“If,” said Vespasian at last, his eyes black and unwavering, “you promise never to call me that again, even in public, I shall do what you ask.”
Then the words echoed and made no sense. He might as well have been speaking Latin. I wasn’t even sure anymore, what exactly it was I’d asked him. “Tell me,” I demanded.
He blinked, and breathed deep, as though I’d broken a spell. He looked down at the bandaging that he hadn’t completed. The tiny hole in the centre of the dragon had begun to bleed slightly and the thin scarlet trail slid across the crease between my breasts and down onto my ribs. It felt hot. Vespasian leaned over to the bowl of herb scented water, rinsed his hands and washed away the blood with one wet finger. His hand was still cool on my breast when he said, “Very well, little one. I pray you’ll never regret this, but, if you’ll have me, my Tilda, I’ll take you to wife.” He looked back up into my eyes, and the wandering smile flicked at the corners of his mouth. “If that sounds ungracious, and certainly less than chivalrous, I am sorry. I am very tired and I believe this to be a mistake, not for me, but for you. But I swear, once committed, I will try and make you happy.” Then he leaned over, with one elbow close to my ear and his face just inches from my own, one hand remaining soft across my breast, and spoke in Latin after all. “Tentigo absolutus,” he said in little more than a whisper, just before he kissed me, “I have, of course anima mia, been quite foolishly in love with you for a very, very long time. Stifling it, and treating you so carefully with the respect you deserve, has been a sad habit and one I’ve long yearned to abandon,” and his voice drifted through my head like soft murmurs, a breeze over water just ruffling the tips of the ripples along a dancing surf.
Chapter Fifty Eight
We exchanged oaths two days later, standing together in front of the fire in the bedchamber. I wondered if I’d have to wear Vespasian’s hose and cotte for the occasion, an idea I found deliciously incongruous, but instead I wore rich velvet and embroidered satins, clothes borrowed from the local dressmaker. The chief steward and Vespasian’s secretary were discreetly present, unessential but useful witnesses.
Then Vespasian kissed me lightly on the forehead, and carried me back to bed before I collapsed.
We sent word the following day to the Baron of Tennaton that his small and scruffy friend Matilda nobody, had become the Baroness de Vrais, which made Tilda giggle, a habit she was trying to grow out of.
It was shortly after the exchange of vows and sitting up in bed, that I told him reluctantly, “I shall try to be a good wife, though I’m not exactly sure what that entails. You may have to explain it to me.” He had brought me hot hypocras and was once again checking my bandages. I felt excitement rather than guilt, but having pushed him into a marriage he considered unsuitable, there was one thing I felt I had to know. “But will you,” I asked, looking carefully and demurely down at my lap, “– not that I should complain, and I won’t complain, and I know your habits after all – but will you, inevitably, be unfaithful? All the time?”
He had laughed out loud, pulled me to him and kissed my cheek, almost roughly. “Absurd child,” he’d said. “Do you expect so little of me?” The amusement in his eyes now seemed a permanent condition.
“You may always have thought me naïve,” Tilda said, “but I could hardly help noticing – before I mean – your behaviour that is, and I suppose you’ll have even more opportunity now.”
He was still laughing. “Inamorata mia, you are incorrigible.” He lifted my chin and smiled into my eyes. “No, I give you my word, which is worth considerably more than you undoubtedly realise, that I will never take any other lover. No such wish nor any such desire will exist. I swear it. Nor will I indulge in any behaviour, improper or otherwise, which may cause you further unhappiness.”
“That,” I said, now smiling myself, “sounds far too good to be true.”
Through the long years of her adolescent passion, she had thought she knew Vespasian well. She had always recognised instantaneously the signs when he was intoxicated, the points of colour high on the cheekbones and the unnatural glitter deep in the black eyes. She knew when he was tired, with the soft bruising around the lower lids, and his hand easing back the strain from the brow. She recognised the first signs of anger when his eyes narrowed and the hint of malice touched the corners of his mouth into the semblance of a smile – and the rare good humour when the genuine smile was echoed in the depths of his pupils, the jaw relaxed. She had always known why he bedded pretty, undemanding Isabel, who would be satisfied with gifts to her vanity and ask for neither fidelity nor consistency.
