Killing Violets

by Tanith Lee

  It was a hot night, dry above and humid near the ground from the residue of rains.

  Lilith bustled Anna along, up the avenue of chestnuts and aside, through a landscape which now seemed quite intemperate under the oaks and ranging cedars.

  “Are there foxes?”

  “Oh yes, Annie. And badgers too. And sometimes they fight.”

  Anna shuddered. Badgers were a sort of bear, weren’t they? Did wolves still run in the English forests? In fact she wasn’t certain. She was so ignorant. Always, probably, would be.

  They came into a sort of grove, and some of the maids were there, not clothed as maids now, but in cheap party dresses, awful frilled, badly-draped things, stitched up by mothers or one-eyed village dress-makers.

  One of the boys stood under a tree. He was tuning up a violin. Would he play badly? Why play at all?

  Then, through the trees, a groom came, guiding a coal-black horse.

  For a second, the whole scene, blaringly-lit by the high moon and sulphurish stars, had the grotesqueness of a Goya sabbat: the girls with loose hair and bare arms, the boy fiddler against the great hewn shape of the tree, and this nightmare horse, black as some devil animal in a story, shaking its head, stepping over the roots and through the weeds, the drifts of strange wild English flowers.

  “Who’ll ride him?” called the groom across the glade “Is it you, Lily Izzard?”

  “No,” said Lilith in a hard cool voice. “It’s her. He wants her on it.”

  “Oh, no,” said Anna. “I can’t ride.”

  “No matter,” said Lilith.

  Anna was light, humorous. “But I’ll fall off.”

  “Better not to,” said Lilith, hard now as a slim cold stone.

  The groom strode over. Ho was a rough man she had seen before, in the kitchen, slurping his sugary black tea from a saucer.

  “Up you go.”

  “My dress,” said Anna, reasonably.

  The groom stood looking at her, at her lower body, where the gown clung over her hips and thighs.

  “You see to it, Lily,” said the groom.

  And Lilith moved around Anna. She leant down, and taking two handfuls of the silk skirt, ripped them apart.

  Anna felt a primeval awe, as if her skin instead had been torn wide as a curtain.

  The gown only just covered her, now, parting about an inch below her crotch. She put, her hand there, involuntarily, and realized she must look like a coy Venus on a shell.

  The groom was lifting her anyway. There was no chance to protest or resist. She was there already, on the horse’s back, sitting awkwardly side-saddle. “Swing thee lug oover.” said the groom impatiently. He looked up now, waiting for the flash of her most private part. But she pulled the skirt upward to cover herself as she eased her right leg to the other side of the horse.

  Now she sat bareback on it. It was restive, and she felt the rolling muscles in its top, and smelled its hot wet smell. How could she have imagined this might be erotic? She was afraid, and clutched the horse’s mane. She had no idea what to do with the horse.

  On the ground – far down – the servants in the grove were voraciously laughing at her, their little cruel eyes very bright. Anna laughed too, to show them how clever they were and how she approved of everything they did.

  But her body was shaking with alarm. The horse jerked and ambled, free of the touch of the groom, and sensing doubtless only panic from Anna, her knees gripping, slipping, her hands pulling at its mane and trying to find, hopelessly, purchase on its neck. She called out, blithely. “What do I do?”

  “You’re all right. He won’t bolt. Maybe.”

  But they would tire of this jest in a few minutes. She had noticed before, such people often lost interest swiftly in all things, even their dearest and most perverse pursuits.

  She patted the horse’s neck firmly. “Steady,” she said.

  The horse shied its head from her. Damnable thing. It hated her too.

  The fiddler had struck up a tune abruptly. It was syncopated, and modern, some song that might be heard on a gramophone record.

  The horse began to walk through the grove. Frozen, Anna sat rigidly upright. The horse took her slowly, decidedly, practiced, across the lines of girls and men, and into the thick trees beyond.

  At once, the moon melted into darkness. The horse stepped on. Behind them, the laughter and jibes merged away like the light.

