Killing Violets

by Tanith Lee

  Mrs Izzard put down a brown jug, which was filled with water.

  Anna sipped her drink. It might be gin. Raoul had bought her a gin at a station. This was very acid, metallic.

  “I have to go up to London,” said Anna, speaking slowly and distinctly. “Would someone drive me to the nearest station? I shall be happy to pay, of course.”

  “No stazn a males,” said Mrs Izzard. She smiled her teeth. When she did this, each time Anna felt a need to count them. “Twod be a longold drav.”

  “But I must,” said Anna.

  She thought, Oh of course I can’t escape. They won’t let me go. But that was totally unreasonable.

  Mrs Izzard spoke with mild decision. “You drink your glaz, Muz, anile seef uny willin. You set.”

  Anna said quickly, “Five pounds.”

  She guessed this was a ridiculous amount, but Mrs Izzard smiled now with her mouth shut, so Anna couldn’t count.

  “Ull see. You set. Jusset, beyeezy.”

  She went out, and Anna had another mouthful of the gin, which stung her like a serpent.

  The parlour was hot. Presently she undid her coat. She felt inadequate and silly, fleeing in fear from the sinister mansion, like a heroine. Anna was not a heroine.

  She could hear the murmur of the giants’ voices, the clink of glasses. Sunlight bubbled, trilled.

  The poor moth. It must have been shut in here and died, dashing itself fruitlessly at the window.

  Anna’s head drooped. Her ears sang like the sea. She shut her eyes, only for a moment.

  When she opened her eyes, she was in bed. She had the impression the bed, too, was in a box. A hot box. Everything was greyish-brown, but for one slab of latening apricot light. For some reason, although this was not the same, she was reminded of the hospital at Preguna. She was swathed in a cotton nightdress.

  The next time her eyes opened, which now they seemed to do without her volition, a bloated vulpine face drifted from the ruddy gloom.

  “Yuad a litt bid of a turn, my dearie. Nodda fret.”

  Anna knew she was indeed a prisoner. (There had been another one, below, hadn’t there, in the parlour, lying dead.)

  She pushed her hand – it looked so frail and white – up over the tons of heavy quilt. The diamond Raoul had bought for her glimmered cool.

  “Do – you – want this?”

  “Wun that, my dearie? Never.”

  “Take it, please. It’s quite valuable. I must get to…” Where was it? Anna felt panic rise. She remembered. “To London.”

  “Butta dunt wan her, Muz Animal. Tes only a bidda glass.”

  Chapter Six: Entering Through Doors

  Returning was not like the arrival. Not at all.

  It was night, for one thing, or rather, earliest morning, and everything was black but for the headlamps of the creaking old car. The car was not up to the short journey from the village to the house. It stopped two or three times. The car did not want to take Anna back.

  In the rear seat, wrapped up in a rug, Anna saw the lanes go by. Starlight thin as wires poked into the fields. When they entered the gate she must have made a little sound for the huge man who sat beside her, Mr Lizard (Izzard) patted her hand. “Umos theer.”

  Anna didn’t want to be theer.

  But presently theer she was.

  The park was black and from the black rose the black house, without a single light anywhere that could be seen.

  Anna thought of prisoners delivered to jails such as the Conciergerie, in dead of night.

  The car toiled round the drive, and then off through another line of trees, and so into the yard of a stable which Anna had not encountered until then.

  They helped her out, the driver and Mr Lizard, and she believed they were going to bed her down in one of the stalls, where she could hear the horses stirring vaguely, so vaguely she wondered if they were horses at all, and not some other animal species, something more eccentric, bulls perhaps, or tigers.

  Then there was a lamp and a side door, and a woman, two women, were taking her in, like a precious parcel.

  When the door shut, the men and the night were outside. The lamp went ahead, and one woman only guided her. Anna’s body seemed too large for her, and lacking feeling. She was somewhere in the centre of it, bumped about like a bottle on a river. There were stairs. So many stairs… Often they had to stop and wait for her.

