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

Anna thought of the rain streaming round the orangery beyond the salon, and hissing in the fire, if the fire was alight – which it must be, so that they could toast the buns and bread, as Lilith described.

A clock ticked. Had she ever noticed it before?

Anna had shortened her black dress, this morning. Lilith had advised this. Lilith said she had found other dresses, apparently the ones Raoul gave to Anna in Europe. But Anna herself had no proper shoes, no coat, no hat. Lilith offered Anna nothing at all, except their excursion.

Anna’s bag sat on the floor under the wooden chair. She had taken off the apron, with the poison bottle one third full in its pocket, and put the whole thing into the bag.

She was ready. Ready to go. To go on.

Anna thought of Árpád. The last time she had seen him had been in the seconds when he came at her like the tram, his face smeared with lipstick like the dye of the birthmark running. Somehow she hadn’t seen him after that.

She never cried now. She looked at memory only for a moment. Then she looked outward, round at the faces of the English servants.

The light was grey and gleaming, fractured by rain and fire, and the electric bulbs, which sometimes stuttered down here, winking in bursts, then settling. These sly pasty faces, with their fat lips and thin lips, and little polished eyes.

Disgusting, they had been made disgusting. And they hung, these people, these things, from the Basultes, like pendulous growths on a strong stupid stone wall.

More than escape Raoul Basulte and the Family, more than evade the pack of the servants, Anna decided she had mostly wished to pull down the wall, and let these parasitic victims tumble free. With the wall gone there would be nothing to hold them or clutch on to. They would slither and drop back into their pit. Yes, that was what she wished.

To stop this mutual dependency of filth and dearth, that had changed them all, masters, slaves, to vermin.

Anna got up. No one paid any attention. They had usually let her come and go as she wanted, within the house, letting her run about in the trap.

She went up the stair to the big door, and through into the Smoking Room. She crossed into the corridor, arrived outside the salon.

How silent. No teacups, voices, talk, laughter, swearing. Had it happened?

Anna’s hand, on the handle of the door.

If they were alive, she would bob, and say, did they require anything? It was perfectly simple.

But she did not knock.

The door undid the salon and Anna walked inside.

Really, it wasn’t such a large room. And the green was almost black, because they had not put on the lamps, or these had for some reason gone out.

The fire burned low. There was a cake lying in the hearth. An iced cake, one of the ones with flies. Just the cake, and the utter density of the silence.

Anna breathed. She saw them, as if they had not been there the instant before, and now they emerged, coming up from underwater.

They had all fallen asleep. They sat in the sage armchairs, leaning back, their hands limp on saucers, plates, all their faces exactly alike as they had always been alike, far too much so.

Only the woman with the lifted face, Raoul’s Mother, had let go her cup, and the dregs of her tea had run over the skirt of her white afternoon dress. And Tommy, the man who was the husband of Margaret Lilian, the Basulte with the scar in his eyebrow, he must have been standing up, for he had fallen right over on the carpet. But his face, turned sideways, was completely calm, nearly smiling.

Raoul, she identified him after William, had his mouth slightly open. Maybe he had been in the middle of speaking. He did look a little surprised, as if death had tapped him on the shoulder in mid sentence, making him jump. But not very much.

William – yes it was William – was smiling too, and Margaret Lilian’s face had sunk into her smile, like interrupted dough half-risen. Raoul’s Father leaned his head on his hand. He had just put out a cigarette, but not quite firmly enough, and a transparent wisp of smoke still twisted from it.

Anna walked over to the teapot. It had been emptied once, and refilled from the silver hot water pot. No one had had time, however, for a second cup of tea.

She stood, in the middle of the peculiar room, wishing that she could feel more. It was shoddy of her to react so inadequately to this quite monumental scene.

For she had murdered them, successfully. She should rail against them, or beg their pardon, suffused with glory and blame.

But something made her only lift the Mother’s teacup from her skirt, and dab with a napkin a crumb off the maroon lips of Lilian, and straighten William’s tie. Tidying for the ones who would come later, in an hour or so, and find them.

Anna couldn’t remember, even now, the way out through the front of the house. But that didn’t create a problem, actually. She went from the salon, shutting the door, and into the red dining-room. One of the long windows opened without difficulty. She stepped out, her bag under her arm, (and oddly, the Mother’s bone china cup, painted with birds, in her right hand) hatless, coatless, to the terrace and the veil of the cold summer rain.

Lilith drove erratically, but the car kept moving, like a wonder. Lilith chattered. She was excited, and a little tiddly, for she had stolen more gin from her mother’s pub, and they passed the bottle between them.

The car had been waiting at the gateway, as stipulated.

“You were a time,” had said Lilith.

Soaked through, Anna got into the car. She had stowed by then the teacup in her bag.

Initially the car wouldn’t start again. Then it did.

“Know the way?