She with apples you desired
From Paradise came long ago:
With you I feel that if required,
Such still within my garden grow.
Shelley
By the end of the first night, he knew that his lodging was haunted. From the night’s first minute, he should have guessed.
A hag greeted him on the threshold.
“M’sire Raoulin?” squawked she in her old-fashioned way. And in the dusk she held high one quavering candle. He learned at once by that the interior would be ill-lit.
“I am Raoulin. My baggage and chest have arrived?”
“You are to follow me,” she said, like a portress of the damned in Hell, who could not be expected to have luggage.
“To my host, your master?:”
She said, “There’s no master here. There’s no one here. M’sire No One is the lord in these parts.”
She led him in across a black cavern of a hall, over a blacker courtyard, up an outer stair, in at an arch, along two or three corridors, and in the light-watered darkness opened for him a wooden door with her keys. When she had lit a pair of candles in his apartment, she told him she would bring his supper in an hour, or if he liked company he might partake below in the kitchen with herself and the groom. Plainly he was not royalty, and she intended him to see she knew it.
Out of malicious curiosity therefore he said he would dine below. She gave him directions he was sure he would forget.
“And mind out, on the stair,” she said.
“Mind what?”
“For M’sire No One,” she replied, and cackled.
She was a cheery eerie old soul.
Raoulin was a tall, well-made young man, good-looking in his ivory-ebony mode, for he was by stock a black-haired northerner. His father owned horses and cattle, vineyards, orchards and numberless fields, and in the long low house, while the other sons toiled at the land or galloped off wenching, there was Raoulin, constricted by tutors. They swelled his brain with Latin and fair Greek, they made inroads on his spirit with philosophy and hints alchemical.
Raoulin was to go to the City and study at the university of the Sachrist.
When the hour came, he was not sorry. He had been set apart from his family by increasing erudition. It had come to pass he could not sneeze without being accused of some sophistry or conundrum. For the City, he had heard it was packed with churches, libraries and brothels. It was the epitome of all desired wickedness: teases for the intellect, pots for the flesh.
The lodging was arranged via his father’s steward, who told him only the place had been, a decade before, a great palace, the home of the noble house of d’Uscaret. They had fallen on hard times, through some political out-management, the steward believed. For the mighty families of the City had, even ten years before, been constantly engaged with one another, fighting their blood-feuds on the streets and cutting each other’s throats besides in the Duke’s council chamber.
Certain members of tribe d’Uscaret were still supposed to live in the mansion. It was said to be dilapidated but also sumptuous. A prestigious residence, a good address.
But no sooner had Raoulin ridden along the narrow twilight street and seen the towers of the manse arising behind their ruinously walled gardens, the ornate, unillumined facade, like that of some antique tomb, than he was sure of poverty, plagues of mice and lice, and that the steward of his father, altogether fonder of the other sons, had done him a bad turn.
Supper was not so bad, a large vegetable dish with rice, and a gooseberry gelatine, pancakes, and ale. Though money had been provided for his fare, Raoulin was not sure he would not be cheated. As it was, grandma tucked in heartily, and the bony groom, smacking lips and clacking their three or four teeth like castanets.
“Perhaps,” said Raoulin, “you might get me some beef tomorrow.”
“Maybe, if beef’s to be had. And my poor legs aren’t fit for running up and down to the meat market,” replied grandma.
“Then send the girl,” said Raoulin casually. “And by the by, I hope you’ll see she’s fed too.”
A silence greeted this.
Raoulin poured himself more ale.
The groom sat watching him like a motheaten old wolf, dangerous for all his dearth of fangs. The hag peered fiercely from her mashed plate.
“We have no girl. He and I, is all.”
“Then, she’s the lady of the house. I beg her pardon.”
In fact, he had not thought her a servant, not for one minute. It had been a test.
Now the hag said again, “Only us. And yourself.”
“And M’sire No One. Yes, I recall. But in the corridors I passed this lady. A maiden, I believe.”
Then the groom spoke. He said, “That can’t be, for let me tell you, sieur, there’s no other living soul in this house saving we and you.”
“Oh, a ghost, then,” said Raoulin.
His heart jumped, not unpleasantly. He did not believe in ghosts, therefore longed to have their being proved to him, like the existence of God.
He had of course lost himself on emerging from his apartment. There were no lights anywhere, only the worm-runs of windowless corridors on which the occasional door obtruded. Now and then, from perversity, he had tried these doors. Three gave access to barren chambers, empty of nearly anything. One had a shuttered window, another a candle-branch standing on the floor. (The branch was of iron, worth little. The candle-stubs had long ago been devoured by vermin.) A few other doors resisted his impulse. He fancied they were stuck rather than locked. Presently he reached an ascending stair he was certain he had not seen on entry with the hag. He paused in irritated perplexity, wondering if it would be worthwhile to climb. Just then a woman appeared and went across the stair-top, evidently negotiating the corridor which ran parallel to that below.
She did not carry a candle, and that he saw her at all was due to his own light, and the pallor of her hair and skin which caught it. Her gown was of some sombre stuff, high-waisted as was now not always the fashion, and she held her hands joined under her breast. A stiff silver net contained her hair; it glittered sharply once as she glided by. That was all. She was gone literally in that flash. Her face he did not really see, yet her slightness, something about her, made him think her girlish.
