Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “It isn’t real,” I said and heard my voice shaking. “You got it from the antique shop in my village. It’s a copy.”

  Sarah shook her head, a sorrowful aunt. She was still wearing the clothes from my world, the modest flowered cottons and fluffy cardigan. “Dear, dear, what ignorance my dear. A copy? No, this is more genuine than anything you have ever had from your treacherous lover.”

  Ruth still held me quite still. My voice barely formed, my hands could not move. It was not the power of total paralysis that the veleda had once exercised over me, nor the sweet trances and escape from pain that Vespasian had given me, but I could neither run nor shout. I tried to cough, spitting for freedom, but couldn’t unravel invisible bonds. “Vespasian’s was real. It protected me and saved my life.” I glared at Malcolm. “When you came to the convent, you drugged me so I wouldn’t see you, but you didn’t expect to find the ouroboros on my wall. You had to leave, and I woke and saw you. What had you come to do? Kill me?”

  Malcolm spat on the floor at my feet. His spittle defiled the smooth marble. “No, bitch,” he said. “I came to demand the power of the gatekeeper from the filth that stole it before.”

  “Rape me?” I raised my chin. “But Jasper already protected me from that, something even stronger than the ouroboros. You can’t know. You ran away before the end of the battle.”

  Malcolm slapped me. I wasn’t surprised it was a slap instead of a punch. I tried to smile although I thought my lip was bleeding. Ruth stepped between us, reinforcing the spell that kept me almost immobile. “But you see, dear,” she said sweetly, “we have a greater strength, for Lilith is with us.” I looked back into her eyes and I saw Lilith’s eyes. I looked across at Sarah and again I saw Lilith’s eyes. “Poor Molly,” Ruth continued, “and dear little Tilda, the ignorant child you dragged into all this with you, what a sad waste. Such a shame, my dear, but I’m afraid, it’s quite over for you now.”

  “We are one,” I said, remembering and reciting. “Tilda and I. Molly and I, we are one. Purity and love unite, so we became fused. Evil destroys and detaches, so although Lilith lives in each of you, you’re separate entities. If you’re in danger, you’ll turn on each other and rip each other apart. Then Lilith will dissolve back into the air. The ouroboros is the symbol of eternal and infinite purity, and that’s something you’re frightened to touch. What you hold is a copy.”

  “Well, bitch, your master’s taught you a few things over your few months swiving together,” said Malcolm. “But you’ll never understand Lilith’s power.”

  Everything was ice. I myself was turning to ice. “Jasper will come,” I said. “He knows Lilith’s power. He repudiates it. He’s beaten her before. He knows when I need him, and he’ll come.”

  Sarah had taken the ouroboros and was holding it high in front of my face, just centimetres from my nose. “A copy?” she sniggered, “you think this is a copy? It was once perhaps, a pathetic piece of wood chip, whittled by some peasant in your dull little village. But Thomas took it from the shop and changed it, transforming it into something far more exciting. Didn’t you hear of the explosion?”

  “In the antique shop. Yes.”

  “Look at the eyes,” giggled Sarah, so intense that her voice became a small frenzy, a high pitched squeal. “It sees you. It’s alive. It holds the soul of your cousin. Speak to it. Greet your long dead relative. She can hear every word you say.”

  I was utterly silent. I stared. I dared not believe it. Ruth said, “Lilith within Thomas entered the shop where the copied ouroboros was for sale, and she took it. The explosion was the transference of your cousin’s essence into the serpent. What a delightful trick, don’t you think? And because we sisters owned what you thought was a sign of the bright magic and puerile purity, you trusted us. Yet all the time, your little cousin was sitting on our shelf, watching us worship Lilith.”

  “Who had killed her in the first place,” smiled Sarah. “Don’t you think it’s a sweet story? All the signs of a charming fairy tale, surely?”

  I still hadn’t spoken. I was bursting with unfulfilled urgency, the desperate hope that Vespasian would hear our voices and come down. And I sobbed for my dearest Sammie, whom I had almost forgotten. I looked at her pretty eyes, sublimated into the carving and drained of emotion. I recognised their flicker of understanding. I knew her. But she was a moth within the flame, and Jasper was deep sleeping after our loving. So I called on the only other relation I knew and the one who could help me most, if she wished to do so.