  Another door. She was assisted inside, and here was another bed, not a Basulte bed, narrow, with an iron frame. She was being helped to lie down, as if she did not know how to. And she didn’t.

  A bank of lumpen pillows cradled her head. Good heavens, they were undressing her. Deft impersonal hands. Again, she remembered the hospital.

  As the new coarse nightdress was eased over her, and the quilts pulled up, and the stone sausage with hot-water rolled against her feet, she thought that of course, they had drugged her in the pub.

  Things faded.

  “Thas mur cumvy,” said one of the women.

  It was. How unsuitable.

  Anna moved, disorganized, about in dreams. She knew that Árpád had left her. They had been walking along a street and between one sentence and the next, he was gone. She understood unalterably that she had caused this, done something wrong, to offend or hurt him, and he had previously warned her, if she did this thing, he would go. And she had not meant to do it, but she had done it. It was inexorable.

  His omission was like something added rather than lost, an aching leaden burden in her stomach, her belly.

  But while she felt it, while it underlay everything, she had other dreams. That she was on a train or in an apartment, or in a market. The buildings were very tall, of monstrous architecture and extreme sculptural decoration. Where landscape was glimpsed, it stretched for hundreds of miles, to ponderous horizons under galleons of cloud.

  These dreams were exhausting. She woke, trembling with the fatigue of them.

  A decanter of water and a glass were on the table. She had to drink the water, even if they had put something in it. She drank the decanter dry.

  Then she slept again, and the enervating dreams went on and on. Until she woke, and now there was a dark whiteness of deadish light, and the decanter had been refilled and she drank it dry again.

  The water had a dusty taste.

  Inside her, the leaden feeling of loss, like a stone forced into her womb, had gone away, but there remained a black residue, a pain that did not hurt.

  Anna lay back. She wanted someone to come and make her wake up, because the dreams were so tiresome and wore her out. She always had to do something in them, go somewhere, achieve something. But no sooner had she managed the task, than it was all to do again. Like the labours in Hell.

  Yet, now she slept dreamlessly, a clear blue sleep. And waking, she was able to sit up in the bed, then get out of it.

  She no longer felt drugged, but she was puzzled, and uneasy, naturally.

  This room was very, very small. The narrow single bed took up most of the space. Fusty curtains covered the window, and when she pulled them wide, outside was a brick wall with a drainpipe. Rain was falling again, very soft and fine.

  To her surprise, Anna saw her clothes were on a chair. Then she saw they were other clothes. Rather a long black belted dress, some under things, plainer than the lingerie Raoul had bought her. The shoes were also different, not very nice, although when she put them on they fitted perfectly. Her bag lay under the chair.

  There were a jug of cold water and a basin, a bit of soap in a dish and a thin towel. Anna washed. She opened her bag.

  Surprising her, her passport was still there. And some of her toiletries emerged, an old medicine bottle, the essentials. But of her make-up, only her powder showed itself.

  Things had been stolen, obviously – confiscated. Her brain was beginning to wake now, after her body, and she was trying to reason. She had been put in this odd room out of the way. She would have to be circumspect, perhaps seem a little dazed.
Certainly not annoyed or primed for conflict.

  She had learned one thing. The village possessed the ramshackle car. She had constantly seen people drive cars. Perhaps she could do it. Failing that, she would simply have to walk. By-passing the village, evidently, keeping on just like someone in a story, until she reached some other more distant place, where help was to be had.

  Anna was not frightened. She felt more exasperated. It was always possible to evade capture. She knew this quite well. How often had she seen her father, and others, do it? Had done it quite adequately herself, in the past.

  But she would need to be careful. If she were questioned about her first escape, she would just say she had become confused. No, she hadn’t said she wanted to go to London. She had said she and Raoul would be going there, sometime. She would accuse no one of drugging her – she must have fainted: the long walk when she had got lost, the sudden hot day.

  When she had dressed and combed her hair and powdered her face, Anna tried the door. In the moment of doing this, she wondered if it would be locked. But the door opened normally, and outside was a corridor narrow as the iron bed.