Anyone else, going over the unlit upper corridor, must have glanced downward at his light. Not she.
He had lacked the impertinence to pursue.
He waited all through supper to see if any reference would be made to the fair passager – he had decided she was attractive; she had to be, being mysterious.
“And if she is a ghost,” he continued, “whose ghost?”
The groom and the old woman exchanged looks. Raoulin had seen such before. The camaraderie of age against youth, stupid cunning against stupid intelligence, the low against the better who was not better enough to get respect.
“There’s no ghost here,” said the old woman at length. “You were dreaming, your head full of scholar books.”
“All right,” said Raoulin, pleased by the heightening Stygian shade of deception, faithfully observed as in any romance. “Probably a trick of the candle.”
Returning towards his rooms, he tried for the fork of the corridor where he had lost himself and found the stair.
He could not regain it.
Having gone up and down and round and about for quite an hour, having peered into further fruitless rooms of dust, mouse-cities, broken furniture, he only rediscovered his rightful corridor with difficulty. His heart, which had begun by beating excitedly, was now leaden with weariness. Reaching his bed, thank God aired with hot stones, he flung himself among the sheets and barely had space to blow out the candle before he was asleep.
Here, unconscious, he dreamed the door to his apartment was stealthily opened. A slim shadow drifted over the outer chamber. He sensed it examining as it went the closed travelling chest, the books he had already set out, a small reliquary his mother had pressed upon him. Then, entering the bedroom, all in black night, the shadow cast around. White fingers, that glimmered in the void, traced his doublet where he had thrown it down, a purse of coins – he heard them chink – his dagger – he longed to warn her to be careful, the edge was newly honed.
Then to the brink of his bed she stole, this immoderate phantom.
In utter black, through sleep and closed eyelids, yet he made her out.
A mask of Parsuan porcelain floated above him in a silver-grilled aureole-light of blondest hair. As he had known it must be, the face was lovely, and cool as snow. And the eyes – ! Never had Raoulin seen such eyes. Wide-set, carved a touch slantingly, fringed with pale lashes, and very clear. And oh, their colour. They were like the jewels he remembered from a bishop’s mitre, two matching emeralds, green as two linden leaves against the sun.
Asleep, miles off, Raoulin attempted to order his body to speak to her. But the words could not be dredged up from the sea, his lips and tongue refused obedience.
Drowning, he could only gaze on her as she drew aside from him, swimming far away, over the horizon of night.
One day remained to Raoulin before he must present himself at the university. How he regretted its brevity. He had meant to use the time in exploration of the wicked City of Paradys, but now a morning sufficed for this. He visited the markets, and pried amongst the crannied shops, saw the shining coils of the river straddled by bridges, gazed on the great grey Temple-Church of the Sacrifice, where he must hear at least one Mass and report the fact to his mother.
By early afternoon he had strayed back south-west of the City, to gloomy House d’Uscaret.
In daylight, the upland streets – the mansion was on one of the many hills that composed Paradys – were not appetising. Nothing fell so low as the highmost. There were other large houses and imposing towers in the area, now gone to tenements, tiles off, stones crumbling, strung with torn washing. In the alleys was disgusting refuse. Every crevice seemed to hold debris or the bones of small deceased animals.
Having gained the house by a side entry, to which the hag had given him a key, Raoulin set himself to master the building.
He had determined to recover the ghost’s corridor, and all through the hot post-noon he sought it, and, wide-awake, finally found it, too. The corridor seemed redolent yet of her ghostly fragrance. And shivering slightly, he started along in the direction she had chosen. Soon enough it gave on a further flight of ascending steps – perhaps the spectre had a lair … But the solitary door above was disappointingly jammed – or secured – Raoulin could only concede that this kept up the best traditions of romance.
Then came another fall of stairs leading down, with, at their head, a slit of window covered by a ‘grill’. Looking out, Raoulin realised himself to be in a tall tower of the house. He saw the pebbled slope of roofs, and, to his surprise, noticed the distant miniature of the Temple-Church adrift like a promontory in soft haze.
Taking the downward stair, he next arrived against a low door, which for an amazement opened.
There lay a garden, walled apart from the rest.
It had been made for a woman, he supposed; even through the riot of weeds and ivy, a map of vestal symmetry was apparent. A garden of more southern climes, modelled, maybe, on the classical courts of the Roman. Clipped ilex and conifer that had burst from shape, a tank of marble all green with lichen and with a green velvet scum upon it. The wrecks of arbours were visible, and a charming statue, a young girl in a graceful tunic, holding up an archaic oil-lamp which once it had been possible to kindle.
Raoulin trod down paths, breaking the skeins of creeper with his elegant shoes, the ivy trying to detain him by clutching at the points of his sleeves and hose.
No birds sang in that garden of emerald green. He knew it had been made for her – or that she had made it her own.
Therefore, he was not startled, reaching the end of an avenue, to confront the bank of yew in which gaped a black frontage: the arched portico of a mausoleum.
The tomb was not very big, nor very old, quite fresh. He read with ease the name on the arch in its bannering of stone. While, student-scholar that he was, he had no trouble either with the Latin underneath.
