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

of the house, at first seeming imagined, then returning more solidly. It was sweetish, yet sour, wet – yet dry, dirty, unspeakable. She thought of a time in Paris, a dead rat under the floor…

From above, in the conservatory box, began a harsh restless crying and moaning. Someone in awful and relentless pain. Almost more distressing than the fox.

Anna moved up the stair, and the conservatory was before her. It was soft-lit, only an oil lamp burning against the glass, old light, from an earlier era. At first she did not reason out what she saw by its glow.

On the table the books were spilled. The decanter stood unstoppered in a puddle of liquid.

A girl in a black dress lay over the table, her head hanging off the table’s end, so Anna saw her upside down. The hair was undone, a tangle of honey straw. Her black dress, the buttons gaping, one round breast brought out, and the rest of her crushed.

She was howling in her delirium. Now and then she gave a mindless cry, not quite like a beast, the beast in the park.

The man lay over and worked on her, inside her. It was one of the Basulte men. In the lamplight, Anna could not be sure which of them.

At every thrust of his body, the girl, sobbing, whining, her eyes shut, her head tossing. Joy or pain? It was impossible to tell which.

She was one of the servants, the slaves. Her apron too flopped to one side, a gasping starched tongue, and the starched bonnet was caught, like a white insect, in the riot of her hair.

On the floor under the table, where they must have knocked them, kicked them, the two slices of gammon Anna had not eaten, nearly a week before, cotton now, putrid, crawled with little wiggling things.

Above the hubbub, his panting, her cries, the colossal roar of stench, the rain prickled delicately on the glass roof, in spangles and sequins, the saliva of moonless, watching, avid night.

Chapter Four: Then

Her life had been a series of bizarre little vignettes. There were so many of them, it seemed almost inappropriate to put them all together, and call this mosaic an Existence.

They were scenes from a play, perhaps. Now a child was dragged along a street, a woman running after the man who dragged the child, waving the man’s shirt and shouting. A procession with a band and a white goat led on a leash, and a girl standing at the roadside, smiling at the soldiers, her fur coat open slightly, revealing she was naked under it. And the soldiers too tired to notice. There was a woman with flowers in her black hair, or they might be ribbons, lying as if dead in a large rumpled bed whose pillows were decorated with lace. Women with baskets picking olives, fingers gnarled like the trees. A drunken man singing in an orange café.

Always, to everything, a background of movement. Of coming or going away. Train, boats on choppy water. Even a carriage drawn by horses, and mountains pointed up by snow.

Finally Anna came down like a deer to a river, and met Raoul Basulte. But that recent memory was different. It had been removed this side of a pane of thick glass, transparent but impervious. Behind the pane, the other memories, all the vignettes, the Past, crouched, bottled up together. And in the midst of them there grew up one tall, tall tree.

The tree cast its shadow away into the distance, back as far as Anna’s birth, or so it seemed to her. And forward, over and through the glass partition, into her present, and then again on, into her future, for ever.

Someone ran up the stairs and knocked on her door. The house where she lodged in Preguna was always full of changing people. She did not recognize the boy, which didn’t surprise her.

“There’s a fat woman downstairs.” Anna shook her head. “From your work-place.”

“Oh.”

“She says the old man’s taken sick. Wants you to come.”

Anna shut the door and dressed. She had been sitting in the chair smoking and drinking coffee, which the German woman brought her on Sundays. Outside the sun was climbing the delft blue sky. It was about ten o’clock.

The fat woman was the woman with the bun, who cooked at the professor’s house, and perhaps poisoned Anna’s strudel. Her face was sulky but frightened, and pale.

“He was taken ill in the night. He said you must go to him.”

Anna could not think why. She was an employee, sometimes a sort of toy. Now and then she had felt sorry for the professor, especially after his sad sudden little hiccup-orgasms. At other times she was rather envious. He had a pension, he had his comforts, and was always writing his book, which he seemed to think was important. He had even, after all, found an easy and successful way to vent the slight sexuality still in him.

Then again, if he was dying, which seemed likely, though the fat woman had not said so, she didn’t envy him at all.

The shutters were uniformly closed, and outside on the cobbles Anna saw something she had never seen except very occasionally, in her childhood, straw thrown down there, to muffle any noise of traffic.

When the woman saw the straw on the road, she put her hands over her face and wept. Anna waited. She wondered if she should say something. Finally she said, “I’m sorry. You’ve been with him a long time.”

The woman said, through her tears and hands, “He was the father of my child.”

Anna was startled.

“Yes, yes. It was long ago. The baby died.”

Anna thought, wondering what else she could say. The woman was the professor’s cook. Yet she had borne his child.

The woman wiped her face with a handkerchief. She said, “It wasn’t love, you understand. We were younger. One night. It was the summer carnival, when they wear the masks, here, and everyone goes mad. He was kind afterwards. He