Killing Violets

by Tanith Lee

  His eyes were black, yet when the lightning came, chrome-blue like the sea.

  “Anna, the race that has the power – these people are gods. Like you, Anna – did you know you were a pale goddess? Like you. But those who lack this power are only dogs. The dogs, Anna, who must worship and serve the gods. Anna, I don’t want to be your dog.”

  She edged the glittering diamanté straps from her shoulders, and pushed down the dress to her waist. A primitive gesture, like the making of fire. He stared at her breasts. Perhaps he had never seen…

  Inside her, all of her spun, fragmented between terror and joy, grief and desire.

  She raised her arms again and caressed his face, stroking with her fingers both sides of it, the tanned and the carnelian side. Had she been blind, she could have told no difference. But lightning dazzled, and his face was like the face of a god, two images in one, blood and golden, ice and fire, silence and red music.

  He kissed now as other men had. His hands slid warm on the bare skin of her back.

  She knew there would never be another, knew they had grown together. Now the bark of a tree would enclose them, arched into each other’s bodies, their souls burnt through flesh and bone, adhering in one eternal molten gasp.

  He had never made love to a woman before. She knew this now, knew he must learn her. He was so gradual. He felt his way across her, through her. Yet he made so sure of her that she broke around him in a whirlpool as soon as he entered her. And as he lost control himself, they were tumbled out down the tumult of the dark.

  In the seconds after, she was afraid he would thank her. She would do almost anything to prevent it. She blazed with preparatory shame. But he didn’t thank her. He lay beside her unspeaking for a long while, as the storm melted, its purpose accomplished, for everything had conspired to render him to her. Then he began again to make love to her, unspeaking still. Unspeaking. They did not speak at all.

  The first morning, she was frightened a long while. Later, they had a conversation about this.

  “I thought you’d send me away,” Anna said.

  “I thought you would go away.”

  “But I love you so much. Why would I go?”

  “Anna, you’re like a child. Why do you think?”

  “But you knew I wasn’t drunk – or quite mad…”

  “There might have been some other reason.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but I told you. I never belonged with anyone else.”

  They discussed what was to be done about the dress. He would arrange it, by letter. He had some money put by. She protested; she would return the dress. But he didn’t want that. She looked so lovely in the dress, and then when she emerged partly from it, like the butterfly from a cocoon of whiteness.

  Time had stopped, and Anna did not care what they did, at first. But then they made changes to the room, and Anna’s few possessions came into the room. There began to be bowls of marigolds, and poppies, and convolvulus, bottles of wine, more books stacked here and there, an oriental wind-chime that rang when the curtains blew, cushions on the bed.

  After the dress had been bought, she continued a while at the dress shop, but the girls asked her things, and she was afraid to speak. It was like trying to prevent herself weeping or shrieking, her need to pour it all forth. And she didn’t want to say a word. She drifted away, and so left.

  She wasn’t bored in their room, even when he was out, attending to his intelligent book-keeping. She dozed and read, or she went out and shopped, bringing back fresh flowers and bunches of herbs, bread, sausage, cheese and coffee, fruit and cake, tall candles banded with gold.

  Though it was not always possible, he preferred to go out very early, before much light came, and to return in the twilight. She argued with nothing. They didn’t talk about it. When they went out together, it was by night, to dim-lit places along some canal, to gardens with arbours of shadow.

  Preguna under the moon was made of a forest of darkness, and white poured milk.

  He bought her things, a little silver ring with an apple-green jewel, a clip for her hair. (And she bought him a tie coloured like a snake.) She must have realised he was not poor. But it would have made no difference, surely, immaterial almost. Things were meant to be as they were. He and she could not have avoided this.

  Had there been happy eras in the past? She seemed to see there only always movement, and gaudy fleeting acted improvisations. Here in the shadows, far from that garish stage, timelessly they danced their subtle, perfect measure.

