Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
Browning
As if from the tomb, sleepily, he rose up from her narrative. (Which might be apposite enough.) She had anyway bewitched him. He had seen what she said, in vivid pictures, masterful paintings come to life.
Raoulin stirred, and stretched himself, as he would not have done so freely in the presence of a lady. He took care not to look at her directly, but into the pallid glow of the fire, which had either been fed while he sat entranced, or which magically never went out.
“But Demoiselle Helise,” said Raoulin, sportive with the supernatural for there seemed nothing else to be, “if you died, here you are, and you haven’t yet given me the alchemical formula for that. Besides – am I to take you for twenty-five or twenty-six years? Not more than eighteen, surely?”
“Time for me has made a stop,” she said. Her liquid voice thrilled him. The voice of a sorceress. One could not be blamed for anything under the same roof as a witch.
At his own thought Raoulin struggled briefly. He reached back after the dead prostitute, the anguish that had brought him here. But a balm had been salved over them. They did not hurt any more.
“Shall I,” she said, “conclude my story at once?”
Then he had to look at her. Into her eyes like emerald. He nodded. She said, “That part’s swiftly told. The poison my husband’s mother had administered was insufficient. I did not die, but lay inert, flexible and wholesome, and with a slight breathing that some doctor ascertained. They did not have the heart for more murder, to finish off the bitch’s work. The feud was out with Lyrecourt, the Duke’s frowns glowering. And there was Heros to be seen to. His corpse had rotted in one night, with a fearful stink, all bits, human and avian. So they made my tomb, and named it for me, and laid the box of his bones there under a proud drape. For me, I was hidden again in this room, and sometimes tended. After many months, it seems I began to revive. I recall nothing of that period, not for three or four years, rather as the infant does not. Then I became myself, and remembered what I had been and what they had done to me. I was content to be hidden, and to hide. I heard tidings of their various deaths from servants. One evening I was told how Lord d’Uscaret, my second father, had been bled on Satan’s Way, under the Temple-Church. I laughed and had to pretend it was weeping, because I was still nervous of my jailors.” Helise put up her hand and rested it on her delicate chin. “You see, Sieur Raoulin, it had driven me mad. You can’t anticipate from me any fine feelings. I cackle at corpses. I burst into tears at the newborn baby’s cry.”
Raoulin shivered. It was not her words, only some latent truth inherent in them for all mankind.
“When most of d’Uscaret had gone, I began to win out of my prison. I was let go about. I caused no trouble with my walking of the corridors, my occasional peeking into cupboards. I learned a little, but did not take up arms. Like the old ones dying here, I was only and all acceptance. Now they think of me as a part of the masonry. I do as I wish. The two servants feed me and serve me when necessary. Of course, I’m spoken of as one deceased. They recall that much, it must never be admitted, my resurrection.”
When she said this, Raoulin was not moved to horror or distress for her. She seemed only reciting the part of a character in a drama, and not even very well. Her passions were dead even if her heart went on beating. But she startled him next.
Her voice had an avidity when she said, “Yet, I’ve waited.”
Raoulin found himself, bewitched or not, on guard.
“For what, lady?”
“Why,” she said, “I think, for you.”
“For me? I can’t assist you – or, if you’ve some petition I could go to the courts with it – my father has some influence, but not in the City – and do you think – the tale, being or seeming, improbable –”
“No, m’sieur. Be at ease. I want nothing like that.”
Raoulin was ashamed of his reluctance, yet now, as reality came back to him, uncomfortable as blood returning to a numbed foot, he began to yearn to be done with this. In the eldritch room he had formerly deemed coy and feminine, the miasma of her history shimmered. What hour was it? Surely Laude had struck –
“I might have roamed the City, but that wasn’t in me to do. My early training was as a daughter of a noble house. You’ll understand, Sieur Raoulin, only aged men have recently entered d’Uscaret.”
Raoulin found himself staring at her again, into the jewel eyes.
“Women also may burn,” she said. “I’ve been chaste as the nun for all these years of my widowhood. The last violation, the monstrous intrusion – never, since then.”
While she had recounted those things, though they seemed enacted before him, they had not aroused. But now, abruptly, with an extreme pressure, lust possessed him. He got to his feet, not meaning to, and clumsily jarred the table where the wine cup stood – and he thought of the wine, Ysanne’s drugs of Alexandria. And through the murk two ideas struck clear, like rocks in a flood. That despite everything, she was a woman of a line older than the City, higher than he could ascend with safety, and, of course, that though his flesh throbbed for her, he did not want to lie down with her, even in a falsehood, the resurrected girl who had pleasured a demon.
But there in the firelight of the sorcerous hearth, Helise d’Uscaret was combing her blonde hair with her fingers, she was shaking her tresses so they flew about her like white foam from the sea. She was putting up her hands to the nape of her neck, the lacing of the gown. “Come here,” she said, “and help me.”
And he discovered he was there behind her, eagerly fumbling at the undoing of her dress. And as it slipped from her shoulders, she drew his hands around her body, over the shift, to her breasts and belly. The fire shone through the linen as through the strands of her hair. The scent of her drenched his lungs, his mind.
“There’s a pact between us,” she said. “This must be.”
“Amen,” he muttered, and pulled her around to have her mouth.
Indeed, could you credit her story? Yes, she was insane a little. The prologue to an enticement, all that rigmarole, with the old hag of the kitchen an accomplice.
Somewhere in his brain, like a bell distantly tolling, some tocsin of unease kept on. But he forgot it as he brought her by the carved posts of the bed, and she threw off the shift and lay down before him like a nymph of pearl.
She gave a low laugh when he entered her. It deterred him half a second. Then she had flung up against him, and he could do nothing but begin with her that dance of death called procreation, the invention of the fiends.
Her cries came like those of one under torture. He lifted himself, and saw her, her face contorted with ravening agony or joy, her whole body pulsing as if rivers broke beneath her bones, as if she must dissolve. One look and he too was set off, like cannon by tinder. He leaned on her groaning and an exquisite needle seemed to pierce through the centre of his loins, into his spine, so he also shook and struggled to be impaled or to get release.
And at the height of it, somehow he began to see her again, to see what clasped him and gave him this, and even in the instants of orgasm, some quarter of his brain started to rip at him, to tear him back into his senses. That quarter howled. Then sight and thought smote him together like blows.
Raoulin shouted out – not in pleasure, not now. He tried to spring backwards, and fell heavily against a post of the bed. There, he lay. He lay looking at Helise. At what Helise had become. Became.
The fever-image had been correct. For she was, it was a fact, dissolving. Her flesh was slopping off, the skeins of muscles showing, melting in their turn, pouring over the bones like heated wax. And the bones themselves were sere. As they came poking up through the deliquescent body, it was revealed they were old bones, meant to be naked a decade at least.
She – no longer she – was a sludge, silt or mud, upon the sheet. And the bones rattled slightly, settling in their improper bed. About the skull, the brittle flax of hair, going every minute more to mould and dust. And in the death’s-head, all stained with the passage of sudden decay, two green gelatines were fixed, the eyes of what she had become, of what had allowed her corpse to live, in waiting, all these hungry years.