The Secret Book of Paradys (44 page)

If he should be there, Heros was seated beside Helise. But sometimes he had gone hawking, beyond Paradys, or to some library, or cloister, or to
another house. Sometimes father, uncle, and son were all of them absent, at the Duke’s table.

She seldom saw her lord during the day in any case. As, by then, she saw him seldom at night.

The first month he did spend with her, prostrate every night at her side. She would lie sleepless most of the hours, tortured by nervous cramps, afraid to be restless. Hearing the level breathing of his sleep, the dim bells of Matines and Laude, sometimes the reborn bell of Prima Hora. If she ever fell asleep it would be towards the dawn, and waking when the sky was light, she would see he had already left her.

She had stained the sheet as he had told her to, that initial morning, with the blood of her finger. She had had to force herself to prick her skin with the point, for she was, that way, a coward. She did it to content Heros, ignorant as to why. Were they then supposed to have acted out together some rite of viciousness and tearing, to cause blood? Was she fortunate to have been spared?

After one month, he did not come to sleep by her often, maybe every eight or ten days. Foolishly, when he entered the room, and when his gentleman unclothed him behind the screen, Helise hoped – but did not know for what. For a kiss, an embrace?

He gave her nothing, no more than in the beginning. Usually he would bid her goodnight, as he would greet her when he met her at dinner. They exchanged few other words, and at night none at all.

In the third month of her life at d’Uscaret, an elderly woman of the house came to Helise in the small square chamber allocated her sitting-room, that lay off the blank bed-chamber.

The woman was bustling and beady-eyed. She seemed respected in the house, and sat at dinner with the family. Her position Helise had never been certain of, but had once or twice heard her referred to. “Consult Ysanne if you still have your cough.” Or, “Hush, that’s a matter for old Ysanne.”

Now the old woman, who was fat, and wrapped her head in an Eastern turban of silk, sat across the fireless hearth and watched Helise, until the young girl turned hot and cold together.

“Have you noticed anything?” said old Ysanne at length, in a gossipy tone.

Helise could only look.

“Come, come,” said Ysanne. “Speak out. Do you vomit in the morning, or at certain foods? Have your courses stopped or grown erratic?”

Helise suddenly became aware that sickness and the stoppage of blood implied a gift of pregnancy.

She shook her head. Here was another failing. And yet (she had randomly grasped enough) she suspected the fault was not all her own. There was something which occurred between the husband and the wife, in bed, some sorcerous communion or vow, which invoked children.

Ysanne now got up again, and said, “You know you must give your husband an heir?” Helise did not reply. What could she say? “Timid,” said Ysanne. “The young wife must overcome her blushes and cherish her lord. You mustn’t shrink from anything he wishes.”

Helise felt faint. It was terrified lust, although she did not know it.

After a litter of more meaningless admonishments, old Ysanne went flat-footedly out.

Helise, as she had not done before, broke into sobs and tears. She even prayed, although she had long accepted God did not listen. Who else was there to talk to?

Then, in her abject wretchedness, when she could think of no shelter and no friend whose counsel she might seek, piercing her like the awl, her inner heart told her what she should do. She must run to
him
, to the one who never spoke to her, who never or rarely lay beside her, to he who was the cause of all her hurt, for he was also her love, the reason she had lived at all.

The decision of unthinking love was an insanity and it made her bold, perhaps for the first time in her existence.

She left her futile stitchery, and walked slowly, as if with an invited purpose, up through the house.

She had begun to learn its thoroughfares almost by default. She knew the situation of that other room, in which her lord slept, when not with his wife. She must go northerly, towards the most ancient portion of the building. She passed servants, but none challenged her. To them, she was a lady, a facet of d’Uscaret, however slight. Long corridors lit by windows, hung with tapestry, and quartered with carven benches, gave on thinner darker lanes, whose windows had no glass but only bars, whose occasional tapestries rotted. No longer did any servants appear. There was a dull silence. Yet she did not lose her way. For in the wilderness there was still some sign of habitation, or passage. Here and there a landmark of a great chest, even the mossy blackened hangings – for elsewhere the corridors were closed by grilles of spiderweb, the floors seas of dust – empty of anything human, limitlessly undisturbed.