  Beyond the long windows, still unshuttered for the night, the moon swam through her gossamer cloud cover and rose higher amongst the stars, full round silver in Scorpio and exactly six months since Samhain’s victory. I looked straight into her mesmerising magnificence and I called my mother. Then I turned back to Malcolm, Ruth and Sarah, and the growing force of Lilith’s shadow within the hall. “You mistake me,” I said, loud and very clear, until quite quickly I knew neither my own voice nor the inspiration for the words. “If Cernunnus opened the path between our worlds for you to pass, then he has usurped my place. I demand he renounce the gateway. I call on the veleda, who designated me alone. I command Janus and Thoth to recognise my prerogative and relinquish their keys. I call on Hermes, who witnessed the tarot and knows my claim is just. Only Vespasian may speak in my stead, and I no longer delegate. I hereby reclaim my position and impose my right. I will close the gates and with the power given to me, I shutter and lock all paths. Now no glimmer passes and Hades itself shivers behind its stream.”

  They laughed at me at first. Sarah was still holding Sammie’s false ouroboros in my face, but my reaffirmation of my own power had snapped the spell that held me and I reached out, jerkily as my muscles responded again, and took it from her fingers. She seemed unable to stop me. I put it to my mouth, and kissed it. Someone screamed and I clutched the carving, afraid it was Sammie. But it was Lilith. No one laughed again.

  The little coiled snake had begun to stretch and open. The explosion that had trapped my cousin now imploded, and the wood shattered and fell to ashes. For one brief moment I saw her. Sammie stood at my side like a white light, shimmering in the shadows and brighter than the moon glow. She smiled at me and put out her hand. I felt the dizzy pleasure of her warm fingers on my shoulder, the pressure of reassurance. She breathed, “Thank you,” and diminished into the pools of moon halo before me.

  With the thin frightened figure of Malcolm now cowering between them, Lilith was two, one crouching small as if to spring, the other soaring and baleful as the demon within. Then I realised, with a pride bordering arrogance, that I had grown myself. I looked behind me. The painted yew tree was shedding its leaf-bound snow cover. The drooping branches with their huge spread stroking the ground beneath, now lifted in a sparkle of deep green, feathered in the moonlight. The hall of the beautiful house I could now call my own, was turning into the nemeton, Vespasian’s sacred grove. The soft silver water of the mural called in gentle song. Other trees crowded round, pushing in through the walls, leaning down on us from the beamed ceiling. A massive oak seeped its gall. I saw my chestnut tree with the hammock swinging a little in the summer breeze. I saw the willows from the woods of the estate, where Vespasian had taken me to look for robin’s nests and the scurry of the weasel. The marble tiles had become grass under my feet and the herbs spread upon the grave mounds by the cold pool. I looked at Lilith, still split between the sisters she had chosen to inhabit. “The gates are almost shut,” I said again. “You are out of time and out of place. Leave now, or you will suffocate.”

  She was snarling, one toad, one skull faced wolf. “You’ve no power to hurt me,” she said, one voice from two gaping mouths.

  “That’s a lie,” I said quietly. “You know it is. I’ve hurt you before. I don’t have the strength to kill you but I can banish you into the air and it will be centuries before you can reassemble. You’ve chosen to bring two bodies from another time and if I close the gates, those bodies die an
d you’ll suffocate unless you fly out. If you try to touch me and keep the gates open, I’ll flay you with the dragon brand, the fifth essence and purity of the inner sacred fire.”

  I was holding a sword. It had come into my fist like the trees had come into the hall. At first I thought it was my own, that I’d lost in the grove at Samhain, but then I saw it was Vespasian’s. It was too heavy for my wrist, its hilt carved with the design of the caduceus of Hermes in solid gold, the two entwined serpents, crowned and twisted around a central pillar that ran down into the blade. I grasped it with both hands and raised it before my face.

  “Fool,” spat Lilith. “You dare make such an enemy? Do you know what I can do to you over a lifetime of torture? You’ll not always have the protection of the veleda.”

