Cruel Pink, Tanith Lee [universal ebook reader TXT] 📗

As for his tasty wife, they have quarrelled over the other business of my ‘insult’ to her, and she is off to the country with her mother. A shame, for my appetite is still whetted, there. But likely she may come back. Or if not, other fruit may fall to my hand.

It is a fact both women and men become enamoured of the actor kind. And since nowadays women, too, parade on the stage, as in former times they did not, they draw so many admirers they (and I) must sometimes leave the premises by a side-door. Merscilla for one has seven drones of this sort. I think she indulges none of them, having her bedroom hours mostly crowded up with me, or her spouse. But I do not tempt fate by looking into this, much. For myself I have had two or three other girls in the past month. One need not go hungry. But one wants, where one can get it, the roast hog not the cutlet.

Returned home, I find for once the old bell-wether of a landlady has laid and lit me a fire, and set out a dish of meat and eggs, as I had asked.

But Satan himself has been before me. He has got in and snouted out all the viands, leaving for me but a few chewed embers of the meal.

And how should I know who is thus responsible for my starvation? Why, he has left his signature, bold as any Shakespeare, in the egg and gravy on my rugs: a great paw-mark the size of a hoof. The dog.

69

Last night the snow came down again, and mantled the wild land beyond the village with its ermine carapace.

I had, having got to the play, half thought I should remain in town with Mis’us Peck. But alas, old Peck sends the page for her. He is sick of the winter plague, (there is for sure a plague for every season), and she must get to their broad house on Hampstead Walk, to tend him.

Losing heart then, I too travelled home, though not on foot but by the carter’s cart, for he had been delayed in London.

“You should make your roost in the city, Mr Thessaris,” says he, calling me Mr now as if he called me villain. “This must be an irk for you to wrestle with, such racketings up and down on my poor cart.”

“Your cart is a swan, sir,” said I. “She breasts the snow with grace and courage.”

He spat into the white-flecked void beyond the lantern.

It was well past midnight when I climbed to my room.

Just at the door, I heard within a stealthy shift, and took it for my fiend of a dog. Charging therefore in I stopped with an oath. For no canine lay beside the once more lighted hearth, but on the bed a naked female form, gilded by the dimness and the fire to a creation of marble and amber.

“Never be startled, dear love,” she said. And for an instant I did not know her. She was instead every female I had ever idled with, yet also none of them. In the strange light her hair showed both dark and golden, and her eyes had no colour, only flame in them.

“Madam,” I said, “should you be here? Is this not unwise?”

“Does Cupid bid us to wisdom or to delirium?” she replied. “Shall we try, and see if we can work the puzzle out?”

I am an actor, and so know voices. Now I knew hers. It was the young wife of Jem Templeyard, back from the country, it seemed, and primed for battle.

I cannot say such an event has never befallen me. But never quite in this way. Jem had led me to believe she was infuriate with me and no less with himself, saying I was a philanderer and rapist, and he a coward, who would not credit the truth. He must run to hide, while I might smoulder in Hell, she would pray for it. (One rarely believes such vows, save on a stage. Men and women both volley out these dragon-vapours here and there. I have done so myself. We are all fools, and can generally be appeased.)

Oh, but she was a tempting sight. So smooth and soft and gleaming, as if limned by gold and opal. To take her so would be like a love-dance with a statue, but one alive.

She did not move, so I went to her, and then she gripped my hands and put them upon her bosom. Up sprang jack, and very next down lay Irvin Thessaris. And we galloped our measure in the riotous firelight, at which her shrieks came on so high and piercing I must stifle them with my mouth, for fear the whole bedlam house-full ran up to ask who had been slain.

As the dawn began to come, we by then beneath the bedclothes, she woke and said to me, “Did you never know I loved you, proud actor?”

“Aye, my lady. How else did you give yourself?”

“I might have done it,” she said, “as with my doddle-dun of a husband. Because I must. No other pass for such as me. A poor girl. Christ aid me, I was sold by my father as you sell a shoe.”

“More beautiful, for sure.”

“Well, then, scholar, a beautiful shoe.”

As a rule such brooding at the chime of midnight, or as the wash of the day comes back, is tedious and sour. But from her pretty lips, ripe and rosy from my kisses, I knew the sadness in her. Poor lass. To be a woman, and sold, as she said, to a man she despised. (For it was plain enough she did despise Jem Templeyard. To me he was a divine romp of a rump. But to her; her master, and her doom.)

“Well, sleep now, sweetheart,” I said.

“No, I cannot sleep. I must be off and away to my mother’s house at Levishamm. But before