by Tanith Lee
I crept down the ancient avenue, there was such an ache in my side, under my breast. I pressed my palm over it. My boots were too big for me.
Grass grew between the stones, which were pied here and there from the sheep that had been herded through the day before, to the markets – but to which markets, now? And the Obelisk? Yes, the Plague Monument, I had been asking after. I recalled it. Nearby was the house. The house would help me, perhaps, if I met no one on its stairs …
Further bells rang in the City. I did not note the hour they struck. The night seemed in suspension, between dark and dawn, affording me as much time as I should need to reach my sanctuary.
And truly, like a temple’s high altar it was, the house, the moon behind it, the aisle of the street blotted all through by shadow.
Up the steps, and oh, the ache in my heart, I went so slowly, and leaned my forehead on the door. Not boarded up. But locked, as the church had been, and yet I had a key – perhaps? I rifled the pockets of my curious clothes, and found a key which seemed the one I sought. It entered the lock of the door, and mastered it with the formal goodwill of a handshake.
A black chimney, the house, with the spine of the stair ascending. Familiar scents were dying. New smells of vacancy. With the turning of the seasons, damp would come, beetles would eat the wood and mice gnaw through the walls. The house would collapse at last like a dead tree.
I climbed, sometimes stopping to rest against the bannister. My debility was luxurious. If I wished, I could fall down and lie there. Who would ever come to disturb me? Yet I must reach the top of the skull, the attic. Why was that? Someone had left me something – it must be collected, for it was mine.
The attics, when I did reach them, had a familiarity I had missed in the remainder of the house. For instance, I remembered reading the books lying about the floors, and hiding in various parts of the hoard. I had often ridden the rocking-horse. It was on one of these rides, it seemed to me, a child of perhaps nine or ten, that I made the decision I did not want to live as a girl or woman. There had been a contrary example constantly before me, a snow-blond male child of my own age. He had taunted me and provoked me. Always copying him, I was never quite successful, while I remained female. Eventually I took the logical step. I altered. I became what he was: a boy. And later I remained masculine as I grew up. Here I was still in both their clothes, the garments of the blond Philippe, and of the young man who, until very recently (but how recently?) had been myself.
Presently I opened the press where Philippe had stored articles of his mother’s wardrobe. She had been a tall, slender woman; we were of a size. The clothes would seem strange to me at first, as my voice had done. But that would not linger. (The fortunate mode of Paradys had outlawed any but the lightest corsetry.) My body itself was a garment only partly recognised. There was a deep stain on the breast of the shirt, but nothing on my skin over the heart. The grime of the burial, too, had been shaken from me; it was mysteriously and satisfyingly gone, which was as well, for there would be no water left in the cisterns of the baths, no soaps in the jars. But here were ivory-backed brushes for my hair, and the pearl-handled nail-clippers. How did I seem now?
My night-sight, sharpened by immersion in the ground perhaps, had been good enough for my wanderings and seekings so far, but, as I bound my waist with a sash, I had an urge to regard. There was a candle in the stand I located and lit with matches from a discarded male pocket. Holding my light, then, I went towards the one round unboarded window at the attics’ end. There was no other mirror.
And in the black panes I saw my dim reflection, a young woman with a cloud of long and curling hair reddened by “Martian” henna. Nothing amiss with her, just a faint mark to the left side of the throat. I returned immediately to the press and took a woman’s lace stock, and wrapped my neck and breast in it.
I had just filled one of the mesh purses with all the left-over items of my male pockets, when I heard, four storeys below me, the house door grate, hesitate, then thunder open.
All the house clanged like a bell, roof to cellars. A fine trembling like a fine dust was left in the air.
Then came footsteps, jumping, stamping, running and stumbling up the house, just the route I had come, but headlong and precipitate.
