The Secret Book of Paradys (42 page)

He could not fail to be aware this room had some resemblance to the make-believe bedroom at the brothel. Or that it too had been prepared for a guest. Madly it came to him that everything that had gone on, since his first entry to the City, was in the nature of a dance-measure, and none of it quite real, or what it seemed.

“Be seated,” said Helise d’Uscaret, if so she was, and why should she not be so?

He obeyed her, taking the right-hand chair.

In the window-embrasure, another book lay, and a little casket. Here and there were scattered small tokens of life, of femininity – a hand-mirror of polished metal, a ribbon, a flaxen bud in a thimble of water. (Nowhere, that he could see, a skull.) Charmingly, from under the bed-curtain, a satin slipper peeped out.

And like the attitude of the table and two chairs, these items had an air of considered arrangement.

Into his glass she poured a dark wine.

He caught the scent of it, and of her, as she bent over him and drew away. Certainly, she was a living woman.

Beauty. Strangeness.

She seated herself in the opposing chair, and sipped from her own glass a vintage like ink. But now he could see the impossible colour of her gaze.

“Be at ease,” she said.

“Your eyes,” he said, as if he could not prevent himself, “never in the world – so
green
.”

“Long ago,” she said, “my eyes were not green at all. That is the badge of what befell me. The mark on me. My eyes are my scar, after the battle.”

It seemed to Raoulin he would not move now, not even to raise the fine glass to his lips. This stasis did not distress him. His mind was alert, to be instructed. Nothing else was of importance.

A girl is grown like a flower in the house of her kindred. She is nurtured for her hues and perfume. At the blossoming she will be plucked from her native soil and planted elsewhere. In other earth she will give fruit, fade, wither, and finish. This is all the usefulness of such a flower, the well-born girl among the great houses of Paradys.

Helise la Valle knew, as she had learnt her alphabet and orisons, that this was her destiny.

Indeed, she had looked forward to the event of her transplanting, once she became conscious of the future. Rather than be afraid, it seemed to her child-mind like the festival of Christmas or the New Year, a season of celebration, dressing-up, the giving and receiving of gifts. Late to these images came a dreamlike icon: the bridegroom.

It was not until her adolescence, actually her saint’s day, in her twelfth year, that this procrastinate shape at last stepped forward to overwhelm, to
crush
all the others, and fill her with pervasive dread.

On that day it was that she heard his name for the first time. What is named, in the oldest rituals of witchcraft, takes power.

“Heros d’Uscaret,” sang out the youngest cousin.

And at this, all the elder cousins fell entirely silent, as if a wind had passed over that robbed them of speech and motion.

“Who is he?” asked Helise.

She was a fey girl, whose quiet attentiveness led adults to think her docile. She had never been discouraged in asking questions, for she asked so few.

“You’re to be wed to him,” said one of the elder cousins, looking abashed, for propriety had been breached. “You are betrothed.”

“Am I?” said Helise, merely interested.

But just then one of the most senior cousins came briskly into the room, clapping her hands and frowning.

The maidens were disbanded. Only the Name was left.

It was at the hour of candle-lighting that Helise approached her mother.

“I am to marry Heros – d’Usc – d’Uscaret?”

The mother started. She was seated in her chair before a glowing hearth (it was autumn, and the nights already were cold) idly combing the long hair of her little lap-dog. At its mistress’ start, the tiny animal growled. Helise did not like the dog, for it had once bitten her with its sharp rat teeth. She blamed the dog for this, and not the sickly cosseting and ill-temper of her own mother, which had formed it.

“What did you say, Helise?”

“That I’m to marry – am betrothed –”

“Very well,” said the mother. “You are. It’s a distinguished match.”

Helise stood between excitement and disarray. She had always known her life would alter, but here was sudden proof.

“Heros,” she said again, “d’Uscar – et.”

“Someone has been twittering,” said the mother. Her sallow proud face was unkind. “Your cousins.”

“But Mother, mustn’t I know?”

