And what will ye wear for your wedding lace?
One with another.
A heavy heart and a hidden face,
Mother, my mother.
Swinburne
A girl is grown like a flower in the house of her kindred. She is nurtured for her hues and perfume. At the blossoming she will be plucked from her native soil and planted elsewhere. In other earth she will give fruit, fade, wither, and finish. This is all the usefulness of such a flower, the well-born girl among the great houses of Paradys.
Helise la Valle knew, as she had learnt her alphabet and orisons, that this was her destiny.
Indeed, she had looked forward to the event of her transplanting, once she became conscious of the future. Rather than be afraid, it seemed to her child-mind like the festival of Christmas or the New Year, a season of celebration, dressing-up, the giving and receiving of gifts. Late to these images came a dreamlike icon: the bridegroom.
It was not until her adolescence, actually her saint’s day, in her twelfth year, that this procrastinate shape at last stepped forward to overwhelm, to crush all the others, and fill her with pervasive dread.
On that day it was that she heard his name for the first time. What is named, in the oldest rituals of witchcraft, takes power.
“Heros d’Uscaret,” sang out the youngest cousin.
And at this, all the elder cousins fell entirely silent, as if a wind had passed over that robbed them of speech and motion.
“Who is he?” asked Helise.
She was a fey girl, whose quiet attentiveness led adults to think her docile. She had never been discouraged in asking questions, for she asked so few.
“You’re to be wed to him,” said one of the elder cousins, looking abashed, for propriety had been breached. “You are betrothed.”
“Am I?” said Helise, merely interested.
But just then one of the most senior cousins came briskly into the room, clapping her hands and frowning.
The maidens were disbanded. Only the Name was left.
It was at the hour of candle-lighting that Helise approached her mother.
“I am to marry Heros – d’Usc – d’Uscaret?”
The mother started. She was seated in her chair before a glowing hearth (it was autumn, and the nights already were cold) idly combing the long hair of her little lap-dog. At its mistress’ start, the tiny animal growled. Helise did not like the dog, for it had once bitten her with its sharp rat teeth. She blamed the dog for this, and not the sickly cosseting and ill-temper of her own mother, which had formed it.
“What did you say, Helise?”
“That I’m to marry – am betrothed –”
“Very well,” said the mother. “You are. It’s a distinguished match.”
Helise stood between excitement and disarray. She had always known her life would alter, but here was sudden proof.
“Heros,” she said again, “d’Uscar – et.”
“Someone has been twittering,” said the mother. Her sallow proud face was unkind. “Your cousins.”
“But Mother, mustn’t I know?”
“In good time. You mayn’t wed tomorrow. It will be three good years before you are fit. Your father is strict.”
“But shall I know nothing of it?”
“The suitor is young enough, twenty years when you are fifteen. Sound, not a cripple. Fair, I have heard. His house is of the best. They’ve the favour of the Duke.”
Helise, at twelve, had already been in love, with a painting of Jehanus the Baptist on the Martyr Chapel wall of the Sacrifice. She understood that it was futile to love a saint in such a manner. But since her own sensuality was to herself undivulged, she did not perceive it for what it was, and had never realised she sinned in her wild thoughts. In her head she pictured to herself the court of Herod, where she saved the saint from death (thereby depriving him, of course, of his martyrdom, maybe of his sainthood) and the clutches of Herod, shameless Salomé, and the Romans. She accompanied Jehanus into the desert where, respected among his followers, she wove him garlands from the locust tree, tended him in sickness, swooned and revived in his miraculous embrace, and, in the river to her breasts, was baptised by the fiery water spilling from his hands. The face of Jehanus in the fresco, formed by an artist of genius, had often become the subject for some young girl’s fantasy. The arched throat, mane of hair, and great upraised eyes, were tautly luminous with that agony of suffering or joy inherent in worldly pain. Or pleasure. Kept ignorant, the perceptive instincts of Helise had already been a trifle warped.
It was her whimsy perhaps that Heros d’Uscaret, described, should resemble her first love.
But the Lady la Valle would not describe Heros d’Uscaret.
It took a maid in the closeted bedroom to do that.
She was crying, this girl, only a year or so older than her mistress. Helise, having been well-educated in many alternative areas, beat her maid’s hands with an ivory comb, to come at the cause.
“Oh madam – they’ve promised you to a monster!”
“What do you mean?” said Helise.
“There’s a curse on that house.”
The maid snivelled, and Helise raked her again with the comb.
“Madam – Satan claims all the men of their line – and the women. But the men are – shape-changers – they are things under the skin.”
At this nonsensical, beastly phrase, Helise left off her interrogation. Her immature mind had now quite enough to play upon.
For five days she was in a fever and the physicians despaired of her life. Then she recovered, and they congratulated their own skills.
The talk of betrothal and terror seemed sloughed with illness. It was not referred to. Helise resumed her former habit, and never asked.
(The maid was gone. There was a new maid, a country girl who was not acquainted with the City.)What one does not speak of need not be believed.
So Helise continued until her fifteenth year, near the end of which they informed her that, soon after her birthday, she was to wed a noble lord of the City, whose name had already been made known to her. By then she had all but forgotten the awful words, her fever dreams. Therefore the icy hand that gripped her heart seemed to have no source.
In the assembled months before her wedding-day, Helise was wan and languid. Her mother and aunts chided her. She would lose her good looks and demean her house. She must eat this and drink that, she must have these unctions applied to her skin and those pastes to her hair.
At fifteen, Helise had mostly dispensed with questions. Her native indifference to the outer world was augmented by realisation that what might be answered was invariably told without inquiry – and what would not be answered would not.
At night in her narrow virgin’s bed, Helise offered vague prayers to a fate that was unavoidable; she prayed as a man prays to be spared death. Perhaps delay was possible.
But the months clambered over each other and the wedding-day came hurrying nearer. The bride was not afforded a single glimpse of the groom.
A priest came to instruct Helise, a man elderly and superlatively uncomely, as was thought correct in the case of a young girl.
One morning, as they sat in the la Valle vine court, Helise spoke to the priest.
“My betrothed is Lord Heros, the heir of House d’Uscaret.” It was not a question, nor did the priest reply. Until now he had somehow managed not to name the name of the bridegroom, though referring to him always deferentially. “Spiritual father,” said Helise, looking only at her knotted hands, “when I was a child, I was frightened by tales of evil that had to do with –”
“This isn’t the hour to dwell on such foolishness,” said the priest. “You must think only of your duties as a wife. Be wary, my daughter, that you don’t interpose such nasty and aimless chatter.”
“But spiritual father, these tales concerned my husband.”
The priest looked as steadily upon the vines as Helise upon her hands. Neither met the other’s eye.
“Put superstition from your mind, my daughter.”
“But father – I’m afraid.”
The priest inhaled and expelled a noisy breath laden with garlic and kitchen wine. He said, “There have been stories told of d’Uscaret, by the ignorant and stupid, notions instigated by enemies of that valiant house.” Then he paused, as if girding himself, and added, “What have you heard?”
Helise stammered that she could recall no details.
At that, the priest seemed happier.
“If you can remember no absolute, how can you fear?”
Helise attempted to confide that she did not know, yet fear persisted.