So she found her way to a twisting stair she had once or twice heard described. It was the path into the tower-top, the Bird Tower they called it: doves had been kept there once. Now Heros dwelled in the apartment, as if upon a rock in that desert of wasted corridors and rooms.

The door was abruptly above her. On its timber, a falcon’s mask in iron, and an iron ring.

As she put her hand on it she realised the door would be locked fast. She would have to sit down under the door-sill and await his return.

But the door gave at a pressure on the ring, without even a resistance.

That frightened her. She saw at once all her temerity in daring to invade the sanctum where no servant, no kindred, would enter unasked.

Yet it was too late, for the chamber opened before her, all its mystery, its spell, for it was his.

She stepped straight off the stair into the room.

It seemed to her the cell of a scholar. The bed was narrow and low, with a footstool by it, and a plain chest. No evidence of luxury was in these things. But across the floor, beneath a high, round, glassed window, that showed only air, was a table laid with a feast of objects and books, with measures and globes, the bones of hideous creatures mounted up as if they lived, weird instruments of alchemy and science.

There, on that board, his interest and his commitment were spread. She knew immediately, and with the jealous pang of a rival.

Between the table and the wall a three-paned triptych had been raised upon a stand.

Peering over the items on the table, careful to dislodge nothing, Helise did not pay the painting much attention. But then something in the angle of it, catching the window light against the shadow of the wall, caught her eye. It was his, of his choosing. She went to see.

How strange then, these images after all, strange as anything maybe in the room, or stranger …

In the first painted panel was a fang-like mountainside parting a ravenous sky. A procession of men and women had ascended, with livid torches; they stood like mindless things, staring into the clouds. Something with black wings was carrying off a young girl in white. From her lolling limbs and head there streamed draperies and hair, and a wreath of flowers went tumbling earthwards. This ominous tableau was titled in gilt:
Nuptiae
.

In the second panel, the scene was a bedchamber by night, a vast couch where something lay asleep. In the foreground, holding back the curtains with one hand, and tilting in the other an antique, flaming lamp, a pale girl leaned forward, her slenderness rigid in lines of anxiety and expectation, endeavouring to see –

This picture was labelled:
Noli me spectare
.

Helise knew now what the triptych portrayed. It was the legend of Cupido and Psyche. The maiden had been left as a sacrifice for a demon, and was accordingly carried off. In a mountain mansion, cared for by invisible sprites, the girl was visited in deepest darkness by one who claimed to be her husband and lord. He was to her only the best of lovers,
but warned her in the blindfold black:
Never attempt to look on me
.

(Hence the two titles –
Nuptiae
, an ironical “marriage,” and the second, perhaps perversely mimicking the instruction of Christ: “
See me not
.”)

But Psyche had been persuaded by desire and doubt to forget this ban. When he slept she lit a lamp, and so beheld her spouse. He was the god of love himself, handsome and perfect. And in her amazement, her shaking hand let drop a scorch of oil upon his shoulder. He woke, he disowned her, and into the unkind world she was cast out lamenting.

Helise glanced at the third picture. Yes, here was the banishment of Psyche following her transgression. And yet, it seemed to Helise that something in the vision was awry. What could it be?

The title exclaimed, once more with apparent irony,
Femina varium et mutabile semper
. Her Latin was restricted, but this was a quotation she had heard before. “Fickle woman is always changeable.”

And indeed, Psyche had altered from carnal curiosity to frenzied terror.

She was depicted rushing down a winding granite stair, her arms flung out, her face ugly and contorted with screaming. All the rest of the small canvas conveyed pitchy nothingness – but for one curious whorling hint of motion, seeming to come on behind her, somewhat like a flock of birds –

The door of the tower room shut in a hollow clap.

“You are here with reason?”

Helise darted about, guilty as a robber, almost afraid as one.

“I came to ask of you –” But no, she had not come to ask.

He stood before the closed door. His doublet and hose were the colour ice, his hair nearly whiter. His face appalled her, it was so fair, so inhuman.

It occurred to her to throw herself on the floor at his feet. She did not do it. Etiquette, which had chained her to a life of slavish unhappiness, also prevented such servile extremes.

“Didn’t they tell you, Helise, never to meddle with my possessions?”