  Where was she? The corridor was painted the colour of the porridge the Basultes sometimes consumed, Raoul had said, at breakfast – the porridge offered her in English station hotels, and refused.

  There were two doors, both of which gave on tiny rooms like the one she had been put into.

  At the end of the corridor was a biggish open space, or perhaps only seeming big by comparison, where trunks and boxes stood. The ceiling of rafters sloped to one side, as she thought the ceiling had done in the room. There were two windows.

  Anna looked out.

  Far below, lawns, beeches, the river. The hills were smeared into rain mist, a running water-colour.

  Across the space, another corridor tunnelled away. But there was also a large latched door, and when she undid it, she gazed down into the well of a grim lean staircase, very dark, descending and descending through the house. For up here, she had slept among the attics, where the servants slept.

  On the mystic down-leading staircase there came occasional landings. When she tried the doors, they were locked. She had no choice but to continue her descent.

  The stair ended in an annexe with several doors and a long window, with curtains of a sort of material she had seen in cheap hotels.

  One of the doors became a gap and the housekeeper called Mrs Pin stepped smartly out, like a cuckoo springing from a clock at the appointed hour.

  “There you are, Annie,” said Mrs Pin.

  Anna looked at her.

  “You must be quite hungry,” said Mrs Pin, briskly. In a moment her chorus-girl side would get the better of her, she would rip off her long skirt and kick up fishnet legs, smiling yellow to the theatre balcony. “Go along there, and straight down.”

  Anna said, “Do you mean to the kitchen?”

  “Yes, Annie. That’s right.”

  After all, a welter of fear tossed up through Anna. What should she do? Nothing – nothing. She reined herself in quickly.

  “Very well.”

  Mrs Pin said, “Don’t be alarmed. They expect you.”

  “Do they?”

  “You’ve nothing to worry about,” said Mrs Pin.

  She stood sentinel, as Anna went across the room, chose the proper door, and pushed through and down again, down.

  She was being punished. That must be it. They were a law to themselves, and she a vagabond, and they might do what they liked, so they had cast her below.

  She was not to be Raoul’s wife. (She had come to suspect that anyway, rather swiftly.) She was to dwell among the ‘dogs’ – the servants.

  Her dress was black. Would the apron and cap come next?

  Anna hesitated on the last stair. She was truly frightened. Less than the chaos of this situation, it was the servants she feared. She could hear them now behind the final door. They were laughing, perhaps in anticipation, loudly and coarsely, and banging things – probably pans – in what sounded like the prologue to a war dance.

  Even their language was alien to her. And besides, they had had to wait as slaves on her. What revenge would they take?

  She must not protest. She must be, as so often, accommodating. Give in and so invite no violence. Escape was still always achievable, providing she were extremely careful. She had not realised before, not believed her own impulse, that the Basultes were creatures out of a myth, something horrible. However, now she knew.

  She bowed her head, and went in through the door, slinking and a little abject, not to invite the viciousness of this other species.

  Anna remembered the great kitchen from her compulsory Sunday visit, brought by the woman, Raoul’s Mother. It had been so clean, immaculate. The linoleum still damp, windows bright, the bowl of fruit and the flowers. Everyone had lined up, women and men, as if to be chastised.

  What time of day was it now? The universal rain-twilight had made it difficult to tell. Also afternoon, perhaps.

  The three long tables were not scrubbed, nor bare. Pots and bowls lay over them, and pans of copper and iron. These were dirty, and a smell rose from them of boiled vegetable matter, fish and cheese. The ovens too were crowded by debris. The floor was splashed, and greasy.

  Two gaunt cruel-looking cats were lapping from a big dish of gravy. A large, freshly-dead rat lay stiffening nearby. Presumably they had killed it and been rewarded.

  A fire burned, and a maid was toasting at it platefuls of buns, piling them high so that sometimes some fell off on to the floor. At last one of the cats took note. It rushed and seized half a bun and bounded away. From somewhere in the kitchen an arm was raised. An item of crockery, thrown at the cat, missed it, and smashed to pieces.