But the priest would have none of that. He rebuked her with sins of self-attention and untrust. Would her loving parents give her over to any tainted man? And did she not have faith in her God to protect her?
Helise sat quiescent under this garlicky lesson, until he left off and went on with the others.
It appeared to her that all with whom she now had dealings, all that were caught up in the train of the approaching marriage, adopted an odd manner. Faces she had been familiar with now looked like masks, and voices did not run along but went choppily, with words left unsaid. And how often she saw the hands rising and falling upon the breasts, marking there a cross. Did the maids stare nervously sideways at her, as if at one who may be infected with plague? Did her aunt’s singing bird go dumb in its cage at her passing?
The shadow is on me. Am I going to die?
She knew nothing of the real rites of marriage, nothing of sex beyond the untutored flarings of her own body, which she had obliquely discovered by then were dangerous, as they might lead her into unchastity. Connubiality was this: the husband lay beside his wife all night in the same bed. Sometimes (so certain cousins had assured her) he kissed his wife, even her nakedness, and some men, though surely they were depraved, set their hands on a woman’s private places. Helise had never even seen cats mating. Though once she had beheld a cat in labour, and was appalled. Later on, hearing her brother’s wife shrieking in childbirth, Helise had had some idea why. The angels of God brought the baby. It was God’s will, and His will also that a woman suffer in travail, the female penance for the disobedience of Eve.
Could it be that Heros d’Uscaret would perpetrate on his bride some alarming foul act, something worse even than the embarrassing things that apparently quite normally went on, these lewd kissings and touchings already mentioned?
Ten nights before her wedding-night, Helise recalled precisely what her maid had said to her: “Satan claims them – shape-changers – things under the skin.”
She woke in a bath of sweat, and bit her hands with terror.
Paradys turned out to recognise the wedding processions of the houses la Valle and d’Uscaret, and to catch the sweetmeats and small money retainers might throw the rabble. They were able to watch besides many scores of men on fine horses, dazzling in brocade and gems, some quantities of damsels clothed like graces and strewing petals, musicians with lutes and shawms, and pages with banners.
The bride rode on a dappled palfrey with a headstall of pearls. The girl’s dress was of cloth-of-silver, with undersleeves of cream silk stitched with brilliants. Her blonde hair fluttered loose but for a jewelled cap of silver daisies and sea-green peridots. Her face was white, but there was nothing uncommon in that.
The bridegroom’s family cantered up, heavy with their colours of sable and viridian. The sigil of d’Uscaret was a cruel preying bird, perhaps a falcon. They were a wealthy house, and bullion clanked on everything, and in the jaunty hat of the young groom was a diamond said to have been dug from the forehead of a dragon in the Holy Land … Otherwise, the hat, the light, the shade, hid the young man’s face, though he cut a brave enough figure. His locks were blonder even than those of the little white bride.
Helise found herself entering the Temple-Church, and acknowledged that the astonishing horror had arrived, was here, about to happen to her.
From the moment of her waking at dawn, through all the preparation of her person, somehow she had gone far off. They had bathed and anointed her and clad her in the silver gown – but she had been at a distance, hanging in the air.
As her body rode along the route on the demure palfrey, the wedding music in its ears, the finery flashing at its eyes like drawn knives, her soul was in a trance.
But now the wanderer had returned, was trapped and must participate. There was to be no escape.
The grey pillars of the Temple-Church rose like tree-trunks of a petrified forest. The roof was ribbed – the inner belly of some apocryphal beast which had swallowed the processions whole. Rays of daylight pierced through. From a massive window a bolt of sunshine streamed and smoked.
An angel of white marble shone out in the path, but did not save Helise. Beyond, the Angel Chapel was an underwater cave where she would drown in marriage.
And now she was at the rail, and now she was alone but for one who stood beside her.
It seemed to her that no one else at all was there.
No maids-of-honour, no gentlemen, no witnesses, not even the priest. Not even her parents, who had condemned her.
Only this other at her side.
Something – the priest’s injunction – brought them to kneel.
Helise knelt, and her gown rustled and the small jewels clinked against the tessellated floor. And she heard the scuff of a shoe, the brushing of a viridian sleeve.
The blessing was being spoken, the magical water was being sprinkled. Could a devil endure that? Seemingly yes, for he had not sprung aside, his garments did not singe.
The responses of the Mass drew from her a whisper. At her side a male voice murmured low its clear Latin. A young male voice, younger than the voices of her father and brother.
Surely, a demon could not utter the responses of God’s Mass?
The one beside her had a voice, and now a hand, resting upon the rail. The hand stayed Helise, for it was in shape the hand of a warrior-saint, made thin and strong for the hilt of battle, the clasp of prayer. And on the fourth finger, an onyx ring.
The priest, having changed the wafers to the flesh and the wine to the ichor of Christ, fed them at the rail like two hungry sparrows.
But could a demon take between its lips the body and blood of Heaven?
Now she must stand up again. She must make the correct replies to the questions of the priest. Like all questions, in her experience, the answers were preordained, unavoidable. Only questions that might be answered could ever be asked.
And so, in a few minutes more, she had been wedded, and had barely noticed, puzzling as she was over the paradox of the pale hand with the onyx, and the Host penetrating the intestines of one accursed.
Finally the pale hand itself took her own and on to her finger ran a coil of cold metal, to bind her, and the priest in turn bound her right hand to the pale hand. Tied, she must turn. Or, they turned her.
Handfast, Helise looked at her bridegroom, her husband. There before her, straight and slender, his face in a halo of uncoloured hair, was Jehanus, the beautiful, harrowed martyr from off the very wall. Only his eyes were altered. Their beauty had been brought to life with a green and stellar fire.
Bound fast hand-to-hand with her, he kissed her passionlessly with his cool mouth. It was a fearsome kiss, for it struck Helise in the breast and heart, into her womb even, down to the soles of her feet, like lightning. As in the Bible, a sword had gone through her. She had never known before what that phrase could mean.
Outside, the crowd shouted. She was put again on to the palfrey. They went up through the City, up to the mansion of d’Uscaret. And sometimes the thrown flowers smote Helise, and some wisps of paper, one of which lodged in her sleeve, and looking at it she saw it was a votive prayer for her safety. But now she did not mind. He rode at her side.
The viridian banners by the doors were garlanded with myrtle. This house was black, like a sarcophagus, and the great hall was black, with old charred flags like broken wings drooping from the rafters. But the candles burned and white damask clothed the tables and he led her to sit beside him.
Helise was happy. Her eyes sparkled and everything had become wonderful. They gave her white wine to drink, and on the gallery minstrels sang like angels.
They banqueted on fowl roasted with figs and cakes of flour and sugar, milk jellies, fish served in their armour, doves in their feathers. There were salads of spinach and beans made into gardens, and castles of rice and pine kernels, and almond puddings sweet as the promise of life everlasting.
A pageant was performed, displaying the prowess of d’Uscaret, her knights and lords, their deeds of valour.
Lilies fell from a canopy.
At the table sat the new father and mother of Helise. He was a dark and peevish man, fretful, who drank until huge drops spurred out on his forehead. The woman was like something cut from wood, having only two dimensions, angular in her tourmaline gown, her silver caul and steeple headdress from which black spiderspun floated.
