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

seat, wrapped up in a rug, Anna saw the lanes go by. Starlight thin as wires poked into the fields. When they entered the gate she must have made a little sound for the huge man who sat beside her, Mr Lizard (Izzard) patted her hand. “Umos theer.”

Anna didn’t want to be theer.

But presently theer she was.

The park was black and from the black rose the black house, without a single light anywhere that could be seen.

Anna thought of prisoners delivered to jails such as the Conciergerie, in dead of night.

The car toiled round the drive, and then off through another line of trees, and so into the yard of a stable which Anna had not encountered until then.

They helped her out, the driver and Mr Lizard, and she believed they were going to bed her down in one of the stalls, where she could hear the horses stirring vaguely, so vaguely she wondered if they were horses at all, and not some other animal species, something more eccentric, bulls perhaps, or tigers.

Then there was a lamp and a side door, and a woman, two women, were taking her in, like a precious parcel.

When the door shut, the men and the night were outside. The lamp went ahead, and one woman only guided her. Anna’s body seemed too large for her, and lacking feeling. She was somewhere in the centre of it, bumped about like a bottle on a river. There were stairs. So many stairs… Often they had to stop and wait for her.

Another door. She was assisted inside, and here was another bed, not a Basulte bed, narrow, with an iron frame. She was being helped to lie down, as if she did not know how to. And she didn’t.

A bank of lumpen pillows cradled her head. Good heavens, they were undressing her. Deft impersonal hands. Again, she remembered the hospital.

As the new coarse nightdress was eased over her, and the quilts pulled up, and the stone sausage with hot-water rolled against her feet, she thought that of course, they had drugged her in the pub.

Things faded.

“Thas mur cumvy,” said one of the women.

It was. How unsuitable.

Anna moved, disorganized, about in dreams. She knew that Árpád had left her. They had been walking along a street and between one sentence and the next, he was gone. She understood unalterably that she had caused this, done something wrong, to offend or hurt him, and he had previously warned her, if she did this thing, he would go. And she had not meant to do it, but she had done it. It was inexorable.

His omission was like something added rather than lost, an aching leaden burden in her stomach, her belly.

But while she felt it, while it underlay everything, she had other dreams. That she was on a train or in an apartment, or in a market. The buildings were very tall, of monstrous architecture and extreme sculptural decoration. Where landscape was glimpsed, it stretched for hundreds of miles, to ponderous horizons under galleons of cloud.

These dreams were exhausting. She woke, trembling with the fatigue of them.

A decanter of water and a glass were on the table. She had to drink the water, even if they had put something in it. She drank the decanter dry.

Then she slept again, and the enervating dreams went on and on. Until she woke, and now there was a dark whiteness of deadish light, and the decanter had been refilled and she drank it dry again.

The water had a dusty taste.

Inside her, the leaden feeling of loss, like a stone forced into her womb, had gone away, but there remained a black residue, a pain that did not hurt.

Anna lay back. She wanted someone to come and make her wake up, because the dreams were so tiresome and wore her out. She always had to do something in them, go somewhere, achieve something. But no sooner had she managed the task, than it was all to do again. Like the labours in Hell.

Yet, now she slept dreamlessly, a clear blue sleep. And waking, she was able to sit up in the bed, then get out of it.

She no longer felt drugged, but she was puzzled, and uneasy, naturally.

This room was very, very small. The narrow single bed took up most of the space. Fusty curtains covered the window, and when she pulled them wide, outside was a brick wall with a drainpipe. Rain was falling again, very soft and fine.

To her surprise, Anna saw her clothes were on a chair. Then she saw they were other clothes. Rather a long black belted dress, some under things, plainer than the lingerie Raoul had bought her. The shoes were also different, not very nice, although when she put them on they fitted perfectly. Her bag lay under the chair.

There were a jug of cold water and a basin, a bit of soap in a dish and a thin towel. Anna washed. She opened her bag.

Surprising her, her passport was still there. And some of her toiletries emerged, an old medicine bottle, the essentials. But of her make-up, only her powder showed itself.

Things had been stolen, obviously – confiscated. Her brain was beginning to wake now, after her body, and she was trying to reason. She had been put in this odd room out of the way. She would have to be circumspect, perhaps seem a little dazed. Certainly not annoyed or primed for conflict.

She had learned one thing. The village possessed the ramshackle car. She had constantly seen people drive cars. Perhaps she could do it. Failing that, she would simply have to walk. By-passing the village, evidently, keeping on just like someone in a story, until she reached some other more distant place, where help was to be had.

Anna was not frightened. She felt more exasperated. It was always possible to evade capture. She knew this quite well. How often had she seen her father, and others, do it? Had done it quite adequately herself,