I took my purse, and the discarded apparel of Andre St Jean, and walked across the attic softly, as the other footsteps blundered nearer, shaking the building to its roots. I left the candle burning on a stack of volumes close to the rocking-horse – as I passed the beast, too, I put a hand on its hindquarters and set it going vigorously. There was a large Italian chest by the window. Lifting its lid, I threw in the clothes, the purse, and got in after them. Here I was again, in my coffin. I lowered the lid of the chest, and the door of the attics burst wide with a crash.
There were two arrivals. They paused as one. Then, through my wooden crate, I heard:
“Look at the candle! And the horse prancing – my God, someone has been in this room.”
“But no one is here now.”
“They say it’s haunted, this bloody place. How not, the things that were done here? Oh, perhaps.”
I knew both voices. What were their names? One deeper than the other, heavy as if leaden.
“The front door had been unlocked. Can a ghost not pass through a door? Does it need keys, and candlelight? Well, who knows. That fool. Why couldn’t he explain himself in his letter.”
“Andre is – Andre was mad. He and Philippe.”
“It was in my mind, he must do something unwise. The insanity over the woman. Then her death.”
“I told you, Russe, I heard them saying at the Iron Bowl, there was another duellist’s body found in the Observatory woods.”
“That’s not unusual.”
“They buried it, as always – no identity, and no questions. That was before dawn yesterday. But when did he send the letter to you?”
I listened, marvelling. When he said, this second man, whose name was surely LeMar – when he said “dawn yesterday” he meant a morning gone, one day and night. Could it be that I had lain all that great while, deliberating, between ending and resuming, before I moved and flung up from the prison? It had seemed to me to be only minutes.
“It may be Andre has only gone away. They think so at his lodging. This is what his letter implies. But I am perturbed by the reference to a debt to this man, this Anthony Scarabin.”
“Her brother – Russe, Russe. Don’t you see? Scarabin shot him. Andre is dead, and in a grave. We’ve searched the City. Where else could he be but under the ground.”
“Here in this house.”
“Yes, in this house. We come searching, we see the flicker of a light and rush in – but where is Andre, tell me that. Oh, he is here. He is here, Russe, but not in the flesh. Ah God!”
The cry was sudden and full of a kind of gratified terror.
Russe only cursed, in his heavy way.
It came to me the candle had been blown out abruptly, by an invisible agency.
I heard the noises of the flight of that one, that LeMar – Le Marc – all down the stairs again, howling, and out into the street.”
But Russe remained, and he said, “Andre? Andre, are you truly dead and truly here?” (I had the desire to answer, sepulchral, from the chest. But he would not know my voice now.) “Ah, Andre, if you are. I warned you. Horror and sorrow, unholy things. You were a fool to meddle with it, Andre. Well, I’ll go to the house of the Baron. I will ask him outright. It must be settled.”
I crouched amid the chest and heard Russe in his turn go down the stairs. Then I rose up. I started – for the first tide of daybreak was in the window. I could see by it the candle, smoking.
Perhaps Philippe and I had played another game upon our friends.
Of whom had Russe been speaking? This Baron. I must follow the two men, and learn.
The lid of the chest fell, shutting in, conceivably for ever, perhaps, the shed bloodied skin of dead shot Andre. I had the bu
llet, however. It must have worked its way out like a splinter.
I took up one of the woman’s veiled hats, the mesh purse, and a pair of respectable gloves, and went quickly down the house, ignoring the soft cracks and hissings it made at me. I locked the front door, then tossed the key high, at the crowns of the trees growing from the old City Wall.
Andre had known the way to the Baron’s house, but I was not so certain. The peculiar light before sunrise showed me the agitated figures of the two men, about a hundred metres up the street. If they should chance to look back, they would think me only some lady of darkness hurrying to her lair, or lady of virtue hastening out to church.
I felt much stronger now. I felt the edge of laughter, but scarcely any pain, under my breast.
And how quaint the lady’s shoes sounded on the pavement.
We went downhill, and crossed a terrace, and heard, far below, the City stirring.
They climbed another hill, my guides, with a clock-tower on it. I climbed after.