  Sarah was the toad, Ruth the wolf. They circled me, crocodile skins, snarling and spitting, wide lipless mouths into bottomless throats, humanity dissolving in demonic transposition. As I faced one, so the other came behind me, iced breath on my neck. Unwilling to touch the dragon brand, they attacked not with the claws and teeth they both exposed, but with the venom of their breath and the threat of death from terror.

  I felt fear eat me from the inside like acid. I struck out a hundred times, and though I missed a hundred times, I swung again, heaving the weight of the blade I could now barely support. The sword tip was increasingly unsteady and unpractised, but this time, its own skill and not mine, the steel pierced Sarah’s leg. I lunged and sliced downwards to the ankle and Lilith spat slime. “With the doorway closed, you cannot sustain breath for two,” I gasped, hardly breathing myself. “One will have to kill the other.” She knew. Ruth had already turned on the weakened Sarah.

  While the wolf ripped apart the toad, I killed Malcolm with two strokes of the sword as Vespasian had taught me, many, many months ago in the old forest outside the house he’d built for Ingrid. I cut first across the pelvis as he stood, cringing beside me, snivelling and trembling. The blood spurted onto the trunk of the yew tree. Then I cut down, two handed, and his head fell from his neck. I hoped there had been time for him to feel the pain.

  I turned back to Lilith. The toad was dead, crumpled in puddles of bloody venom and popping eyes. I looked at the wolf. Ruth was gasping, holding her furred muzzle, clawing at her throat. “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve closed the way. All the doors are shut.”

  She was shrinking, rejecting the useless body of the woman, and stretching out all her fury to take her up into freedom, away from the power of the grove. I watched her for a moment. If I tried to kill Lilith, I would shatter like glass. Reluctantly I waited until she was quite gone, wisps of steam in a current of parting smoke, then a lost wail which disappeared and became the screech of an eagle, or a whistle of the wind across the waves. Then I killed Ruth.

  She had no defence, just a cherubic maiden aunt, soft lilac and glasses on her nose, but I ran her through with the bloody sword and watched her fall beside Malcolm’s decapitated body. Then I stood panting for breath and was myself again.

  Before, I’d felt terrible guilt, knowing I’d killed Uta and the others. Now I adored it. I could kill and kill again for what I killed had no right to life.

  Panting, I looked around. Behind me the mural of the yew became paint, the little locked door reappeared and the great trees above and around me began to whisper and rustle, moving back into their huge shadows. There was neither music nor breeze and the moon seemed to shrink as her silver puddles fell on the marble floor tiles like little apple blossoms in the night. I dropped the bloody sword where Ruth, Sarah and Malcolm lay dead and empty.

  The silence was complete, a huge silence that shouted at me over my heart beat. I walked to the small staircase across the hall which led to the master bedroom. I already knew what I would find.

  Chapter Sixty

  He was on my bed. They had taken him in the slumber of his only vulnerability, the deep contentment after love making, during the seduction of all his senses.

  As they had to his first wife and to his young mistress, they had split his sternum and his belly to the groin. His arms were flung out to his sides as I had left him, waiting for my return. Instead, he had embraced death. The blood was so thick across the fur and velvet coverings, it was black rivers in the shimmering moonlight.

  I had expected it, in the end. There had been too much noise for my beloved to be sleeping still, and too much living magic for him to drift on through his dreams, had he been free to come. He would not have slept through the entrance of Lilith herself into his home. I had known, before I saw him. But I had not expected the butchery.

  They had put out his eyes. All his life had been in his eyes, rich black caverns and a tunnel into every emotion, secrets and passion, power and sensuality and love, liquid shadow, beautiful eyes that spoke without words, a vocabulary more intense than all the other languages he spoke. I had loved his eyes so very much.

  At least, even with magic, there had been no time to flay his wrist and ankle as they had done to Ingrid and Isabel. I sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand in mine and stroked the long sensitive fingers and kissed his palm and told him how much I loved him. His face streamed with the sticky, drying blood from his eye sockets, but the little curl at the corners of his mouth retained the sweetness of dreaming smiles. I could not believe he had suffered. All the terrible savagery of his torture had been done to an empty body, after the departure of the soul. They would not have dared kill him slowly. His power was too great.