At the side of Helise sat Jehanus who was Heros, still and nearly silent, real as all things, given to her by God.
I am his wife, and he is –
He was beautiful as a young divinity. Had she suffered so only to be intoxicated by this ecstasy?
The masque in the hall was now of a girl and youth embraced upon an isle on wheels, while tame panthers frisked about – but they were all men inside the feline velvets. A dim cry floated on the sea of delight: shape-changer.
“Come, madam. Now, lady, come with us –”
D’Uscaret’s maids of honour, the young girls of the house, were urging her bashfully, wantonly. She must get up and go with them, to the bridal chamber.
Helise rose and let them lead her out. Their butterfly mutters and touches, playful, childishly-naughty, swirling her through a door and up an inner stair where brands blazed in brackets. A vast heat was on the stair, bringing out the scents of flesh and unguents, and above in the curve of a shadow, the arch, the corridor, great doors carved with falcons, through which they slipped like thieves. And there the room, the room, and the tall wide bed, where tonight she would lie beside her lord.
Now she could reconcile herself with all of it. Yes, she could conjure endless darkness furled in ceaseless embrace. His mouth on hers, his arms about her. And if he should wish more – whatever he wished she would grant.
The girls of d’Uscaret, with sighings and nonsensical acid ribaldries – traditional things they probably did not, all of them, comprehend – disrobed Helise and clad her in a shift of samite, combed out her hair and wove lilies in it. She climbed into the high bed, and they arranged her there like a toy, leaning on the pillows.
At the hour of Matines, the wedding-party bounded up the stair with torches and candles, bells and lyres, bringing the husband to his wife.
The solid doors flew wide, and between them the uproar surged, the lights and sequins and the blowing of tin trumpets. The old men making sour old dirty jests, and the women laughing or compressing their faces. The Lady d’Uscaret was there, like a pillar of flint. Her perspectiveless face also contorted to smile or grimace, but it was like a disc of paper.
Before all the horde, the bridegroom. He made the rest into a dumbshow.
They brought him forward to the bed, and the men instructed him and the women looked away.
The eldest of the maids of honour bowed.
“Your bride is here awaiting you, m’sire. May you have joy of your night.”
Then, hiding their faces coyly, the maids ren away, and the old men tried to catch them going down the stairs, so there were shrieks and a scattering of sugarplums.
With a susurrus of trains and mantles, the doorway sucked back the last of the crowd. The doors were shut.
Heros and Helise, alone now, in the bedchamber.
She sat in the bed, as if in a bank of snow. She knew she must be shy like the gentle female deer. Her heart drummed, and she watched him under her lids.
What would he do now? She did not care, so long as he would lie down with her. She was parched for his nearness, the pressure of his mouth and body. This was true lust she felt, and did not even know it.
But Heros went straight back to the doors, and in came one of his gentlemen. Behind a screen painted with a hunting or hawking scene, the bridegroom was undressed. He stepped out from the screen wrapped in a mantle, and the gentleman took himself away, and again the door was shut.
And now, now surely, Heros would come to her.
But, as if he were alone only with himself, Heros d’Uscaret wandered along the length and breadth of the chamber. He seemed deep in thought. Now and then he hesitated, picking up some article or other. Once he stood for several minutes reading at an open book on a stand.
Helise did not dare to call to him. To question.
Her suspense became firstly painful, and then sickening, as gradually her trembling warmth died into chill.
As though he perceived this, Heros circled once more and snuffed the candles.
A veil of blackness covered the chamber, edge-to-edge, shrinking it to the area of the bed, where one light remained burning on the chest at the bedfoot.
Heros now moved towards this final candle, it enamelled him upon the dark.
There and then, he looked at his wife.
Before she could control herself, she leaned from the pillows, as if to hold out her arms to him.
But Heros d’Uscaret, her husband, blew out the candle. And as she shivered there, he got in beside her, and reclined, with the space of a third person left between them. And he said, “Goodnight, Helise.”
Perhaps only minutes later, lying beside and apart from him, she whispered, “Have I offended you, my lord?”
“No,” said the darkness.
“But will you not then –” and here she faltered on her own unspeakable audacity.
After her anguish had gone on for some minutes more, Helise stretched herself out, and visualised that now they lay together as man and wife should. But her instinct knew perfectly well that this was not as it should be. Blindly, her instinct clawed at the night while she kept like a stone, but after a century had passed, she murmured, “But will you not – kiss me, my lord?”
This question was answered.
“No,” darkness said again. “I won’t do that.”
And then there went by aeons of blackness and heartbeats like massing tides in the shell of the ear. After which Heros d’Uscaret said, “In the morning, Helise, you must take a pin and make your finger bleed. Stain the sheet with it, and your shift. That’s for the showing, to prove your virginity is gone. Without that your life will be miserable here. More miserable than necessary. Do you understand?”
She did not, of course. Of course she said that she did.
There were a hundred things – she did not know how they must be expressed. She lay in black silence, until he added, “Go to sleep now.” And then she lay awake all night until the dawn.
“Well, demoiselle. Do you please my son?”
Helise, a bride of eight days, gazed modestly on the ground. Eventually she found some words. “I try to, madam.”
“Come, lift your head. I can tell a liar by his eyes.”
Helise lifted her head, but not her gaze.
“Look up,” said the implacable Lady d’Uscaret.
Helise looked up. Just like her other mother, this one in her inlaid chair, but having no lap-dog.
The eyes of the second mother were black. Her dark hair was imprisoned within a birdcage of silver-wire, with a band of nacre across her pallid forehead. Everything was hardness, even the folds of her gown seemed hacked from steel.
“You’re afraid of me, Helise,” pronounced d’Uscaret’s lady. “But that’s as it should be. Your family’s rich, but has no history, in comparison with this house. Beside my own lineage, your name is a title written in sand.” Helise might have been surprised; already, not interpreting, she had seen that the new mother despised her own husband. But the new mother continued. “I too am by birth a d’Uscaret. But of the elder line. We may trace our roots to the days of the emperors at Rome. My lord is of the lesser branch. My blood kin are dead. A plague …” She paused, her eyes not softened but made adamant by memory or bitterness. “Perhaps you’ve heard legends of the d’Uscaret? These concern my kindred.” (Helise could not ascertain if this boast concerned legends of might, or myths of – other things.) “I alone am left. And my son. My son is d’Uscaret. He has the sign on him. His fairness. His wonderful eyes. Once, my own eyes … Do you love my son?” said the Lady of d’Uscaret as if she spoke of dross.
Helise bowed her head again.
“Madam, yes.”
“Naturally. How could it be otherwise. But to you he is indifferent. Am I correct?”
Helise wavered between shame and fright.
“Oh,” said the hard woman, as she would flick a fly from her gown, “you are serviceable. You may entertain his nights and bear him a boy or two. But that’s all. His brood-mare.”
Helise stared at the flags as if at the gate of Hades.
