Tanith Lee - Paradys 02 by The Book of the Beast

Author:The Book of the Beast [Beast, The Book of the]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-12T02:16:41+00:00

PART FIVE

The Widow

Be a god and hold me

With a charm! Be a man and fold me

With thine arm!

-Browning As if from the tomb, sleepily, he rose up from her narrative. (Which might be apposite enough.) She had anyway bewitched him. He had seen what she said, in vivid pictures, masterful paintings come to life.

Raoulin stirred, and stretched himself, as he would not have done so freely in the presence of a lady. He took care not to look at her directly, but into the pallid glow of the fire, which had either been fed while he sat entranced, or which magically never went out.

“But Demoiselle Helise,” said Raoulin, sportive with the supernatural for there seemed nothing else to be, “if you died, here you are, and you haven’t yet given me the alchemical formula for that. Besides - am I to take you for twenty-five or twenty-six years? Not more than eighteen, surely?”

“Time for me has made a stop,” she said. Her liquid voice thrilled him. The voice of a sorceress. One could not be blamed for anything under the same roof as a witch.

At his own thought Raoulin struggled briefly. He reached back after the dead prostitute, the anguish that had brought him here. But a balm had been salved over them. They did not hurt any more.

“Shall I,” she said, “conclude my story at once?”

Then he had to look at her. Into her eyes like emerald. He nodded. She said, “That part’s swiftly told. The poison my husband’s mother had administered was insufficient. I did not die, but lay inert, flexible and wholesome, and with a slight breathing that some doctor ascertained. They did not have the heart for more murder, to finish off the bitch’s work. The feud was out with Lyrecourt, the Duke’s frowns glowering. And there was Heros to be seen to. His corpse had rotted in one night, with a fearful stink, all bits, human and avian. So they made my tomb, and named it for me, and laid the box of his bones there under a proud drape. For me, I was hidden again in this room, and sometimes tended. After many months, it seems I began to revive. I recall nothing of that period, not for three or four years, rather as the infant does not. Then I became myself, and remembered what I had been and what they had done to me. I was content to be hidden, and to hide. I heard tidings of their various deaths from servants. One evening I was told how Lord d’Uscaret, my second father, had been bled on Satan’s Way, under the Temple-Church. I laughed and had to pretend it was weeping, because I was still nervous of my jailors.” Helise put up her hand and rested it on her delicate chin. “You see, Sieur Raoulin, it had driven me mad. You can’t anticipate from me any fine feelings. I cackle at corpses, I burst into tears at the newborn baby’s cry.”

Raoulin shivered. It was not her words, only some latent truth inherent in them for all mankind.

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