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

You didn’t notice? Ah, well, Anna. Your charms doubtless softened his rage.”

They did not refer to her engagement, or impending marriage. They asked her nothing about herself.

Later they opened the curtains. That is, the servants opened them. Outside was the terrace, lit by electric lamps held up by statues, and rain glittering and prancing on the stones. The women did not separate from the men.

Then they migrated jointly back to the salon. One of the men put records on a gramophone. He danced with the woman in jade-green, the cosy, liquidly-shuffling dance from America that was only intimate, asking no footwork. Her husband? There was a little scar through his left eyebrow. Anna could memorize him from that.

They never told her their names. She didn’t ask.

Raoul did not come in.

Should she pretend to be worried, make a slight gentle feminine fuss?

At ten they began to go to bed, or off about their own pursuits. They said to her, “Good-night, Anna. Do sleep well.”

She sat alone in the salon, got up and walked into the dining-room. Rain glittered and pranced.

The butler, the maids, the footmen, (there had been two at hand for dinner) stood at their stations.

Hotly embarrassed, she suddenly stupidly grasped she was imprisoning them, they were having to wait, to wait on her.

She left the rooms and went through the dismal black-windowed orangery of cut-outs, upstairs, along the gallery, through corridors to her bedroom.

The fox maid was standing by the bed like some awful useable machine, a trouser-press or mangle.

“It’s all right, Sister. Thank you.”

“Sull I undo yemiss?”

“No. Thank you. Goodnight.”

When Sister – Sister! – sibling, nurse – had gone, Anna threw off her clothes and left them on the carpet. She knew from novels this room was hers, not theirs. Her betrothed had an apartment elsewhere.

Anna woke, swimming. She was lying on her side, and an anemone had fastened on her breast, and was drawing her up by silver strings through the nipple. On the other breast, feathers tickled irresistibly.

Anna unsealed her eyes.

“No… stop… where were you?”

“I’ve been away from the house so long. I wanted to see it so much. Sorry about that. And I was so tired then, I went to sleep. Rotten of me. Your first night. Forgive me?”

His other hand strummed sweetly the instrument of delight between her legs.

She fell back and he mounted her, firming into her, filling her full. Ripples of swirling ecstasy. Unbearably she came, arching her throat and back, as he rode on the crest of her, slapping her hips and choking her name.

At the house in Preguna, Anna had typed the old professor’s manuscript. The manuscript was very long, about one thousand pages, in long hand. It was a study of certain, to Anna, obscure schools of thought, starting in third century Greece, encompassing Renascence Rome and Coptic Egypt, ending up in Paris and Alsace. Apparently. Sometimes the professor would wander in and hand her a new sheaf of papers, which were to be inserted, say, after page five hundred, paragraph six. So the manuscript was not complete, was growing, and might never be finished with.

Some afternoons, when the warm dusty sun shone through the windows, whose shutters had been thrown back, Anna typed in paroxysms of yawning, voluptuous and nearly painful, her eyes streaming with water. And twice, when the professor entered, he saw this, and asked if she were crying.

“No, no. I have a little cold.”

The house was tall and crooked, packed between other tall, crooked houses, all the colour of old brown bread. The road outside was cobbled, and at the end of the vista was an ancient horse trough and a clock-tower with a narrow blue dome.

If the professor asked her to stay for supper, they ate in a brown back room, waited on by a big woman with a bun. There were cats who lived in her kitchen, but only for the mice. The professor allowed the cats to come up and sun themselves at the window on a chair’s back, but if Anna tried to stroke them they ran away, or scratched her.

Usually, after the supper, they had strudel, which the woman had made. It was wonderful strudel, but Anna always suspected the woman put things into Anna’s piece. Once there was a hard grain, which might have been glass, and once a bitter taste, and later Anna’s stomach had hurt. But she ate the strudel nevertheless.

When the sun went and the rooms darkened, the professor would give Anna a liqueur.

All evening, he would have talked about poetry or philosophy, ideas and people she had never heard of, but she knew herself to be quite ignorant. Then again, he might be making it all up.

In the darkness, he would sit down in the big armchair, and ask her to sit on his knee. He liked her to sing a little song he had taught her, about woolly lambs, gazing away from him but at the same time fiddling gently with his organ.

After about a minute, though now and then it was longer, he would come, with a slight jolt, like a hiccup. There was very little moisture, and this he quickly wiped away with a handkerchief.

Then they would have coffee, and she would go out on to the street, to catch the tram.

Those warm evenings, the dust settling on a nine o’clock breeze, the smell of flowers from the public gardens thick as honey. She was never nervous, even passing through clouds of drunken sailors from the dock, who whistled and called out to her. She didn’t mind them. If they had caught her, she would simply have given in. There was only trouble if you resisted, so she had heard. She even smiled, if they did.

Out of the dimness of evening, the tram would come rattling; chrysanthemum yellow with lights.

Once a young man on the tram had picked her up. They went to a café and drank a schnapps. He had a birthmark over his forehead and one cheek, and