“Poor little mite,” said Lady d’Uscaret, without compassion. “At least you have the wit to know he is a god, and far above you. You won’t annoy him, I believe. Never do that. It was a marriage of convenience. You brought cash, and we thank you, Helise. Remember your place here. You are a pretty beetle we keep to amuse us now and then.” She leaned her snake’s head thoughtfully upon her bone hand. “Go away.”
And Helise gathered up her skirts and hastened from the room.
The world was as it always had been, incomprehensible, unyielding. She had her part. A lesser part perhaps, here. She had fundamentally as much sway over the house as had her brother’s wife at la Valle. If she was dutiful, and did not thwart them, they would not chastise her.
The humble were the elect of God. Did not the priests teach so, in their gemmed, kingly robes, from their towering pulpits?
Helise spent her days in ladylike domestic forms. She embroidered, she pressed flowers. She had no talent for music, and reading soon tired her. At the proper times she heard Mass with the household in the family chapel. Food might have been a diversion but she had no appetite.
At dinner, sometimes she saw her husband.
Generally the great ancestral hall was not employed, d’Uscaret dined in a parlour of panelled walls, where were displayed some paintings on classical and religious subjects. Above the table, whose legs were in the shape of eagles, three silver herb-censers depended from the ceiling, with aromatics burning over charcoal, to perfume the air. All d’Uscaret that was present in the house assembled here, in this show-place, with their house dogs lying at their feet, and the tame monkey of the lord’s brother eating candied cucumber or running about the length of its leash.
If he should be there, Heros was seated beside Helise. But sometimes he had gone hawking, beyond Paradys, or to some library, or cloister, or to another house. Sometimes father, uncle, and son were all of them absent, at the Duke’s table.
She seldom saw her lord during the day in any case. As, by then, she saw him seldom at night.
The first month he did spend with her, prostrate every night at her side. She would lie sleepless most of the hours, tortured by nervous cramps, afraid to be restless. Hearing the level breathing of his sleep, the dim bells of Matines and Laude, sometimes the reborn bell of Prima Hora. If she ever fell asleep it would be towards the dawn, and waking when the sky was light, she would see he had already left her.
She had stained the sheet as he had told her to, that initial morning, with the blood of her finger. She had had to force herself to prick her skin with the point, for she was, that way, a coward. She did it to content Heros, ignorant as to why. Were they then supposed to have acted out together some rite of viciousness and tearing, to cause blood? Was she fortunate to have been spared?
After one month, he did not come to sleep by her often, maybe every eight or ten days. Foolishly, when he entered the room, and when his gentleman unclothed him behind the screen, Helise hoped – but did not know for what. For a kiss, an embrace?
He gave her nothing, no more than in the beginning. Usually he would bid her goodnight, as he would greet her when he met her at dinner. They exchanged few other words, and at night none at all.
In the third month of her life at d’Uscaret, an elderly woman of the house came to Helise in the small square chamber allocated her sitting-room, that lay off the blank bed-chamber.
The woman was bustling and beady-eyed. She seemed respected in the house, and sat at dinner with the family. Her position Helise had never been certain of, but had once or twice heard her referred to. “Consult Ysanne if you still have your cough.” Or, “Hush, that’s a matter for old Ysanne.”
Now the old woman, who was fat, and wrapped her head in an Eastern turban of silk, sat across the fireless hearth and watched Helise, until the young girl turned hot and cold together.
“Have you noticed anything?” said old Ysanne at length, in a gossipy tone.
Helise could only look.
“Come, come,” said Ysanne. “Speak out. Do you vomit in the morning, or at certain foods? Have your courses stopped or grown erratic?”
Helise suddenly became aware that sickness and the stoppage of blood implied a gift of pregnancy.
She shook her head. Here was another failing. And yet (she had randomly grasped enough) she suspected the fault was not all her own. There was something which occurred between the husband and the wife, in bed, some sorcerous communion or vow, which invoked children.
Ysanne now got up again, and said, “You know you must give your husband an heir?” Helise did not reply. What could she say? “Timid,” said Ysanne. “The young wife must overcome her blushes and cherish her lord. You mustn’t shrink from anything he wishes.”
Helise felt faint. It was terrified lust, although she did not know it.
After a litter of more meaningless admonishments, old Ysanne went flat-footedly out.
Helise, as she had not done before, broke into sobs and tears. She even prayed, although she had long accepted God did not listen. Who else was there to talk to?
Then, in her abject wretchedness, when she could think of no shelter and no friend whose counsel she might seek, piercing her like the awl, her inner heart told her what she should do. She must run to him, to the one who never spoke to her, who never or rarely lay beside her, to he who was the cause of all her hurt, for he was also her love, the reason she had lived at all.
The decision of unthinking love was an insanity and it made her bold, perhaps for the first time in her existence.
She left her futile stitchery, and walked slowly, as if with an invited purpose, up through the house.
She had begun to learn its thoroughfares almost by default. She knew the situation of that other room, in which her lord slept, when not with his wife. She must go northerly, towards the most ancient portion of the building. She passed servants, but none challenged her. To them, she was a lady, a facet of d’Uscaret, however slight. Long corridors lit by windows, hung with tapestry, and quartered with carven benches, gave on thinner darker lanes, whose windows had no glass but only bars, whose occasional tapestries rotted. No longer did any servants appear. There was a dull silence. Yet she did not lose her way. For in the wilderness there was still some sign of habitation, or passage. Here and there a landmark of a great chest, even the mossy blackened hangings – for elsewhere the corridors were closed by grilles of spiderweb, the floors seas of dust – empty of anything human, limitlessly undisturbed.
So she found her way to a twisting stair she had once or twice heard described. It was the path into the tower-top, the Bird Tower they called it: doves had been kept there once. Now Heros dwelled in the apartment, as if upon a rock in that desert of wasted corridors and rooms.
The door was abruptly above her. On its timber, a falcon’s mask in iron, and an iron ring.
As she put her hand on it she realised the door would be locked fast. She would have to sit down under the door-sill and await his return.
But the door gave at a pressure on the ring, without even a resistance.
That frightened her. She saw at once all her temerity in daring to invade the sanctum where no servant, no kindred, would enter unasked.
Yet it was too late, for the chamber opened before her, all its mystery, its spell, for it was his.
She stepped straight off the stair into the room.
It seemed to her the cell of a scholar. The bed was narrow and low, with a footstool by it, and a plain chest. No evidence of luxury was in these things. But across the floor, beneath a high, round, glassed window, that showed only air, was a table laid with a feast of objects and books, with measures and globes, the bones of hideous creatures mounted up as if they lived, weird instruments of alchemy and science.
There, on that board, his interest and his commitment were spread. She knew immediately, and with the jealous pang of a rival.
Between the table and the wall a three-paned triptych had been raised upon a stand.
Peering over the items on the table, careful to dislodge nothing, Helise did not pay the painting much attention. But then something in the angle of it, catching the window light against the shadow of the wall, caught her eye. It was his, of his choosing. She went to see.
How strange then, these images after all, strange as anything maybe in the room, or stranger …
In the first painted panel was a fang-like mountainside parting a ravenous sky. A procession of men and women had ascended, with livid torches; they stood like mindless things, staring into the clouds. Something with black wings was carrying off a young girl in white. From her lolling limbs and head there streamed draperies and hair, and a wreath of flowers went tumbling earthwards. This ominous tableau was titled in gilt: Nuptiae.
