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Tanith Lee is the author of almost 100 books, over 270 short stories, 4 radio plays, 2 TV scripts, several (mostly closet) poems—but not a partridge in a pear tree. Her work includes fantasy, SF, horror, historical, YA, contemporary—and even the detective genre—plus endless combinations and crossovers of all of the above. She writes longhand, then types the results, in a blue and yellow room, through whose windows tall trees, squirrels, doves, pigeons and magpies stare, (naturally with appropriate disbelieving amusement).
“In childhood I wanted to be an actress,” Lee recalls, “but what I was, and am, is a writer. Acting on paper is my trade—the only thing I can really do well. The most important part of me.”
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1. Grey
Everyone said she was the perfect wife.
Perfect, that was, in her demeanour and her constancy. For example, she was never seen to look at another man, even should he be glamorous, except in the most friendly, indeed almost maternal way. She never flirted with him either, was only courteous, sympathetic and, when occasion called for it, amusing. It would seem, they said, Monsieur Carmineau must have more to him than met the eye. He must be an ardent and accomplished lover, a vigorous and entertaining partner in all the dual occupations of a marriage. They would not normally have suspected this of him. He was in his later fifties, and though as a youth not unattractive, now he had grown grey, jowly and corpulent. His own wit was rather slow. Nor was he either a poet or a dazzling intellectual, the sort that might despite all else still sweep a young woman into adoration. He did, however, own the big house, the Little Chateau, and its park. He was rich. And she. Madame Carmineau—well, she came, one heard, from very humble beginnings, a dead scholar’s daughter, who had been teaching ungrateful brats in the town, and they more likely to put a rotten cabbage or a dead mouse in her lap than to learn a single lesson. Probably she was grateful to be rescued. Probably she knew when her luck changed, and wanted to risk no new loss of it. And yet, Madame never appeared caught in a union of that order. She seemed—if not in love with her husband—yet raptly fond of him, sensitive only to his welfare. While there was about her the blissful inner vivacity, the hint of melancholy and unease, the absorption, that only those in love ever demonstrate. More, she seemed happy. Fulfilled. And true happiness and fulfillment are so rare, one must always doubt them, in oneself and others. For surely there is always something behind the densest and most sparkling veil that may give the lie to both.
~o0o~
At seven o’clock, rather late in fact, certain business confrères of Monsieur were to dine at the Little Chateau. Jeanne had spent an afternoon supervising the bevy of cooks and kitchen staff; thereafter, another two hours in self-preparation.
While she did this, she mentally reviewed the dinner guests. There was faddy Monsieur Belart, and didactic Monsieur Devalle, each with his wife. Besides there was the old actor Ronesset, whom Jeanne had privately christened the Wasp, for his verbal sting. Monsieur Ronesset brought no wife. He preferred himself to eat for two. To make up the extra female at table, Jeanne’s husband, Monsieur Carmineau, had asked the insane widow of a dog-breeder, Madame Tupe. She would come with her current ‘husband’ naturally, a hound by the name of Petit, a creature almost as tall as a horse and covered in thick black fur.
Did Jeanne sigh over these guests? Not at all. She did not mind them. She always made sure Belart’s food was exact, listened respectfully to Devalle, subtly commiserated with both their spouses, laughed at Ronesset’s stings, and agreed with every word uttered by La Tupe. And when the English custom was observed, and the ladies withdrew to leave the men to their brandy, pipes and cigars, (Mme Tupe would always remain) fed the two wives and the big dog called Small, who usually left with the retiring ladies, treats and dessert wines in the hothouse.
It tickled Jeanne slightly, the way in which the other women always puzzled over her. Each time, even as they pecked the sweets and fruits, they would try to tease out of her some confession of regret. They failed. They, on the other hand, (around the second glass of Armagnac au Framboise) were soon openly regretful on their own accounts. “Oh, Devalle can be such a beast!” “Oh, Monsieur Bel drives me into madness with his carping—I have lost our third cook only this month, due to his foolishness!” “Woof,” said Petit softly, gnawing a honey-glazed meat-bone under the ferns. As if to add, “And none of you knows what I have to put up with from that Tupe woman.”