  Nerves tingled in Anna’s spine. They were deep into the nightness of the park. Fragrance rose from the flowers and clover beaten by the rain, crushed now by the hooves of the horse.

  She wanted to call, but there was no one to call to. There had never been, of course.

  Anna sat still, facing through the dim ghost-greyness that filmed between the tree trunks.

  A firefly sparkled. It was a cigarette. Raoul walked out into her path.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. Like a prince meeting a royal fairy-lady in the wood.

  Bleakly Anna ordered her mind. But she was suddenly sick of it now. So bloody sick of them all. She had tried so hard. These games. Always these foolish deadly games.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “Raoul.”

  “Well, I think you came to find me, didn’t you, Ann?”

  “Oh, yes,” she concurred listlessly. Tears pushed inside her eyes. She held them in, and instead her eyes began to burn and ache.

  Raoul now was guiding the horse.

  Distantly, she heard a couple of loud communal cries back in the grove. The fiddle sawed and squeaked. But here in the dark was another world.

  “You’re a treasure. Ann,” he said. “You’re worth a lot to me.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes, Ann. I like you like that, all dolled up. I liked you in the apron, too. Your quaint little curtsy. You’re awfully good, Ann. I knew you would be.”

  “Thank you.”

  He must have indicated something to the horse. It stopped. Raoul came around its body, and put his hands on her bared leg.

  She said, “The dress got torn.”

  “I’ll buy you another.”

  “When we go to London?” she asked, before she could control her tongue.

  Raoul laughed softly. He ran his hands up her leg, and clasped the join of her body, and a thrill of disgusting arousal stabbed through her, but divorced from her utterly, as though mind and flesh had separated.

  “Shall I mount?”

  She said nothing. He swung up on to the horse as if it were no trouble at all. He was behind her. And for him, the horse kept still.

  Raoul slipped his arms around her. He fondled her breasts, pressing into her body.

  “Do you like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s better when he gallops. Like to try it?”

  “No,” she said, “I’ll fall…”

  “I’ll keep hold of you.” he said. And he kicked the horse in the side.

  Anna screamed.

  “Yes,” said Raoul.

  The trees miraculously parted. They were flying over rough tumbling open ground, and the moon raced with them overhead.

  Every leap of the muscles of the horse slapped Anna upward, and as her body came down each time his fingers penetrated her more deeply.

  She was sick with fear and lust. Her head flung itself back. She thought in a moment she would be dead, but she wouldn’t feel it.

  Only what he did to her, this ugly grunting man, mattered.

  She had let go of the horse. The monster, Raoul, kept her on, kept her from being dashed away. Omnipotent.

  When it ended, she was crying. Raoul sat behind her, swigging from a silver flask, He did not offer it.

  “Wonderful Ann,” he said. “Remember, I won’t let you go. You belong to us. You know I’d kill you, if you ran away again. And; anyway, where would you go? To hell and back, eh? But you understand. It’s sorted out now, isn’t, it? You just needed a bit of guidance. Eh?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  They
rode back. He controlled the horse expertly, a bit of guidance. Anna seemed boneless, mindless. She had lost everything, surely. Or, only realised that she had lost everything already, long ago.

  In the grove, men and women fornicated in couples and in heaps. With his shirt off, the fiddler played. Some danced.

  Raoul got off the horse, then pulled Anna quickly and easily down and passed her immediately over into another man’s arms, like a dancer.

  Was this William? Or Tommy…

  “She’s all warm.”

  “She’s warm enough.”

  She was on her back, (the wet bath of the grass), and the man was astride her. “Struggle a bit,” he invited her.

  Like a puppet worked by God, Anna struggled a bit, and he slapped her face quite softly, and climaxed.

  There were two or three more. Perhaps the same ones more than once. None of them hurt her, not even the slap had done much more than sting. It was no worse than had happened here and there, before.

  In the end, there were no men, and Lily flopped down beside her. She had brought a bottle of lemonade spiky with gin. Tired children at a picnic.

  “What a night,” said Lilith, satisfied.