In the second panel, the scene was a bedchamber by night, a vast couch where something lay asleep. In the foreground, holding back the curtains with one hand, and tilting in the other an antique, flaming lamp, a pale girl leaned forward, her slenderness rigid in lines of anxiety and expectation, endeavouring to see –
This picture was labelled: Noli me spectare.
Helise knew now what the triptych portrayed. It was the legend of Cupido and Psyche. The maiden had been left as a sacrifice for a demon, and was accordingly carried off. In a mountain mansion, cared for by invisible sprites, the girl was visited in deepest darkness by one who claimed to be her husband and lord. He was to her only the best of lovers, but warned her in the blindfold black: Never attempt to look on me.
(Hence the two titles – Nuptiae, an ironical “marriage,” and the second, perhaps perversely mimicking the instruction of Christ: “See me not.”)
But Psyche had been persuaded by desire and doubt to forget this ban. When he slept she lit a lamp, and so beheld her spouse. He was the god of love himself, handsome and perfect. And in her amazement, her shaking hand let drop a scorch of oil upon his shoulder. He woke, he disowned her, and into the unkind world she was cast out lamenting.
Helise glanced at the third picture. Yes, here was the banishment of Psyche following her transgression. And yet, it seemed to Helise that something in the vision was awry. What could it be?
The title exclaimed, once more with apparent irony, Femina varium et mutabile semper. Her Latin was restricted, but this was a quotation she had heard before. “Fickle woman is always changeable.”
And indeed, Psyche had altered from carnal curiosity to frenzied terror.
She was depicted rushing down a winding granite stair, her arms flung out, her face ugly and contorted with screaming. All the rest of the small canvas conveyed pitchy nothingness – but for one curious whorling hint of motion, seeming to come on behind her, somewhat like a flock of birds –
The door of the tower room shut in a hollow clap.
“You are here with reason?”
Helise darted about, guilty as a robber, almost afraid as one.
“I came to ask of you –” But no, she had not come to ask.
He stood before the closed door. His doublet and hose were the colour ice, his hair nearly whiter. His face appalled her, it was so fair, so inhuman.
It occurred to her to throw herself on the floor at his feet. She did not do it. Etiquette, which had chained her to a life of slavish unhappiness, also prevented such servile extremes.
“Didn’t they tell you, Helise, never to meddle with my possessions?”
“I’ve touched nothing – I was so careful –”
“Why are you here?”
She was too frightened even to cry. She loved him. But who? This god of ice and snow?
“My lord,” she said, in a little voice. Then, “Oh help me! Everywhere they accuse me – I didn’t know what I must do.”
“Who accuses you? What are you talking of?”
“Your mother, the lady – that old woman. I see – I don’t please you – but I’d suffer anything – only educate me, my Lord Heros –”
“Crucifixion of Christ,” he said.
The partial blasphemy checked her. She bowed her head and now tears streamed from her eyes. Useless: he would not comfort her.
Presently he moved across the room and, going to the table, ran his hands recklessly, as she had not had licence to do, over all the compendium of scales and jars, parchments, mummies, vertebrae. It was even violent, this sweeping, for one of the wired skeletons gave way when his fingers encountered it. At that he took the horror up and threw it across the room. It smashed to powder on a wall.
But when he spoke, his voice had no edge or noise.
“I believe they must have asked you, Helise, if you’re with child.”
Something gave way within her.
“Yes, my lord.”
“And naturally, you’re not. Poor innocent,” he said, rather as his mother had, lacking all pity. “You must learn fortitude. Now if I were a sodomite, or impotent, you might divorce me.” (These syllables were like a sentence in a foreign tongue.) “If you had the will and the power, you could seek an annulment. But do you even comprehend, Helise, how I fail you?”
And she thought of kisses and his hands upon her waist. She burned, but it was ice. She could not say anything.
“I see you nearly do comprehend,” he commented. “Well, madam. You’ll go wanting. I could, but I will not. Understand this. Think me a monk. I’m sworn to chastity. Of a kind.”
“What will become of me?” said Helise. She had made out one word in ten. To inquire of the Infinite was a ritual, like the peccavi before a priest, one’s mind elsewhere.
Heros had proceeded to the room’s hearth (empty), and there he leaned, looking down on the bruises of finished fires.
“There’s a dream I have sometimes,” said Heros d’Uscaret, conceivably to the hearth stone. For it was unlikely he would confide in the pathetic wife they had allotted him. “It began when sin began. I mean, impurity. The body’s urge, Adam’s rod, that makes him one with the beast, the reptile, the bird, and all the copulating, fornicating mass of lower creation. I remember the first dream. You see, I’d caught sight of a girl, washing herself in a river. The blood rushed to my head, and swelled my loins. I itched with my gluttony. It was manhood, and it was vice. Or, as they tell us, it was the natural order. All day, I could scarcely think of anything but that naiad in the water, laving herself, her round breasts with their eager tips, and the smoky hair in her armpits and under her belly.”
(Helise, arrested, gazed dry-eyed. Her heart raced. But he, he might have been meditating on the digging of a grave.)
“Night fell, and I into the night, and into the dream. Because I was well-schooled by the priests, I had not thought to ease myself. But asleep, the Devil took gentle charge of me. What were my hands doing, there in the dark? How should a sleeper know. And up and up I rode upon that delirious wave that had begun like an itch and mounted to a storm. And there was a pressure in my brain, a green torch behind my eyes – and at the end there came a kind of fit in which I groaned aloud – and then, then, everything unravelled in me. I tell you, my sinews, my bones ran as if molten. And my skull was burst inside out. Where was I then? No longer in the throes of my pleasure. It was a place of mud, and I crouched there. Above were stars that blazed like pain. And beneath me was something that writhed only a very little, and I lowered my face and tore at it, and raw meat was in my mouth and hot salt gushed between my lips and up into my nostrils.”
Heros drew in his breath and let it go.
“I woke in indescribable panic. Sin had changed me. I’d become – I did not know what I had become. But in the dark I found myself with my criminal hands, which had betrayed me to Satan in my sleep. God’s benison. I was only myself. In all ways, a boy, a man. In those nights then,” he said, “I’d have them tie my hands to the posts of the bed before I would sleep. But by my sixteenth year I’d trained myself to wake from the snare before the dream should go very far. Do I disquiet you, Helise? Of course. You should never have come into this room. This is where I look upon my soul. Stupid girl. You see in the picture what happens to the curious.”
Helise, her palm pressed to her mouth, drum-beats shaking her body, turned to remove herself from the chamber.
“You must never come here again,” he said. “You must forget what I’ve said to you. Tell no one. Swear it. On your saint.”
In a crumb of a voice, she swore as he required.
He did not, with his emerald eyes, observe her creep away. He was staring once more into the hearth.
All down the stairs, and in the corridors, going south now back across the house of d’Uscaret, to her nuptial bedroom and the room of sitting which were her jail, she imagined him borne upwards on the inexplicable wave, twisting, arched like the Christ on a cross, and his face an agony like the face of Jehanus. And when at last she reached privacy she sank on the wide bed where they had lain side by side, sword by sheath. And she too twisted and turned and was arched on her scaffold, and upon her also came the fit, so her cry rang clear against the ceiling. It was like the call of a bodiless preying thing that flew about there.
