Stefan came, and the banker uncles and the beautifully dressed aunts who hosted large, glittering parties and talked about their acquaintance with politicians and diplomats. There were cousins who discussed off-shore investments.

  ‘It would be nice to think that some of them come to see you or me, Franz-Josef,’ Catherine’s mother often said, half amused, half not.

  ‘They do,’ said Franz-Josef, untroubled.

  Pietro talked easily with the uncles – many of them distinguished people in their own fields – entering effortlessly into their conversation, joining in the masculine laughter, but somehow keeping an edge of deference. He could flirt with the elderly aunts without once stepping over the line of what was acceptable to them, which Catherine found intriguing. There was this line with most people: no matter how well you got to know them, there was always a point beyond which you knew you must not go. The difficulty was knowing where the line was, because it was in a different place for everyone. But Pietro always knew to a hair’s breadth how far to go and he never once got it wrong.

  ‘It’s sleight of hand,’ he said once, when Catherine asked about it. ‘A trick. Easily acquired.’

  ‘Could I acquire it?’

  ‘Of course. I could teach you. But you have your own tricks, Katerina.’

  A trick, but a shining trick, all the same. Pietro could light up the entire house simply by being in it. Catherine could never sleep when Pietro was at home. She could not sleep on the night that Stefan and Ladislas were there, listening to Pietro’s stories, drinking wine and laughing. Occasionally Ladislas lowered his guard and the jealousy boiled over. Did the others realise?

  Catherine remembered how Ladislas had once deliberately plied Pietro with wine and whisky, and how Pietro had simply become more incandescent than before: his eyes like huge dark pools, fingers of colour limning his slanting cheekbones. The wine had made him shine more brilliantly, and it had been Ladislas who had become flushed and inarticulate and eventually rushed out to be sick. Pietro had only laughed and raised his glass and sent Catherine a wink across the room.

  Sleep was impossible. Even with the casement windows flung open to the sweet cool night air, it was beyond reach. Pietro was at home, and for Catherine the house vibrated and thrummed with life. At length she got up and, pulling on a thin robe, stole out through the house, going beneath the old stone arch and through to the old walled garden. The roses were here, the rioting blooms of ancient Persia and Isphahan. Had Elizabeth walked in this garden and felt her senses become intoxicated by the perfume? The roses were furled against the night, but their scent lay on the air, heady and drowsy, like mandragora, the sleep-juice, the love-syrup of the poets . . .

  And of course he was there. He had known she was coming, as he had always known.

  As I always will know, my love . . .

  He moved out of the shadows, part of the night, somehow mingled with the scents and the twilight, as insubstantial as the soft beating of wings overhead. And there is no one to see us out here, no one to know what we do . . . The moonlight showed up the passion and agony in his eyes – so he, too had suffered – and they were dark and broodingly intense eyes: suddenly, frighteningly, they were the eyes of Elizabeth’s portrait . . . And there is something else there, something that is hungry, something that is tinged with ancient evil . . . Why did I never see how much he resembled Elizabeth until now?

  ‘Couldn’t you sleep, Katerina?’ It was no longer the gentle, charming voice of the deferential nephew and cousin; it was the soft, intimate tone of the lover.

  ‘No,’ said Catherine, staring at him.

  ‘Nor could I,’ he said, and as his arms went round her, the moon slid behind a cloud.

  It was worlds and light years away from Elizabeth’s strange, barely understood desires, and it was aeons and galaxies away from the fumblings of the boy cousins and the darting dabbing kisses that were all Catherine had so far experienced.

  If it had to happen, it had been inevitable that it should happen here, in Elizabeth’s rose garden, behind the ancient stone walls, with the perfumed twilight enclosing them and the soft beating of wings overhead. I never meant it. I never schemed for it.

  But let me have just this one night, whispered Catherine, her mind spiralling between ecstasy and fear. Let me have this night, just this one, and I will never sin in this way again. On the other side of tonight lies cold emptiness and aching loneliness – I know it does – but just let me have this. Because if I can have this, I would go barefoot, I would make pilgrimages, suffer pain . . .

  One did not make bargains with God, but Catherine made one then with Pietro’s arms about her, with Pietro’s hands reaching for her.

  His lips against her cheek were soft and sinless and unbearably sweet, and his hands on her body were like velvet.

  His touch was raking at senses so deeply buried that Catherine had not known she possessed them, and his lips were stirring into awareness such a ravening desire that the twilit garden blurred and spun around her. His hands were burning her skin through the thin robe and there was the taste of fresh, masculine sweat and clean hair against her bare shoulders. She wanted to feel every part of him: eyes, skin, lips, hair, and she was conscious of every single bone beneath the smooth skin and of every shred of nerve and muscle . . . Learn it all, commit every fragment to memory, even the flickering dark inner persona, for there will never be another night, this will be all you will ever have, this will be all you will ever dare have . . .