This evening, things went as always.
Jeanne, in her pale silk gown, oversaw the candles and flowers and the impeccable service of a tasty, greedy dinner. Now and then, between her attentiveness to his guests, she glanced at her old husband. Tonight he had a glow from the wine, and when their eyes met they smiled at each other, assured, content. If she had been twenty-five years older, even so some might have remarked on it, for contemporaneously aging couples do not always like each other, either.
Next in the hothouse among the orange trees, Jeanne commiserated as ever with the wives, yet contrived also to spare the erring husbands. “How aggravating for you, Sophie—” this to Mme Belart. “Your fourth cook to leave. Dreadful! He is so fortunate you are so kind. And I suppose poor Monsieur does suffer with his stomach. But you are so understanding and clever, why he’d be lost without you, wouldn’t he?” Or: “Poor Monsieur Devalle must be so tired after his work at the university. Yet how exhausting for you, Annette, with everything else you must deal with.” To the dog luckily she need only slip a candied alcoholic cherry to soothe his nerves.
Eventually in great gladness they were able to unite en masse in the wish that Monsieur Ronesset should be flogged and drowned. While they were, when with him, his merciless target, he became theirs once they were out of his hearing. Soon the hothouse rang with pitiless laughter as they pictured him hung up for crows to peck—let him try his stinging remarks on them.
Petit meanwhile slept. Jeanne stroked his huge sleeping forehead, which frowned somewhat in slumber. Had he been a cat, she thought, he would be purring. But he led the life of a slave with his mistress, this extraordinary animal. Walked once every day or so, by one of La Tupe’s reluctant and scared servants, but only around the paved paths of the town’s public gardens. Meagrely fed on ‘healthful’ foods that left him hungry. Expected to attend his owner in virtual silence and to behave like a well-trained lap-dog. When all the while he should be romping over fields and through woods, terrifying innocent rabbits and barking at sun, moon and stars. Jeanne felt she respected Petit. She sensed that he acted as well as he did less from coercion than out of his compassionate nature and good manners.
The party concluded around eleven. The church clock was striking from the village, clearly heard across the summer night.
The guests climbed, most of them heavily, (the dog included) into their carriages. Only Ronesset sprang like an elderly and over-athletic weasel into his equipage, and sat there picking his pointed fangs with a silver toothpick filched from the table. “Won’t miss this gew-gaw, will you, Carmineau? No, I shouldn’t think so. I’ve seen better on a stage. But the food was not so bad. Even if your cook can’t tell a flambé from a flambeau.”
Off they all presently rattled, into the darkness under the trees.
A huge golden moon stood high in the east, calling the earth to wake for day-in-night. But yawning, Jeanne’s husband led her back towards the house. Below the servants were dousing the lights.
Husband and wife climbed the stair, he commenting on the dinner in a mild and satisfied manner. He thanked Jeanne, as he always did, for her stewardship of house and table, and complimented her on her charming looks, the way her fine brown hair shone in candlelight, the luminous whiteness of her skin. Despite that, she knew he would be too drained by the pleasures of the evening to ask, polite as he always was, and more so when asking this, if he might visit her in half an hour in her bedroom. She never of course refused such a visit. She had no reason to. She had guessed from the first, and been proved right, that Monsieur Carminaeu was a gentle and undemanding lover, dull but in no way unwholesome or offensive. The transaction was on every occasion swiftly accomplished. Nor did he expect lies and raptures from Jeanne, only that she did not mind, and she demonstrated freely that she did not. The other aspect of the arrangement which pleased her besides was that she suspected her husband was sterile, and this far had found him so. She had no wish to bear a child, having had more than enough of them when forced to teach.
At the top of the gracious stairway, they graciously kissed each other on the lips. He said to her the one sweet and romantic thing then of which he felt able to deliver himself. “Sleep well, my beauty. You are the jewel of my life.” He meant these words, and sometimes when he said them, (as he had, almost every week of their four-year life together) his eyes filled briefly with the tears of truth and joy. Because of this also, Jeanne loved him. For love him she did, as he loved her. The ideal couple, in their own fashion. They parted quietly, each going to their own chamber.
