The Secret Book of Paradys (45 page)

Helise, her palm pressed to her mouth, drum-beats shaking her body, turned to remove herself from the chamber.

“You must never come here again,” he said. “You must forget what I’ve said to you. Tell no one. Swear it. On your saint.”

In a crumb of a voice, she swore as he required.

He did not, with his emerald eyes, observe her creep away. He was staring once more into the hearth.

All down the stairs, and in the corridors, going south now back across the house of d’Uscaret, to her nuptial bedroom and the room of sitting which were her jail, she imagined him borne upwards on the inexplicable wave, twisting, arched like the Christ on a cross, and his face an agony like the face of Jehanus. And when at last she reached privacy she sank on the wide bed where they had lain side by side, sword by sheath. And she too twisted and turned and was arched on her scaffold, and upon her also came the fit, so her cry rang clear against the ceiling. It was like the call of a bodiless preying thing that flew about there.

She did forget the other element of which he had told her. The meat and wine among the mud and stars: that was gone.

She had only been able to learn one lesson from him.

It had killed her. She had exploded from her own skin, and lay stranded on the pillows. No longer was she an innocent.

She was defiled, she had entered the lists of the wrongdoers. She felt relief. If she was wicked, she need no longer rein herself in. She could admit her
wants and where possible indulge them.

When she was in the d’Uscaret chapel now, her eyes on the prayerbook, she thought, This one never bothered with me. But Satan covets me.
He
will attend.

And then, frightened, she put away the idea.

But in the night, lying alone, recaptured it.

Would Heros ever return to her, to their bed? Surely yes. It was expected that a husband lie now and then with his wife. Such forms he honoured.

But she had learned what had been missed from their lying down. She had learned, by his voice and words, if not his embraces, the communion they might have shared.

Of course it was a fearful thing. Uncanny, astonishing. That escalation, that paroxysm –

She recalled now only that chastity had prevented him. His hands tied that he might not dream of lust.

Helise visualised that she came to him in the dark, and untied the bindings, and his hands fell instead upon her own body.

But although the bed had at last pleasures for her, he did not return to accompany her in them.

Ten nights went by, twelve, twenty.

Having confessed, would he never come back?

She saw him seldom, even at dinner. He was on some business of his father’s, Lord d’Uscaret, the peeved man who drank and sweated and kicked at his dogs.

Yet one morning early, going into the Sculpture Garden, Helise beheld Heros walking with his mother slowly up and down.

The garden lay on the north-west side and had high barriers. It was supposed to be a retreat for the women of the house and Lady d’Uscaret would frequently avail herself of its shade in summer at midday. Helise therefore restricted her forays to dewy twilights, dawn or dusk.

She did not like this garden, either. It had none of the quaint simplicity of the courts of la Valle, where figs and vines grew up the walls and flowers lived in pots. The Sculpture Garden was ruled with straight paths, partitioned by yew and box, conifer and ilex, all coerced and sheared to the shapes of balls, cones, squares and other symbols, or if not that, let out into birds with beaks and stretching tails. Where arches crossed the way they were thick with foliage, mathematical hoops of solid green. In the marble water tank was a hairy water-lily, which ate flies, a curiosity: Helise had witnessed a gloating gardener feeding the plant. In the shrubs nested statues. Leaves and boughs strove to swallow the statues up as the lily gulped insects, but this was not allowed. At the end of the garden was a statue of Psyche, so Helise had come
to apprehend. She carried a lamp, on her way to discovering her naked, handsome lover.

But one thing was certain, and that was the ease of hiding in such a garden.

A month before, Helise would have slipped away. Now she slipped into the cavern of a prodigious yew, and as he went to and fro with his steel mother, devoured Heros with her eyes.

After the two figures had patrolled in silence for some minutes, the lady spoke.

“You must know, if you take yourself away, I shall have nothing.”

And Helise was amazed to hear the passionless metallic woman say such a thing in her remote voice.

“Mother – I hoped you’d excuse me this.”

“Berating you? You know I won’t rail at you, or weep. I shall be quiet. But if you leave this house, my light goes out.”