She did forget the other element of which he had told her. The meat and wine among the mud and stars: that was gone.
She had only been able to learn one lesson from him.
It had killed her. She had exploded from her own skin, and lay stranded on the pillows. No longer was she an innocent.
She was defiled, she had entered the lists of the wrongdoers. She felt relief. If she was wicked, she need no longer rein herself in. She could admit her wants and where possible indulge them.
When she was in the d’Uscaret chapel now, her eyes on the prayerbook, she thought, This one never bothered with me. But Satan covets me. He will attend.
And then, frightened, she put away the idea.
But in the night, lying alone, recaptured it.
Would Heros ever return to her, to their bed? Surely yes. It was expected that a husband lie now and then with his wife. Such forms he honoured.
But she had learned what had been missed from their lying down. She had learned, by his voice and words, if not his embraces, the communion they might have shared.
Of course it was a fearful thing. Uncanny, astonishing. That escalation, that paroxysm –
She recalled now only that chastity had prevented him. His hands tied that he might not dream of lust.
Helise visualised that she came to him in the dark, and untied the bindings, and his hands fell instead upon her own body.
But although the bed had at last pleasures for her, he did not return to accompany her in them.
Ten nights went by, twelve, twenty.
Having confessed, would he never come back?
She saw him seldom, even at dinner. He was on some business of his father’s, Lord d’Uscaret, the peeved man who drank and sweated and kicked at his dogs.
Yet one morning early, going into the Sculpture Garden, Helise beheld Heros walking with his mother slowly up and down.
The garden lay on the north-west side and had high barriers. It was supposed to be a retreat for the women of the house and Lady d’Uscaret would frequently avail herself of its shade in summer at midday. Helise therefore restricted her forays to dewy twilights, dawn or dusk.
She did not like this garden, either. It had none of the quaint simplicity of the courts of la Valle, where figs and vines grew up the walls and flowers lived in pots. The Sculpture Garden was ruled with straight paths, partitioned by yew and box, conifer and ilex, all coerced and sheared to the shapes of balls, cones, squares and other symbols, or if not that, let out into birds with beaks and stretching tails. Where arches crossed the way they were thick with foliage, mathematical hoops of solid green. In the marble water tank was a hairy water-lily, which ate flies, a curiosity: Helise had witnessed a gloating gardener feeding the plant. In the shrubs nested statues. Leaves and boughs strove to swallow the statues up as the lily gulped insects, but this was not allowed. At the end of the garden was a statue of Psyche, so Helise had come to apprehend. She carried a lamp, on her way to discovering her naked, handsome lover.
But one thing was certain, and that was the ease of hiding in such a garden.
A month before, Helise would have slipped away. Now she slipped into the cavern of a prodigious yew, and as he went to and fro with his steel mother, devoured Heros with her eyes.
After the two figures had patrolled in silence for some minutes, the lady spoke.
“You must know, if you take yourself away, I shall have nothing.”
And Helise was amazed to hear the passionless metallic woman say such a thing in her remote voice.
“Mother – I hoped you’d excuse me this.”
“Berating you? You know I won’t rail at you, or weep. I shall be quiet. But if you leave this house, my light goes out.”
“The Duke’s commission –”
“Is needless. A ploy. For your escape.”
Heros smiled faintly. Helise did not think she had ever seen that before. The lady’s hand rested on his sleeve like a long bud of the motionless carnivorous lily. Then it twitched, as if it could not help itself, losing a fly.
“Madam-mother. You must let me go.”
“When you were a child you had these notions. That the City choked you.”
“Don’t you prefer me at peace?”
“It’s that wife he foisted on you that drives you away. A witless female spawn of la Valle, got by your father for her dowry, because he cannot leave the pots alone.”
“It’s true. Marriage doesn’t suit me, Mother.”
“I’ve noted your aversion to her. But what is she? Less than one of the bitches. You live your life as you wish, and leave her to hers. She’s barren besides. In time, you can slough her for this.”
And then, sick and trembling, Helise saw that he grinned, the beautiful saint’s face split like that of some riotous drunk. Not laughter, but this bestial snarl of mirth, quite soundless, behind the woman’s head, so she did not even know. And when he answered his voice was composed.
“Oh, let Helise alone. What might her replacement be?”
“But you will remain at d’Uscaret?”
“No, Mother. I’ll be gone.”
They had halted, there beneath the statue of Psyche with her lamp, forever frozen in her marble moment, never to reach revelation and despair.
“Heros,” said Lady d’Uscaret, and then, after a second, “you should have been a priest. If I had had any say –”
“And I mine, Mother. It was the only chance for me.”
“That drunkard I wed, that disgrace to our name, that clod. A fool in everything.”
In the umbra of the statue they hung, neither looking at the other, not speaking.
Then she said quickly, “We must never fear shadows. It strengthens them. What are the nightmares of your childhood? What, you and I to credit a delusion?” But suddenly she seized hold of him. She clung to him, and her flat hardness was like petrification. And he, he bowed his head until it rested on her shoulder. One could not see his face. Yet they were like any mother and son in a scene of awful grief.
And then they drew apart, and this might never have happened.
“In a month,” he said, “I’ll be in another country.”
“As you think fit,” she said. “Yes. We’re in accord.”
When they had vacated the garden, Helise stayed rooted in the tree.
Her stomach heaved as if she were indeed pregnant. But all she had truly discovered was that Heros would soon leave her.
That night, the door of the bedchamber opened. Heros entered. Behind the screen with its running of white dogs and grey hawks, the gentleman undressed his master. Then the gentleman, as ever, discreetly left. Heros approached the bed in his silken robe. And Helise ceased to breathe or think.
“Sad little wife,” said Heros, looking at her not in complacency, or pity, definitely without excitement or intent. “We did you an ill-turn. I’m sorry for it, Helise. Will you forgive me, and pray for me sometimes?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“Have they told you? In a few days, I’ll be away on the Duke’s errands.”
Someone must have told her, superfluously after she had spied.
“Yes, my lord.”
“You’ll be glad to see me gone,” he said. “Believe me, your disappointments weren’t my aim.”
Helise let out her breath in a shivering sigh. She did not look at him any more, and he went about the room as usual, dousing the candles, so the dark tide came sweeping from the stones, and followed him to the bed’s foot, and there he blew out the last candle, and blackness filled the room and the bed alike. And he and she were alone inside that blackness, like two birds shut inside a cage.
Never before, not even on the first night, had she been so conscious of him, his proximity, as he joined her in the bed. The movement of his flesh and limbs against the sheet, the whisper of his hair over the pillow. She felt a warmth from him like the radiance of a cool flame.
He did not speak to her again. In a short space, his respiration assumed the levelness of sleep. Could he really render himself to oblivion so readily? It was some cantrip he knew, this knack for slumber.
But she must lie awake and think of him. Of his nearness. And if he slept, might she not approach him more closely? Would he wake and chide her?
Helise swam through the sheets and her hands encountered him, as the swimmer in sightless deep ocean encounters another living thing, with a galvanic shock.