“I’ve touched nothing – I was so careful –”

“Why are you here?”

She was too frightened even to cry. She loved him. But who? This god of ice and snow?

“My lord,” she said, in a little voice. Then, “Oh help me! Everywhere they accuse me – I didn’t know what I must do.”

“Who accuses you? What are you talking of?”

“Your mother, the lady – that old woman. I see – I don’t please you – but I’d suffer anything – only educate me, my Lord Heros –”

“Crucifixion of Christ,” he said.

The partial blasphemy checked her. She bowed her head and now tears streamed from her eyes. Useless: he would not comfort her.

Presently he moved across the room and, going to the table, ran his hands recklessly, as she had not had licence to do, over all the compendium of scales and jars, parchments, mummies, vertebrae. It was even violent, this sweeping, for one of the wired skeletons gave way when his fingers encountered it. At that he took the horror up and threw it across the room. It smashed to powder on a wall.

But when he spoke, his voice had no edge or noise.

“I believe they must have asked you, Helise, if you’re with child.”

Something gave way within her.

“Yes, my lord.”

“And naturally, you’re not. Poor innocent,” he said, rather as his mother had, lacking all pity. “You must learn fortitude. Now if I were a sodomite, or impotent, you might divorce me.” (These syllables were like a sentence in a foreign tongue.) “If you had the will and the power, you could seek an annulment. But do you even comprehend, Helise, how I fail you?”

And she thought of kisses and his hands upon her waist. She burned, but it was ice. She could not say anything.

“I see you nearly do comprehend,” he commented. “Well, madam. You’ll go wanting. I could, but I will not. Understand this. Think me a monk. I’m sworn to chastity. Of a kind.”

“What will become of me?” said Helise. She had made out one word in ten. To inquire of the Infinite was a ritual, like the
peccavi
before a priest, one’s mind elsewhere.

Heros had proceeded to the room’s hearth (empty), and there he leaned, looking down on the bruises of finished fires.

“There’s a dream I have sometimes,” said Heros d’Uscaret, conceivably to the hearth stone. For it was unlikely he would confide in the pathetic wife they had allotted him. “It began when sin began. I mean, impurity. The body’s urge, Adam’s rod, that makes him one with the beast, the reptile, the bird, and all the copulating, fornicating mass of lower creation. I remember the first dream. You see, I’d caught sight of a girl, washing herself in a river. The blood rushed to my head, and swelled my loins. I itched with my gluttony. It was manhood, and it was vice. Or, as they tell us, it was the natural order. All day, I could scarcely think of anything but that naiad in the water, laving herself, her round breasts with their eager tips, and the smoky hair in her armpits and under her belly.”

(Helise, arrested, gazed dry-eyed. Her heart raced. But he, he might have been meditating on the digging of a grave.)

“Night fell, and I into the night, and into the dream. Because I was well-schooled by the priests, I had not thought to ease myself. But asleep, the Devil took gentle charge of me. What were my hands doing, there in the dark? How should a sleeper know. And up and up I rode upon that delirious wave that had begun like an itch and mounted to a storm. And there was a
pressure in my brain, a green torch behind my eyes – and at the end there came a kind of fit in which I groaned aloud – and then, then, everything unravelled in me. I tell you, my sinews, my bones ran as if molten. And my skull was burst inside out. Where was I then? No longer in the throes of my pleasure. It was a place of mud, and I crouched there. Above were stars that blazed like pain. And beneath me was something that writhed only a very little, and I lowered my face and tore at it, and raw meat was in my mouth and hot salt gushed between my lips and up into my nostrils.”

Heros drew in his breath and let it go.

“I woke in indescribable panic. Sin had changed me. I’d become – I did not know what I had become. But in the dark I found myself with my criminal hands, which had betrayed me to Satan in my sleep. God’s benison. I was only myself. In all ways, a boy, a man. In those nights then,” he said, “I’d have them tie my hands to the posts of the bed before I would sleep. But by my sixteenth year I’d trained myself to wake from the snare before the dream should go very far. Do I disquiet you, Helise? Of course. You should never have come into this room. This is where I look upon my soul. Stupid girl. You see in the picture what happens to the curious.”