  At this, the collective coarse wild laughter rose again. Anna looked at them, for they had not turned to look at her. Like the tables, the kitchen was crowded. It was hot and ill-smelling, and lightnings went over it from disturbed cutlery and plates. Women sat, as Anna had seen them in the summer doorways of houses elsewhere, their legs spread wide, hands busy with darning and sewing.

  No bonnets were worn. The thick rich filthy-looking hair spilled from its knots and pins. Their aprons, if on, were patterned with stains. Some were barefoot on the greasy linoleum.

  One fed a baby from her breast, there in the middle of the frowsy blowsy scene. Among the farms or slums of Europe this would not seem amiss, but here it was a dissolute image, augmented soon, for the girl – she was about fourteen – took from the table a bottle of some dark alcohol, and put it first to her mouth, next tipped it over her nipple. It would keep the child quiet.

  Anna felt a disturbed flash of pity. But it wasn’t wise to pity these people. She must only respect them, and be wary.

  “Whussat?” a voice shouted.

  Anna knew this alarm heralded her entry.

  She saw the cook called Ox propped in a gargantuan chair. Her stockinged feet, misshaped by bunions, were on a footstool. Her hair too was half unpinned, and her face incredibly like red cabbage. There was a tankard in her hand, which a boy now hurried to fill up, aslosh, with beer.

  “Here’s our Unny,” said the cook.

  What world had she come to? Downwards – it must be the Inferno.

  Anna confronted the cook, and all the faces turning now to her, even the fur-sketched face of the cat with its beard of gravy.

  And Anna bowed, as she had seen them do, to the ones who were, just, their superiors.

  “Cummer,” said the cook. “You sittun by me, Unny.”

  Was this a welcome?

  Anna walked through the room, through its dense veils of staring and heat, the flicker of fire and rain on windows.

  The cook patted her hand. “God gul.”

  A maid, her buttons undone, grinning, brought Anna a bun, and buttered it before her. Poured chocolate-coloured tea from the big black pot.

  Anna was hungry. She ate with care. The cook said to her, soft as a bee, “Y
ou’ll likun bedder here.”

  And the maid, her breasts white-bulging in her undone bodice, leaning over Anna with the cup of tea, remarked, “Yoon ourn now.”

  When he had led her in, and closed the door, Árpád put Anna into a chair she did not recall. He had taken the cloak from her, or it had fallen. He brought her a glass of something which she thought was wine, but it was water.

  The storm vented a burst of light, and this apparently happened inside the glass, and Anna dropped it, thinking the glass had shattered.

  “It’s all right. Be calm, dearest. You stole this dress? I’ll buy it for you. You can say it was a mistake.”

  “Would you? Would you?”

  “Why did you take it?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I do. To come to you.”

  He shook his head.

  The storm howled and exploded; it was like the end of the world, and so made all things permissible.

  Anna left the chair. She fell at his feet and clasped his knees. She laid her cheek against his thigh. “Don’t send me away.”

  “Oh Anna.”

  But he was utterly still, and then she got up and put her bare arms round his neck, and pressed her mouth against his fine-made lips. He let her kiss him, and then, as if remembering, began to kiss in turn. But he was very gentle, as though at any moment she would realise she had lost her mind and what she was doing, and leap away, spitting and cursing him. In his kiss there was all of that, and a terrible unspeakable forgiveness for when she did.

  Anna drew back. “I love you.”

  “Dear Anna.”

  “I love you, Árpád.”

  He too drew away from her, quietly. At first he half turned, hiding the right side of his face which, anyway, in the gusting night and conflagration of the storm, she could barely see. Then he turned back, and his eyes met hers. He looked deeply into her brain. After all, she had never seen a gaze more steady. Or less kind.

  “You see, darling Anna, there are only two races among humanity. Those that have power, and those that haven’t any power. It may come from anything, the power. From money, from good looks, or cleverness – from normalcy, even. But to be powerless is to lack these things, or most, or even some of these things.”