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

theirs. Mutual grooming among the pack.

In fact, Madam never came down. It seemed that had been some test of Anna, not the staff.

Despite their early start, they all sat up late. The cook loomed huge in her chair, drinking gin and beer.

They sang songs full of naive sweetness. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!, and boozy sentiment, We all go the same way home. And they asked her to sing them a ‘foreign song’, and so Anna, perched among them on firelight midnight, sang a song she recalled the soldiers singing as they came back from war, a sad low tune, translating the words as she traced them. ‘Oh I would give my glory for my dear girl’s heart, I’d plant my rifle for an apple tree.’

She saw tears stand in their eyes, and on her knees one of the scrawny cats purred.

They were human. She must love them or perish.

Later, another evening, they asked her for the song again, but after she had sung it, some of the footmen jeered.

“He was a proper simple one, wasn’t he? Thinking the gun’d bloody grow into a sodding tree?”

Anna laughed too, as if they had just shown her the vast joke of existence. As they had.

On a special morning, Lilith Izzard came in to Hell.

“He’s done with you then?” asked Mrs Ox.

“For now, he has.” And Lilith cocked her fox eye at Anna. “Likes a change. I expect you were glad of the rest.”

Anna shrugged. She was saying, “But you are the victrix.” (Victrix, vixen.)

Lilith wore her servile dress, and was tying on her apron. Her hair hung long and loose from a white central parting.

Anna saw that Lilith had a Mediaeval face, as if from a painting, perhaps by the Dutch school. You might think the face was ugly, but studied, as you entered the time of its inception, you saw its fairness.

The face of Lilith was some centuries out of date. But she, truly, was a sorceress. So pale, her ginger hair so pale, her strange stranger’s eyes.

“What are you staring at, Annie?” demanded Lilith. But there was no malice in her regard, not now.

Anna said, “He’s an old bastard, that Raoul. But looks like he’s done you good. You look that nice.”

And the fox tossed her head.

“I’d give you a run.”

“I bet you would, you horror. A bit of paint and you’d knock their eyes out.” Anna made soft her own eyes. “Let me make up your face some night, Lily.”

“And your dresses he bought you,” said Lilith.

“Upstairs. If someone can bring them, you’re welcome.”

Lilith came over. She pinched Anna lightly on the arm.

“You’re not so bad.”

“No, I’m not so bad.”

“But you’re a bad girl, you are.”

“So are you.”

“It’s men,” said Lilith. She turned about to the whole room, flaunting at the footmen, the scullions, the boys. “They drag you down.”

Greasy, gap-toothed, at the edges of all things, they jollied back at her. She had lifted them. They were Men. Magical and fearsome, mighty. Valid.

Anna thought, No not so far off. That face…

Lilith’s face was, after all, from the sixteenth century. She resembled rather the young Elizabeth I, whose oak tree grew in the Basulte park.

And it was that evening Lilith took Anna up to the room of Raoul Basulte. For the male Basultes, apparently, were playing cards in the Smoking Room. They were drinking port and brandy, and would not be done till three or four in the morning. “And if he is,” said Lilith, “if he finds us here, maybe he won’t mind so much.”

Anna had not been asked, or told, to wait on the Family. As many of the other servants did, she entered their apartments only when they were absent.

And now she saw Raoul’s bedroom in the house, where she had never been.

How bizarre. Superimposed upon the hotels in Europe, the berths in trains, those cold little stops along the way.

There were two terrible stuffed masculine chairs before the black marble fireplace, and a table of newspapers, with a box of cigarettes, even a tobacco jar and some pipes like a gentleman’s club.

The solid bed was draped in a kind of tartan rug of reds and browns, but above, the tester was crimson.

It smelled, the room, of male cologne, tobacco, and another faint smell, fusty, almost meaty, an odour Anna associated with adolescent young men, not very clean, living without some abrasive woman to chivvy them.

“See?” asked Lilith.

She drew Anna in and danced her about.

Anna waited for the curses and spittings to commence. But Lilith only pulled open the bed, and stood there smiling.

“Go on, you do it.”

Anna went forward.

For a moment she felt inhibited and slightly sickened, which was her squeamishness, because of course what the servants did was perfectly right.

Then a rage swept through her. She spat violently into the centre of his smooth new sheet.

“Damn you, Raoul Basulte,” she whispered. “I hope you rot in hell.”

Lilith pranced, pleased. “Go on – go on…”

Anna took off her shoe. There was nothing in it, but she emptied it in the lower part of the bed below the sheet, secretively, as if there was.

“Fuck you, Raoul,” said Anna.

Lilith crowed.

“He’s a dirty dog,” she cried.

But he was not a dog. They were the dogs. His bitches.

Lilith pushed her gently.

“Lie down. Go on. Let’s lie in his dirty old bed.”

Anna threw herself down and over, and lay on her back, her head on Raoul’s pillows. Lilith leaned over her, then climbed lightly on her body.

They stretched there a few seconds, like folded gloves in a box, the buttons of Lilith’s dress pressing into Anna’s breasts, as hers must do, she thought, into Lilith’s.

Lilith’s face, the flesh falling a little forward as she leaned up now and over Anna, swollen-looking and carnal, said, “I’ll be him. I’ll be Raoul.”

And she began to jerk her hips forward and back, forward and back.

“Go on,” said Lilith, to Anna, “tell him how grand he is.”

So Anna called softly, “Oh Raoul, you’re so lovely. Oh Raoul, how you fill