“The Duke’s commission –”

“Is needless. A ploy. For your escape.”

Heros smiled faintly. Helise did not think she had ever seen that before. The lady’s hand rested on his sleeve like a long bud of the motionless carnivorous lily. Then it twitched, as if it could not help itself, losing a fly.

“Madam-mother. You must let me go.”

“When you were a child you had these notions. That the City choked you.”

“Don’t you prefer me at peace?”

“It’s that wife he foisted on you that drives you away. A witless female spawn of la Valle, got by your father for her dowry, because he cannot leave the pots alone.”

“It’s true. Marriage doesn’t suit me, Mother.”

“I’ve noted your aversion to her. But what is she? Less than one of the bitches. You live your life as you wish, and leave her to hers. She’s barren besides. In time, you can slough her for this.”

And then, sick and trembling, Helise saw that he grinned, the beautiful saint’s face split like that of some riotous drunk. Not laughter, but this bestial snarl of mirth, quite soundless, behind the woman’s head, so she did not even know. And when he answered his voice was composed.

“Oh, let Helise alone. What might her replacement be?”

“But you will remain at d’Uscaret?”

“No, Mother. I’ll be gone.”

They had halted, there beneath the statue of Psyche with her lamp, forever frozen in her marble moment, never to reach revelation and despair.

“Heros,” said Lady d’Uscaret, and then, after a second, “you should have been a priest. If I had had any say –”

“And I mine, Mother. It was the only chance for me.”

“That drunkard I wed, that disgrace to our name, that clod. A fool in everything.”

In the umbra of the statue they hung, neither looking at the other, not speaking.

Then she said quickly, “We must never fear shadows. It strengthens them. What are the nightmares of your childhood? What, you and I to credit a delusion?” But suddenly she seized hold of him. She clung to him, and her flat hardness was like petrification. And he, he bowed his head until it rested on her shoulder. One could not see his face. Yet they were like any mother and son in a scene of awful grief.

And then they drew apart, and this might never have happened.

“In a month,” he said, “I’ll be in another country.”

“As you think fit,” she said. “Yes. We’re in accord.”

When they had vacated the garden, Helise stayed rooted in the tree.

Her stomach heaved as if she were indeed pregnant. But all she had truly discovered was that Heros would soon leave her.

That night, the door of the bedchamber opened. Heros entered. Behind the screen with its running of white dogs and grey hawks, the gentleman undressed his master. Then the gentleman, as ever, discreetly left. Heros approached the bed in his silken robe. And Helise ceased to breathe or think.

“Sad little wife,” said Heros, looking at her not in complacency, or pity, definitely without excitement or intent. “We did you an ill-turn. I’m sorry for it, Helise. Will you forgive me, and pray for me sometimes?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“Have they told you? In a few days, I’ll be away on the Duke’s errands.”

Someone must have told her, superfluously after she had spied.

“Yes, my lord.”

“You’ll be glad to see me gone,” he said. “Believe me, your disappointments weren’t my aim.”

Helise let out her breath in a shivering sigh. She did not look at him any more, and he went about the room as usual, dousing the candles, so the dark tide came sweeping from the stones, and followed him to the bed’s foot, and there he blew out the last candle, and blackness filled the room and the bed alike. And he and she were alone inside that blackness, like two birds shut inside a cage.

Never before, not even on the first night, had she been so conscious of him, his proximity, as he joined her in the bed. The movement of his flesh and limbs against the sheet, the whisper of his hair over the pillow. She felt a warmth from him like the radiance of a cool flame.

He did not speak to her again. In a short space, his respiration assumed the levelness of sleep. Could he really render himself to oblivion so readily? It was some cantrip he knew, this knack for slumber.

But she must lie awake and think of him. Of his nearness. And if he slept, might she not approach him more closely? Would he wake and chide her?

Helise swam through the sheets and her hands encountered him, as the swimmer in sightless deep ocean encounters another living thing, with a galvanic shock.