Helise d’Uscaret
Brought a bride to this House
Now at the court of Death below
A huge lock maintained the entrance of the tomb. But, thought Raoulin, leaning on a tree, a ghost could pass straight through all walls, of wood, iron or granite.
Useless then to fasten up his own chamber. Even had he dreamed of doing so.
He wished to be served his supper that night in his rooms. He did not question the hag. He told her nothing. He did not even note she had put some morsels of beef into his stew, as requested.
During the evening, he glanced upon a few books, and partly turned his mind towards the morning. But the Sachrist had lost its stature.
In a strange condition he took himself early to bed, soon after the City bells had rung the Hesperus. (He would need to rise at Prima Hora.)
He lay on his back, besieged by sensuality, and lovely listless desires that had no need to exert themselves or to hold back. Lethargy stole slowly but certainly upon him, the harbinger. Sleep came in drifts, easily, totally, before the window had quite darkened.
But she, she did not come at all.
Though he had been trained to be something of a thinker, Raoulin was not properly a dreamer. Where he inclined to poetry, it was the cadence of the moment.
The ghost had failed to keep their assignation, and continued to fail.
Within a month, unsupplied by anything further uncanny, and by then thoroughly embroiled in the student life of the university, Raoulin had put the green-eyed haunt aside. It is true that he referred privately to the house as “bewitched” and even once in conversation with a fellow student had described his address as “d’Uscaret the ghost mansion.” But the fellow student had only absently remarked that among the desuetudinous old houses of Ducal times, there were scarcely any that did not have either a phantom or a curse.
By day the university, which was run rather on the classical lines, worked its claws into his brain, and Raoulin caught a fever of learning only before intimated. By night he had now friends of the same feather, unlike his leery brothers, with whom to go debating and drinking. More often than not, as the first month enlarged to a plural, Raoulin did not bother to sup at his lodging, but dined in some cheap tavern with his comrades, went to a cock-fight, or to watch in their season the street players, who would set up their stages under the walls of the Sacrifice, or such commemorative plague churches as Our Lady of Ashes. His head was either burnished with wine or bright with ideas, the licence or strictures of Petronius, Petrarch, and Pliny the Other, the miracles of Galen. Raoulin was aware he was happy, but wisely, like a superstitious savage in some travelogue of the Caesars, did not name his state.
With the wine-shops and bookshops and passing shows, temporal or religious, he was soon familiar. Not so after all with the brothels. Some caution from home had stuck, concerning dread diseases, and heartless females intent only on robbery. Raoulin had been accustomed to the wholesome but difficult girls of the village, or to celibacy perforce.
The ghost had fired his blood, but that was only to be expected. Women were the Devil’s, and if dead or damned, their power must be irresistible. You could not be blamed for fancying a ghost.
But the phantom came no more to tickle him in helpless sleep.
Instead it was Joseph who caught his arm and said, “Tomorrow is a Holy Day.”
“Good. Let us be holy,” replied Raoulin.
Joseph laughed, and the dark sunlight of evening glinted on his eye-glasses and the silver tags of his points – for Joseph was not poor.
“I had another notion in mind. Over the river is a tavern, by name the Black Smith. Behind lies a house which calls itself the Sweet Cup.”
“Ah ha,” said Raoulin cautiously.
“The girls are clean, you have my word,” said Joseph. “I’ve been there.”
“I have a treatise on the fifth humour –”
“First come and console the possibly non-existent other four. The world is for man’s enjoyment.”
On the board of the tavern was a mighty Nubian – the eponymous smith – who, swinging high his hammer, was about to crush the noddle of a fallen enemy sprawled across the anvil. Raoulin regarded this sign with interest, disfavour, and amusement. They drank no more than a token goblet, however, before going through a hind door and out across a yard. Here a ladder had been fixed, seeming to ascend into a hayloft. “What kind of pastoral cubby is this?” demanded Raoulin jollily: the one goblet had been of the strong kind. “Never fear, you shall see wonders,” answered Joseph.
They managed the ladder and so got into the loft. It seemed bare, and they crossed in near blackness.
The far end of the loft gave them a shut door. Joseph knocked loudly in five spaced raps.
Presently a tiny aperture, like the spy-hole of a nunnery, was opened, and someone looked out at them invisibly. A woman’s voice inquired: “Who is there?”
“Two men.”
“Are you thirsty?” asked the voice.
“For a sweet cup,” said Joseph.
Apparently all this was in the nature of a password. The door of the brothel came unbarred, and they were let through.
Raoulin stared. He was in a lobby, the plaster of whose walls was covered by paintings of a vivid and obscene nature.
There a shepherd disrobed a shepherdess by means of his crook, there a minstrel, his curvaceous viol put by, gently bowed the naked breasts of a lady instead – and there a priapic faun frolicked with two dryads in garlands of grapes and vine leaves. Swerving about from this, Raoulin encountered the door-keeper herself, who was startlingly clad in the draped garment of an antique Roman lady, a thing of such fine gauze that through it every contour, glint and shade of her otherwise nudity might be seen.
This nymph greeted them with an Eastern flourish.