Now risen so high, the golden plate of the moon blazed on the roof of the Little Chateau, screaming and hammering to be felt and answered.
But every light had faded from the house.
Beneath heaven’s fire, even the black woods seemed sleeping.
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 though 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.
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.
Jeanne propelled herself from the bed. She was alert and fired by independent anger. By a sort of hunger, too, that was unconnected with food.
Hurling herself into her clothes, she found peculiar alterations there, as if suddenly nothing fitted her, despite doing so perfectly well the day before. Then she was opening the door, running down the cranky stair, expelling herself from the outer doorway and yard on to the cobbled thoroughfare to find this was no longer the street she had lived by and been familiar with for so many years.
She stood amazed. (Indeed, the astonishment of a Monsieur Carmineau, confronted by the rising phoenix of his youthful ardour for a pretty woman, was nothing to Jeanne’s upon that alien street.)
She had never beheld, either in ordinary reality or a painting, such a place. Yet, to be fair, very likely she might have read of one in, say, the translated tomes of Arabia, Greece or Italy.
The byway was itself made of hard-packed earth that baked in the heat of a dry and sultry night. (The rain then was also gone.) All along the way squatted innumerable tiny shops, these mostly like caves, in which mysterious objects sparkled like eyes from the flare of various flambeaux on poles, or clay dishes of oil, each with a single tear of fire. Here and there a canopy, awning or patterned carpet hung down. There was the smell of spice and dust, oil and alcohol, perfume and incense. High above, abnormal constellations lustered in vast quantities, as if a sack of diamond sugar had been spilled all over the sky. The road was additionally full of people. Some idled, others scurried by. Tall horses, caparisoned with tassels and bells, jingled arrogantly past. Their riders, hawk-like faces muffled in hoods or other wrappings, stared with contempt on all and everything.
Directly across from where she stood—which, turning again, Jeanne saw as in an ornately-carved stone gateway, shut by a stout black door—a tavern blared with lamps.
This is no dream—so Jeanne thought to herself. She was by now, after all, familiar with her relocation to otherness. But unlike the pine-grown garden, this place was of a very different other time, and of another culture, too. Even another earth.
At the same moment, she realized her unmanageable garments had adjusted themselves. Without looking down, although soon she felt compelled to do so, she grasped that now she wore the fine silk shirt, breeches and cloak of some well-off male of the environ. All was embroidered. Even the boots had been incised with silver. And at her side, (she was still most definitely a woman, as this escapade had altered her apparel not her gender) hung a light and lissom sword, with what seemed a sapphire in its pommel.
Jeanne engaged herself by swaggering a little. She next crossed to the inn. And when a boy ran out and begged to know what she would have, she tossed him a coin from a pouch handily at her belt, and called for wine.
No sooner had she downed the cup than she heard again behind her that voice which had intruded on her bedroom. This time, it was augmented by a sharp tap on her left shoulder.
Sauntering around, Jeanne beheld her new companion.
There was no doubt, this too was a woman. But clad, like Jeanne, in the exquisite garments of a wealthy male, even to boots and sword. The entire costume was of a deep sky blue leavened with more somber tones, and sewn with lapis lazuli. The hue, however, did not give over its theme. It had informed the colouring of the woman herself. Her eyes were the blue of smoke, and quite beautiful. But the lashes and brows which framed them were of a dark indigo shade, while the cascade of hair, that in the earthly room had seemed black, was itself of an even denser blue tint, smalt blue, like the glaze on a priceless plate. Nor was the woman’s skin merely pale. It was like dusk reflecting on white snow.
“Well,” said the woman, her face cold as her glamorous colour, “what do you want, then?”
“I?” said Jeanne, amused. “It was you yourself that called me here.”
“I never called you. What rubbish. Go back to wherever you came from. Some lesser hell, no doubt.”
“With you gone from it, it must be hell now,” said Jeanne. “But,” she added, “not a lesser place, if you were ever in it.”
“Why do you pursue me in this way?” demanded the woman.
“Oh, as to that—why do you think?”
“You are obsessed by me,” replied the woman.