  I sat there beside him for a very long time in the dark, listening to my own stifled breathing as the moon slid past the window and the clouds covered the stars and total blackness shifted in around me. I kissed my lover’s mouth, though it was becoming tight and hard and cold, and where I held his hand, the fingers soon gripped me so tightly that I thought he spoke. I stroked his ruined face and carefully combed his hair with my fingers, smoothing it back from the savagery of his destruction. I put my other hand slowly across his opened breast, absorbing the last liquidity of his life’s blood, the beauty of the skin as it became alabaster and the elegance of curve where the muscles still rose beside the great wound.

  It was an hour perhaps that I sat, lost in love for him, whispering promises. Finally, I unclasped his fingers from mine, apologising softly for my brief abandonment.

  “I will not be gone long,” I murmured, “for I will not ever leave you now.” I kissed him again on the mouth, and then slowly left the room. Downstairs the three bodies sprawled in their dark corner, sinking within a low hanging fog of menace and the stench of remaining evil. I passed them by, opened the big door of the hall and stepped out into the courtyard. Above the high tiled roof of my house, the moon swung up across the jutting turrets and blazed full again, shedding her cloudy aura. I walked down past the stables and across the lane into the rise of the first trees, ghost trunks looming over me. I knew what I was looking for.

  Vespasian had taught me herb lore. I knew hemlock and scarlet yew berries. I knew the soft white fungi and the creeping nightshade, toadstools and roots of monkshood. I collected what I needed, kneeling there in the moon spangled dew.

  I made up the drink back in the kitchens, very carefully filtering, stirring and pounding. I lit a tall candle and stood it beside the mortar. The flickering shadows danced over my hands like sunlight on a stream, but the drink I mixed was dark brown and rank. The remaining leaf and stringy tubers I destroyed with the candle flame, leaving no poison for the servants to find in the morning.

  Then I took the opiates from where Vespasian stored them, locked safe, the strongest redress and the greatest scourge, which he had always forbidden me. The two little cakes were wrapped in leaves, then in a sealed jar, and kept in a cool cupboard. I unwrapped one and took it to my bowl. The opium shone like polished marble. I crumbled a little into my drink and then heated the cup over the flame, sitting patiently though my blood stained fingers scorched. It was my left, the hand that Arthur had forced through fire an
d it still hooked a little unnaturally, hard to straighten, with puckered flesh on a raised palm. There was less feeling there now and I could hold the cup with very little discomfort, but in truth, there was little feeling in any part of my body for I was numb.

  I took my cocktail upstairs and sat beside Vespasian on the drenched bed. The great fur counterpane which had been so smooth and rich beneath our naked bodies, now was hard and blood crusted in a welter of carnage. But it was my lover’s blood and nothing of his could feel obscene to me. His blood was already on me, on my hands and my mouth where I had kissed and caressed him. The black gape of his empty eyes stared up at our bedroom shadows, no lids left for me to gently close. This was the bed that had known all the passion of his loving and now it sheltered only bitter misery. I kissed him again before I drank from the cup. The poison tasted foul but I finished everything there was, through to the dregs which I left because they were gritty.

  Then I lay down, curled very close to my husband’s side, and put my arm tight around him. He was still beautiful, but so cold. I knew I would die slowly but I hoped the opium would bring some narcotic relief and the assurance that I would not vomit away all the lethal dose I was determined to endure. I did not want to writhe, and disturb Vespasian. I shut my eyes, squeezed tight, and breathed away my life.

  Chapter Sixty One

  I woke. I should not have woken.

  I lay still, my eyes closed, terrified that it had all failed and that I was still alive and all the horror would begin again. Then I opened my eyes. Above me was the frilly lampshade and the electric light and the white plaster ceiling with its cheap cornice and the stain where the rain had leaked through the roof three years ago. I was Molly and I was back.

  I curled tight, hugging my knees around the terrible nausea of disgust, and sobbed in desperation until fatigue eventually stifled me into silence, which was four hours later perhaps, and a pearlised dawn was fading into the night sky outside my attic window.