“Will you drink of the bowl of joy?”
“We will,” said Joseph.
The nymph ran her glance across Raoulin. Her eyes were edged with kohl and her cheeks powdered. Her face had on more clothing than her body.
“Do you know the custom of the house?”
Joseph nodded. Raoulin, his blood thundering in his ears, was prepared to learn it.
From a pedestal the nymph raised a large cup of white ceramic. She held it out before them.
Joseph reached in a hand, and plucked something forth.
“Take a counter,” he said to Raoulin. “That’s how you select your girl.”
“What? Unseen? Suppose she’s not to my taste –”
The nymph said to him smoothly, flirtatiously, “Every one of our damsels is beautiful.”
“Whose word do I have?” (Joseph wriggled uneasily.) “What if,” said Raoulin, primed still by the one strong goblet, “I prefer you?”
But just then he became aware of a man stirring in the shadow of a curtain beyond the paintings. Big and black he looked, like the smith off the tavern sign. So Raoulin shrugged, paid as Joseph did what he was asked, and took a small square counter like a die from the cup.
The nymph, while she had not responded to his sally, did not seem to dislike him for it. She said to Joseph, “You know the way, sieur. I’ll guide your friend.”
Then the curtain was drawn aside (the bully had effaced himself) and they entered a corridor. It appeared to run back a long way, and its sides were made mostly of high wooden screens which creaked mysteriously and emitted driblets of light. Although the screens were occlusive, weird shadows had been flung up on the low uneven ceiling, tangles of writhing knots, like serpents. And there were sounds too, perhaps like the noises in Hell, gasps and grunts, squeals and moans, and now and then a cry, a blasphemy, a prayer.
Raoulin was filled by apprehension as by lust. They had long since become, these two emotions, mutually conducive.
Suddenly Joseph slunk aside. He went through one of the screens and was consumed into the abyss.
The door-keeper had not looked at the counter Raoulin selected, perhaps it made no difference. She led him unerringly, and all at once the corridor was crossed by a pair of aisles. These were both of them in darkness. The nymph halted, and pointed to the left-hand way.
“Yes?” said Raoulin uncertainly.
“Yes, m’sieur,” said the door-keeper. And reaching up, she kissed him on the lips with a little snake’s flicker of the tongue. “The very last of the doors. It’s marked with the same mark as on the counter. For you, something special.”
Then she was gone, leaving him alight with the thirst of the house.
He went into the corridor and saw that it did indeed have doors rather than screens. The last of these, blundered on in the gloom, was marked with – what was it? A sort of mask … He did not wait for more, but pushed at the barrier. It swung open with a lubricious croak.
Again, Raoulin had pause.
There was a pale-washed room with an Eastern carpet on one wall, the floor very clean, and lightly strewn with colourless flower-heads picked for their scent, as in a lady’s chamber. One felt one had stumbled into the wrong house. Against another wall stood a couch, perhaps too wide for virginity; yet otherwise this was all the stuff of a well-to-do and pure girl’s bedroom – even to the straightbacked chair and the little footstool. These, turned a fraction away from the door, were occupied.
Raoulin’s heart, ready engorged like his loins, took a leap. Was it all some jest – some mischief – but how would Joseph have known –?
Raoulin closed the door with stealth, and began to walk silently forward, his heart noisy, and prepared for anything –
As he circled like a fox, the posed picture came visible, the chair and the girl seated in it, her blonde head slightly bent, her face dippered into shadow …
She wore a black gown, but its lacing, at the bosom not the back, had been loosed, and under it there was no modest “breast-plate” of embroidered linen or silk, only the silken pressure of two breasts. Her feet were bare upon the stool, and nearly all one leg, the skirt of the gown caught up as if through negligence. Her left hand lay idly at her throat, just above the portion of white flesh that rose, swelled and tugged at the laces of the bosom, and sank down, leaving them slackened. The right hand rested upon an object which nestled at her belly. It was a skull.
Here was a maiden discovered alone and untrammelled, her hem carelessly raised, but in the most solemn act of contemplation advocated by the church: dwelling upon the martyrdom of the saints, and on the personal death. To this shall you come.
But her face – whose face was it?
At that instant, as if quietly wakening from a dream, she lifted her head.
Despite the blondness, and the skull, she was not Helise d’Uscaret.
Raoulin shuddered. He was dreadfully relieved and sorry.
It was a pretty face, too innocent, with a weak kissable mouth, and cool weasel eyes that knew everything.
She had seen him shudder, and she said in a whisper, “Thinking of death makes me remember life.”
And she took his hands and put one upon the skull and the other upon her left breast.
So warm one, and beating itself with a heart, and the other as cold and hard as a stone.
“We’re only mortal,” said the girl. “How constricting are these laces –”
For a moment he could not unclamp his hands, from the icy apple of corruption, the hot fluttering apple of quickness.
But she released him and drew his fingers to her laces.
Then, the skull had rolled down into the flowers and he knelt between the bared limb and the covered one, his hands sliding on the treasures of Eve, and her hands, not those of a maiden, everywhere upon him, so he could hardly bear it.
She showed him how he might have her in the chair, if he wished, and he could not wait another second.