  There was nothing ugly or alien about his body pressing against hers; about the hard, lean thighs, the pulsating heat between, hard and strong and demanding . . .

  Cloven is far more exciting than crested, my dear. . .

  Understanding exploded in a sunburst of delight, and Catherine thought: oh no, Elizabeth, you poor creature, you are wrong . . . There was a sudden surge of superiority over Elizabeth, who had preferred women to men, the cloven to the crested . . . Yes, now I understand. But Elizabeth had been wrong.

  Catherine’s hands were unbuttoning Pietro’s shirt, sliding inside of their own volition so that it was like watching somebody else do it. She could feel the light sprinkling of hair on his skin against her palms, faintly rough. Desire cleaved her body.

  There must have been a moment when he straightened up to undress but Catherine never remembered it. She only remembered the moment when the soft sweet grass was beneath her, and when Pietro’s skin was against hers . . . She could feel every line, she could feel the hard insistence against her thighs. Would there be pain? The cousins giggled that there was, that you bled, and that people screamed with agony at the first time.

  Pietro’s body entering her was like polished silk and a myriad of tiny
shooting stars began to explode within her. There was a kind of helpless violence about his every movement that clawed at Catherine’s heart and she sobbed and pulled him closer, feeling the pounding of her heart exactly in step with his. And then her senses, every glittering strand of love she was feeling, every shining thread of desire, spun and coiled into a huge, incandescent sphere, refractive with every colour of the spectrum, and exploded in a starburst of fiery iridescence. There was a long, velvet silence.

  At length, he broke it, sitting back, looking down at her, his expression one of such love and such anguish, that Catherine felt her heart splinter and ice form.

  ‘Katerina . . .’ The absurd, fanciful name that no one else ever used. Tears stung her eyes. He is going away. He is going away and I shall never be warm or happy again.

  Pietro said softly, ‘I cannot trust myself to stay, Katerina.’ He turned his head, so that the upper half was in shadow. But pinpoints of light showed in his eyes, making him a masked devil, a creature of the night . . .

  Without Pietro there would be nothing, anywhere, ever. But Catherine forced calm into her voice, and said, ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘France, I think. Paris.’

  He would fit well into Parisian Society. He had the charm and the intelligence. Catherine supposed he would have sufficient money to live comfortably, to enter some kind of social circle. He had always had the ability to slip effortlessly into whatever role was required of him – as he had done tonight? Please, no. Let it have meant as much to him as it did to me.

  He caught that, of course. He bent over her and brushed her skin with his lips and took her face between his hands as if he was printing her features on his mind. ‘So that I shall never truly be without something of you, my love.’

  My love . . . There was such helpless longing that Catherine’s senses spun and the night blurred into a dizzying confusion of love and hopelessness and the scent of the roses and the twilight.

  And then, in a sudden hard voice, he said, ‘Katerina, is there any way that you could leave Varanno?’

  ‘Leave Varanno?’ said Catherine, stupidly, staring at him. ‘Why?’ Was he asking her to come to him? Pietro and I in Paris . . .

  But he said, ‘This is a strange Family, Katerina. I don’t have any right to ask this, but I do ask it.’

  ‘What . . .?’

  Pietro took her hands suddenly, holding so tightly that it hurt. ‘Leave them,’ he said. ‘Not now, not tonight. But soon. Before—’

  ‘Yes?’

  For a moment he was looking at her with the soft, gentle eyes she had seen earlier. Love-filled eyes . . . Oh God, how am I going to get through the rest of my life never seeing that look again? And then, without warning, the darkness filled his eyes again, so that Catherine thought: Elizabeth . . . and stared at him. When he spoke, she could feel that he had set her beyond a barrier.

  ‘It’s a narrow life here for you,’ said Pietro. ‘Stifling.’ He touched her face again. ‘It would please me to think of you seeing more of the world. Before . . .’

  That word again. Catherine waited.

  ‘Before you become fossilised,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Caught like a fly in amber. Like a chrysalid.’

  ‘Nothing more than that?’

  For a moment she thought the darkness receded and that something haunted and tormented looked from his eyes. But then Pietro said, ‘Nothing more, Katerina.’

  And then he was gone, before she could say anything, he was gone and she was alone again – I awoke and found me here on the cold hillside. . . There was a thin smear of blood between her thighs, and the sensation of rich moisture within her body so that she understood that there had not been time or self-control for what was sometimes called Nature’s cheat. But there was nothing else to tell that it had ever happened.

  Only that the colour has gone from the world and the light has drained, and I shall never be warm or safe or happy again. She stayed where she was, hugging her knees, trying to infuse the warmth back into her body. Heart-cold. Bone-cold. A tiny wind ruffled the surface of the night, and, as the clouds scudded across the moon, a dark shadow fell across Catherine’s mind like a caress.