  They lay, looking up at the stars, their bodies half bared, splashed by the lusts of their masters, their own.

  “Thought I’d forgotten, hadn’t, you,” said Lilith, as if this were only an ordinary evening, and some mundane place. Nearby rose gigglings and a rusty rhythmic and prolonged shrieking of female orgasm.

  “Forgotten,” said Anna.

  “Got that car,” said Lilith. “Run off shall uz?”

  Anna shut her eyes. Raoul would not let her run. Raoul had taken command of her. She had allowed it. The world was the horse, and death up behind her, making love. (The stars were dirty, and seemed to be going out.)

  “Lonun,” said Lilith throatily. “Bet as you know sumon can make me a star.”

  Chapter Eight: A Nocturne; with Extended Coda

  Such hot nights, that late summer, at Preguna. The open windows brought no air, only traffic sounds, and moths. But the pot of dorisa redly bloomed on and on, like an unquenchable fire.

  How long had she been with him? A month, or less. The time seemed longer. Shorter.

  But now she would wake up sometimes, from the heat, about three or four in the morning, before the first ephemeral cool of the predawn.

  Anna would pace quietly about the room, which now also was hers, theirs. She was careful not to wake him.

  Sometimes she sat in the basket-work chair, and watched him sleep. He was silent and almost entirely still. Very occasionally, he would turn on his side or back, and once he spoke distinctly to someone in a dream. She leaned close to hear if it were herself, yet couldn’t be sure.

  The light was warmly silvery, and everything, except for Árpád, insubstantial. She often thought, watching him, how handsome he was, and the mark on his face so beautiful, like the colour painted on the wing of a butterfly, or across some exotic leaf.

  Asleep, he hid nothing. He was lean as a white lion, naked, the sheet spilled.

  At last she would lie down beside him. In the brief coolness, it was reasonable to touch, and draw near.

  Now and then he woke. They amalgamated in a dislocated and surrealistic way. She did not like to press for this, because she sensed a weakness in him, a tiredness. Yet at other times of day or night he would take her now, swiftly and surely, his urgent love-making halting stammeringly only in order not to be too quick for her.

  Best, he liked the dark of night – of course – their bodies and faces gliding pane on pane, invisible, only tactile.

  It was one early morning, however, the light only just beginning to remember it might exist, when she began to search among his things.

  She knew this was wrong. She sensed in herself some impulse, but had no idea what it was. She was curious, insatiable, eating up everything about him. And his privacy should not be attempted.

  So, she did not read the letters she found in bundles under his folded garments in a drawer, nor did she pick the lock, (she could pick locks, sometimes), of the cash box he kept. Old correspondence, money – what were these?

  In the end, though, behind the books stacked two or three deep in the frontless cabinet, she found a small bottle, stoppered shut and sealed, like a fine old wine.

  She knew. Must have known – her search. She held the bottle to the waking window, but it was only black. How cold it felt to her.

  When she had replaced it, she lay down on the bed far off from him, nervous he would feel culpability on her skin.

  He was to go and see to his accountancy somewhere, and their breakfast was hurried. When he returned, it was dusk.

  Anna had laid the table and put purple flowers in a bowl, left wine to cool in the basin.

  They drank a little of the wine.

  “I took a book from the cabinet,” she said artlessly, “and a funny little bottle fell out. It looked such an odd little bottle.”

  Árpád glanced at her. Frequently he forgot to shield his face from her, but abruptly he turned now, shielding it. Against the blue-gold of the window, his profile, the left side, was chiselled and expressionless.

  “Oh. Really. Did you try to open it?”

  “No. Is it yours?”

  “Yes, Anna.”

  Anna said, “What could it be?”

  “Have you heard of Pandora?”

  Anna shuffled papers of memory. “She undid a bottle?”

  “In a way. All the ills of the world got out. But the last thing to escape was hope.”

  She went to a side table, where she had set some food. She began to slice tiny pieces of vegetables even smaller.

