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

your stomach. And it was all this that caused the haemorrhage. Naturally I said I was with you, and I brought you here, of course.”

Anna said, “I killed him. Did I?”

“Hush, Anna. Don’t say this now. I saw there was all the other blood. And you’d cut your hand on the knife. But no one else bothered with it. I’ve lied for you, Anna, to keep you safe. You mustn’t speak.”

The tears ran slowly, hurting her as the welling blood had hurt.

That evening, when Margot was gone, the doctor questioned Anna. But Margot had told Anna everything she was to say, and where she must be vague and confused, and want her fiancé, the man in France, who had promised to marry her, and give her a beautiful diamond ring.

In the papers, Margot had said, people reportedly had seen a young woman with a badly bruised face, her white breast and white evening gown covered in blood, wandering.

But Margot had insisted that Anna was her relative. Somehow Margot had patched things up, with lies and money. Or no one cared enough, perhaps. Árpád was nothing to them. No one really knew who he was. A disfigured grotesque. A freak.

In an hour or so, another doctor entered and told Anna that she had lost her child, and would never be able to conceive another. They had saved her life. That had been the most urgent task. One could not perform two miracles at once.

She had been with so many men. Never to her knowledge had she been pregnant. She never thought about it. But Árpád had put into her his child, and she hadn’t known.

All these messages, warnings and foretellings were only stories, like something overheard on a train.

She lied because Margot had wanted it so badly, and Anna was used to liars, to abetting and assuaging liars.

When she thought of Árpád she cried. Or, the tears simply ran from her eyes. But then she would start to think of something else. And the tears would dry.

After a while, Margot took Anna to the flat. Anna was polite and grateful.

As the car went along the roads, Anna saw the sunlight glimmering on Preguna. She smiled. She wasn’t even upset. Grief – was this grief? – so easy.

There must have been embattlement and then truce, between them, Margot and the Great Love.

Margot treated Anna always – as a niece. Demonstrating by every nuance and gesture that she was fond of Anna but nothing else, did not desire anything but to be kind.

And the Great Love, whose volcanic tirade must surely have cracked plaster off the walls, broken glass, filled the air with a laval burning, now acted out this performance of impartial mildness, looking on, intending only to be generous, and noble.

Every move the Great Love made was redolent of these things. A symmetry informed even her rustling breath when she smoked her swarthy cigarettes. She tossed her head and her earrings clashed like a tocsin, but she smiled at Anna, and at Margot. She would be just. She would think no evil, nor speak none.

When she cursed or reviled Anna, at cards or elsewhere, it was lovingly. Affectionate, she was not jealous. She said to Anna over and over, sometimes even in words, You are so young. I have no quarrel with you about this. God is to blame. We are friends.

And Margot did not touch Anna. She was comradely. If Anna came from the bath in her robe – the embroidered robe Margot had loaned her – Margot’s eyes slid over her, as if over some nice article without meaning.

And the Great Love didn’t even watch. No. She turned her huge eyes away; I? Not trust you? What nonsense.

Outside the flat, summer would not end, as if the seasonal needle had stuck in a groove. On and on. The sun-lit days, the dusty dusks, the nights of blurred stars.

Anna said, now and then, that she could now go. She could effortlessly regain her old room. It would be simple to find work.

No – oh no, they clamoured. They vied with each other to keep her there, the symbol of fiery gold by which they knew they had each been virtuous, and would never doubt each other.

Sometimes the Great Love rested in the afternoons, when Margot was at the shop. Anna, instructed also to rest on her white bed, always had.

About three, Anna got up. She went softly and listened through a door to the deep raspy breathing of the Great Love, asleep.

Anna had put a few things into her bag. She wore one of the dresses and a light coat and some shoes, and the little bell-shaped hat Margot had obtained. It no longer hurt Anna to walk. But her stomach felt so light. Like a balloon on a string. Her sense of gravity was affected. Occasionally she paused, and leaned against a wall of the apartment.

Margot’s cash was kept in a drawer of the study, very unwisely, the Great Love had always told her so.

Anna stole some of the money. Not very much. It was a horrible thing to do. She wished she hadn’t had to, but she had nothing of her own at all.

She wrote a note to Margot, but then tore it up. Anna left the pieces, the bits of words that mentioned sadness and regret and thanks, left them lying in the drawing room on a table.

The birdcage lilted, beckoning the bird. But no bird would come. And the bladed fan, not turning, was as grisly as a guillotine.

Outside, alone, on the hot street of a dying summer that would not admit its death, Anna felt faint as a spectre.

But she made her journey across Preguna to a station, and here she found a train. Margot’s thieved cash facilitated a seat, which bore Anna successfully away.

Sitting there in the train, as it churned towards the border, Anna and her lightness, her absence of all centre, seemed tossed in the air, a vile levitation.

Before her lay