by Tanith Lee
In the second panel, the scene was a bedchamber by night, a vast couch where something lay asleep. In the foreground, holding back the curtains with one hand, and tilting in the other an antique, flaming lamp, a pale girl leaned forward, her slenderness rigid in lines of anxiety and expectation, endeavouring to see –
This picture was labelled: Noli me spectare.
Helise knew now what the triptych portrayed. It was the legend of Cupido and Psyche. The maiden had been left as a sacrifice for a demon, and was accordingly carried off. In a mountain mansion, cared for by invisible sprites, the girl was visited in deepest darkness by one who claimed to be her husband and lord. He was to her only the best of lovers, but warned her in the blindfold black: Never attempt to look on me.
(Hence the two titles – Nuptiae, an ironical “marriage,” and the second, perhaps perversely mimicking the instruction of Christ: “See me not.”)
But Psyche had been persuaded by desire and doubt to forget this ban. When he slept she lit a lamp, and so beheld her spouse. He was the god of love himself, handsome and perfect. And in her amazement, her shaking hand let drop a scorch of oil upon his shoulder. He woke, he disowned her, and into the unkind world she was cast out lamenting.
Helise glanced at the third picture. Yes, here was the banishment of Psyche following her transgression. And yet, it seemed to Helise that something in the vision was awry. What could it be?
The title exclaimed, once more with apparent irony, Femina varium et mutabile semper. Her Latin was restricted, but this was a quotation she had heard before. “Fickle woman is always changeable.”
And indeed, Psyche had altered from carnal curiosity to frenzied terror.
She was depicted rushing down a winding granite stair, her arms flung out, her face ugly and contorted with screaming. All the rest of the small canvas conveyed pitchy nothingness – but for one curious whorling hint of motion, seeming to come on behind her, somewhat like a flock of birds –
The door of the tower room shut in a hollow clap.
“You are here with reason?”
Helise darted about, guilty as a robber, almost afraid as one.
“I came to ask of you –” But no, she had not come to ask.
He stood before the closed door. His doublet and hose were the colour ice, his hair nearly whiter. His face appalled her, it was so fair, so inhuman.
It occurred to her to throw herself on the floor at his feet. She did not do it. Etiquette, which had chained her to a life of slavish unhappiness, also prevented such servile extremes.
“Didn’t they tell you, Helise, never to meddle with my possessions?”
“I’ve touched nothing – I was so careful –”
“Why are you here?”
She was too frightened even to cry. She loved him. But who? This god of ice and snow?
“My lord,” she said, in a little voice. Then, “Oh help me! Everywhere they accuse me – I didn’t know what I must do.”
“Who accuses you? What are you talking of?”
“Your mother, the lady – that old woman. I see – I don’t please you – but I’d suffer anything – only educate me, my Lord Heros –”
“Crucifixion of Christ,” he said.
The partial blasphemy checked her. She bowed her head and now tears streamed from her eyes. Useless: he would not comfort her.
Presently he moved across the room and, going to the table, ran his hands recklessly, as she had not had licence to do, over all the compendium of scales and jars, parchments, mummies, vertebrae. It was even violent, this sweeping, for one of the wired skeletons gave way when his fingers encountered it. At that he took the horror up and threw it across the room. It smashed to powder on a wall.
But when he spoke, his voice had no edge or noise.
“I believe they must have asked you, Helise, if you’re with child.”
Something gave way within her.
“Yes, my lord.”
“And naturally, you’re not. Poor innocent,” he said, rather as his mother had, lacking all pity. “You must learn fortitude. Now if I were a sodomite, or impotent, you might divorce me.” (These syllables were like a sentence in a foreign tongue.) “If you had the will and the power, you could seek an annulment. But do you even comprehend, Helise, how I fail you?”
And she thought of kisses and his hands upon her waist. She burned, but it was ice. She could not say anything.
“I see you nearly do comprehend,” he commented. “Well, madam. You’ll go wanting. I could, but I will not. Understand this. Think me a monk. I’m sworn to chastity. Of a kind.”
“What will become of me?” said Helise. She had made out one word in ten. To inquire of the Infinite was a ritual, like the peccavi before a priest, one’s mind elsewhere.
Heros had proceeded to the room’s hearth (empty), and there he leaned, looking down on the bruises of finished fires.
“There’s a dream I have sometimes,” said Heros d’Uscaret, conceivably to the hearth stone. For it was unlikely he would confide in the pathetic wife they had allotted him. “It began when sin began. I mean, impurity. The body’s urge, Adam’s rod, that makes him one with the beast, the reptile, the bird, and all the copulating, fornicating mass of lower creation. I remember the first dream. You see, I’d caught sight of a girl, washing herself in a river. The blood rushed to my head, and swelled my loins. I itched with my gluttony. It was manhood, and it was vice. Or, as they tell us, it was the natural order. All day, I could scarcely think of anything but that naiad in the water, laving herself, her round breasts with their eager tips, and the smoky hair in her armpits and under her belly.”
(Helise, arrested, gazed dry-eyed. Her heart raced. But he, he might have been meditating on the digging of a grave.)
“Night fell, and I into the night, and into the dream. Because I was well-schooled by the priests, I had not thought to ease myself. But asleep, the Devil took gentle charge of me. What were my hands doing, there in the dark? How should a sleeper know. And up and up I rode upon that delirious wave that had begun like an itch and mounted to a storm. And there was a pressure in my brain, a green torch behind my eyes – and at the end there came a kind of fit in which I groaned aloud – and then, then, everything unravelled in me. I tell you, my sinews, my bones ran as if molten. And my skull was burst inside out. Where was I then? No longer in the throes of my pleasure. It was a place of mud, and I crouched there. Above were stars that blazed like pain. And beneath me was something that writhed only a very little, and I lowered my face and tore at it, and raw meat was in my mouth and hot salt gushed between my lips and up into my nostrils.”
Heros drew in his breath and let it go.
“I woke in indescribable panic. Sin had changed me. I’d become – I did not know what I had become. But in the dark I found myself with my criminal hands, which had betrayed me to Satan in my sleep. God’s benison. I was only myself. In all ways, a boy, a man. In those nights then,” he said, “I’d have them tie my hands to the posts of the bed before I would sleep. But by my sixteenth year I’d trained myself to wake from the snare before the dream should go very far. Do I disquiet you, Helise? Of course. You should never have come into this room. This is where I look upon my soul. Stupid girl. You see in the picture what happens to the curious.”
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 o
n 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.