Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be Mistaken, Tanith Lee [classic fiction txt] 📗

Being a soldier, he had some sort of rank, but I can’tremember what. There were a lot of soldiers at the dance in the town. I’ll callhim Captain. I’ve done that since, always since. Captain Ashton.

The dance was to mark Christmas,and recent Victory, and was held at the Eddington Hall, a lofty stone buildingwith a ballroom of sorts. The big room had been garlanded with paper leaves,and lit with candles in addition to the electricity. I wore a pale dress, and Iremember it had a yellow sash, and little yellow flowers worked on the bodice.By then there was a dislike of coupling red to white. I had heard someoneremark such a combination was now supposed to be avoided, as it might indicatebandages and fresh blood. Probably they were being ‘dramatic’, as Eric wouldhave termed it. (Nevertheless, the red-white partnership seemed seldom to beseen, certainly in our part of the country, after the upheavals of 1916).

I remember too I felt lessnervous before we left for this dance. Perhaps that was due to my havinglearned that a tiny secret nip of sherry, from the evening decanter in thedining-annexe, seemed to calm my nerves. (The maids sometimes stole quick nipsof sherry too, or the port. No one seemed to notice it. As for me, I hadreached the revelation after having a teaspoon of brandy, administered to me byan irritated Constance, when I had wrenched my ankle the previous winter).

Also that evening of the dance Inoticed, as if for the first, my arms, mostly bare in the evening frock, alsoslim and firm, and quite shapely, and luminously pale, if warmer in tone thanmy dress. Then I noted my eyes were large and clear, and of a shiny grey, thelashes quite long and dark. And my hair, washed carefully the day before, andpinned up with little silvery combs, shone in a wonderful, metallic way.Possibly I was not, then, as unprepossessing as I’d always thought, or beenassured, by implication, or family remarks, I was. I had a tiny waist, eighteeninches for my eighteen years. (And for the year; come to that). I never askedmyself thereafter if the measurement would increase, by one inch, for everysubsequent birthday. Nor would I have the time or space to find out.

When I entered the hall of thedance, everything was as usual. Clusters of young men, cold or timid, and, bythis date, some flushed and a touch heightened by alcohol, (it seemed I wasn’tthe only coward at a social gathering. Of course, the men were brave as lionselsewhere, on the Plains of War). Others were obviously bored, however,scanning the available female meat, just as tired or over-heated lions wouldbe, and thinking: but these gazelles aren’t quite up to scratch, old boy.For there we were, the straggly gaggle of gazelles, we girls, some alsonervous, and some not. Constance began dancing almost as soon as she entered.Her Cuckoo brigadier was absent, in a mud-hole somewhere, waiting valiantly tolead his men into ferocious battle. But Constance had the ‘Correct’ attitude.She was Brave, and lived every day as it came to her. One must not show worry,must not brood or mutiny. One must set the proper example. And why shouldn’tshe dance, after all, in her turquoise dress with gilded beadwork? She did herduty. She nursed dying warriors back to health, Saint Constance. I shouldn’tsay that.

I believe I was starting to losethe spoonful of courage I’d gained after about ten minutes. I would, wouldn’tI, have been useless in a battle. Others had been selected from the gazelleherd, borne off in strong lionesque, uniformed, masculine arms, and weredancing now like my sister, yielding and swirling like lilies on a lake.

And I, as ever, sat on my chair,and looked about me brightly, as if loving simply to be there, while my heartdrained of its wisp of valour. Until, all at once, he stood before me.

He said his name, and I thoughthe said that he knew my aunt, one of my aunts, as if he must reassure me he wasacceptable. I forget which aunt he was claiming to know. I personally knew noneof them well. But he held out his hand, politely, coolly asking me if he mightdance with me. So I stood up and said, in my silly small voice, “Of course,Captain.” After which he led me out on to the floor, just as a waltz began.

How can I describe him? I don’tknow. All the words I choose – tall, beautiful, unlike any other – seementirely mindless, as no doubt, since I selected them, then and still,they are. His hair was a flaxen almost white, and his eyes that deep blue onesometimes sees in old paintings of a foreign sea, in Italy, say, or up againstthe shores of Egypt. He had retained a settled tawny brownness of other places,acquired in hot summer and upheld by the burning winds of winter cold.

I’m not, or I was not, a baddancer, not really. Light on my feet, somebody had said, and I followedobediently the male lead. Acquiescent cowardice then has its virtues, it seems.Even so, this wasn’t what I felt when I danced with this stranger calledCaptain Ashton. I felt so much more than ever, in my tiny little world of daysamounting to eighteen years, I had felt before.

When the music stopped, he led meout of the hall into a side room, where there were chilled drinks – I can’trecall what I drank, some sort of lemonade punch, I think, not alcoholic, butvery cold. He drank a whisky, just one.

Then we danced again. I can’trecall what this dance was. More brisk, I think, than the waltz. We had spokena few words, both when on the dance floor, and at the draped and pink-paper-floweredtables. The conversation, or rather, the things he said to me, flowed and sankaway, what they call, and perhaps did even then, small talk. Yet his intensesea-blue eyes met mine, stared deep within me. Did he do this with all hispartners? I don’t know how much the war had damaged him, or even if it had senthim mad with