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

purpose accomplished, for everything had conspired to render him to her. Then he began again to make love to her, unspeaking still. Unspeaking. They did not speak at all.

The first morning, she was frightened a long while. Later, they had a conversation about this.

“I thought you’d send me away,” Anna said.

“I thought you would go away.”

“But I love you so much. Why would I go?”

“Anna, you’re like a child. Why do you think?”

“But you knew I wasn’t drunk – or quite mad…”

“There might have been some other reason.”

“Yes,” she said, “but I told you. I never belonged with anyone else.”

They discussed what was to be done about the dress. He would arrange it, by letter. He had some money put by. She protested; she would return the dress. But he didn’t want that. She looked so lovely in the dress, and then when she emerged partly from it, like the butterfly from a cocoon of whiteness.

Time had stopped, and Anna did not care what they did, at first. But then they made changes to the room, and Anna’s few possessions came into the room. There began to be bowls of marigolds, and poppies, and convolvulus, bottles of wine, more books stacked here and there, an oriental wind-chime that rang when the curtains blew, cushions on the bed.

After the dress had been bought, she continued a while at the dress shop, but the girls asked her things, and she was afraid to speak. It was like trying to prevent herself weeping or shrieking, her need to pour it all forth. And she didn’t want to say a word. She drifted away, and so left.

She wasn’t bored in their room, even when he was out, attending to his intelligent book-keeping. She dozed and read, or she went out and shopped, bringing back fresh flowers and bunches of herbs, bread, sausage, cheese and coffee, fruit and cake, tall candles banded with gold.

Though it was not always possible, he preferred to go out very early, before much light came, and to return in the twilight. She argued with nothing. They didn’t talk about it. When they went out together, it was by night, to dim-lit places along some canal, to gardens with arbours of shadow.

Preguna under the moon was made of a forest of darkness, and white poured milk.

He bought her things, a little silver ring with an apple-green jewel, a clip for her hair. (And she bought him a tie coloured like a snake.) She must have realised he was not poor. But it would have made no difference, surely, immaterial almost. Things were meant to be as they were. He and she could not have avoided this.

Had there been happy eras in the past? She seemed to see there only always movement, and gaudy fleeting acted improvisations. Here in the shadows, far from that garish stage, timelessly they danced their subtle, perfect measure.

It was inexplicable. Even later, desperately looking back, she could make no sense of it. Their love had been like the most natural thing, soon taken for granted utterly, lived out because there was nothing else that might be done. Like youth. Like life itself.

Chapter Seven: Among the Pack of Dogs or Cards

As a child, often borne randomly and without preparation into some place, where she did not know the language of the people, Anna would be puzzled days and weeks. She was like a deaf person, for all the use she got from the chattering all around. Then abruptly some crystal membrane would tear wide. Suddenly she could understand. And in her head the new language came alive; needing no translation. Thoughts and visions available instantaneously as words.

It was rather like this with the dialect of the Basulte servants. In a few days of hearing only their voices her ignorance ceased. Then she heard them speak in English for the first time. Mimicking, as she had done since childhood, the alien sounds, she was also able to speak back to them in their own tongue.

“Oor kite unoor uz nay, enum, Unny?” That is, “You’re quite one of us now, aren’t you, Annie?”

This accolade from one of the kitchen maids. Anna responded with a smile that she was glad to be.

(She had seen her father ingratiate himself with the most loathsome and dangerous people. It was a game which had fascinated him, and she never witnessed him lose it, no, not once. Almost, it seemed to her, he sought out madmen, drunks and felons, in order to play with them and to win. He compared mankind to a pack of cards – there the joker, there the king or the jack, or the well-dressed queen – who might be a whore (hearts) or a rich man’s mistress (diamonds). The secret however was to play not with but within the pack. They must never sense manipulation. You must believe utterly, while with them, what you did and said.

She had watched him with a politician once, a type he detested and held in contempt. But her father seemed gradually to fall in love with the man, admire him, even to be a little bewildered at his own change of heart.

And the politician was subtly flattered, and so betrayed confidences, and lent her father a large sum of money, which, naturally, was used instantly to fly the country.)

The servants didn’t ask her to do very much. She peeled a few vegetables, stirred cakes and put cherries on to them. Now and then she offered to wash pans and dishes, or take bread from the ovens. They allowed this. Once the cook handed her an apron to sew, but Anna sewed badly, in uneven stitches. Then they mocked her, but only amused, patronisingly, with no hint of menace, and someone else finished the apron, which they then gave her.

Nor was this apron like theirs. It was the palest blue, with a pocket and an edging of lace. (And no one had taken her ring.)

She was like a child of the Family, allowed