Now Tilda discovered that she had never known him at all.
The first night my medieval husband came to me, I was still weak and still in bed. I wore only a chemise. The chamber was low lit but the fire high, and when he undressed, the flames gilded him in black and gold and scarlet. Never having seen him naked before, I found him unutterably beautiful. His body was long and lean, tinged by candlelight, creating a perfection I could never have imagined. He appeared unaware of his beauty, and even of his nakedness, though I know I stared.
He sat on the edge of the bed facing me, put his hands on me and drew me into his arms. There was something thrillingly different about his embrace. He had held me before, but simply as protection. This time I felt his undisguised desire. I felt the smooth and sinuous muscle of his arms, the sleek sheen of body hair across his lower arms and chest, black though barely noticeable, and the inner strength of his whole body. Where he’d touched Tilda often but only as her doctor, strictly disciplined neither to arouse nor to wound, now his fingers danced in wonder, all magic unleashed. What he’d done that once when he was neither doctor nor friend, she did not ask and did not want to know. But Vespasian had discovered all those secret responses of her body, and I felt him use his knowledge. As he removed my chemise, his hands wandered at once, practised and passionate and exploring.
He clearly knew Tilda was nervous, but asked nothing and instead breathed, “Mona mia, trust me,” and for the first time kissed me hard on the mouth. Where his passions had been tamed for so long, he now allowed himself free licence, taking what he wanted but sweeping me always with him. Eyes heavy lidded, his watchfulness intensely intimate, every glance and every brush of his fingertips was whispered alchemy.
He made love to her for a very long time, building her very, very slowly to full knowledge. His ultimate climax was immense and prolonged but he raised me even further before he drank deeply himself.
Each night after that I lay in bed, my cheek on the hard dark rise of his breast and his hand gently on mine, I could taste his desire and the sweat of him. I adored his nakedness though Tilda was slow to the pleasure of exploration and he was gentle with her, conscious of her wounds and careful of her inexperience. Kissing the ear he whispered to, so that it tickled and reminded me of sunshine on the cornflowered fields, he said, “Now you have me, you seem remarkably timid in discovering what you have.” He took my hand. “Look – touch here – like this –”
I loved the hair on his body, a fine dark silk, almost invisible in its drift across his chest, curling around the dark nipples, concentrating in a narrow flat line down the stomach like an arrow to the groin. I loved to kiss his nipples so they hardened and rose like small obedient buttons. I loved the strength of every part of him, supple contours and elegant muscle. And most of all, I loved what he did to me.
When he kissed me, as he did constantly, sometimes with tenderness and sometimes in passion, I felt his breath like fire on my skin. Once I said, “I adore it. You kiss with such hunger. I often wondered why you never kissed Isabel.”
He seemed bemused. “I do not forget, amorcito, that I’ve known you as a starving street chit, huge eyes and breastless. What were you? Ten years old I think? You used to watch me with an adoration I found disconcerting.” His wandering hand between my legs did not pause as he smiled at long lost innocence. “No, I doubt I ever kissed poor Isabel
, for after all, a kiss, wherever it is planted, is the more intimate of all intimacies.”
“But you sacrificed Isabel,” I murmured. Muffled within the crook of his arm, it was not an accusation. “You never intended her death, but I think, through neglect, you allowed it.”
“Are you trying to discover,” he smiled into my navel, “whether I’m still capable of the foul temper you once accused me of?” His fingers searched deeper. “Maybe you’re right. Perhaps I was more insensitive even than I realised. So much suffering because of me, and for you most of all. But Isabel was never meant to be a sacrifice. The sacrifice was supposed to be myself.”
“I know,” I said, but then, because his touch was such exquisite artistry, I said nothing else. I gave myself to his travelling fingers.
I knew he loved me now because I contained the gentle sweetness Tilda wove through my nature and loved Tilda because of the knowledge and determination I brought her. But we didn’t talk about the duplicity of my character. Vespasian called me Tilda, but he knew we were both. Only once, one night, late after love making, he lay with one arm around me, the other playing in my hair, long fingers tangling and then unknotting the curls. “I wonder if I might find it dull now,” he murmured, words lazily slurred, “keeping just one woman at a time in my bed.” And I did not answer because I had no idea what to say.
