Killing Violets, Tanith Lee [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

“Izzard.” She had thought for a second he said lizard.

“Lily,” he said. “They call her that, I believe.”

Anna breathed the wet tree-dripping country air. It had an English smell, what she would have expected.

“I don’t know the names of any of your family.”

“Oh, Anna. So much to remember. Poor girl.”

“I didn’t forget. They didn’t tell me.”

“Oh, they must have. Never mind.”

The long flags of chestnut leaves, grainy and veined as ageing skin, painfully green; the wet flopping down in enormous droplets. Black clouds bubbled over the sky.

“Your sister is called Lilian,” said Anna.

“Mm,” he said. “Margaret Lilian.”

Anna left a gap. She said, “Your brother told me he was called Raoul.” Another snap decision.

But Raoul only pulled a stick off a bush, and slashed with it at other bushes, and the high grass now bordering the drive. Live leaves tattered and tore from the stick and were lost.

“William. He’s named for my father.”

Anna considered the bouquet of names. Something stirred incoherently in the depths of memory. The Conquest of England, the Norman Conquest. Hadn’t the man who led that invasion been called William? Perhaps William was not the name of Raoul’s brother.

Water splashed up and entered the galoshes, and now she walked in two cold puddles.

There was the odour of soaked earth, dead clandestine things rotting, springing plants.

At the end of the drive, they turned out of the tall gate into a lane. The dreary fields folded away, and trees in patches, and in the distance were smoky woods.

It was a horrible walk, so wet and pointless. And finally, when they had trundled through several lanes, and clambered over stiles of black wet wood, and a bull had leered at them, black himself as Tartarus, they got down into the sodden village.

Sallow houses with ebony timbers and fish-bowl windows ran up the street. Flowers lay flat, smashed by rain, in gardens. There was a church, with flinty, scratchy-looking walls, and with a big square tower that had a clock on it.

“The bells ring all Sunday,” said Raoul. “It gets on my nerves, rather.”

He took her by the pub, which had a sign of an armoured knight killing a pretty doll-like dragon, strangely similar to a picture she had seen by Ucello. “I’d buy you a drink, but if they see me they get in a lather. The beer’s good. It’s a pity.”

Anna pictured them, jumping into a vat of lathery beer.

Two wet cats were yowling by the pub’s garden wall. Roses grew in tubs, but the heads were off and on the street like pools of cerise paint. A horse stood tied by the horse trough, swishing its tail as if the drizzle starting were only flies.

“You seem different here,” she said softly.

“Mm. I’m sorry. It’s not much fun for you. There are things I must do, to please my father. Then, maybe we’ll go up to London. You’d like that? Restaurants, and the theatre. Cinemas too. And you can buy your trousseau.”

“For the wedding.”

“Yes, darling Anna. For the wedding in that grim church we just saw.”

She wondered if she should confess to him, at this crucial and quite inappropriate moment, that she could never bear him a child. She felt no responsibility really. A plan of escape was almost before her now. For in London, that great city, she could give him the slip.

“I’m a foreigner,” she said.

“Your English is virtually perfect,” he answered.

The cats began to fight, rolling over and over, screaming, and a woman ran out of the inn or pub to throw a pail of excess water over them.

“Good day, Mrs Lizard,” said Raoul.

No, he had said Mrs Izzard.

The sign of the lizard-dragon swung in a glancing wind, and the woman gave a little bob to Raoul, her sly lemon eyes slipping over Anna.

“G’dee, Masur Basul. Issis or young lady, mi do I be boldun ask?”

“Yes, Mrs Izzard. My lady, Anna.”

The cats, sopping wet, snaked between Anna’s legs, and she felt them even through the galoshes. Counterpoint, warmly, Raoul’s semen ran down her thighs in an abrupt laving.

Mrs Izzard, the mother perhaps of Lilith, displayed her few teeth. A smile out of prehistory, placatory and trustless.

“Willastup in, Masr? Take a pint?”

“No thanks, Mrs Izzard. Not now.”

“The yun lady loogs tired, she duz.”

In the inn or pub was darkness. Nothing moved. A den, waiting, for the she-fox to bring in her prey.

“Good day,” Raoul said again, guiding Anna up the lugubrious street.

Anna was tired. Enervated. They had the return walk, too. The air was not refreshing.

At the top of the village were copses of trees, and fields, and Raoul plunged off into the grasses, swinging his vicious slaughtered stick.

As they strode on, Raoul took off his hat, and shook it. She glimpsed the back of his neck.

Had that little mole always been there, surely she would remember it?

“We can go round this way,” he said. “It’s uphill. A bracing walk. We’ll be back like the children in the story, in time for tea.”

Later on, after the scones and muffins and teacakes and iced cakes and fruit cakes, he took her mildly aside.

“Mrs Pin says you won’t let the girl dress you.”

“Who says?”

“Mrs – the housekeeper. If you don’t like that one maid, you can have another. Just say. That’s what they’re there for, to look after you.”

“Your servants.”

“Our servants.”

“William said,” said Anna, “he thought of the servants as dogs. Obedient and loyal.”

“Oh, William. Just do as I ask, Anna.”

“But what do you ask?”

“Silly girl. Let the maid see to your clothes and hair and so on. You see, Anna, you’ve insulted her in a way. It’s her function to wait on you. If you say no, you’re – frankly, you’re slapping her in the face.”

One evening at Preguna, when she hadn’t gone to the Professor’s house, Anna was sitting in a café, drinking coffee, and the young man with the birthmark came in.

Anna looked away at once. Then, in a while, she heard him walk over. His shadow fell between her and the sun.

“May