“Body and soul,” Jeanne heard herself answer. This, now, did not confound her. She knew it to be true, just as, her initial disorientation over, she knew the woman. As though they had met every day for all the years of Jeanne’s young life, played and fought together as children, later dallied, (yes, dallied too when adults—lovers) at least in Jeanne’s many feverish dreams.
But at the declaration, the blue woman drew her sword with a practiced air.
Jeanne felt no misgiving. A tide of delirious abandon went over her. (It was comparable, perhaps, even if she did not then compare them, to those times when Angeval had swept her up in his strong arms, spread her before him, mastered her and ridden with her through the golden spasms of exploding moons.) This was surrender of another order. Yet, like the other, it had the most feared, longed-for, bitter-sweet taste in it of death.
“I must kill you, I see,” said Jeanne’s beloved foe, “to be rid of you.”
“Kill me if you wish. That won’t do it. I’d rise from any grave to haunt you. But then, naturally, we are pre-supposing you might succeed.” And she drew also, her blade with the sapphire.
The street had cleared. Since their meeting, all passers-by seemed to have withdrawn themselves. Maybe they still watched intently from hidden apertures. Or else, the essential privacy of the duel between Jeanne and her opponent conjured its own supernatural exclusivity.
Only the lamps and torches now, to see, the secret gleams that were not eyes, and the many billion stars.
The swords smote on each other, sent up lightnings, crossing and recrossing. Jeanne became aware that both she and the woman fought—seemingly—with lethal intent. As if one of them must surely kill the other.
In spite of the prelude, perhaps Jeanne was taken aback. She had discovered herself well-versed in sword-play, which in her ordinary life she had never been. Versatile she, as did her adversary, translated their match into an elegant and witty spectacle, which even the stars might be enthralled to spy upon. But in the instant of realizing where it would lead, this choreography, Jeanne lost her concentration. Only a moment. Enough.
She felt the woman’s blade pierce all through her with such minimal difficulty, Jeanne’s own body must be like a green stem—without bones—though not lacking blood, because now blood sprang from her, copious, like wine.
The world darkened. Stars, lights, fading. The sapphire sword dropped miles off with a tinsel sound. As she sank, the other caught her. Jeanne did not know if she were dying, not even if the blade had struck her heart. There was no pain.
But the woman with blue hair held her; this was all that mattered. She had the scent to her of open skies, of sand dyed blue with evening. “Listen,” the dark voice breathed in Jeanne’s ear, across the sea-song of faintness or death. “I love you. I love you. I will always be with you. You’re mine.”
And in Jeanne’s last conscious second, she felt the pressure, the divine invasion of this lover’s ice-smouldering kiss. Then through the black door in the gateway Jeanne drifted. And fell back, woundless and whole, into the wretched reality of her own world.
~o0o~
Jeanne named this daemon Lalise. Jeanne did not have a reason for the name, did not select it. Like the events of their first meeting, the name occurred, and was.
To begin with, nevertheless Jeanne believed the first meeting might be the only one. Or would it, as with Jeanne’s first sight of Angeval, not be repeated until some years had passed? This was not to be the case. Her female daemon returned only a few nights later, at the end of the very day, in fact, that several gifts arrived from the elderly suitor, Monsieur Carmineau.
Thereafter, Jeanne met as often with Lalise as with Angeval. And her meetings with Lalise never altered in their main component of flirtatious, adoring, delicious dread. Just as the times with Angeval never changed their tumults of fulfilling passion, their glorious and uncomplex joy.
With Angeval she made love. With Lalise she made a loving and lascivious hate. To the heights of ecstasy Jeanne ascended in each scenario, never disappointed, although the dramas, and their climaxes, were so unlike each other in content and form. Honey and opium. Kiss and steel. Lace and blade.
A week after her wedding, folded in previously unknown comforts, (and only a night or so after her full consummation with Angeval) Jeanne and Lalise duelled to the death, as so frequently they did. Yet the outcome was not always fixed. It varied. As did the venue, which was sometimes again the street of shops, or inside the tavern, or sometimes in an open square with fountains, on a night road walled by grasslands, in the nave of some huge building like a cathedral. And Lalise might spurn the duel and turn mockingly away—or else seize Jeanne, embrace her with an incinerating flare of desire, only then to push Jeanne from her with, “You? Oh, most others will find you appealing. But to me, you’re nothing.” Even, once or twice, Lalise would appear in female garb, her midnight hair piled intricately on her head with combs of turquoise. And Jeanne, still clad as a man, would woo her as a man would, attempting Lalise’s seduction—and agonizingly almost achieve her goal— then lose, lose all, as always she must, since Lalise, in breeches or petticoats, was her master, and Jeanne an abject slave.