  It was inexplicable. Even later, desperately looking back, she could make no sense of it. Their love had been like the most natural thing, soon taken for granted utterly, lived out because there was nothing else that might be done. Like youth. Like life itself.

  Chapter Seven: Among the Pack of Dogs or Cards

  As a child, often borne randomly and without preparation into some place, where she did not know the language of the people, Anna would be puzzled days and weeks. She was like a deaf person, for all the use she got from the chattering all around. Then abruptly some crystal membrane would tear wide. Suddenly she could understand. And in her head the new language came alive; needing no translation. Thoughts and visions available instantaneously as words.

  It was rather like this with the dialect of the Basulte servants. In a few days of hearing only their voices her ignorance ceased. Then she heard them speak in English for the first time. Mimicking, as she had done since childhood, the alien sounds, she was also able to speak back to them in their own tongue.

  “Oor kite unoor uz nay, enum, Unny?” That is, “You’re quite one of us now, aren’t you, Annie?”

  This accolade from one of the kitchen maids. Anna responded with a smile that she was glad to be.

  (She had seen her father ingratiate himself with the most loathsome and dangerous people. It was a game which had fascinated him, and she never witnessed him lose it, no, not once. Almost, it seemed to her, he sought out madmen, drunks and felons, in order to play with them and to win. He compared mankind to a pack of cards – there the joker, there the king or the jack, or the well-dressed queen – who might be a whore (hearts) or a rich man’s mistress (diamonds). The secret however was to play not with but within the pack. They must never sense manipulation. You must believe utterly, while with them, what you did and said.

  She had watched him with a politician once, a type he detested and held in contempt. But her father seemed gradually to fall in love with the man, admire him, even to be a little bewildered at his own change of heart.

  And the politician was subtly flattered, and so betrayed confidences, and lent her father a large sum of money, which, naturally, was used instantly to fly the country.)

  The servants didn’t ask her to do very much. She peeled a few vegetables, stirred cakes and put cherries on to them. Now and then she offered to wash pans and dishes, or take bread from the ovens. They allowed this. Once the cook handed her an apron to sew, but Anna sewed badly, in uneven stitches. Then they mocked her, but only amused, patronisingly, with no hint of menace, and someone else finished the apron, which they then gave her.

  Nor was this apron like theirs. It was the palest blue, with a pocket and an edging of lace. (And no one had taken her ring.)

  She was like a child of the Family, allowed to act out Being of Help in the Kitchen.

  They would sit and talk to her too, at the table. Their histories amazed her, they were so devoid of anything, and yet mattered so much, for the one who told his or her story was its hero.

  They were all intrinsically feral and cruel. They laughed as if at a circus over a crippled rabbit, before breaking its neck for the pot. They smashed mice in the trap with a poker, discussing other things as they did it. While from each other’s ills, a bleeding chilblain, an agony of toothache, they fashioned hearty jokes.

  Among the pack, Anna made certain to look at everything that occurred, or was perpetrated, through their eyes. They could do no wrong, and she treated them
with respect and interest, showing the willingness to be taught.

  The kitchen was hell, the centre of their demonism, the hub, but as they spread out through the house, like flies, they took their pandemonium with them. And they took Anna with them too, to see and learn, acquiesce and render praise.

  Along with their tongue, she discovered from herself a new laugh, just like theirs, sly or brash – animal.

  Out in the house, invisibly, they did things.

  That is, things not their work. Or perhaps it was their work. Weren’t they creatures of misrule – the Enemy? Dogs who fawned, but had hidden teeth.

  In the bedrooms first, they showed her how they made the beds.

  It was done carefully and quickly, the sheets shaken, the pillows plumped. And then, deep down, a tiny bit of something, gently laid. What was it?

  “From a nettle,” said the girls. They smiled and nodded at Anna. One explained it would chafe and sting, but, so small, would not be found. They did not do it every time, of course. Now and then. In different beds. This was the Basulte Father’s room. He often didn’t use it, preferring the couch in his study. Once they had sprinkled fine pepper there and he sneezed and hawked for hours. But that was a treat, not for everyday.

