Lycanthia by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The Visit

The cold house, after the snow garden, was densely shadowed but seemed warm. The blue-glass porthole insisted the chateau lay beneath the sea. The tall windows implied, between their drapes, that: No, it lay at the North Pole. The grande hall itself susurrated as if rushes were scattered on its floor.

Giddily Christian inspected the variety of illusions. He had asked himself where he should lead the two guests who prowled upwards from the kitchen in his wake, and he had decided on the fireless, heatless, inhospitable salon.

He walked into the room and sat down in the chair by the dead hearth to wait for them.

At some point then he became able to listen to them, to their approach, though it was scarcely audible. Two winter leaves, they blew across the grande hall. He pictured them, staring upwards at the blue window, fingering the carved wooden things, the brocades, the silver candlesticks. They would know it all. Their house.

Dimly, the hall chandeliers were ringing. That sourceless draft again disquieting them.

Gabrielle de Lagenay entered the salon first, but Luc was only a pace behind her. You could as little control them or keep them out as two cats.

“Oh,” said Luc carelessly, “you see what he’s trying to do.”

“He doesn’t know, himself,” said Gabrielle.

“Yes, he does. There’s a fire in one of the upper rooms. You could smell it, even outside. But here, no fire.”

“This is the correct room for entertaining,” she said. “For the English tea, with little cakes and segments of fruit.”

Christian watched them, and listened to them. He needed to do nothing else. He did not need to move, not even his hands, or his head. The room was horribly cold after all, but the young man stripped off his gloves and threw them, with his fine hat, idly onto a chair. The auburn nails were not at all ugly, merely disconcerting. Even in the sumptuous top coat, jacket, trousers, he was essentially arboreal. The woman had gone to the mahogany buffet. A bowl of hothouse oranges had been placed there at some time during the preceding day, beside a silver tray with a small vase of Armagnac.

Selecting three of the tiny goblets, she poured some of the treacle-colored drink into them. No longer guest but hostess, she bore one glass to her brother, who accepted it with ironic graciousness. She came to Christian next, extending a glass also to him. When he made no move to take it, she set it down on the table at his side. She returned to the buffet, and raised her own glass, primly, to her lips, lioness, drinking brandy.

Luc lifted an orange from the dish.

Christian stirred. He could not quite resist it.

“Wrong, children. You have made a mistake.”

“My God,” said Luc “He spoke to us.”

“That doesn’t mean,” said Gabrielle, “we’re forgiven.”

“It means,” Christian said, smiling at them somberly, “that you’ve learned your roles improperly.”

“Ah, yes?” said Gabrielle.

Luc, taking a silver knife from a drawer of the buffet (familiar also with the cutlery), cut the orange in two neat bleeding halves.

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