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

me up!” Things she had never said, would never have thought to say, but which she knew Lilith would enjoy.

And Lilith shrieked thinly with mirth and jerked faster.

“It’s not a fucking Derby, dearie,” said Anna, remembering Lilian.

“Oh, I’ve got to, Annie, got to,” whimpered Lilith, rolling her eyes. Had this happened? Did Raoul behave in this way, selfish and pathetic, when with his servant doxy?

“Oh wait, Raoul, please wait…”

“Oh I can’t dear, no, no…”

“Oh Raoul…”

“Ooff! Ooff!” honked Lilith, grinding herself about on Anna’s belly, bruising her perhaps. Lilith collapsed, and Anna patted her. “Did you love it, Lily?” whined Lilith, forgetting that Anna was only playing herself.

“Oh, yes, Raoul, you were wonderful. Like a stallion,” said Anna. She found the awful witch’s laugh rising in her, and let it crackle out of her lips and through the space under the tester.

“Do you love me, Lily?” Asked Lilith of herself.

“Oh, Raoul, I love you, I do, I do.”

Insane merriment. They clung together, writhing in paroxysms of laughter in his bed. Anna was afraid neither of them would be able to stop.

Then Lilith pulled away and stood up, sober.

“We’d better tidy up.”

And Anna’s laughter too was utterly dismissed. They corrected the bed, pulled up the sheet and covers, folded them open again as in the best hotel. “When are you going to make me up?”

“When you like.”

“Mousie brought your dresses down. Some weren’t there. There were only two.”

“You have them.”

“We’ll put them on in our room.”

Our room. And one dress for Anna, as well.

Lilith would have to be at work by four, or perhaps not. She would have concessions, surely. As Anna had.

They ascended the backstairs, up and up, and Lilith had brought a bottle of wine, stolen under the nose of Mrs Ox, she said, because long ago Lilith had acquired a copy of the butler’s keys.

The butler wasn’t one of them. The housekeeper was, for although Anna had never seen her in the kitchen, as she had only once seen the butler, Mrs Ox spoke of the housekeeper familiarly as Pinnie.

“When Pinnie was on the boards,” had said Mrs Ox, only today, “she had a pair of legs that put them in a frenzy. Nothing else to her, mind. Jug of a face and no bosoms to speak of. But those legs kicked up a storm.”

“Is it true,” Anna had asked, since the cook had turned to her, expecting due reverence, “she was on the stage?”

“And she was a bad girl too,” said Mrs Ox, “like you and Lilith.”

Three bad girls.

The other girl from ‘our room’ had not come to bed. Lilith told Anna this girl, Mousie, slept more regularly with one of the footmen. She had been pregnant four times, and got rid of ‘it’ by drinking four cans of mustard in water. (Another bad girl.)

By the light of the soupy electric bulb, Anna saw two of her dresses spread like flat corpses on Lilith’s narrow bed.

How tawdry they looked, after all. Had they always been of such poor quality?

One, greyish silk, the other black and stitched with lurid green beads.

“Redheads should favour green,” announced Lilith, and took up this gown. “You dress me.”

Anna said, subserviently naturally, “You’ll have to take everything off, except your knickers.”

“Naughty cow,” said Lilith. “Got you excited have I?”

“You’re better than Raoul,” said Anna.

They laughed, shortly.

Lilith only stripped pragmatically and in fact totally. She was thin and wiry, with her little breasts set on like small soft-iced cakes, each with a cherry. But at her groin was the brush of the fox, redder than on her head.

Anna slid the beaded dress on to Lilith’s body, and did it up.

“How do I look?”

“Undo you hair.”

Lilith unpinned the coil, and it fell down her, shining and slithering like a snake. Such long hair. It feathered her waist.

“A shame you can’t wear it like that in the house.”

“Just see old Madam’s fat face if I did.”

Anna recalled watching Lilith on a horse, dashed over the park behind Raoul, hair flying.

She put back the hair behind Lilith’s left ear, and combed it out, flowering round the right side of her face. “We need a clip. And an earring.”

But these had not been brought. Make-up had.

Anna sat Lilith on the bed.

Lilith had a touching innocent eagerness now, a reliance on Anna, quite frightening in such a frightening being, for she was really so chancy, Lilith, so potentially lethal. A demon that wanted to play, and let itself be tarted up. One wrong step, and she might bite or rend or invoke fire.

But no, Lily was a charming and wonderful girl. Anna was liking it so much, powdering her face this way, putting the mascara on her lashes, and a little on her pinkish eyebrows to darken them. And these scarlet lips.

Oh then. The last time she had made up another’s face… at Preguna… just such ruby lipstick – oh, then.

“Why have you stopped?” challenged Lilith.

“I thought I heard a mouse.”

“Probably did. Finish me. Come on.”

Two or three more deft strokes. She had grown proficient, behind the dress shop at Preguna.

“There.”

Lilith rose. She was imperious. She stalked to the mirror.

As Anna watched fondly, admiringly, Lilith fell head-over-heels in love with her reflection. She flirted with it, turning this way and that, once almost right round, looking back at herself over her own shoulder.

“I’m a pretty girl.”

“Beautiful,” said Anna. “I don’t know about Pinnie. You’re the one ought to be on stage.”

“Oh, go on.” This time it did not mean continue. Although, too, it did. And Anna took her cue.

“No, you’re good enough for the films. You know, I’ve heard the producers just go round the city, in big cars, looking out for girls for a film. They want to find someone nobody’s ever seen before. Some of the biggest names got started that way.”

“The city? London, you mean?”

“Oh, yes. London, of course.”

“I’ve never been to London.” (Iner bin a lonun.)

“It would be fun to go,” said Anna, “wouldn’t it?”

Lilith spun to her with sparkling, black-lashed eyes. “What ud we do?”

Anna