Vespasian continued to nurse me until all the wounds on my body were thread scars and silver memories, and only the dragon remained clear and dark as it coiled around my breast. He touched it often while caressing me, his fingers tracing its curves. I knew he found it beautiful, which I considered strange. I believed it grotesque.
His own wounds healed quickly. I took over his nursing from the estate’s physician, who doubled as barber and apothecary. His sewing was better than my own but his touch was less gentle and less patient. There were three serious injuries to Vespasian’s head, a deep cut to one cheek, a gouge to the upper forehead and a graze to the jaw which had removed nearly all the flesh in one long strip. These were all healing under a series of tiny black stitches. I made him sit quietly on the bed, back against the pillows and eyes closed, while I treated the wounds with the herbs he prescribed himself, with old wine thick and red as blood, and with dressings of egg white. The stripe around his neck from Lilith’s claws remained like a ragged collar but it was not deep. The more serious injury to the left arm had already been sewn in a beautiful straight row of little black butterflies by the doctor, but it bled for many days and I changed the bandages many times, washing and disinfecting. “If it’s bleeding,” I said, “I think it’s a good sign. It keeps it clean.”
“No doubt a good sign if I faint in your arms from lack of blood,” suggested Vespasian. “Does this coincide with the four fluids, the humours? I’ve no idea what I am. Red cholic, I presume.”
“I was never educated in that sort of thing,” Tilda said, rebandaging his arm. “In fact, I was never educated in anything at all, though my mother taught me my letters. What little I know about anything, I learned from you.”
“Which means that all you know is either improper, or irrelevant,” smiled Vespasian. “But this estate will soon run itself, once I’ve finished putting things in order. There’ll be no necessity for you to become mistress of the house in anything but name.”
More than a week passed before I knew the house which had become my own. From the great hall through archways and cloistered window recesses with their thick cushioned seats, a passage led to the kitchens, the buttery, the pantries, the brewery and the bakery. Out through the kitchen doors the vegetable garden ran between the outhouses and chicken runs, swinging back around to the long thatched stables, barns and paved courtyard, then again to the front of the house. From the small corridor between kitchen and buttery, steps led down to the wine cellar with its huge wooden barrels, a cooper’s delight of well tapped and aromatic wealth.
The main hall was high beamed and lit by hundreds of beeswax candles in sconces and along the vast oak table. The carved chair at its head was cushioned in velvet. Tapestries and embroidered arras lined all the walls except at the high end, which was painted with a mural of water falling from rocks into a sunlit pool and a spreading yew tree, whose branches dipped down to the water, creating a cave within its shadow. There was a door in the wide girth of the tree’s trunk and Vespasian did not open it for me.
Instead he showed me the chambers and parlours, rooms on the second floor connected by passages with deep alcoves containing the privies. The master bedroom had its own private nook, a garderobe incorporating a separate latrine which I found marvellously modern. There was also some piped water, brought up from two deep wells at the back of the house, supplying not only the kitchens and bakery, but also a sluice on tap within the main corridor between rooms which could fill buckets to be heated over the fire, and from there to a standing barrel bath.
Eventually I said, “There’s a doorway in the painting of the yew tree, which you keep locked. Is it a secret?”
“Everything here is open to you,” said Vespasian. “Everything is yours.”
It was a small chapel and a place he would have preferred not to show me, although he did, with grace and explanations, without prevarication or defence. Once it had been beautiful, in the time of his father perhaps. Now, although sunlit, it was dark.
A rare glass window astounded me, thick coloured squares caught in black lead and fashioned into a blaze of beauty, mullioned chips in a mosaic of swirling pattern which trapped and refracted the light, distorting it into a thousand colours beyond the five shades the glass had been stained. The rainbows spun their beams amongst the drifting dust and spangled along the rows of a thousand strange objects. The high table might once have been a pulpit. Now it was hung with a tiara of cobwebs and beetle tracks, dead flies, lost brown leaves and a shallow pewter bowl, once baptismal, now stained black and crusted with the disintegrated memory of some viscous substance. Beside it stood a tall bottle, carved in silver, and marked Red Mercury.