He was naked. Like Cupido, like the god. With her palms she had contacted his flank, the architecture of ribs under its suit of skin.
He had not woken, no, he had not. Therefore might she discover him once again? Or, more crazily, lawlessly, why not, like Psyche, look at him?
No sooner had the fancy taken hold of her than it seemed she must do it. She could no longer control her need, or savagery.
She slid from the coverings and sought her way by touch along the bed, a mile of stuffs and ungiving framework, until she found the chest, the candle, and the tinder set by.
She struck the spark. She might say she had heard some noise, or – at long last – that she could not sleep.
But not a murmur of protest issued from the bed. And when the fire leapt up on the wax, shielding it with her own body, she glanced about. He had not moved.
Like Psyche, and with all her stealth, Helise stole back again, along the length of the couch, cupping the candle flame. The curtains of the bed were drawn back, she had no necessity, as Psyche had, to lift them away. It was the sheet, the covers of brocade, these she meant to pull aside.
She must kneel up on the bed. She did so. The candle palpitated and steadied, flickering only with her rapid pulse, as if illumination itself sprang from her heart.
She leaned over him, her left hand now on the coverlet.
His head was turned from her, the blond hair rayed upon the pillow. Bare, the shoulder presented itself to her for the scald of spilled burning matter. She must be wary.
And as she leaned there, her left hand getting its slow grip on the sheet, he stirred.
Helise started away. Instinctual precaution made her thrust the candle aside to the length of her arm. The flame bent, flattened, sputtered – and the room reeled. But he, after all, did not wake. He had merely pressed his face further into the pillow, away from a light unconsciously perceived.
The walls and ceiling settled, the candle-flame resumed its steady trembling. Helise looked down on the sleeping man, and saw the hair had been caught away now from the nape of his neck. A strange shadow emerged at this place, from the roots of the hair, coiling along the spine, to dissolve between his shoulder-blades.
With caution, she brought the candle close again. The shadow dimmed but did not move. Helise leant nearer. She inhaled the clean maleness of his flesh and longed to brush her lips against the flax of hair, and saw the shadow on him was a scar, a curious plating, a trail of tarnished studs – she could not make them out. Like a lizard’s scales.
It was a birthmark. (Had not her own maid had a raised discoloured nubbin on her knee, the shape of a star?) Helise put out her hand to finger the mark, the sweet flaw in his beauty – stayed herself, reached again for the edge of the sheet.
She stripped the covers from him deftly, in a leisurely receding wave, inch by inch, her heart hammering in her breast.
Would he wake now? No, he would not. His sorcerous sleep was like a breathing death.
She had never seen a man’s nakedness, save in a statue or a painting, there never fully. He had the appearance of both statue and painting as he stretched there in the light amid the shores of darkness, adrift in the bed, his skin more swarthy than the linen, the smooth musculature carved and scarcely troubled with breath. Not stone, perhaps, but some strong ashen wood, tinted faintly to the hues of life, in order to deceive, and equipped with quiescent manhood, something at which the young girl had guessed, dismaying to her more in its first-seen familiarity than by anything alien, the tempter, the serpent of sex.
Careless of the glimmering, burning tallow, Helise bowed over the body of her husband. Her kisses printed themselves along his arm, his side.
But the hot wax did not drop upon him, and her mouth, the helpless small noise she could not now keep herself from making – these did not break in the membrane of his slumber.
He was enchanted. And she dared do no more.
Helise quenched the candle, and removed herself from his vicinity.
He did not rouse even at that.
The chamber seemed distended and tinderous with her solitary sins.
It was because of his aversion to her that he made the opportunity to be gone. He did not want her. If she had been able to cause him desire, how could he have resisted? He would then have remained. He would have been her lover.
But it was a witchcraft on him.
Did a woman then have no skill in such magic? It was the most ancient sorcery, Eve’s art, practised at the foot of the apple tree in Eden, that which brought down the race of mankind.
They said, at d’Uscaret, they muttered that Ysanne … that Ysanne was clever in women’s business.
“Cherish,” had said fat old Ysanne, “she must overcome her blushes.”
“I’m unsure what is meant. The lady should be plainer,” said Ysanne. Her beady eyes were cunning.
Helise sat in her chair and her humiliation, clenching herself to endure.
“My Lord Heros is tired of me. Now he departs the City. How shall I provide an heir if – if –”
“If he doesn’t assist you. Yes. A woman’s lot is a rare fix.” Ysanne had changed her tune. Now she and Helise were co-conspirators against the masculine order, conceivably the masculine God.
“They say –”
“And what do they say?”
“That you can make a potion that will – enhance –”
“That will make a girl too good to be left alone. That will swell the male member so it must get busy. I can do that. And several other things.”
“I think – he won’t visit me again.”
“Ah, that’s tricky. I’ll give you a charm. It will call him. If he doesn’t arrive directly, then you must find some excuse to bid him. The charm will render him pliable. Then something for his wine, and an unction I’ll give you to rub in your skin, very fragrant. Leave it to me,” said Ysanne. “I’ve always relished that little chain you wear, with the pearl.”
Helise removed the chain. She held it out to Ysanne.
“No, no. Are you offering that to me? But lady, I serve the house. I’m your slave.” Then seeing the chain flutter, knowing Helise inept, Ysanne quickly added, “You’re too kind, madam. I thank you. It’s always safer to seal a bargain. Naturally, this is a secret.” And with the pearl in her bosom off she went, leaving Helise to pace about, between repentance and vaunting, dread and disbelief, praying with untame transgression for Heaven to grant her profane hope.
She wore the charm, a mouse’s sack of herbs, under her shift. Not seeing Heros d’Uscaret by night, morning, afternoon, she sent him word. Through servants, she entreated he would speak to her before his journey. The servants said they had not found him. Further inquiry told her that her husband was dining at the house of this family and that. That her husband was dining at the palace with the Duke. That her husband was in his tower, where they did not venture to bother him except at the summons of his father, or his mother.
Days ebbed. She stitched them into her embroidery, and picked them out again, but still they were lost.
Ysanne’s herbal charm did not work. Her other mixtures would be as useless, the unction, the drug for the wine. She would not address herself to Ysanne again.
Then, from a dry husk or two let fall by the voice of Lady d’Uscaret, Helise had made known to her that in three nights, Heros would leave the City. She did not even recall – perhaps they had never mentioned it to her – where he was bound. Whether by ship or overland route. The date of his return had not been coined.
There was a page who sometimes waited on Helise when the household gathered. She supposed he had been designated hers. On the stair she beckoned him.
“Where is my Lord Heros?”
“In House Lyrecourt, across the City.”
“You will follow me now and I will give you a letter for my lord. Then go with it to the door of d’Uscaret and wait for him. Wait all night if you must.”
“He’ll be home at midnight,” said the page, perkily privy to the doings of her husband as she was not.
“That’s as may be. Only behave as I tell you.”
In the bedchamber by the void hearth, the great chimney-piece with its falcons either side, she wrote: “Call upon me tonight, my lord, or, such is my misery, I shall kill myself and damn my soul for ever.”
What fashioned these words, succinct and awful, she could not decide. The Devil? It could not be her own desperate mind. She was a fool, but Satan was wise.
