Babylon (22 page)

Lord Azrael stood and offered me his arm.

‘You will need to refresh yourself, I think,’ he said, as I got to my feet. He glanced down the carriage. Some girls averted their faces; some chose to study the floor; but others stared back, their eyes flashing with defiance. ‘All of you will, of course. My men will show you to the reception centre.’ I took his arm and he led me into the aisle. ‘Don’t worry about your luggage. It will follow later.’ From each side, whispered curses assaulted my ears. ‘Traitress,’ said some. ‘Bitch,’ said others more inclined to frankness. And ‘Necroslut,’ snarled those who knew the truth. While those girls from France, Germany, Italy, and Spain treated me to péjoratives I could only guess at.

Lord Azrael squired me the length of the aisle and then opened the carriage door. He stepped out onto the platform, turned, held me by the waist and swung me down, as if I were his partner in a country-dance. Breathless, I stood by his side, looking about me, conscious, horribly conscious—for the first time since becoming reacquainted with him—not only of the stark fact that I was wearing a nightgown, but moreover that I did not feel shame, only a strange and delicious sense of vulnerability.

‘Come,’ he said, again taking me by the arm. ‘I shall make it my duty to escort you to where you may conduct your toilette. And if I may say so, my dear, however charming you are
déshabillé
, you must allow me to present you with a trousseau.’

‘A trousseau,’ I said, my heart galloping so fast that it threatened to unseat my reason. ‘Do you mean—’

My words were lost to a hubbub of voices: commands, sighs, orders, screams, warnings, and pleas. To our rear, the Men were shepherding the other girls off the train. And ahead, amongst an already swelling crowd of captives, was Cliticia. I waved, but her back was towards me. And then Mr Malachi appeared, took her arm, and led her off into the throng. For a moment, I felt impelled to break free of my own escort, run down the platform, and reassure myself that she had not simply vanished into thin air, never to return. But then something deep inside me forcibly smothered my concerns.
She will come to no harm,
it said, whispering my lines, and urging me to follow the script.
You must simply act the part as you have rehearsed it. And, Madeleine, you have rehearsed it, have you not, not less than a hundred thousand million times
?
Then conclude
:

‘Doubtless,’ I said, obeying the prompt, ‘Mr Malachi will make it his duty to ensure that my friend is treated like a lady?’

‘Like a lady, Miss Fell,’ said his lordship. And then he laughed. ‘Indeed, she will be treated just like you.’

On leaving the train station we came upon a public square that served as a holding area. After briefly assembling for the purposes of a head count, we proceeded along a colonnade and then filed into the eastern court, the first of the five great courts of the palace. There, an avenue of monumental winged bulls led to a narrow incline and the mouth of a shadow-occluded tunnel. Those who went before were led two abreast into the tunnel mouth, and quickly disappeared into the darkness.

I scrutinized each face, both hoping and dreading to discover one that I might recognize.

‘The Serpentessa—’

‘Alas,’ said Lord Azrael. ‘We could not capture her alive.’

I stopped, spun about and looked up at him.

‘You killed her!’

‘Oh, no, no, no.’ He too came to a halt, and for a moment seemed genuinely distressed; and yet I had seen the illustrations in
The Illustrated Police News;
and I had read the accompanying stories. It did not become me to entertain illusions and play the
ingénue.
‘Spontaneous combustion,’ he concluded, somewhat apologetically. ‘It is always the way with women like that.’

I saw that now. The sack of Ereshkigal was doubtless what the Serpentessa had always wanted, even if, wanton hysteric that she was, she had kept it a secret from herself. And I wondered if the same might have been true for Ereshkigal as a whole. Cliticia and I had, perhaps, done no more than provide a long hoped for
coup
de grâce.
I bowed my head. ‘I’m
glad
she was different,’ I said.

‘There are none so different as you, Miss Fell,’ he said. ‘Upon my word, you are an original.’