As he united with her, the whole room seemed to thunder. He had not had a girl for half a year.
She urged him on with wild cries that, in his tumult, he believed. As the spasm shook him, he kicked the damnable skull, and it rattled away across the floor.
“Have I pleased you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then … will you give me a little gift –?”
Raoulin frowned. He had paid at the door and reckoned this unsuitable. But then again, perhaps they robbed their girls here, and it had been very good. If he tipped her, she might let him have her again, although she had already gone behind a curtain to wash, and she came back with her laces tied, and he supposed his time with her was up.
He put a coin between her breasts, and leaned to kiss her. She allowed it. But then she said, “I regret. The Mother’s strict.”
“Mother – what, of your nunnery?”
The blonde whore lowered her eyes. But she removed his hands.
“Unkindness,” he said. “No charity.”
“It isn’t my choice. In a minute I shall be wanted.”
“And if I protest, that hulk of a door-fellow will throw me out.”
She said nothing.
Raoulin straightened his clothes and did up his points with surly tardiness. “This is a churlish place. I won’t come back. Even the old hag’s more friendly at d’Uscaret.”
No sooner had he uttered this than he was puzzled at having done so. To name his lodging to a chance harlot would not, even in the nicest circumstances, have seemed sensible to him. But there, too late, it was said.
He expected no response. Perhaps she would have the grace to be deaf.
But then she asked, in a peculiar tone, “How is it called?”
“What?”
“Your lodging is it? There?”
“Where?” And now he looked up with a merry smile – and met the eyes of a terrified animal in a trap. “Why – what’s up with you?”
“D’Uscaret?” she said. “Is it there?”
“Possibly I may have –”
“You lodge there?”
She was so insistent she seemed to drive him.
“Very well, I do. But don’t try to make anything of it –”
Before he had even finished, she began to scream.
He stood astounded, without a thought in his head. It seemed to be occurring in another room, this appalling outcry and madness – for while she screamed she ran about, threw herself at the walls, tore at herself with her nails in the most horrible way – dragged down the costly carpet from the plaster and writhed with it on the ground.
As had to happen next, the door burst open. Two roughs, one with drawn dagger, came shouldering through. The larger, unarmed, man seized Raoulin, while his companion laid the dagger under Raoulin’s ear.
Raoulin kept quite still. He said firmly, “I did nothing to her that wasn’t natural. We were talking after – and then this!” He had to raise his voice, for she went on shrieking, though now her vocal chords cracked. The doorway filled with clusters of frightened or curious male and female faces. A girl, clad only in a shift, pushed by and ran to the blonde harlot, tried to take hold of her and quieten her. It was beyond her powers. Two others hastened to join the struggle, calling the blonde pet names as they ripped her ripping hands from her hair and breasts –
Then the proprietress, the “Mother,” was in the room, a pockmarked frump one would not turn to regard once on the street.
“Explain this hubbub.”
Her presence bore such authority, even the demented creature on the floor grew abruptly mute, and then began to weep. The three other girls cradled her.
The Mother turned her unadorable gaze on Raoulin.
“Well?”
Raoulin thought quickly. Only the bizarre truth would do. He reluctantly rendered it. “– And when I told her d’Uscaret –”
“D’Uscaret!” exclaimed the woman. Her face had altered. She did not look afraid, but a wily sort of blankness was stealing over her, the appearance she would put on for the confessional.
Raoulin took heart. He said boldly, “This isn’t what I called here for.”
“No, no doubt not. There’s some superstition, concerning that house. An old curse. I’m surprised my girl knows of it.”
Abruptly the blonde harlot raised her raw voice in another spewing of screams.
“Be silent!” cried the Mother. And the screams went to weeping again.
“Let him be,” she added to her roughs. And to Raoulin himself, with all the casualness of cunning unease, “And you, sieur, had best get off.”
As the slabby hands released him, Raoulin caught in the doorway now the wink of Joseph’s humiliated and resentful spectacles.
Crossing the bridge in the torchlight, between one dark bank and the other, Joseph lamented, “I can never go back there now.”
“Do you want to? We find it’s a hospital for lunatics not a bawdy,” said Raoulin, obscurely embarrassed.
“Frightening a silly trollop with your foul story –”
“I told no story. I said that name – d’Uscaret – and all the hordes of Hell broke loose. I can tell you, any fun I had wasn’t worth that.”
They parted unaffectionately on the upper bank. Laude was ringing softly from Our Lady of Ashes. The river flexed its gleaming muscles. Raoulin was sorry to have lost Joseph’s regard. Probably tomorrow, or in a few days, they would laugh about the affair.
Yet somewhere inside his head as he climbed the hills, the awful screams of the harlot rang on and on. One believed she might have seen and heard and done a thing or two. Whatever had made her afraid was something proportionally horrible.
Going under the Sacrifice, beneath the winged cliffs of its buttresses, he considered his lodging. He considered the ghost he might only have dreamed. Was it that?
Some late revellers from a tavern roiled by with lanterns. They seemed to have come from another world than the darkness in which he moved, through which he climbed, and to which he went.
And then, as he entered the twisting alley that led up to the back walls of the house, he saw the black tower-tops, and the one black turreted tower with a faint greenish firefly-light flickering in it.
