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

to survive, and all the while, planned her second escape. Her father had loved such games and would have been peerless in this one. Yet she was not her father. And playing so well, taking pleasure in it all, a shadow was reaching for her out of some other dimension.

Oh, she must get free. For her time was running out. Could it be, her time as Anna, as her self?

The Basultes were talking. Their voices were a blur, and their educated English dialect as uncouth, and now nearly as indecipherable, as the vernacular of their slaves had been,

The footman kept whispering, helping her translate their wishes.

Drinks were manufactured. They seemed to make no sense at all, whisky with a spoonful apparently of hot sauce, and these ghastly green liquids, like squeezed alligators, which the women had ordered – what was in them? Only bottles were pointed out.

However, now she stood in front of Raoul, who she had met in a European city, when she was starving by its river. She offered up to him the tray with the very large whisky.

Anna the maid, her hair imprisoned under her cap, tied up tight in her starched apron.

“And how are you liking it, Ann?” She understood him. She stared, remembered, bobbed. And Raoul gave a ripe muscular laugh. “You learn quickly. Very nice, Ann. I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Anna.

“We’ll have you waiting in the Palace yet.”

Lilian threw back her head and roared with amusement. Was it at his words? She had seemed to pay no attention.

And William was quarrelling with too-quick Derby Tommy by the fire, which tonight, despite the rain, was unkindled.

Anna kept her head dipped at the majesty of Raoul. She thought, I spat on you.

The shadow breathed on her neck. It was like a memory she had forced herself to forget, and had forgotten, and which now threatened to emerge and fill her skull with images of torn and bloody things. But it was not that. Memory she had never escaped.

“Thank you, Ann,” said Raoul. Ah, she was to go. Dismissed. As she turned, he patted her bottom.

When the Family left the room, the butler also told Anna she might go. More experienced staff were required, it seemed, to attend the feeding of the gods.

All the stairs up to the attics were like a mountain. Anna climbed slowly, indifferently. She should return below. She would have to say she had felt ill. Which wouldn’t do, would it?

When Anna woke, Lilith the Lizard’s Daughter, was sitting on the foot of Anna’s bed. Lilith wore her maid’s black, but her hair was loose.

What now? A reprimand for retreating here and not going back to the kitchen.

“He says you’re to come out, tonight.”

“Who? Come where?” Anna had journeyed too far, asleep, to hope.

“In the park. Tonight.”

“Why? Who?”

“Him. Master. That Raoul Basulte.”

Anna lay bemused. The window was black, but pinned with a scatter of stars.

“Rain’s stopped,” said Lilith. “It’ll be warm. The moon’s up.”

Anna sat. She smiled.

“You look lovely, even in that dress.”

“Oh, I’m to be a film star, aren’t I? When we two get to London.”

“…That’s just a dream, London.”

Lilith winked. “Wait and see.”

Anna lurched back. She shut her eyes and her heart drummed so loudly it broke the stars.

“He says, put on a dress. That grey one, maybe.”

Who? Oh, Raoul, presumably. He wanted her out in the park in the grey dress, in the moonlight. But that was irrelevant. What was relevant were the words Lily had said. Wait and see.

Lilith was taking off her maid’s uniform and pulling the beaded gown from under the bed, shaking it, putting in on.

“Come on, you,” said Lilith, brisk and commanding. “Stur yer stumps.”

Just like the poem, the white moon had climbed the summit of the sky. To the height it had had to go, the stairs of a tall house were nothing. And life was nothing. Fifty years, eighty years. The moon had done all of it, over and over.

Above the Basulte grounds, their park, (all muffled as if in black furs), the stars were big, and many had colours, yellow, sallow, or boiling white-blue.

It was a hot night, dry above and humid near the ground from the residue of rains.

Lilith bustled Anna along, up the avenue of chestnuts and aside, through a landscape which now seemed quite intemperate under the oaks and ranging cedars.

“Are there foxes?”

“Oh yes, Annie. And badgers too. And sometimes they fight.”

Anna shuddered. Badgers were a sort of bear, weren’t they? Did wolves still run in the English forests? In fact she wasn’t certain. She was so ignorant. Always, probably, would be.

They came into a sort of grove, and some of the maids were there, not clothed as maids now, but in cheap party dresses, awful frilled, badly-draped things, stitched up by mothers or one-eyed village dress-makers.

One of the boys stood under a tree. He was tuning up a violin. Would he play badly? Why play at all?

Then, through the trees, a groom came, guiding a coal-black horse.

For a second, the whole scene, blaringly-lit by the high moon and sulphurish stars, had the grotesqueness of a Goya sabbat: the girls with loose hair and bare arms, the boy fiddler against the great hewn shape of the tree, and this nightmare horse, black as some devil animal in a story, shaking its head, stepping over the roots and through the weeds, the drifts of strange wild English flowers.

“Who’ll ride him?” called the groom across the glade “Is it you, Lily Izzard?”

“No,” said Lilith in a hard cool voice. “It’s her. He wants her on it.”

“Oh, no,” said Anna. “I can’t ride.”

“No matter,” said Lilith.

Anna was light, humorous. “But I’ll fall off.”

“Better not to,” said Lilith, hard now as a slim cold stone.

The groom strode over. Ho was a rough man she had seen before, in the kitchen, slurping his sugary black tea from a saucer.

“Up you go.”

“My dress,” said Anna, reasonably.

The groom stood looking at her, at her lower body, where the gown clung over her