We came to a street along the hill’s inner shoulder, and here memory sharply returned. The stuccoed houses were still asleep and blank as mausoleums, all but one. There was already some activity there. A pair of carriages stood outside the wrought-iron gate, reminding me of another pair of carriages, or the same, under the trees above the duelling hollow. Grooms had been holding the heads of the horses; now a coachman came and got up on the box of the foremost vehicle. Russe was on the pavement, arguing with a domestic from the house. Both spoke intensely, quietly, not to wake the street, Le Marc sometimes joining in, flapping at the house, the carriages, the sky.
Across the road I spied on them, concealed in another gateway.
Le Marc had turned towards the iron gate, now ajar, and the steps. The domestic tried to restrain him. The voice of Russe rose suddenly.
At that moment, the house door opened. Something was coming out. In the twilight, so pale it seemed to float of its own volition, a faceless glimmering shape – but two servants bore it between them. It was a milk-white coffin. Down the steps, the gate opened out for it. A groom pulled wide the carriage door. They eased the coffin into the interior.
It had had its effect, this manoeuvre. Le Marc was immobile, nonplussed. Russe had foolishly removed his hat.
And now the Baron, the banker, von Aaron – I recalled him very well – was coming down the steps. I listened with great concentration, and heard him say, to Russe, “This is not the time, not the place. What is it you can want?”
“We are concerned,” said Russe, holding his hat, “for the safety of our friend. Monsieur St Jean. I believe you, or your guest, may be able to help us in the matter,”
“I? How can I do that? Her brother, to whom I take it you are referring, has insisted that the body of my wife return with him to – to a previous residence. I am to follow. As you see, that second carriage is already loaded with my trunk and boxes. There is no time now, to discuss any of this. If you must, you may call on me upon my return.”
“When will that be?” said Russe.
“I’m not certain, monsieur. You must excuse me, you really must. I’m surprised, monsieur, at your lack of taste. To accost me at such a moment, almost across the corpse of my wife.”
Russe stood, frowning and out of sorts at this reproach.
Le Marc cried, “And the duel? There was one – you admit as much?”
Von Aaron said nothing. From the porch above, a clear voice cut sinuously and crystallinely down, like a fencer’s sword.
“If that is your problem, you must address yourselves to me.”
There, in his white, white as the coffin, my enemy, gazing at them from his battlements of flawless arrogance and contempt. My heart leapt. The pain of death’s memory wracked through it: my heart recollected. And in the purse of mesh the silver bullet, blunted on my muscle, flesh and bone, seemed to jump and scrabble.
“Then,” said Russe doggedly, “we do so address ourselves.”
The man Anthony Scarabin, descending to the street, said in passing, “I can tell you only this. Your friend caused harm. I therefore shot him, two mornings ago. You will find his grave, I believe, in the derelict cemetery that is generally used for such purposes. And now, if you would move aside.”
As if they could not refuse, they obeyed him. Then as he stepped into the first carriage (which contained the coffin), Le Marc bawled: “You murderer!” But Russe took hold of Le Marc’s arm. From Scarabin there was no reply. (And from the flat windows all about, not a face squinted out.) The groom closed the carriage door. The coachman unfurled his whip. The horses came to life and sprang forward. With a grumbling jangle, the carriage was off. It bowled along the street, and up on to the crest of it. Watching, each of us beheld it run away, looking weightless as a shadow-ball, around the tower with the clock, and then, taking the downward path, it was gone.
“This is not over with,” said Russe.
Le Marc broke out shouting, and just as quickly broke down in silence.
“I shall present the business to lawyers,” said Russe.
Von Aaron nodded.
“On my return, I will be at your disposal. But now you must let me get on.” He nodded to them, and turned abruptly, marching back into the house. The door was shut by the domestic, who had followed him. The one remaining carriage, humped with its luggage, without a coachman still, and with only the groom beside the horses, waited like a thing of stone, in the stony light.