But then, would Heros attend to her threat?
It seemed Satan ascertained he would.
She handed the letter to the page, folded in a scarf which she had smeared with Ysanne’s unction.
Alone, she anointed her body, rubbing the spicy-smelling oil into her breasts, her thighs, her throat and belly. The friction maddened her. She sprinkled the powder into some wine. She wondered in alarm at all she did. But now, as if a bell had struck the hour, she knew that her prayers were heard in Hell.
She heard too, finally, the midnight Matines tolled from the Sacrifice, and not many minutes after, a dog barked under the wall. It seemed then she felt the reverberation of the shutting of a door.
Time passed, or else time was stilled. And in the midst of the candles’ shining, as if in a slab of crystal, Helise waited.
Until the great door of the bedchamber was opened.
On a frame of dark, her pale husband stood looking at her.
“What is it, madam, that you want of me?”
Some feminine slyness had kept her in her gown, her hair bound in its metal caul. The same slyness stayed her on the spot, staring at the floor, her hands clasped under her breast.
“My letter to you,” she said, “told everything.”
“No, nothing. Are you so desperate?” he said coldly. “You seem in command of yourself.”
“I die of sadness,” she said. “But since you don’t care for me, I strive to hide the hurt. What do I want? Only courtesy. Not to be the mock of the house. That you should say farewell before you leave me for ever.”
Ah, Satan, her tutor.
Now Heros had closed the door and advanced into the room. Helise did not lift her eyes, although he was before her.
“It isn’t to be helped,” he said quietly. “But since you wish it, I’m here to say farewell. And for this talk of death …”
“To kill myself? Why not? What should I live for?”
“You are God’s. What worse insult can you offer the Creator than to fling back His present in His face? Do you think He would ever forgive you? Through the endless centuries until Doomsday, He would not.”
He spoke as sternly as any friar. She recalled the conversation between himself and his mother in the garden. To be a priest, his only chance. He was wrong. She was his chance. Her love, so strong and vital that it seared, this would set him free.
“You must be my guide,” she whispered.
“Then cancel every idea of self-destruction.”
“I will remember your words. If you were here to guide me –”
“Helise, I can’t remain. Sweet girl,” he said, suddenly very tenderly, “you must guide yourself. Let your own angel instruct you. You’re so young – not one iota of blame …” And he ceased speaking, and she knew that his concentration was centred wholly on her. Either her vehemence, or Ysanne’s ointment, possibly both together, had taken hold of him. She had come to life for Heros, with all that implied.
Saying nothing she turned from him and poured the wine into a glass. She offered it to him, meekly, still her eyes lowered, afraid he would glimpse the fires in them.
“The cup of parting,” said Helise. She employed the phrases of courtly songs, these came with facility, now she needed them, or Satan sent them, for how could she have a vocabulary to manage this?
He accepted the wine slowly. He did not drink, but stood regarding her.
Then, at last, at last, he raised the cup.
She looked, and saw him swallow, once, twice.
“What wine is this?” he said absently. His eyes were fixed on her. At their intensity a wonderful terror submerged her. Never, in any of their dealings, had he studied her in this way. It was the gaze of desire, or so it seemed. He drank again, not taking his eyes from her. And then he frowned, and said, “There’s something in the wine – did you mean to poison me?”
“Oh no!” she cried. Her heart seemed cloven by its hammering.
“But – what is it? What have you done to me?”
“A love potion,” she said. The admission was safe now.
“Then, there’s no choice.”
He smiled, grinned with the deadly dead mirth she had witnessed once before, and tilting the glass he drained it, and let it go. It crashed in bits upon the floor.
“Perhaps, Helise,” he said, “perhaps you haven’t been sensible. Come here.” And when she took a step, he took several more to meet her, and caught her between his hands. “Love potions,” he said. “Did you think I didn’t want you? For every night spent in bed with you, first a draught to make me sleep. So that I shouldn’t be tempted. For you’re adorable, my white wife. Better than any dream. But perhaps the dreams won’t matter now –”
The earth gave way and the room broke off in shards. She clung to him and he kissed her, a kiss of serpents, his tongue in her mouth.
His hands were those of a saviour, supporting, rescuing her in tumult, but also the hands of one who would destroy her, finding purchase on her body, ripping at the laces of her gown –
She had unleashed desire, the carnal entity. His breath burned on her throat. He held her so tightly she herself could not breathe. He bore her backwards and the hard floor was harsh under her uncushioned slimness. His weight pushed her down. A sore sweetness shot through the core of her breasts as he drew on them with his lips. Almost delicious but partly horrible – almost a torment – and then a tickling and probing between her thighs so her instinct was to evade – but he would not allow her now to evade him, and then came a terrible pressure, like that of a thunderbolt trying to cleave her, and she felt she would be burst, but there was only a shrill tearing, like a broken string.
She saw his face as he invaded her. She did not know him. He bore upon her, his skin engorged with lust and his eyes opaque and perhaps unseeing. There seemed no longer any contours to his face. He did not behold her and was unrecognisable. His hair tossed about him, shaggy as the mane of a beast, lank and dark with sweat as if with blood –
The thrusting of his body within hers was a punishment, a horror that was nearly an ecstasy, and far worse for that.
Helise heard herself moaning and pleading in pain. The fire-making action of his loins scorched her. She struggled, and the ghostly ecstasy surged in her again, and she no longer cared what had mounted on her, what killed her there on the ungiving ground. It was not Heros. It was some hideous thing, some creature of the Devil, torturing her in Hell for all her sins –
She heard terrible sounds rising in her throat, and then the spasm hurled her apart. She was screaming. It would never end. In animal fear she let go her clutch upon the excruciating peak, and fell away.
Only then was she revolted, finding herself on the floor, ground into the tiles under the weight of him, a hard mass of flesh that still moved upon her, still thrust mercilessly inside her.
He was lifting himself up, his head thrown back –
On the arch of his throat, the weltered light caught a dull sequin that all at once flashed, and then another, and another –
Helise lay pinned under his racking body. She stared at the altering skin of his throat. It was coming out in tiny jewellery slates, which ran together. His neck was scaled now. It was all a perfect tesselation.
Something scraped along her breast. Her head rolled and she saw a black claw retracting from her behind a thread of blood.
She could not scream. Her screams had been spent. At that instant, the quake of his crisis rocked through her, and it was he that cried out. It was not the cry of a man.
A whirling clotted the air, a fume of candles shaken by a gale.
The sword of flesh unsheathed from her. She was filled only by pain.
Something rose up, many miles high against the ceiling.
She did not want to see. Her eyes refused to close.
The shape of a man, but the face, the head …
It must be a mask, a visor – it was a bird. A bird’s head, formed from a streaming mosaic of scales, but for the blackish carved beak, the thin black worm of the tongue … the eyes were green bulbs. There was no intelligence in them, yet there was being. They lived.
Helise lay on the floor. She had no breath, no reason. Her heart had stopped, her blood was frozen cold. Yet she saw.
The thing moved from her, left her. It lurched across the room. It came upon the fireplace and there it squatted, and then suddenly leapt. It was away up the chimney. It was gone.