Was I also an hysteric? Hysteria was, after all, a female malady most often associated with rebelliousness and abnormal force and decision of character. I must say, if an alienist like Dr Charcot had thought me worthy of being committed to an asylum such as the Salpêtrière, I might even have taken it as a compliment.

‘Spontaneous combustion,’ I said, so quietly that I perhaps gave the impression that I talked to myself. ‘Is it—’

‘Spontaneous combustion,’ he said, careless, perhaps, of exactly who I addressed, ‘is, more properly speaking, a hystero-epileptic seizure. Three phases are involved: the epileptoid, during which the subject foams at the mouth and loses consciousness; the clownistic, involving the adoption of bizarre postures; and the
attitudes passionelles,
or miming of amorous encounters. After which—’      
I

‘Death occurs ?’

‘After which,’ he said, studying me closely, ‘the subject experiences the full onslaught of the hysterogenic paroxysm.’

‘And dies in ecstasy,’ I said, with more boldness than I had thought possible. The deep waters that I longed to drown in had always been covered in ice. But like decency, the ice was thin, and I felt it begin to crack beneath my feet.

‘Black ecstasy,’ he said. And then he smiled. ‘Do not concern yourself about the High Priestess.’ His smile at once broadened and became thinner, crueller, like something inflicted upon parchment by the swipe of a paper-knife. ‘A
grand mal
can be so ... fulfilling.’ His lordship’s flippancy made me a little angry. But, reminding myself where I was, and that a question mark hung over what was to happen to me, I refrained from criticism.

‘And Duenna Celeste?’ I said.

‘The crones? Oh, they eluded us. Not that it was difficult. My troops, quite understandably, always concentrate on the acquisition of a temple’s more
nubile
elements.’ He pursed his lips. ‘We’ll just have to deal with your accursed Duennas some other day.’

Where was Miss Manning, I wondered. And more to the point, where was Gabrielle? But before I could ask, his lordship tightened his grip on my arm and strode forward. Cliticia and Mr Malachi were by now quite a way in front of us. The crowd had become compressed as we neared the tunnel mouth, and progress had become difficult. But as we slowly closed the gap I stood on my toes and, looking over the heads of those in front, observed Mr Malachi stoop, whisper something in Cliticia’s ear, and then turn aside to allow her to walk on alone. For a moment, she seemed confused. Approaching her again, he seemed to say something else, and she carried on walking down the incline, glancing back just once to fortuitously catch my eye. Her lips flickered with an uncertain smile. And then she was gone, consumed by the shadows like those that had gone before.

Again, Lord Azrael drew to a halt.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said. He was staring at the flow of femininity that crowded the approach to the tunnel, a mass of ringlets, downcast eyes, glittering jewellery, painted lips, and pink, yellow, and blue silk ribbons—a prospect that suggested an army of nymphs returning to their Venusberg to celebrate a victory over the collective heart of man. ‘Please,’ I added. ‘What is it?’ His lordship’s grip had become so fierce that he almost made me cry out. Then, as if upon impulse, he drew back—away from the long line of temple-maidens who still patiently filed down the central incline—and ushered me through a gap in the line of colossal stone beasts towards an archway set in the courtyard’s farther wall. ‘What is it?’ I said again.

Reaching the archway, we stopped. He seemed unable to make up his mind whether to proceed or turn back. His brow creased. And then, with cool, almost scientific, detachment, he turned to me and gently stroked my cheek—not to console, I was sure of that, but it seemed, to evaluate. ‘So pale,’ he said. ‘And your hair—’ He began to fondle it, as if testing the quality of a fine silk. ‘Your hair is almost... Hyperborean.’ I lowered my gaze.

‘Am I really so pale?’ I said, blushing a little and looking up at him through my eyelashes. ‘It seems to me that my skin is actually getting darker.’ I lifted up a cotton sleeve, exposing the underside of my left arm, the blue-veined delta of the wrist betraying a hint of burnt sienna. ‘The moonlight—it’s starting to burn me.’

