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

is not ultimately incredible to us that we should be recognised, by the gods.

When they got up, it was with an accomplished ease that she glided before him from the dining-room.

And in the smart travelling clothes he had bought her – just her size, as the gown had been – she next proceeded him to the taxi.

The station loomed in blocks of smoke and steam, the lights flickering, roars of motion and agitation everywhere. But they were led, by uniformed men, to their secure compartment.

Exhaustion felled her. She sat on the lower bunk. Raoul kissed her hand.

“Sleep, Anna. There’s no hurry, now.”

He did not make love to her until the second night.

Dizzy with wine and the motion of the train, she lay with her arms outflung, her legs lifted so the tender backs of her knees were on his shoulders.

His kisses shivered like feathers into her sexual core. As he stroked her breasts she forgot everything, her past, her future. Harp glissandi, sensations of fizzing, and sweet ache. She seized his shoulders frantically. The train bounced her up and down and she had the half image, as once or twice in her life before, that she rode the back of a black horse, but that had been in dreams and now real flesh and muscle galloped between her thighs.

As she came, her womb gulping in pushes and rushes, returning and returning to the bursting pivot of bliss, the train slowed down. It halted when she did, as if the whole world had stopped. For a second she did not know his name, perhaps not her own. Where were they? Would he kill her now? But he groaned and spasms shook him, and they were only in Europe, somewhere, and he was only a man, after all.

Chapter One: Having Arrived

By the time they reached Paris, Raoul had bought her betrothal ring.

It was a diamond. A polished diamond, not cut, for he said he thought that large cut diamonds were vulgar. This stone was soft as a rainy moon. It was set in twisted old dark gold.

In the shadowy basement room with barred windows, where first she tried it on, Anna was impressed. It was what she would have called antique jewellery. She could imagine thieves cutting off her finger to get it. It did not seem it could ever belong to her, but nothing ever had. Either seemed to, or had, belonged. He would take it away, or ask her only to wear it sometimes, locking it in a safe. This did not happen.

In a way, the house was like the ring. Like the ring, as it seemed to be: hers… not hers… Nothing to do with her. Big. Polished, though.

Or no, the house was simply somewhere they went to.

She had never been in England. She had only read about it, and looked at pictures.

This was like a Landscape with Country House.

Outside, there had been farms and fields, and then a gateway in a wall, and a muddy drive. The rain was streaming, and against the opaque purple slate of the sky, the horse-chestnuts that lined the drive were a rich, acid and improbable green. There were so many trees. Old cedars and beeches, and oaks, one of which had stood, Raoul muttered, in the time of a queen called Elizabeth I. Then there was a treeless gap, and the lawns went up baldly to a long terrace, and a house of yellowish stone, with pointed roofs crayoned in on the shadowy light.

And far, far behind, there were hills like small vague mountains.

Anna knew she should be impressed, overawed, or – what Raoul seemed to want – thrilled. So she gripped her hands together and said breathless things – How old was the house? What style was it? Wasn’t it just like a painting? – to please him.

She was indifferent to it, however. It did not seem real. It was preposterous. She felt like a visitor to some peculiar and perhaps over-rated monument. She would always, she decided, be a visitor, here.

The afternoon arrival was a flurry. Anna had read in novels about such flurries of arrival.

There were a lot of servants. They wore the shiny black of beetles and searing white starched aprons and caps that had a Puritan look. A tall fat man, with a horseshoe of grey hair round his bare scalp, was the butler. They all, saving the butler, had some sort of accent. Anna had spoken English and French most of her life, and other languages, where needed, fluently. But the accent of the servants she found difficult and excluding. She stared at them, feeling her eyes popping with strain, and only realised after, they had simply been welcoming her.

All the maids curtseyed – a bob, it had been called. And the butler nodded.

Anna might have wanted to laugh, but instead it depressed her. She was so tired. The journey had been in quite easy stages, until the last two or three days. Then train succeeded train, and boat, train, and train, boat, with dull miserable little stops between, hotels creaking in the wind, fires quick-lit that smoked and warmed nothing. Sandwiches, cold meats, things you didn’t want, being worn out, and only a few snatched hours of sleep before starting off again. Raoul so relaxed. She trying to be bright.

How swiftly, Anna saw, she had got used to food and proper beds, to rooms even, shelter. How blasé and thankless she was, turning from the sour cheese, the smoky fire. She was not, though, used to Raoul. Sometimes he woke her during the journey, making love to her. Once he had come into a bathroom and simply begun stroking her, there, at her core. Until she climaxed with a sudden shudder.

After the last soul-rattling train, which was freezing cold, came the car ride, to the house, which took two hours.

When the episode of servants was over, Anna went up to bed. Raoul had explained she would not need to meet anyone until