Thorn Boy and Other Dreams of Dark Desire (34 page)

As the summer
scorched the lawns, Xanthe basked in the herb garden, while Samuel
toiled to keep his ladies alive. The work was really too much for
him, the garden too large. At first, as he struggled around his
domain carrying heavy buckets of water, he thought Xanthe might
offer to help, but when no suggestions were forthcoming, he stomped
over to the herb garden, intent on complaining. Wasn’t a wife
supposed to assist her husband in all his duties? He found her
lolling prostrate in the sun, soaking up its heat like a reptile.
At his approach, she rolled onto her back on the flag-stones and
squinted up at him. Her dress had fallen from her shoulders, where
her skin was dry as paper and studded with tiny pebbles and strands
of moss. ‘You are sweating on me, Samuel. What is it you want?’

‘
Some
help.’

She frowned.
‘To do what?’

He gestured
angrily. ‘My garden is dying and you just lie here all day, every
day. Help me carry the water.’

Xanthe laughed
and raised herself onto her elbows. ‘You want me to help? What on
earth for? Get a boy from the town, or one of the farms. You surely
can’t expect me to lug carriers of water about.’

‘
You
know I don’t want strangers here.’

Xanthe
shrugged. ‘You are a fool. Keep your dark lady secret, by all
means, but there’s no reason why some local boys shouldn’t attend
to the rest of the place.’ She smiled. ‘Samuel, I am not a big,
strong man and that’s what you need for this. See sense.’

‘
What
about Hesta? Get her to help me.’

Xanthe shook
her head mildly. ‘No, the garden is not Hesta’s province. She has
too much to do about the house.’

‘
I
noticed!’ Hesta’s hours had increased over the weeks, as had her
wages - at Xanthe’s insistence. It was as if the women were somehow
building a new house around him that no longer belonged to
him.

‘
Are you
complaining that I have turned your ruin of a house into a home?’
Xanthe said, her voice cool.

‘
No,
no...’ Samuel wanted to abandon the conversation. He backed away
from his wife until the hedges hid her from view. Pausing beyond
them, he heard her sigh, then imagined she just settled herself
back to drowsing, dismissing him from her mind.

Disgruntled,
Samuel sought the sanctuary of Night’s Damozel’s bower. He couldn’t
help unburdening himself of sour thoughts about his wife.
‘Sometimes, the mere sight of her makes me angry,’ he confessed.
‘Yet she is exquisite - submissive and calm. What she said about
hiring boys from the village was right, of course, and yet...’ He
shook his head. ‘There is something wrong. Something.’ The queen of
his garden listened patiently. She alone seemed unaffected by the
heat. Around her, her maidens lay swooning on the soil.

Later, when he
returned to the house, Xanthe was there with her serpent smile and
cool, welcoming hands. ‘Samuel, we must not argue about petty
things. Of course, I shall ask Hesta to give you an hour of her
time every day. I’m sure she won’t mind.’ She bathed his brow and
kissed his finger-tips. She was his wife, his beauty. He felt
ashamed.

Now, every
day, Hesta, apparently without grudge, tramped back and forth from
the kitchen to the gardens with water. She was a strong, steady
worker, but even her help was not enough to slake the thirst of the
parched soil.

‘
The
garden is dying,’ Samuel told Xanthe in anguish. ‘I am
helpless.’

‘
There
is more to life than gardens,’ Xanthe said. ‘And anyway, what is
lost can be regained. Your precious Damozel won’t wither. I know
you make sure of that.’

Samuel did not
like her tone. She often seemed to make innuendoes about his
relationship with the Damozel, but not enough for Samuel to
challenge her outright. He wondered whether in some way, Xanthe
actually enjoyed watching him panic as his ladies succumbed to the
drought. Perhaps she was jealous.

Every day,
Samuel examined the rat-traps he kept in corners of the house to
augment the poison trays. For the past few weeks, he’d been
surprised to find all the traps empty, although on one occasion
he’d thought he detected a smear of blood, some hairs. It was
strange there were no kills. Had the vermin become wise to his
precautions, or was the continuing hot weather responsible?

He mentioned
it to Xanthe, who replied, ‘Are you complaining? I’d have thought
you’d be glad to see the back of them.’

Again, that
sharp tone, an implied criticism. ‘But they are not gone
completely,’ Samuel said, ‘I hear them walking beneath the
floor-boards at night. Don’t you?’