He was naked. Like Cupido, like the god. With her palms she had contacted his flank, the architecture of ribs under its suit of skin.

He had not woken, no, he had not. Therefore might she discover him once again? Or, more crazily, lawlessly, why not, like Psyche,
look at him
?

No sooner had the fancy taken hold of her than it seemed she must do it. She could no longer control her need, or savagery.

She slid from the coverings and sought her way by touch along the bed, a mile of stuffs and ungiving framework, until she found the chest, the candle, and the tinder set by.

She struck the spark. She might say she had heard some noise, or – at long last – that she could not sleep.

But not a murmur of protest issued from the bed. And when the fire leapt up on the wax, shielding it with her own body, she glanced about. He had not moved.

Like Psyche, and with all her stealth, Helise stole back again, along the length of the couch, cupping the candle flame. The curtains of the bed were drawn back, she had no necessity, as Psyche had, to lift them away. It was the sheet, the covers of brocade, these she meant to pull aside.

She must kneel up on the bed. She did so. The candle palpitated and steadied, flickering only with her rapid pulse, as if illumination itself sprang from her heart.

She leaned over him, her left hand now on the coverlet.

His head was turned from her, the blond hair rayed upon the pillow. Bare, the shoulder presented itself to her for the scald of spilled burning matter. She must be wary.

And as she leaned there, her left hand getting its slow grip on the sheet, he stirred.

Helise started away. Instinctual precaution made her thrust the candle aside to the length of her arm. The flame bent, flattened, sputtered – and the room reeled. But he, after all, did not wake. He had merely pressed his face further into the pillow, away from a light unconsciously perceived.

The walls and ceiling settled, the candle-flame resumed its steady trembling. Helise looked down on the sleeping man, and saw the hair had been caught
away now from the nape of his neck. A strange shadow emerged at this place, from the roots of the hair, coiling along the spine, to dissolve between his shoulder-blades.

With caution, she brought the candle close again. The shadow dimmed but did not move. Helise leant nearer. She inhaled the clean maleness of his flesh and longed to brush her lips against the flax of hair, and saw the shadow on him was a scar, a curious plating, a trail of tarnished studs – she could not make them out. Like a lizard’s scales.

It was a birthmark. (Had not her own maid had a raised discoloured nubbin on her knee, the shape of a star?) Helise put out her hand to finger the mark, the sweet flaw in his beauty – stayed herself, reached again for the edge of the sheet.

She stripped the covers from him deftly, in a leisurely receding wave, inch by inch, her heart hammering in her breast.

Would he wake now? No, he would not. His sorcerous sleep was like a breathing death.

She had never seen a man’s nakedness, save in a statue or a painting, there never fully. He had the appearance of both statue and painting as he stretched there in the light amid the shores of darkness, adrift in the bed, his skin more swarthy than the linen, the smooth musculature carved and scarcely troubled with breath. Not stone, perhaps, but some strong ashen wood, tinted faintly to the hues of life, in order to deceive, and equipped with quiescent manhood, something at which the young girl had guessed, dismaying to her more in its first-seen familiarity than by anything alien, the tempter, the serpent of sex.

Careless of the glimmering, burning tallow, Helise bowed over the body of her husband. Her kisses printed themselves along his arm, his side.

But the hot wax did not drop upon him, and her mouth, the helpless small noise she could not now keep herself from making – these did not break in the membrane of his slumber.

He was enchanted. And she dared do no more.

Helise quenched the candle, and removed herself from his vicinity.

He did not rouse even at that.

The chamber seemed distended and tinderous with her solitary sins.

It was because of his aversion to her that he made the opportunity to be gone. He did not want her. If she had been able to cause him desire, how could he have resisted? He would then have remained. He would have been her lover.

But it was a witchcraft on him.

Did a woman then have no skill in such magic? It was the most ancient sorcery, Eve’s art, practised at the foot of the apple tree in Eden, that which brought down the race of mankind.

They said, at d’Uscaret, they muttered that Ysanne … that Ysanne was clever in women’s business.

“Cherish,” had said fat old Ysanne, “she must overcome her blushes.”