For a few instants, Le Marc continued to complain and flail. Then Russe had him in hand. Russe declared there was no point in their loitering there any longer. They would go straight down to the Justiciary, and be ready when the doors opened at eight o’clock.
Once they had dwindled from the street, the groom took out of his pocket some pieces of bread and dark chocolate, and began to eat them hungrily.
When I emerged from my gateway, crossed the road and approached the carriage, the groom did not look at me with any special interest. When I opened the carriage door and got into it, he said merely, “Now –” but nothing else. Obliged to keep the horses in check, he did not pursue me, nor call again.
I placed myself on the upholstered seat, adjusted the veil of my hat so that my face was lightly filmed, put my gloved hands on my purse, and waited for von Aaron to come back.
He was not very long. Probably he had only gone in again to evade Russe and Le Marc. Now the coachman also came, and going round, got up on the box. I heard the groom say in an undertone, “Some girl has got into the carriage.” The coachman grunted with no amazement.
But von Aaron, when the groom had opened the door for him, froze in the middle of his ascent into the vehicle.
“Who the devil are you?”
“Your fellow traveller.”
“This is,” he said, still bowed over in mid-entrance, “a private coach.”
“Quite so.”
“Then please get out, mademoiselle.”
“I will not,” I said. “You had better get in, instead.”
His engraved face loomed before me, at a loss. Then he pulled himself up and sat down across from me. The groom hovered at the door and von Aaron indicated this fact with his hand.
“Must I have you ejected, mademoiselle?”
“Don’t consider such a thing.” I stared at him through the veil. “I am going where you are going.”
“And where is that?”
“After the other. The man in white, and that white coffin. It’s perfectly simple. Why delay us both.”
His hand went into his cuff of metallic lace and drew out a lace handkerchief. He put it to his brow and lips. His eyes never left me. Finally, he said, “It occurs to me that I know you, mademoiselle.”
“Not at all.”
“Yes. I’ve seen you before. I –” Quite suddenly his face grew very white and still. Only the lips separated from each other, and the eyes darted up and down me, up and down. There could be no doubt; I was a woman. He was thinking to himself, was he, t
hat I was some relation of Andre St Jean? A cousin, perhaps, or a sister. At length he glanced away, at the hovering groom, and told him to withdraw and to shut the door of the carriage. The groom did so. He went back into the gateway and stood there looking at us, not much intrigued, surreptitiously slipping slivers of chocolate into his mouth. Von Aaron said, “You will render me your name, mademoiselle, at once.”
I lowered my eyes. I replied deliberately, “My name is Anna Sanjeanne.”
There was a pause. The difference in the “Sanjeanne” was very slight from the one he had been expecting. It caught and held him, trying it over, licking his lips. The handkerchief fluttered again. I closed my eyes, my hands folded upon the purse in my lap.
“And you –” he said, “you will not get out?”
“No I will not get out.”
“God in Hell,” he said. He swore. He compressed the handkerchief and thrust it away. Then, he leaned from the window and shouted at the coachman. As von Aaron lurched again into his place, the whip cracked outside and the vehicle juddered. We began to move, rolling forward, the wheels grinding over the stones, as I had seen happen with the first carriage.
Sleep, or faintness, stole over me. I leant my cheek against the seat’s cushioned support, my head turned from the Baron towards the other window. The world swam and streamed, all Paradys streaming away. My lids fell again.
Von Aaron said to me from far off, “I shall not, mademoiselle, exchange another single word with you. You must understand this.”
“Do as you please,” I murmured.
He laughed bitterly, just once.
The jolting of the carriage as it gained speed joined with the furious knocking of my heart. The roar of wheels and hoofs flowed in my brain. Awareness, Paradys, they poured off me together. The City was going, being left behind, as if we lifted into the morning sky. Somewhere, thin and hard and pure as steel, a thread led away out of the labyrinth, at the other end of which there ran before us a blazing gem of white.