With the golden lover, consummation was essential and certain and could never fail.
With the azure lover, resolution must never be reached. As it never would be.
~o0o~
Approaching the chateau, Jeanne walked slowly. Like a wild beast of the woods, she scented dawn. She was wonderfully tired out from the pleasures of Angeval’s attentions, yet vaguely felt a foreshadow of Lalise, even in the dew that coolly startled her feet. Jeanne sighed, replete, but not sated.
And precisely then, she glimpsed the dark animal she had seen earlier, racing across the distant lawns, its coat spangled with dew. What could it be? Some big dog, perhaps, from a neighbouring farm? Her instincts still honed, Jeanne knew it meant her no harm, although she sensed too it saw her, as nonhuman creatures always did, while her fellow humans, unvisited themselves by daemons, never could.
Reaching the lower door, Jeanne paused. She aligned herself again with her role of wife. And her thoughts turned to her old, naive husband, Carmineau, with great fondness.
She would, she thought, rather suffer on a rack than hurt him. But she never could hurt him. There was no one else who could rival what she had. No human lover would ever tempt her.
Jeanne knew, as few are given to know, will and vow and mean it as they may, that she would not be unfaithful to her husband. At least, amid the concrete reality of mankind. Which was all that counted, was it not, in the mortal world.
~o0o~
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 144, 1609
Epilog. Amethyst
He woke, some faint unusual noise woke him. Leaving his bed
, Monsieur Carmineau went to the long window and looked out on his park. He wondered if he would see Jeanne out there, on one of her nocturnal jaunts, and smiled a little, thinking of her, and of that. He did not grudge her, any more than he grudged her the luxuries their marriage afforded. She was a lovely girl, his Jeanne, and he had long wished for a pretty wife to adorn his house. In any event, it was not Jeanne he saw, there in the mauve hour before sunrise. It was the dog! By the stars, the black hound of La Tupe, Petit—who had been borne home in the carriage hours back, and doubtless locked indoors as ever. But now Petit was rushing over the lawn towards the woods, with a rabbit in his jaws. Except, of course, the rabbit was abnormally large, and silvery, and not really a rabbit. Instead, it would be Petit’s daemon of a rabbit, which no doubt he always successfully caught, and in vast quantities. And what other daemons, Carmineau curiously wondered, did Petit possess? A paramour...?
Who would have thought it? How splendid! That a dog too might live another life, while back on his cushion Petit’s big furred body seemed to lie, the simulacrum twitching in sleep. Yet Petit was out there. As Jeanne probably was. While he, Maurice Carmineau—
Ah. Monsieur half turned, and saw the phantom shape that now occupied his bed. It was old and grey and it snored softly, poor old man. While he, obviously, he stood at the window.
Carmineau glanced down at himself. He was twenty-five years of age, his hair the deep brown of polished wood, his skin smooth. Quite muscular, yet very slim. An attractive young man and see, dear me, already erect.
Because, without the whisper of a lie, he knew what came next. What always came next.
It did, too.
The panelled wall had melted. And there he stood as well, the other young man. Oh God, so beautiful, in his amethyst silk coat of over a hundred years ago, and his black hair worn unpowdered and long, to tantalize—as it did, oh it did—and his shirt undone and—such an abundance. Such eagerness so visible, even though the pale handsome face was grave.
“Why, Maurice. How is you are so selfishly out of bed? Well then, dear friend, you’d better come with me to my bed, hadn’t you? Before I perish of lack.”
And Maurice left the window and the pre-dawn light, the dog, and his wife, and crossed to his lover, kissing and kissing him, and cupping as he did so the excellent greeting already evidenced, through the purple clothes.
“I missed you, Pierre. Three days and nights since we met.”
