Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

He stops. Holds up his hand. He is listening, and looking over James's shoulder towards the door. He says: 'Did you hear them?'

James counts the fingers on the librarian's hand. One, two, three, four, five, six.

'It is the twins,' says Collins, and for a moment the oddest smile lives on his face. James turns. Two heads have appeared round the door. Four eyes examine him, then the heads withdraw and he hears the hiss of their slippers, running.

'After them!' The librarian prods James between the shoulder-blades. 'Make haste, or you shall lose them!'

James sets off in pursuit, stopping now and then to listen, then running on. He glimpses them on the stairs, then at the far end of a gallery, slipping through a doorway into the dusk of another passageway. For half a minute he loses the trail completely; then comes a muffled crash, a cry of'Damn! Damn!' He follows, finds the shards of porcelain, but no sign of the girls, no noise of their slippers.

They are in a room that he learns later to call the 'Hall of Statues'. The moon is wedged between two cypress trees outside

the window, and the statues throw long sharp shadows on to the marble floor. Men with coiled hair, their naked bodies slackly muscular, lean on spears or gesture wearily with absent arms. Women, goddesses, hands draped across breasts, heads without noses, eyes blank, staring inwards.

The girls are on a bench near the window, sleeping. He goes close to look at them. They are huddled together; their heads with high white brows lean one against the other. The eyes beneath their bloodless lids seem unusually large. Their mouths are small; the lips bunched, babyish.

One of the girls opens her eyes, very suddenly, as if her sleep has been a ruse. She smiles. 'I was dreaming of you,' she says. 'And now you are here.'

'How do you know me?'

'Mr Canning said you were to come here. And then I saw you from my window. Mr Canning said you look like any other boy but that you are not so, not at all. He would not have brought you if you were.'

'I have not seen Mr Canning. Not since I arrived.'

'Oh, you must not expect to see him. At least, not often. He will send when he needs you. My name is Ann. This is my sister Anna. We were in the circus before Mr Canning found us. We did not like it. You were in a circus too.'

James shakes his head. 'I was in a show. It was to sell medicine.'

'Was it a good medicine?'

'It was nothing. Nothing good.'

'Mr Canning gives us good medicine. He prepares it himself.'

'What is wrong with you?'

'Hardly anything, except that our heads sometimes ache and we are so tired we fall asleep in the middle of our sentences.'

'You are always with your sister?'

She laughs, a snort, as if he has said something amusing

though in questionable taste. 'Of course; and she is often such poor company. But soon we shall be apart and then I shall not see her for a whole week, or even a month, so when we meet we may have a conversation, like ordinary people do.'

And then he understands. It is something in the way they are nestled together on the bench like the two halves of an ink blot. He asks: When are you to separate?'

When we are sixteen. Mr Canning has promised us.'

'How old are you now?'

She is asleep. The other sister is looking at him. *You tire us out with so much talk. Why are you not in bed?'

Why are you not in bed, since you are so tired?'

We like it here. We Hke to look at the statues. We like that one especially.' She points to the corner of the room. A squat figure with a great tumescent cock thrust to the sky. 'Mr Canning says he is the god of gardens. Priapus. We call him . . .' She whispers a name James cannot hear, then giggles, a sharp hysterical sound. The other sister does not wake. Her big head lolls on her chest.

James asks: 'How long have you been here?'

She shrugs one shoulder. 'Since Mr Canning found us . . . We are having our likeness done. Mr Molina does it. Perhaps he will paint you too if you come.'

Where does he paint you?'

She points upward, a gesture as wearily elegant as any of the statues. Then she too is asleep.

For a long time he stands, observing their sleep, waiting to see if one of them will wake. He feels towards them a kind of kinship; not a warm emotion, not friendship. Mr Canning, then, is a collector, and he, James Dyer, like the twins, like Mr Collins, has been collected. Or in his case, stolen. He is quite untroubled by it. Canning will serve as Gummer has served. And there are things in this house, things that he wishes to know more of. A six-fingered librarian; two girls as one. What did Gummer call

him once? Rara avis. How many of them are there here, in Mr Canning's gilded cage?

It is many days before he speaks to them again, though several times he sees them walking in the park beneath twin white parasols, Ann and Anna, waiting for their sixteenth birthday. Twice he has seen them accompany one of the servants to the little house that stands on a rise near the lake. The servant always carries a bucket; full when he goes, empty - to judge by the way it swings upon its handle - on his return. As for Mr Molina's studio, he cannot discover it. He has begun to wonder if the painter exists only in the twins' mind.

Whenever he is bored or wishes for some company, he goes to the library. Mr Collins - as Viney before him, both men quickly aware of the boy's capacity to absorb knowledge - persuades him to slide the leather volumes from their shelves and read. Not