  Elizabeth.

  Chapter Six

  Elizabeth had never crouched in dry-eyed agony in a garden, aching for a man. She disliked men; she had hated her wedding night with the warrior count, Ferencz Nádasdy, to whom she had been betrothed as a child. She had been fifteen, and she had found the whole business repulsive.

  The marriage ceremonies had been dazzling, for it had been the joining of two ancient and illustrious names. The Emperor sent his blessing from Prague, together with jars of wine and two hundred thalers in gold as wedding gifts. The Empress sent goblets of beaten gold. Songs were written praising the bride’s beauty and the bridegroom’s bravery and there was music from gypsy orchestras. Elizabeth had been unutterably bored by it all, although she had enjoyed the feasting and she had enjoyed dressing for the celebrations. When Ferencz came to her bed she was perfumed and powdered; her hands were pomaded and her hair was brushed into a shining coil, threaded with rubies. She was gowned in her favourite white, and her eyes were burning pits in her little pointed face. She knew what had to be done and she would submit to Ferencz, but he would have to do it swiftly. They would get the tedious charade over as quickly as possible.

  Ferencz had been a little afraid of her; as she lay in the huge bed waiting for him, he had paused in the doorway and he had sketched the sign of the cross in the air. He had knelt down at the side of the bed and asked God’s blessing on the union and God’s protection against demons. His eyes had flickered to her when he had said that and Elizabeth had laughed silently. And then he had got into bed and pulled up his nightshirt and pressed his thick hairy body against her, forcing his ugliness inside her. He had jerked and bellowed like a bull, throwing his head back in crude triumph when his repulsive seed spurted into her body.

  It had been tedious and uncomfortable: like being poked with a thick, slimy stick, but Elizabeth was remembering that quick scared look he had given her. So Ferencz, with his ugly protruberances and his messy emissions, thought she was a demon, did he? So much to the good if it kept him away from her. If he became a nuisance, she would get rid of him. Poison? Poison was slow and eroding. She could watch him dying by agonised inches. The thought was far more exciting than anything Ferencz Nádasdy could do to her.

  In any event, it was only after the man had gone from your bed that you could get up and wash away the disgusting stickiness deposited inside you, and that you could go out to slake your real hungers . . .

  Your real hungers . . .

  Catherine had stayed in the rose garden for a long time after Pietro went, but at length she pulled the thin robe about her and went back into the house by a side door. Hungers to satisfy . . . Desires to slake . . . As she stole through the sleeping house, Elizabeth was with her, slinking catlike in the shadows. Catherine went cautiously into the kitchens, into the familiar, comfortable scents of baking and herbs and fresh-ground coffee. As she took the large electric torch from the shelf and then the glinting butcher’s knife from the wooden chopping block, Elizabeth watched approvingly.

  Once you have felt the thrust of the cloven, little sister, the other hunger awakes . . . And the blood never fails. . .

  Elizabeth had discovered it by accident. It had been an ordinary morning, with her maidservants gowning her for a midday banquet to welcome Ferencz and a party of huntsmen back. She would have to listen to them boasting about the animals they had killed, and she would have to admire their prowess. They would smell of stale sweat and unwashed leather and Ferencz would certainly come to her bedchamber that night, his body swollen and throbbing from the ardour of the hunt. He would grunt and poke at her and then fall into snorting slumber and the bedroom would smell of his wine-tainted breath and his farting. It was all too revolting to bear.

  It was as they were brushing her hair, preparatory to coiling it into a
jewelled snood, that one of the maidservants pulled too hard at one silken strand. Elizabeth lashed out at once, knocking the stupid, clumsy creature to the floor because she would not endure such fumbling, and if the wench sported a bruise for a week it would be no more than she deserved.

  But the girl was not just bruised, she was cut. The ornate rings from Elizabeth’s hand had torn her cheek and blood spurted from the wound, splashing on to Elizabeth’s uncovered arm.

  The women surrounded their mistress instantly, clucking and exclaiming, reaching for clean linen squares to mop away the stains, but Elizabeth pushed them away, staring down at her arm. White. Where the blood had smeared it, the skin that had been white already was whiter still. And the feel – it felt like silk, like spun gold.

  She raised her eyes to the servant who was cowering in a corner, and a slow smile curved her lips.

  Catherine reached down a dark mackintosh that somebody had left hanging in the small, stone-flagged flower room, and stole out into the gardens again. It was still full night, which was surprising; she had lived through an entire lifetime since those sweet, sinful moments with Pietro, and she had thought that dawn would long since be streaking the skies to the east.

  ‘Oh no, little sister, not yet; midnight’s arch is still rearing above us . . . This is the time when the incantations of the woodland sorceresses work best of all . . . This is the time when only lovers and witches are abroad . . .’