Raoulin stopped as if he had met the Medusa’s petrifying head. For a moment he could not breathe.
The tower was that which looked north, towards the Temple-Church – the tower into which he had penetrated the first day, trying its one door that would not open. The tower whose stair gave on the weedy garden and the tomb.
How ominous the light looked there, dim and shifting behind its pane of corrupt glass. Did someone move in the room, up and down?
Had he the spirit now to go in and seek the chamber, to push wide the door and maybe find there a young woman in a chair, her hand upon a skull …
Raoulin broke into a chill sweat. To his dismay he realised he too was frightened. He remembered the porcelain face of his dream and the cat’s-eyes of perfect emerald hovering above him – and marked himself with the sign of the cross. “The Lord is my keeper. The sun shall not smite me by day, nor the moon by night –” And, at the side door, unlocking it, whispered: “Be not afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth …”
To the kitchen he went, and lit there two of the candles and stuck them on the spikes of a branch. This he carried before him. Somewhere the hag and the groom snored in aged sleep. They were not juicy enough for demons to chew –
He crowded such ideas from him, and crept like a scared child up through thick night to his apartment. And there he locked the door, and there, by the shine of many extravagant wicks, he opened the reliquary his pious mother had sent with him, and took out the bones and the nails of the saint, and kissed them.
And in bed he recalled that to go with a whore was a sin and if he died tonight, the Devil would get him.
So at length he slept and had nightmares, but nothing else of the quick or the dead approached.
In the morning came summer sunlight, and the now familiar sounds and stenches of the summer city. Birds chimed past the window. Raoulin lay in the warm brightness of the reborn earth and called himself a dunce.
Too timid to go to the tower by night. Well, he would go there presently and smash in the door if he must.
It was even a Holy Day, God watchful.
In the kitchen, where he broke his fast, the hag pottered about. An evil grey cat, thin as a string and kept for the mice, hissed at him from the hearth like an adder.
“Well, puss,” said Raoulin to the cat, “I’m off to watch the priests and processions. Is it a fact, granny,” he added for the hag’s full benefit, “they carry a Christ out of the Sacrifice made all of alabaster and silver, with wounds of malachite?”
“Go see,” said the hag.
He promised he would, but instead of course made straight for the yard stair and the rooms of the hinder house.
Again, he had difficulty locating the exact spot. Then on the proper steps, up in the correct passage, confronting the solitary door, in the dark, doubt wormed under his skin, his flesh crawled. Until, turning, he saw – as if he had reinvented it – the slit of window above the garden stair, and day and daytime Paradys (in which reverential bells were ringing, to encourage him). He went and drank in the vista, like a draught of medicine. Then returned up into the passageway. Here he tried the door again, courteously. As before, it was immovable. It was a formidable bastion, too, looked at with an eye to damage. The timbers were heavy, and thewed with iron.
Dunce again. He had brought no implement to help him.
But then there was the adjacent garden, some handy bough or up-levered stone would do the job.
He was on the garden stair, descending, past the window and into shadow, when he heard a noise above.
Raoulin clamped himself against the wall. His lips formed a prayer. He thrust it off angrily. This was broad day. No non-existent fiend had power now –
What he had heard was the sigh of a woman’s skirt, sweeping along the corridor. Then his heart roared loudly enough he could scarcely hear anything else – until the rasp of a turning key somehow reached him.
The big obdurate door was being breached, and Raoulin could no longer cower there in ignorance. He went back up the stair, crouching like a toad, and peered above the top step.
The doorway gaped. It was a gap of paleness, not dark, a chamber lit by a window. That was, from this quirky vantage, all he could see.
And then, out of the door walked the hag.
Over one arm she bore some bed-linen, and in her other hand a platter on which there balanced a costly goblet of glass. There were some dregs of murky fluid in it, some brackish wine.
Not looking about, the hag proceeded along the corridor, and as she did this the door swung suddenly shut, and again he heard the note of a key turning in a lock.
Raoulin sat himself on the stair. He was grinning, bemused, disturbed, but no longer afraid. Did a ghost require wine and food and fresh linen? Did a ghost lock itself in by hand?
A voluntary prisoner lurked within the tower. The lady of d’Uscaret was a recluse. They had said no one lived here, to confound the lodger. But, by the Mass, it was his own father’s coin went to feed her now. He had some say in her doings.
He half resolved at once to burst upon her. The hag must have a secret knock. He would have to batter in the door, explain the act as a notion of rescue in ignorance. After all, she could not have reported or complained of his previous attempts.
In a moment he thought better of this idiocy. There were other ways to come at her. Whoever she was, she was not Helise, the dead bride. He had only glimpsed her, for that dream, he saw now, was only a dream. Perhaps the reality was old, toothless and ugly. Be careful. He would spy, and woo her slowly, to see if she was worth the effort.
With an abrupt easing of the heart, Raoulin ran up the stair, along the corridor, and off through the house, which he left inside another half-hour. He went to join the throng of the City, the religious processions, the hucksters, players, taverns.
It was as if he had been reprieved from a severe sentence, but this did not occur to him.