He shook his head, as if to clear it of musty thoughts. He repeated the operation several times, on the last occasion so violently that it seemed he was determined to make his intellect unfit for habitation. ‘There is something I must show you,’ he said, as his head came to rest and his mood shifted into the abstract. ‘Something I want you to understand.’ He was gazing across the courtyard at the slow procession of compliant girls that fed the hungry, gaping maw of the tunnel. ‘They, of course, would not be able to understand. They are creatures of the night. But you?’ Again, he began to toy with my hair. ‘You have the locks of an Aphrodite or Poppaea, the locks’—there was a little catch in his voice—‘of a Blessed Virgin.’

Mum, I knew, kept a curl of Dulcie’s hair in her jewellery box, and sometimes I had spied upon her when, thinking herself alone, she had taken her golden treasure from its hiding place to savour its scent, press it to her cheek, and weep. One day, unable to contain myself, I had burst in upon her and thrown my arms about her neck. ‘Read me the stories,’ I whimpered, ‘that you used to tell Dulcie. Read me
La Belle
aux Cheveux d’Or
and
La Belle
et la Bête.’

As it was then, so it was now. I could only indulge my feelings by means of an impersonal expedient, such as a fairy tale, or verse:
‘I am black
,
but comely
,
O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold. His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk ...’

He held me by the shoulders, the puffed sleeves of my nightgown rucked up beneath his restrained yet passionate hands. ‘It is your soul that is black, Miss Fell. You are a witch, a succubus. You are the Queen of Sheba.’ He placed the tip of a finger beneath my chin and raised my head so that he might look directly into my eyes.
‘Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor. Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.’

‘You know the Song of Solomon!’

‘I am acquainted with all your sacred texts.’ He bestowed a chaste kiss upon my forehead.
‘And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab. And, behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel. And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from among the congregation, and took a javelin in his hand. And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly.’

‘Numbers,’ I said, trying to stop myself from trembling. ‘You’re reciting from the Book of Numbers—the passage that tells how the plague was stayed from the children of Israel!’ The Midianitish woman was called Cozbi, a name that means ‘deceitful’. She was the only woman in the Bible of whom it is written that a javelin was thrust ‘through her belly’. If Lord Azrael was reciting from Numbers he was also, of course, reciting the
modus operandi
of Jack the Ripper.

‘
But Moses said unto them
,’ he continued, ‘
Have ye saved all the women alive
?
Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him
.’

‘But all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him,’
I quoted, and more fervently than I ever had before, whether from family Bible, or at Sunday school, ‘
keep alive for yourselves
.’

He smiled.

‘There is only one text that I truly wish to become better acquainted with,’ he said, ‘and that is the necronomicon I suspect is sealed within your heart.’

Without further ado, he led me through the archway. It was adorned with brightly coloured friezes in enamelled brick. And its fascia displayed the words: ‘
Hierarchy
,
Fraternity, Liberty’.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let me show you my quarters.’

‘But Cliticia,’ I said, looking over my shoulder. ‘What about Cliticia?’

He said nothing. He did not need to. We had entered into some kind of untranslatable contract—one, moreover, that I did not think I could get out of. Never mind the small print. Never mind the alien grammar and vocabulary. Whatever the lawyers might argue, this was certain: I had long ago put my mark to paper and signed away my soul.

But for what?

We passed into the next courtyard, and then into the one that followed, and the one that followed that, each quad of stark, bleached stone demarcated by high walls, and each a reservoir of silence. So much, in fact, did each successive courtyard resemble its predecessor that my sense of
déjà vu
soon translated itself into an eerie apprehension that I was about to return to my starting point. The courtyards, of course—or so I was informed—eventually led to the Throne Room, a replica of the room in which Belshazzar had hosted his calamitous feast. The silence deepened. For a few seconds, a bluebottle’s erratic flight lent the dead air a sudden fit of vitality. Then all sign of life absented itself, with even the shadows seemingly holding their breath and turning their faces to the wall at our approach.