  Later they took Anna back into the apartment of Margaret Lilian, and here each one pulled a hair from her own head. They coiled these together. “May it wrap round your guts,” they said to the sheets and the hairs. They giggled, pleased, and pulled up the covers. It was a charm for ill, some old up-country thing.

  All over the house they put their maledictions, if nothing else, soft and secret, nothing too much, nothing that could really be found, or if found, mean anything.

  They showed her later, these ones, others, the servants who could write wrote little quick curses – May you get a canker, May you shoot blood – on paper scraps, and then burnt them lovingly in a candle, and the maids scattered the ash laughing between the blanket and the mattress, or behind a curtain, a basin.

  They wrote in clear spit on woodwork Take sick and Itch with no easing.

  They spat white phlegm or smeared earwax in the baths, after cleaning, and rubbed it in like polish.

  Sometimes they ran, round and round on the carpets, like hares, whispering, almost bursting with a ribald hatred so pure and primordial it seemed to chime. Foam and rave, drop in a grave, they sang. Children’s games.

  And Anna looked on wondering, and did not shrink, and clapped her hands, looking through their eyes. These poor offended slaves, worthy of so much better than slavery. (Slaves must always have done such things.)

  She too had lain in water and bath-salts and wax and gobbings, and slept in a cancer-wished bed… that one black hair – not Raoul’s, not William’s. Whose? This girl? That one?

  If there was a pimple, its gleanings were dabbed inside the newly-burnished shoes, the stocking drawer.

  There were other things they had devised.

  She saw it on the second day she was with them.

  There had been a rat in the trap. And the cook was making a large meat pie.

  Under the golden crust, among the wholesome body parts of cows, this too.

  “Oh, Madam loves her pie, she does,” said Mrs Ox, contentedly.

  They spat into the pots of tea, the casseroles and sauces, tea-cakes and meringues.

  The gardener brought them worms. Once a woman slunk in from the village. A neighbour had given birth and the midwife retained some debris.

  Anna laughed merrily, and then went out to the privy in the yard. She vomited as she had her first night with Raoul, though more quickly. They might have wanted…

  She had eaten such dishes.

  Going back, they told her she was pasty – pale – and watched her, grinning, thrilled, waiting. She owned up to her weakness. How strong they were to handle such things. She said she wished she had had the courage to do it.

  “That old Raoul treated you like a bitch,” said one of the girls.

  Anna saw none of the Basultes. She was led by back-ways, hidden arteries, about their house. At night she slept now in the attics in a room of three beds. Only one other was filled. “That one’s Lily’s,” said this other girl.

  When the first Sunday came, Anna wondered if Madam would come down to the kitchen to inspect it, and if so how they would clean it to the perfection she had formerly seen. For the den was Hell, and a den of vice, which reminded her always of the horrors of Hogarth. Eternally pans unwashed on tables, swept off to the floors that the pack might themselves eat. Beer bottles, the shed fur of cats, the cats’ fleas, from which Anna now had bites, both cats’ and fleas’, of her own.

  As the fire burned and the heat rose, she sat among them and they petted her. The men petted her as they did the other girls, a kiss slapped on a cheek, a swift fondle of breast or thigh – never worse. (And sometimes they would even ask: “May I try a bit of titty?”) The girls brushed her hair, and she theirs. Mutual grooming among the pack.

  In fact, Madam never came down. It seemed that had been some test of Anna, not the staff.

  Despite their early start, they all sat up late. The cook loomed huge in her chair, drinking gin and beer.

  They sang songs full of naive sweetness. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!, and boozy sentiment, We all go the same way home. And they asked her to sing them a ‘foreign song’, and so Anna, perched among them on firelight midnight, sang a song she recalled the soldiers singing as they came back from war, a sad low tune, translating the words as she traced them. ‘Oh I would give my glory for my dear girl’s heart, I’d plant my rifle for an apple tree.’