There was a summer storm, the sky the colour of cinders, and the rain falling in remote leaden drops. In the tavern called the Surprise, Joseph tapped Raoulin’s shoulder, and Raoulin, turning with some pleasure to pick up their friendship, was only surprised when Joseph said, straight out like a cough or swear word: “That girl’s dead.”
The sentence shocked in several ways. Raoulin could not sort them.
“The little blonde harlot. Shall I say how?” Joseph’s spectacles enlarged his eyes like two monstrous tears.
“How then?”
Joseph sighed. “She filled a bladder with some corrosive tincture and squirted it up inside herself.”
There was a nothingness then, rather than a silence, between them, while the normal racket of the Surprise went on all about. At last Raoulin murmured, “How did she come by such a thing?”
“Oh, there is a physician for the girls. He practises with the alchemical arts and keeps a cupboard of ointments and mixtures. She visited him on a pretext, and stole the essence. It may be she didn’t understand its strength … They heard her cries but couldn’t save her. A ghastly death.”
Raoulin had turned deathly sick, as though he himself had been poisoned. His genitals burned. The room trembled as if under water. “And do you blame me for this?”
“No! Blame you? No. And yet.”
To his absolute confusion, Raoulin felt the pressure of grief mounting up his senses into his eyes like a wave. He rose suddenly, pushing away from the bench, thrusting by Joseph as if he hated him – he did hate him and was sure the sentiment was shared – and got out into the alley by the wine-shop. Here, leaning on the masonry, he vomited his drink. Good. Good. He should suffer some penance. Where to run? Into a church? Oh God – what had she reckoned, that stupid little trull, with her sweet face and silly mouth, and eyes wise to everything except what she would work on herself.
He had not even now been able to vomit away the question – Why? — or the cause – himself.
It was a truth, he had been spared much distress. He was young, and lucky. Death and illness, misery and want, the ancient degree of panic itself, were matters apart from Raoulin. He had read of states and afflictions, in books. But until this hour the wing of night had not brushed him. Scratched by its metallic feathers, he quailed.
The lead sky leaned on Paradys. Her heights pressed up against it in luminescent stabs. Still the whole impact of the thunder and the rain was not released.
He beheld above him the cliffs of the Temple-Church. He had gone over much ground, had crossed the river, without seeing. A cruel olivine glare glittered on the holy windows. The processions were done. Christ had gone in again and left the world to sin and savagery, and to all the inexplicable shades.
Raoulin stood a minute on that runnel of path nicknamed, by some, “Satan’s Way,” and did not know it.
Then continued his dreary ascent towards the house called d’Uscaret.
The storm broke loose on the City at midnight, and roused several thousand sleepers, of whom Raoulin was only one.
His last thoughts had been of a childish running away. He had wanted to leave it all, the City, the university, the fever of learning, to escape back into the dull safe farm where nothing bad had ever happened to him, or been told to him in any way he had to credit.
But waking at the blast of the thunder and the shattering rain flung through the windows, he knew at once what he must do instead.
There was after all one here in this house who could tell him what had made the name of d’Uscaret so vile it killed.
Raoulin got up and secured the shutters of his two rooms. He had slept in his clothes and now tidied himself, and drank the ale left with his untouched supper.
Then, with two candles lit on the branch, and his knife in his belt, he took himself from the chamber and went to seek the recluse in her tower. No longer in the spirit of romance or unchastity. But with a grim purpose; as a right.
On the stair to the upper corridor, something checked him. He had the thought to put out the candles. Thunder bellowed and the stone-work seemed to whine. What use two feeble flames? He quenched them. And then, entering the corridor there was candleshine enough soaking out from the hidden chamber, whose door was standing wide. A figure came from it, slender, high-waisted, hers.
The light she carried dipped, swooped up and formed an arch, a funnel. The dark centre of the light, she flowed away and seemed drawn down into the earth – she was descending the stair towards the garden.
With the stealth of a starving hunter, Raoulin followed.
From the stair-head he glimpsed her below, a spectral creature still, on the threshold of the garden and the tempest. Then with one blow the howling night quaffed her candle. A rushing filled the doorway – rain and noise. She was gone into the weather.
On the edge of night, his civilised self held him back half a moment. Then he too was plunged in wet and chaos.
The water gushed upon his head and shoulders. It beat him, and slapped his face over and over, and he could not see.
On all sides the trees of the garden groaned and foamed like rivers.
The quick-growing weeds which, if trodden down and broken, in a day or night of fecund summer would reweave themselves, had formerly concealed any other excursions through the garden. It had seemed unvisited for years. But perhaps she walked here often, under sun and moon, under downpour, in the winter snow –
He had continued forcing himself forward through the night, and now he glimpsed the great yew ahead, where the mausoleum gaped from the foliage, the little house of Helise the dead bride.
The rain all at once slackened, and was lifted up like a swag of heavy curtaining. He heard the fountain breath of the drenched trees, and the individual notes of oval glass beads falling from branch to branch. The moon struck suddenly from a cloud like a spear. In the entry of the tomb stood a woman in a black gown, with dead-white hands clasped upon a dead candle, a white stalk of throat and a white face in a powdery bloom of hair.
In those instants she was uncanny, the dead one risen from her grave.
