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

They would sit and talk to her too, at the table. Their histories amazed her, they were so devoid of anything, and yet mattered so much, for the one who told his or her story was its hero.

They were all intrinsically feral and cruel. They laughed as if at a circus over a crippled rabbit, before breaking its neck for the pot. They smashed mice in the trap with a poker, discussing other things as they did it. While from each other’s ills, a bleeding chilblain, an agony of toothache, they fashioned hearty jokes.

Among the pack, Anna made certain to look at everything that occurred, or was perpetrated, through their eyes. They could do no wrong, and she treated them with respect and interest, showing the willingness to be taught.

The kitchen was hell, the centre of their demonism, the hub, but as they spread out through the house, like flies, they took their pandemonium with them. And they took Anna with them too, to see and learn, acquiesce and render praise.

Along with their tongue, she discovered from herself a new laugh, just like theirs, sly or brash – animal.

Out in the house, invisibly, they did things.

That is, things not their work. Or perhaps it was their work. Weren’t they creatures of misrule – the Enemy? Dogs who fawned, but had hidden teeth.

In the bedrooms first, they showed her how they made the beds.

It was done carefully and quickly, the sheets shaken, the pillows plumped. And then, deep down, a tiny bit of something, gently laid. What was it?

“From a nettle,” said the girls. They smiled and nodded at Anna. One explained it would chafe and sting, but, so small, would not be found. They did not do it every time, of course. Now and then. In different beds. This was the Basulte Father’s room. He often didn’t use it, preferring the couch in his study. Once they had sprinkled fine pepper there and he sneezed and hawked for hours. But that was a treat, not for everyday.

Later they took Anna back into the apartment of Margaret Lilian, and here each one pulled a hair from her own head. They coiled these together. “May it wrap round your guts,” they said to the sheets and the hairs. They giggled, pleased, and pulled up the covers. It was a charm for ill, some old up-country thing.

All over the house they put their maledictions, if nothing else, soft and secret, nothing too much, nothing that could really be found, or if found, mean anything.

They showed her later, these ones, others, the servants who could write wrote little quick curses – May you get a canker, May you shoot blood – on paper scraps, and then burnt them lovingly in a candle, and the maids scattered the ash laughing between the blanket and the mattress, or behind a curtain, a basin.

They wrote in clear spit on woodwork Take sick and Itch with no easing.

They spat white phlegm or smeared earwax in the baths, after cleaning, and rubbed it in like polish.

Sometimes they ran, round and round on the carpets, like hares, whispering, almost bursting with a ribald hatred so pure and primordial it seemed to chime. Foam and rave, drop in a grave, they sang. Children’s games.

And Anna looked on wondering, and did not shrink, and clapped her hands, looking through their eyes. These poor offended slaves, worthy of so much better than slavery. (Slaves must always have done such things.)

She too had lain in water and bath-salts and wax and gobbings, and slept in a cancer-wished bed… that one black hair – not Raoul’s, not William’s. Whose? This girl? That one?

If there was a pimple, its gleanings were dabbed inside the newly-burnished shoes, the stocking drawer.

There were other things they had devised.

She saw it on the second day she was with them.

There had been a rat in the trap. And the cook was making a large meat pie.

Under the golden crust, among the wholesome body parts of cows, this too.

“Oh, Madam loves her pie, she does,” said Mrs Ox, contentedly.

They spat into the pots of tea, the casseroles and sauces, tea-cakes and meringues.

The gardener brought them worms. Once a woman slunk in from the village. A neighbour had given birth and the midwife retained some debris.

Anna laughed merrily, and then went out to the privy in the yard. She vomited as she had her first night with Raoul, though more quickly. They might have wanted…

She had eaten such dishes.

Going back, they told her she was pasty – pale – and watched her, grinning, thrilled, waiting. She owned up to her weakness. How strong they were to handle such things. She said she wished she had had the courage to do it.

“That old Raoul treated you like a bitch,” said one of the girls.

Anna saw none of the Basultes. She was led by back-ways, hidden arteries, about their house. At night she slept now in the attics in a room of three beds. Only one other was filled. “That one’s Lily’s,” said this other girl.

When the first Sunday came, Anna wondered if Madam would come down to the kitchen to inspect it, and if so how they would clean it to the perfection she had formerly seen. For the den was Hell, and a den of vice, which reminded her always of the horrors of Hogarth. Eternally pans unwashed on tables, swept off to the floors that the pack might themselves eat. Beer bottles, the shed fur of cats, the cats’ fleas, from which Anna now had bites, both cats’ and fleas’, of her own.

As the fire burned and the heat rose, she sat among them and they petted her. The men petted her as they did the other girls, a kiss slapped on a cheek, a swift fondle of breast or thigh – never worse. (And sometimes they would even ask: “May I try a bit of titty?”) The girls brushed her hair, and she