“In good time. You mayn’t wed tomorrow. It will be three good years before you are fit. Your father is strict.”

“But shall I know nothing of it?”

“The suitor is young enough, twenty years when you are fifteen. Sound, not a cripple. Fair, I have heard. His house is of the best. They’ve the favour of the Duke.”

Helise, at twelve, had already been in love, with a painting of Jehanus the Baptist on the Martyr Chapel wall of the Sacrifice. She understood that it was futile to love a saint in such a manner. But since her own sensuality was to herself undivulged, she did not perceive it for what it was, and had never realised she sinned in her wild thoughts. In her head she pictured to herself the court of Herod, where she saved the saint from death (thereby depriving him, of course, of his martyrdom, maybe of his sainthood) and the clutches of Herod, shameless Salomé, and the Romans. She accompanied Jehanus into the desert where, respected among his followers, she wove him garlands from the locust tree, tended him in sickness, swooned and revived in his miraculous embrace, and, in the river to her breasts, was baptised by the fiery water spilling from his hands. The face of Jehanus in the fresco, formed by an artist of genius, had often become the subject for some young girl’s fantasy. The arched
throat, mane of hair, and great upraised eyes, were tautly luminous with that agony of suffering or joy inherent in worldly pain. Or pleasure. Kept ignorant, the perceptive instincts of Helise had already been a trifle warped.

It was her whimsy perhaps that Heros d’Uscaret, described, should resemble her first love.

But the Lady la Valle would not describe Heros d’Uscaret.

It took a maid in the closeted bedroom to do that.

She was crying, this girl, only a year or so older than her mistress. Helise, having been well-educated in many alternative areas, beat her maid’s hands with an ivory comb, to come at the cause.

“Oh madam – they’ve promised you to a monster!”

“What do you mean?” said Helise.

“There’s a curse on that house.”

The maid snivelled, and Helise raked her again with the comb.

“Madam – Satan claims all the men of their line – and the women. But the men are – shape-changers – they are
things under the skin
.”

At this nonsensical, beastly phrase, Helise left off her interrogation. Her immature mind had now quite enough to play upon.

For five days she was in a fever and the physicians despaired of her life. Then she recovered, and they congratulated their own skills.

The talk of betrothal and terror seemed sloughed with illness. It was not referred to. Helise resumed her former habit, and never asked.

(The maid was gone. There was a new maid, a country girl who was not acquainted with the City.)What one does not speak of need not be believed.

So Helise continued until her fifteenth year, near the end of which they informed her that, soon after her birthday, she was to wed a noble lord of the City, whose name had already been made known to her. By then she had all but forgotten the awful words, her fever dreams. Therefore the icy hand that gripped her heart seemed to have no source.

In the assembled months before her wedding-day, Helise was wan and languid. Her mother and aunts chided her. She would lose her good looks and demean her house. She must eat this and drink that, she must have these unctions applied to her skin and those pastes to her hair.

At fifteen, Helise had mostly dispensed with questions. Her native indifference to the outer world was augmented by realisation that what might be answered was invariably told without inquiry – and what would not be answered would not.

At night in her narrow virgin’s bed, Helise offered vague prayers to a fate
that was unavoidable; she prayed as a man prays to be spared death. Perhaps delay was possible.

But the months clambered over each other and the wedding-day came hurrying nearer. The bride was not afforded a single glimpse of the groom.

A priest came to instruct Helise, a man elderly and superlatively uncomely, as was thought correct in the case of a young girl.

One morning, as they sat in the la Valle vine court, Helise spoke to the priest.

“My betrothed is Lord Heros, the heir of House d’Uscaret.” It was not a question, nor did the priest reply. Until now he had somehow managed not to name the name of the bridegroom, though referring to him always deferentially. “Spiritual father,” said Helise, looking only at her knotted hands, “when I was a child, I was frightened by tales of evil that had to do with –”

“This isn’t the hour to dwell on such foolishness,” said the priest. “You must think only of your duties as a wife. Be wary, my daughter, that you don’t interpose such nasty and aimless chatter.”