There was no cross, no image of the Christ or the blessed Mother Mary. The walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were filled with rows of jars and leather bottles, carved wood and fragile bone objects buried under their years of dust, skulls both human and animal, a number of pestles and mortars in various sizes, bowls and gourds of dried herbs now long shorn of perfume, platters holding crystals and small rocks, the sudden glitter of jewels and gold. There was a time-piece, its complicated function in pieces spread over a low table, a mass of various mathematical instruments for measuring, for weighing and for calculating, an astrolabe and several globes marked with patterns of stars and meteors. One shelf held an assortment of equipment for distillation, some in etched glass, still catching the light beneath their grey powder cloaks. There were alembics, fine tubes of bone and several small sculptures and figurines, divinities perhaps. Most numerous of all, there were huge dust trailed piles of papers, charts, maps and scribed books bound in softest leather and marked in gold.
I recognised the vellum charts of astrology, similar to those Sarah Ableside had once shown Molly. “I know that’s part of alchemy,” I said, very quietly because the room troubled and awed me. “You once told me your birthday coincides with Candlemas. Do you know your horoscope?”
“I have the Sun in Sagittarius,” he said. “Scorpio is in Ascendance and the Moon in Pisces. I imagine this means little to you. But I also know your chart.”
“My birthday’s in August,” I said, wondering if I should tell him Molly’s.
“Sun in Leo, the golden lion, symbol of instinct,” he answered softly. “You don’t know the hour of your birth, but I know you have Pisces Ascending with your Moon in Sagittarius. We’re both a combination of fire and water.”
I nodded. “Yes, she is too,” I murmured.
“Your other spirit?” he smiled. “It would have to be. In alchemy acqua nostra represents fire and in turn, its partnership with water is represented by the perfect s
tar.” He held his hand outstretched to me, the heavy ring he had always worn suddenly illuminated with coloured brilliance from the window. Around the central ruby, the gold was deep etched with the six pointed star. “It is perfect balance, power and spirit.”
“Then, if you know the zodiac so well,” I said, “you know all our futures.”
“Would you have me tell you?” The glitter in his eyes seemed to recede and he looked away. “Not yet,” he said. “I think not. Perhaps – one day – I shall see. I will keep no secrets from you, but some knowledge does not bring the satisfaction you expect. Now, when you have finished with curiosity, let us leave this room, and I shall lock it up again.”
Earthenware plates held the last traces of soot from long cold fires, jars of liquids were dried into smears and the marble tiled floor was dust deep, though marked with a light pattern of recent footprints.
Instead of the crucifix, on one wall hung a mighty ouroboros, ten times the size of the one I had once been given. The serpent’s eyes were emerald and his tongue was pure gold. The opposite wall was a great map of the heavens, each star stamped in silver and above, the moon, full golden behind its veneer of flaking age, marked at the side with a long scrolling calendar in a thousand tiny numbers.
On a stool before the pulpit, was the pack of tarot cards that Vespasian had presented to Lilith in the grove when he had repudiated her own. The tarocchi of Hermes. Vespasian stood behind me, waiting for me to see all I wished, and then to leave. “You put the cards back?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “They never left this room. That is not the way alchemy works. Symbolism is always the key.”
“But they’re the same cards,” I said, though I was careful not to touch them. “You called them the cards of Hermes, instead of the others, which were the pack of Thoth.”
“You do not understand,” he said, his voice soft in my ear. He had put his hand on my shoulder, and turned me gently, to look into his eyes. “Hermes and Thoth are the same being. It is all the same, and as it is above, so it is below. Reality is ultimately the most unreal, for the physical is only a living symbol of spirit. Do not look for easy explanation, my love, for the truth is far too simple to understand.” He leaned over and kissed the tip of my nose. “We are all confused, Tilda,” he said, half smiling. “Would you believe in a God small enough for you to comprehend?”
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