Xanthe
shrugged. ‘I hear many strange things. This is an old house. What
do you expect?’

Anger burned
through him. He wanted to strike her. Relations between them were
becoming more frequently tinged with what Samuel perceived as
sniping comments, yet at the same time, he found his desire for
Xanthe increased. His lovemaking became urgent and unsophisticated
although Xanthe remained unruffled by his lust Samuel always felt
drained and exhausted afterwards, usually falling into a deep sleep
within minutes, while he suspected that Xanthe remained awake for
hours. More often than not, he would wake in the morning with a
pounding headache, as drained and groggy as if he had hardly slept.
The heat was oppressive; he felt feel weak and sickly.

As the weeks
of summer rolled on, it seemed that Xanthe’s initial interest in
renovating the family pile had been short-lived. Hesta, no longer
confined to scrubbing away the past in the house, was now Xanthe’s
constant hand-maiden, sitting beside her in the herb garden,
shelling peas for dinner, or skinning rabbits. Xanthe’s sole
occupation was to lie in the sun, and when she entered the house at
night, she seemed to burn with her own light. She and Hesta
murmured together. Samuel could hear their soft tones in every
corner of the garden, and occasionally a husky laugh. Hesta brought
gifts for Xanthe from the farm, some of which were distinctly
strange: a dish of goat’s milk, what appeared to be a withered
umbilical cord, some dried poppy heads, a dead bird. Samuel
supposed this was some traditional thing that once his mother must
have enjoyed with the local women. One day, in the kitchen, he
said, ‘She seems to think you are a cat.’ He gestured at the milk
Hesta had left out in a dish on the table.

‘
No,’
said Xanthe emphatically, ‘she does not. The milk is for my hands
and arms.’ She began to rub it into her dry skin.

‘
But the
other things...’ He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

Xanthe
examined him blandly. ‘Alkanet root, poppy seeds, feathers? They
are ingredients for a herbal concoction. I have trouble with my
skin.’

Samuel shook
his head. Xanthe increasingly unnerved him. She was attentive in
their shared bed, but during the day seemed distant and
indifferent. Also, Samuel noticed that she rarely seemed to drink.
It was unnatural. As he watched her dipping her pointed fingers in
the milk, he had to suppress a shudder. It was more than being
unnerved; he felt a wave of revulsion.

Xanthe looked
at him, alert, as if his mind was her garden in which to walk. She
smiled at him, perhaps with a hint of cynicism. He felt dizzy; the
heat was getting to him. There was so much to do, yet he had little
energy. Xanthe had come into his domain and had made it hers. She
had brought searing equatorial heat with her, and both he and his
garden were withering in it. She will be the death of me, he
thought.

That evening,
Samuel wearily carried water to the Night’s Damozel’s bower. Her
blooms reared into the darkness, releasing a drizzle of shimmering
pollen. He held out his hands to it, let it run over the backs of
his hands. Xanthe left dust wherever she lay. In the mornings,
their bed was full of it, a pollen of her own, faintly soapy
against his fingers. Groaning, he threw himself into the lap of the
Damozel’s leaves. ‘Help me,’ he said. ‘I am invaded!’

The Damozel
could not speak.She only gave him visions. As the pollen settled
over him, seeped down into his lungs and melted through the pores
of his skin, he saw Xanthe stealing through the house at noon, when
all was still and drenched in heat. He saw her stoop over the rat
traps and take the soft corpses from them. He saw her eat. In his
stupor, his stomach roiled. She had what she wanted: this house,
these gardens. She would turn them into a barren desert where her
unnatural hunger for heat could be indulged.She was a witch who
influenced the weather, killing all that he held dear. Hesta was
her creature now; bewitched and pliant. What a fool he had
been.

The blooms
above him looked like fairy faces. He fancied he could almost see
thin lips mouthing silent words. ‘Listen, my beloved,
listen...’

Later, Samuel
crept in from the garden, and went to the room where his wife lay
slumbering. He stared at her for a few moments, noticing the
faintly luminous sparkle on her skin, which might be an effect of
the oils she used. He dreaded the powdery touch of her flesh
against his own, yet when he slid beneath the covers beside her
still form, he could do nothing but take her in his arms, inhale
her strong, musky scent. She had that power over him. He resented
it. Do not think. Act now or it will be too late. Carefully, he
rolled her onto her back. She made a small sound, but did not wake.
Her lips were slightly parted.

