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

sat with his hand covering it, as he had tilted his hat to try to hide it on the tram.

At last he said, “Are you always so easy? Don’t I disgust you?”

Anna shook her head. He had an attractive face, and the mark was a clear sumptuous red. It reminded her of warrior’s paint before a battle.

“Oh, you liar,” he said. He tossed back the schnapps – for a second she had thought he would toss it in her face. “You whores will take on anyone. Dirty bitch.”

She saw he hated his body so much that he had come to hate proportionately anyone who would tolerate it. To tolerate him must be the sign of a deviant.

Anna realised she should have left well alone, but this was something that she never seemed to do.

After he left her, Anna walked the rest of the way to her lodging. Above her twisted street, the stars were burning bright and coldly blue.

When she thought of Preguna, she usually remembered first the stars, and the trams, and often the professor, and then the man with the birthmark.

When she woke in the morning, the bed was empty but for herself. But she had woken because two of the maids were rustling in through the door.

In the half-dark of the closed curtains, they looked undeniably malign in their beetle black, and starched headdresses. Two preying insects that perhaps had meant to crawl up on the bed.

But one said, “Goomorna, muz,” and they both executed their absurd little ‘bob’.

Before Anna could say a word, the speaking one glided to the curtains and flung them wide.

Excruciating light exploded about the room.

Anna winced.

The other maid seemed to be trying to haul her to a sitting position. It was too late, Anna’s white breasts with their pink buds had been popped out over the sheet. The maid did not react at all, only immediately brought the robe from the bed’s foot and draped it over Anna.

Now there was a breakfast tray on her knees. Good heavens. The English breakfast. Toast in a silver cage, a silver teapot and china cup, butter and jams, and the huge warm plate, covered by a silver bulb.

They shook and fluttered the napkin, and laid it on her like an honourable flag.

The light from the windows was not so bright, in fact. A day pale grey as a dove, the ghosts of the foggy mountain-hills.

“Issum ovuthan you reguire?” asked one of the maids.

I don’t require most of it, Anna thought. She said, “Thank you. Oh, yes. Thank you.”

They hovered. What now? Would they try to feed her? She had penetrated their accent rather better today. Or were they enunciating more carefully for her dunce’s ear?

“Do go,” she said, “please do. Thank you.”

When they were bobbingly gone – did they titter in the corridor? No, they were machines – Anna pushed the tray aside. She went into the bathroom to relieve herself, clean her teeth and wash her face.

When she came back she inspected the hidden plate with startled wonder.

There were two thick slices of crisped ham or gammon, two perfect poached eggs, some sort of garnish, like a sort of solid sauce mixed with cream, black mushrooms.

She ate the toast and drank all the tea, then flushed the eggs and mushrooms and garnish down the lavatory. She folded the gammon into the napkin. There might be a dog she could feed it to. Didn’t the English always keep dogs? Dogs, and horses.

Where was Raoul? There was one black hair lying in her bed, like a token. Had he pulled it out for her on purpose?

She thought of Psyche in the legend, who never met her lover by day, only during the exquisite passions of the night, in blackness, unseen.

Psyche’s lover had been a god. When she found that out, he left her.

Anna bathed, and dressed in a day dress bought in Paris, far too plain and chic to be suitable here.

With the napkin of pig-meat in her bag, she left her room and went out through the house by the route the map had shown her yesterday.

But she took a wrong turning, somehow. It had seemed straightforward, the previous night. The gallery did not appear, whatever the case. The corridors led into and out of each other, papered in heavy damask, red, cream, gold, fleur de lys and Tudor roses, or so she thought…

There were bewildering windows, now looking out to the drive and parkland, now back at the mountains and the fields where the lorn cows meandered by the river, next into a walled garden with broken roses clambering everywhere, their cups smashed by coarse rain. It was drizzling again.

Once a black and white maid approached, scuttling. Not one Anna had seen before, but there were doubtless dozens here, in this large mansion. Upstairs maids, downstairs maids, ’tweenies for the between-stairs – whatever that meant. Maids for scullery and kitchen, assistants to the cook who had fried up the gammon, whisked the sauce-thing. And ladies’ maids, like Lily Sister. Then there were footmen, boys of this and that. Grooms for the horses. A whole regiment. An army.

“Oh – excuse me. I’m lost,” she said to the maid, who had already bobbed, and cowered her face away as if to pass in terror, then brought it reluctantly back to attend. “I’m trying to get to the stairs…”

“Tuz thaway, mss,” said the maid, pointing the way Anna had been going.

“Thank you so much. Thanks.”

Bob. Scuttle. The creature turned the corner, vanished.

But Anna still did not come to the stairs, or only to a smaller stair that led up, and this she unwillingly took.

Then she was in a corridor damasked light green, and then there was an open door. A man came out. Raoul’s brother, or the husband of Raoul’s sister. No, not that one, for that one, recollect, had the tiny scar through his left eyebrow. Brother then.

He was so like Raoul. The black eyes and smooth black hair, the long chin and aquiline