  She saw tears stand in their eyes, and on her knees one of the scrawny cats purred.

  They were human. She must love them or perish.

  Later, another evening, they asked her for the song again, but after she had sung it, some of the footmen jeered.

  “He was a proper simple one, wasn’t he? Thinking the gun’d bloody grow into a sodding tree?”

  Anna laughed too, as if they had just shown her the vast joke of existence. As they had.

  On a special morning, Lilith Izzard came in to Hell.

  “He’s done with you then?” asked Mrs Ox.

  “For now, he has.” And Lilith cocked her fox eye at Anna. “Likes a change. I expect you were glad of the rest.”

  Anna shrugged. She was saying, “But you are the victrix.” (Victrix, vixen.)

  Lilith wore her servile dress, and was tying on her apron. Her hair hung long and loose from a white central parting.

  Anna saw that Lilith had a Mediaeval face, as if from a painting, perhaps by the Dutch school. You might think the face was ugly, but studied, as you entered the time of its inception, you saw its fairness.

  The face of Lilith was some centuries out of date. But she, truly, was a sorceress. So pale, her ginger hair so pale, her strange stranger’s eyes.

  “What are you staring at, Annie?” demanded Lilith. But there was no malice in her regard, not now.

  Anna said, “He’s an old bastard, that Raoul. But looks like he’s done you good. You look that nice.”

  And the fox tossed her head.

  “I’d give you a run.”

  “I bet you would, you horror. A bit of paint and you’d knock their eyes out.” Anna made soft her own eyes. “Let me make up your face some night, Lily.”

  “And your dresses he bought you,” said Lilith.

  “Upstairs. If someone can bring them, you’re welcome.”

  Lilith came over. She pinched Anna lightly on the arm.

  “You’re not so bad.”

  “No, I’m not so bad.”

  “But you’re a bad girl, you are.”

  “So are you.”

  “It’s men,” said Lilith. She turned about to the whole room, flaunting at the footmen, the scullions, the boys. “They drag you down.”

  Greasy, gap-toothed, at the edges of all things, they jollied back at her. She had lifted them. They were Men. Magica
l and fearsome, mighty. Valid.

  Anna thought, No not so far off. That face…

  Lilith’s face was, after all, from the sixteenth century. She resembled rather the young Elizabeth I, whose oak tree grew in the Basulte park.

  And it was that evening Lilith took Anna up to the room of Raoul Basulte. For the male Basultes, apparently, were playing cards in the Smoking Room. They were drinking port and brandy, and would not be done till three or four in the morning. “And if he is,” said Lilith, “if he finds us here, maybe he won’t mind so much.”

  Anna had not been asked, or told, to wait on the Family. As many of the other servants did, she entered their apartments only when they were absent.

  And now she saw Raoul’s bedroom in the house, where she had never been.

  How bizarre. Superimposed upon the hotels in Europe, the berths in trains, those cold little stops along the way.

  There were two terrible stuffed masculine chairs before the black marble fireplace, and a table of newspapers, with a box of cigarettes, even a tobacco jar and some pipes like a gentleman’s club.

  The solid bed was draped in a kind of tartan rug of reds and browns, but above, the tester was crimson.

  It smelled, the room, of male cologne, tobacco, and another faint smell, fusty, almost meaty, an odour Anna associated with adolescent young men, not very clean, living without some abrasive woman to chivvy them.

  “See?” asked Lilith.

  She drew Anna in and danced her about.

  Anna waited for the curses and spittings to commence. But Lilith only pulled open the bed, and stood there smiling.

  “Go on, you do it.”

  Anna went forward.

  For a moment she felt inhibited and slightly sickened, which was her squeamishness, because of course what the servants did was perfectly right.

  Then a rage swept through her. She spat violently into the centre of his smooth new sheet.