  “Don’t worry about it, Anna.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “It was a long time ago that I got it. Years ago. In case I found, in the end – I couldn’t go on with it.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s painless. The chemist promised me. He – showed me. The little mouse, it simply curled up quite happily in its straw, and went to sleep for ever. One need only take a small spoonful. But, I wanted to be sure.”

  She cut the loaf, and seemed to stand thirty feet in the air, working the sharp knife in the cooked dough by a process of directive magic having nothing to do with sight or hands.

  “Please just forget you found it, Anna.”

  A torrent rushed against her brain. She wanted to fling herself at him, crying that it must be thrown away, he must never, never…

  Her mouth was wise, refusing to form these words.

  She said nothing, and then, when Árpád said again, uncertainly, “Anna?”, Anna said, “Of course. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else.”

  That night they went walking through Preguna, among the shadows. There were posters up under the lamps, reminding the city of approaching carnival.

  In the bed, they made love. As he came against her, slipped aside, kissed her, slept, she thought of the mouse, going to sleep so peacefully in its straw.

  She waited several days, and nights. She wasn’t sure that he would trust her; perhaps he would. But probably, most likely, he would check the bottle had been replaced, and left alone.

  When she thought there had been enough time, one day when he was gone, she took the poison bottle out again.

  She couldn’t quite bring herself to destroy it. It was, if horribly, his property, and in any case, poured down a drain or thrown away outside, might kill other blameless things, beasts, or children. She hid it as best she could.

  Anna had known about the carnival at Preguna since she had first been there. People had talked to her, reminisced about it. Even the old professor.

  He had, apparently, masked himself as a ram, and danced in a ballroom with a woman of mystery and charm. She had not been masked, simply had had her face painted, partly black and partly silver, and somehow this had made it useless for him to try to guess who she might be, and she had known that too, flirting
and leading him on. She was not truly, (naturally), the sort of woman he preferred. But carnival galvanised and disorientated. For three days and nights after, he had been haunted by her presence, the memory of her voice.

  Peepy too, at the shop, had held the girls spellbound, (blondes, brunette, redhead, sitting naked, smoking), with the tale of how a young man had pursued a young woman all through the carnival, he in his immaculate dinner clothes, and she in a starry gown, only her eyes concealed by a wisp of tinsel. He had possessed her at last in a stationary carriage among some nightingaled gardens. But as the dawn flowed in, the fatal woman dissolved in scented powder. She was only some exquisite ghost, cursed for ever to lure men to her on that single lawless night.

  Anna had said to Árpád, they might go out, mightn’t they? For she was also lured by the stirring excitement, the prickling and elasticity of the air, as if before a storm.

  He had, she knew, a set of perfect evening garments, night-black, moon-white, left from some unavoidable function. And she had the moon-white dress he had bought for her, after she had run to him in it.

  She bought a slender mask, a white moth, with diamond-sequinned eye-holes. She described herself to him in this garb; her lips lipsticked crimson, her opalescent hair sleeked in the diamanté clip.

  “All right, Anna. If you want. I know, it’s a fever, the carnival. I’ve watched from the window…”

  Anna thought of photographs seen of the carnival, the masks, or faces spectacularly painted, a man speckled like a leopard, a woman whose cheeks were transformed to flowers like some glorious leprosy.

  Árpád was reluctant. What else? No, no, he was terrified. She could not give him quarter.

  And carnival arrived.

  Long before the sun had gone, revellers were on the streets. The trams clanked up and down, and other vehicles hooted, and the gold leaf of the falling sun showed her, leaning from the window, the garlanded figures, the black and white men, the women who were rainbows, the children running, and none, none of them with a properly human face. A night of animals, phantoms, and secrets, walking on two legs.

  She had bathed and used perfume. She dressed in the white dress, and did her hair. At the mirror he had bought for her, Anna made up her face, darkening her lashes, affirming her lips. She put on her mask, and a moth enclosed her eyes. She felt utterly suddenly, like a hundred thousand others, I am no longer myself. I am in disguise. Now I may do as I wish.