Because of this, he could not make himself move or speak.
And then, the shadowy features of her face (like the smudged shadows on the face of the moon itself) realigned themselves. It was she who spoke to him.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
A fundamental inquiry, perhaps a fearful one, given the time and place, and since she was not a phantom.
Raoulin took some random steps nearer. There was no explanation he could offer that would in any way humanly excuse his action.
Thus he said, “And you, lady, why did you come here in the rain?”
She leaned out of the porch of the tomb at him, her face tilted upward. He saw it was the face of the dream and that, even in the moon’s colourless ray, the discs of her eyes, lent only a hint of proper light, would flood with greenness, like the trees.
“Who are you?” she said again.
“My name is Raoulin,” he said, wondering if she had been told of him. That must be so. For she had come seeking him that first night, and stared into his sleep when he dreamed. “And you, demoiselle?” he added, for it appeared she was young, after all the speculation, and yet, being moon-like, ageless and old, under her surfaces.
“I?” she said. “Who am I?” She lowered her lunar-emerald eyes. “You may read my name above me.”
He looked irresistibly above her head, and there on the stone banner ran the letters, as he had seen before: Helise d’Uscaret.
“A namesake of the dead girl,” he said.
“Oh no. This tomb is mine, which naturally is why I visit here. I’m long dead, Sieur Raoulin. And therefore why should a storm deter me?”
For all her reality, her body, her shadow going away from her on the path, again the skin crawled over his bones.
Harshly he said, “The rain wets your gown. You drink wine from a glass and need a candle in the dark.”
“Do I? You mean to say I’m flesh and blood. Yes. But yet, I died. I died and was awarded this black box. I went down to the court of death as they so prettily describe it, or so I take the Latin to mean, and perhaps I decipher wrongly. You are the scholar, Sieur Raoulin. Do I have the message right?”
He said, “You questioned the old woman about me.”
Then she smiled.
“It’s been many years,” she replied, “since there was any life in the house. And suddenly, a young man from the provinces. I confess the fault of curiosity.”
“Do you confess, too, stealing into the room and watching me as I slept?”
“You are unchivalrous, sieur. Asking that I admit such a thing.”
“The dead can’t expect much courtesy,” he answered boldly.
Her glancing conversation irked, but also flattered him. She was very beautiful. It was very strange.
“Perhaps,” she said then, “perhaps I shall resolve this riddle for you. If you have the will and wish to listen.”
“What else,” he said.
Her eyes fixed upon his. Even in the darkness now he saw that they were green.
“You may not believe the story I tell you. It’s incredible and utterly exact. I can’t lie. That is my – atonement.”
“I’m all impatience,” he said.
“Then, I invite you to my chamber. With me, no codes of propriety remain, to be upheld or sullied. As you say, the dead can hope for slight courtesy.”
“I won’t harm you,” he said.
She smiled again. “Don’t trouble. It’s understood.”
She went before him through the garden, the skirts of her gown brushing off rain-opals from the bushes. Such jewels were strewn in her hair, grey gems in a white web, for she wore it quite loosely, carelessly.
He followed her back into the house and up the stair. His pulses beat, insisting on carnal matters; but his brain stayed wholly clear. It was not for a tryst he companioned this one.
The room that she led him into was unlike the rest of the house. Eight candles burned and lit a painted floor of squares, and showed the ceiling too was figured with scrolls and smouldery fruit. The posted bed stood partially away behind a curtain, and guarded by a chest of carved ebony. There was the window, to glow its marsh-light on the City. There, a broad fireplace bordered by columns, with a pale fire frisking in it. This, after the rain, was solacing. Two black chairs, with footstools, faced each other across the hearth, a table between with a book upon it, and also a silver pitcher and two glass goblets of the valuable kind he had seen before.
He could not fail to be aware this room had some resemblance to the make-believe bedroom at the brothel. Or that it too had been prepared for a guest. Madly it came to him that everything that had gone on, since his first entry to the City, was in the nature of a dance-measure, and none of it quite real, or what it seemed.
“Be seated,” said Helise d’Uscaret, if so she was, and why should she not be so?
He obeyed her, taking the right-hand chair.
In the window-embrasure, another book lay, and a little casket. Here and there were scattered small tokens of life, of femininity – a hand-mirror of polished metal, a ribbon, a flaxen bud in a thimble of water. (Nowhere, that he could see, a skull.) Charmingly, from under the bed-curtain, a satin slipper peeped out.
And like the attitude of the table and two chairs, these items had an air of considered arrangement.
Into his glass she poured a dark wine.
He caught the scent of it, and of her, as she bent over him and drew away. Certainly, she was a living woman.
Beauty. Strangeness.
She seated herself in the opposing chair, and sipped from her own glass a vintage like ink. But now he could see the impossible colour of her gaze.
“Be at ease,” she said.
“Your eyes,” he said, as if he could not prevent himself, “never in the world – so green.”
“Long ago,” she said, “my eyes were not green at all. That is the badge of what befell me. The mark on me. My eyes are my scar, after the battle.”
It seemed to Raoulin he would not move now, not even to raise the fine glass to his lips. This stasis did not distress him. His mind was alert, to be instructed. Nothing else was of importance.