“But spiritual father, these tales concerned my husband.”

The priest looked as steadily upon the vines as Helise upon her hands. Neither met the other’s eye.

“Put superstition from your mind, my daughter.”

“But father – I’m afraid.”

The priest inhaled and expelled a noisy breath laden with garlic and kitchen wine. He said, “There have been stories told of d’Uscaret, by the ignorant and stupid, notions instigated by enemies of that valiant house.” Then he paused, as if girding himself, and added, “What have you heard?”

Helise stammered that she could recall no details.

At that, the priest seemed happier.

“If you can remember no absolute, how can you fear?”

Helise attempted to confide that she did not know, yet fear persisted.

But the priest would have none of that. He rebuked her with sins of self-attention and untrust. Would her loving parents give her over to any tainted man? And did she not have faith in her God to protect her?

Helise sat quiescent under this garlicky lesson, until he left off and went on with the others.

It appeared to her that all with whom she now had dealings, all that were caught up in the train of the approaching marriage, adopted an odd manner. Faces she had been familiar with now looked like masks, and voices did not run along but went choppily, with words left unsaid. And how often she saw the hands rising and falling upon the breasts, marking there a cross. Did the maids stare nervously sideways at her, as if at one who may be infected with plague? Did her aunt’s singing bird go dumb in its cage at her passing?

The shadow is on me. Am I going to die?

She knew nothing of the real rites of marriage, nothing of sex beyond the untutored flarings of her own body, which she had obliquely discovered by then were dangerous, as they might lead her into unchastity. Connubiality was this: the husband lay beside his wife all night in the same bed. Sometimes (so certain cousins had assured her) he kissed his wife, even her nakedness, and some men, though surely they were depraved, set their hands on a woman’s private places. Helise had never even seen cats mating. Though once she had beheld a cat in labour, and was appalled. Later on, hearing her brother’s wife shrieking in childbirth, Helise had had some idea why. The angels of God brought the baby. It was God’s will, and His will also that a woman suffer in travail, the female penance for the disobedience of Eve.

Could it be that Heros d’Uscaret would perpetrate on his bride some alarming foul act, something worse even than the embarrassing things that apparently quite normally went on, these lewd kissings and touchings already mentioned?

Ten nights before her wedding-night, Helise recalled precisely what her maid had said to her: “Satan claims them – shape-changers –
things under the skin
.”

She woke in a bath of sweat, and bit her hands with terror.

Paradys turned out to recognise the wedding processions of the houses la Valle and d’Uscaret, and to catch the sweetmeats and small money retainers might throw the rabble. They were able to watch besides many scores of men on fine horses, dazzling in brocade and gems, some quantities of damsels clothed like graces and strewing petals, musicians with lutes and shawms, and pages with banners.

The bride rode on a dappled palfrey with a headstall of pearls. The girl’s dress was of cloth-of-silver, with undersleeves of cream silk stitched with brilliants. Her blonde hair fluttered loose but for a jewelled cap of silver daisies and sea-green peridots. Her face was white, but there was nothing uncommon in that.

The bridegroom’s family cantered up, heavy with their colours of sable and viridian. The sigil of d’Uscaret was a cruel preying bird, perhaps a falcon. They were a wealthy house, and bullion clanked on everything, and in the jaunty hat of the young groom was a diamond said to have been dug from the forehead of a dragon in the Holy Land … Otherwise, the hat, the light, the shade, hid the young man’s face, though he cut a brave enough figure. His locks were blonder even than those of the little white bride.

Helise found herself entering the Temple-Church, and acknowledged that the astonishing horror had arrived, was here, about to happen to her.

From the moment of her waking at dawn, through all the preparation of her person, somehow
she
had gone far off. They had bathed and anointed her and clad her in the silver gown – but she had been at a distance, hanging in the air.

As her body rode along the route on the demure palfrey, the wedding music in its ears, the finery flashing at its eyes like drawn knives, her soul was in a trance.