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

But she would need to be careful. If she were questioned about her first escape, she would just say she had become confused. No, she hadn’t said she wanted to go to London. She had said she and Raoul would be going there, sometime. She would accuse no one of drugging her – she must have fainted: the long walk when she had got lost, the sudden hot day.

When she had dressed and combed her hair and powdered her face, Anna tried the door. In the moment of doing this, she wondered if it would be locked. But the door opened normally, and outside was a corridor narrow as the iron bed.

Where was she? The corridor was painted the colour of the porridge the Basultes sometimes consumed, Raoul had said, at breakfast – the porridge offered her in English station hotels, and refused.

There were two doors, both of which gave on tiny rooms like the one she had been put into.

At the end of the corridor was a biggish open space, or perhaps only seeming big by comparison, where trunks and boxes stood. The ceiling of rafters sloped to one side, as she thought the ceiling had done in the room. There were two windows.

Anna looked out.

Far below, lawns, beeches, the river. The hills were smeared into rain mist, a running water-colour.

Across the space, another corridor tunnelled away. But there was also a large latched door, and when she undid it, she gazed down into the well of a grim lean staircase, very dark, descending and descending through the house. For up here, she had slept among the attics, where the servants slept.

On the mystic down-leading staircase there came occasional landings. When she tried the doors, they were locked. She had no choice but to continue her descent.

The stair ended in an annexe with several doors and a long window, with curtains of a sort of material she had seen in cheap hotels.

One of the doors became a gap and the housekeeper called Mrs Pin stepped smartly out, like a cuckoo springing from a clock at the appointed hour.

“There you are, Annie,” said Mrs Pin.

Anna looked at her.

“You must be quite hungry,” said Mrs Pin, briskly. In a moment her chorus-girl side would get the better of her, she would rip off her long skirt and kick up fishnet legs, smiling yellow to the theatre balcony. “Go along there, and straight down.”

Anna said, “Do you mean to the kitchen?”

“Yes, Annie. That’s right.”

After all, a welter of fear tossed up through Anna. What should she do? Nothing – nothing. She reined herself in quickly.

“Very well.”

Mrs Pin said, “Don’t be alarmed. They expect you.”

“Do they?”

“You’ve nothing to worry about,” said Mrs Pin.

She stood sentinel, as Anna went across the room, chose the proper door, and pushed through and down again, down.

She was being punished. That must be it. They were a law to themselves, and she a vagabond, and they might do what they liked, so they had cast her below.

She was not to be Raoul’s wife. (She had come to suspect that anyway, rather swiftly.) She was to dwell among the ‘dogs’ – the servants.

Her dress was black. Would the apron and cap come next?

Anna hesitated on the last stair. She was truly frightened. Less than the chaos of this situation, it was the servants she feared. She could hear them now behind the final door. They were laughing, perhaps in anticipation, loudly and coarsely, and banging things – probably pans – in what sounded like the prologue to a war dance.

Even their language was alien to her. And besides, they had had to wait as slaves on her. What revenge would they take?

She must not protest. She must be, as so often, accommodating. Give in and so invite no violence. Escape was still always achievable, providing she were extremely careful. She had not realised before, not believed her own impulse, that the Basultes were creatures out of a myth, something horrible. However, now she knew.

She bowed her head, and went in through the door, slinking and a little abject, not to invite the viciousness of this other species.

Anna remembered the great kitchen from her compulsory Sunday visit, brought by the woman, Raoul’s Mother. It had been so clean, immaculate. The linoleum still damp, windows bright, the bowl of fruit and the flowers. Everyone had lined up, women and men, as if to be chastised.

What time of day was it now? The universal rain-twilight had made it difficult to tell. Also afternoon, perhaps.

The three long tables were not scrubbed, nor bare. Pots and bowls lay over them, and pans of copper and iron. These were dirty, and a smell rose from them of boiled vegetable matter, fish and cheese. The ovens too were crowded by debris. The floor was splashed, and greasy.

Two gaunt cruel-looking cats were lapping from a big dish of gravy. A large, freshly-dead rat lay stiffening nearby. Presumably they had killed it and been rewarded.

A fire burned, and a maid was toasting at it platefuls of buns, piling them high so that sometimes some fell off on to the floor. At last one of the cats took note. It rushed and seized half a bun and bounded away. From somewhere in the kitchen an arm was raised. An item of crockery, thrown at the cat, missed it, and smashed to pieces.

At this, the collective coarse wild laughter rose again. Anna looked at them, for they had not turned to look at her. Like the tables, the kitchen was crowded. It was hot and ill-smelling, and lightnings went over it from disturbed cutlery and plates. Women sat, as Anna had seen them in the summer doorways of houses elsewhere, their legs spread wide, hands busy with darning and sewing.

No bonnets were worn. The thick rich filthy-looking hair spilled from its knots and pins. Their aprons, if on, were patterned with stains. Some were barefoot on the greasy linoleum.

One fed a baby from her breast, there