Samuel
dribbled a shining stream of motes down into Xanthe’s mouth. The
Damozel’s pollen could be rubbed into the skin, inhaled or
ingested, the latter being the most effective method. The gate of
dreams or the portal of death: only long acquaintance with the lady
made that distinction. A dust glistened faintly at the corners of
Xanthe’s lips; Samuel covered them with his own, her body with
his.

The funeral
cortege milled around the front of the house. There was Sythia,
imported from her summer home of Mewt, holding a scrap of black
lace to her eyes. She was surrounded by others of her tribe,
profligates, counts and divas, debutantes, artists and concubines.
The majority of them had been summering at Sythia’s estate, and
once the news of the death had arrived by swift courier, the group
had flocked to accept the invitation to the funeral. They were a
mass of tall, nodding feathers and rustling costumes of black silk.
Jetty horses stamped and snorted before the hearse, tossing their
girlish manes, their hooves polished to a sheen. The day should
have been overcast and grey, the trees weeping tears of rain.
Clouds should have occluded the sun. The brightness and heat of
late summer seemed an affront to the occasion, and several ladies
were already feeling weak in their tight stays.

Sythia spotted
a tall figure emerging from the shadows of the hall and swept up
the worn front steps. ‘Oh, but I shall ride with you in the
foremost carriage. What a distressing time, for you, dear heart.
How terrible. How cruel.’

Xanthe paused
to pull on a skin-tight pair of black gloves. She inclined her head
coolly. ‘I shall be grateful for your company, Sythia.’ Together,
the women descended the steps, and the mourners drew apart to give
them passage.

On the boat
over, one of Sythia’s friends had divulged an alarming revelation.
Although information concerning Xanthe was scant in Mewt, the
informant had discovered that Samuel’s death occasioned the fourth
time Xanthe had been widowed. ‘It seems, my dear,’ the confidant
had said dryly, ‘that the lady has a distressing propensity for
losing husbands.’

‘
Sad
coincidences,’ Sythia said coldly, for she admired Xanthe
greatly.

‘
Perhaps
so,’ the companion said, ‘but this is certainly the shortest
marriage of her history. The other three husbands at least survived
the wedding for several years.’

‘
You
should not say such things,’ Sythia retorted. ‘That is how ugly
rumours start.’

Her friend
raised an eyebrow. ‘But I heard this from the second cousin of her
last husband, who was Cossic. What do you think the talk of the
coast is at present? There were rumours already. Some have said
that Samuel had the spectre of death at his shoulder even as he
spoke his marriage vows.’

‘
I won’t
countenance this nonsense,’ Sythia said. ‘Xanthe is a lovely woman.
She comes from a rich family, and lacks for nothing.’

Now, as she
climbed into the sombre carriage, with Xanthe so self-possessed
beside her, suspicions flitted across Sythia’s mind. The widow
seemed very little marked by grief. Her eyes were clear, her face
set in its usual enigmatic expression. ‘It was very thoughtful of
you to wait so long for the interment, my dear,’ Sythia said. ‘This
heat...’

Xanthe flicked
her a glance. ‘Poor Samuel has no family. It was the least I could
do to gather his friends for this occasion.’

‘
But
three weeks...’

‘
The
coffin is sealed,’ Xanthe said. ‘And we have stored him in the
cellars, which are cool.’

Sythia
shuddered. The frank details seemed indelicate. ‘Of course, we came
as soon as we could.’

Xanthe patted
Sythia’s hand. ‘I know. Please don’t trouble yourself.’

Sythia paused
for a moment, then said, ‘The contents of your message were scant.
How exactly did Samuel die?’

Xanthe closed
her eyes for a moment, the first signal Sythia had seen that the
widow suffered any twinge of emotion. ‘This may be distressing for
you to hear,’ she said, ‘but the truth is, Samuel has long been
addicted to intoxicants extracted from certain exotic plants he
grew at the estate. I’m afraid he poisoned himself unwittingly.’
She seemed to sense her companion’s troubled thoughts and fixed her
with a guileless stare. ‘The family doctor from the town has
identified the plant responsible, and we made upsetting discoveries
in my husband’s study - equipment to distil the essence of the
plant, and so on.’