Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  “Can you come down here? Just for a day? I need you.” Even Kate could hear the whine in her own voice, and hated herself for it.

  Two days later, the sisters stood in the changing rooms of a Beaconsfield bridal shop. Hangers sagged under the weight of discarded dresses in every style, from simple satin sheaths to Bardot necklines, fishtails and flounces. Nothing looked right, according to Kate, and now she was in tears. “I feel as if I’m playing dress-up.”

  Jess, tired from the drive, rolled her eyes. “Well, you are. It’s not as though you’re looking for something to show off the everyday you, is it? This is supposed to be your princess moment. You might as well embrace it, no matter how ridiculous it seems.”

  Kate’s chin corrugated.

  “Oh don’t. Please,” Jess said, recognizing the symptoms of yet another crying jag. “Come on, Sis, chin up. What’s with you?”

  Kate lifted miserable eyes to her twin. “I don’t…I don’t…”

  “Don’t what? Don’t want to get married? Don’t want to marry James? What? Tell me.”

  Kate nodded dumbly. It was a relief to have it articulated, especially by her twin, who knew her so well.

  “Oh, Kate.”

  “I know. I’m so stupid. I shouldn’t have let it get this far.” She gazed hopefully, expecting a hug, some sort of reassurance that she could escape all this and everything would be fine. But instead all she got was “For God’s sake, Kate, you’re a bloody mess. What’s got into you? You said after Matty you wanted to have a relationship with a proper grown-up, and now you’ve got one and you want to run away? Honestly!”

  “Is everything all right in there?” The faux-chirpy voice of the shop manager, used to tears and tantrums and chivvying the unwilling into spending more money than they’d planned.

  “Fine,” they called in unison, and waited for her footsteps to recede.

  “It’s just pre-wedding jitters—everyone gets them,” Jess said in a low voice. “You’re just not used to the idea of getting married. Well, you’d better wrap your head round it sharpish. It’s high time you settled down and got a life of your own. Evan and I have our own problems—we don’t need you compounding them. I’m fed up with finding you giving Evan a sympathetic shoulder to cry on all the time.”

  Kate stared at her twin, appalled. “I thought I was helping.”

  “Helping? You’re kidding! Kate, for God’s sake, just marry James and grow up! And leave me and Evan alone!”

  It was as if all this time Jess had pretended to be her sister but had suddenly allowed a glimpse of her true reptile skin and nictitating eyelids. Kate took a step back. “I thought you’d understand,” she said quietly. “Of all people, you’re the one who knows what a nightmare I had with Matty. I thought you’d understand I didn’t want to make another stupid mistake.”

  Jess firmed her lips into a hard, thin line. Kate recognized that look: that mulish look her sister had when she was in the wrong and knew it but would never back down. In a sudden fury Kate grabbed the first dress that came to hand and marched out into the shop. “I’ll take this one,” she said, thrusting it at the surprised manager.

  The woman reached for it with alacrity and started ringing the price into the till. “Are you quite sure? Does it need any alterations?”

  “No,” Kate said through gritted teeth. “It’s absolutely fucking perfect.”

  Jess drove straight home and they didn’t speak for a fortnight. Then one day an envelope arrived at the cottage. Out fell a lovely notecard bearing an image by one of her favourite artists. She opened it to find two lines of Hobbit runes:

  Can you forgive me?

  Two hearts beat as one.

  She pressed the card to her chest, feeling choked up. Then she called Jess. There was a long moment of laden silence on the line, and then they both said “I’m so sorry” at exactly the same time.

  “You bloody well should be,” said Kate.

  “I know,” said Jess.

  The dress, of course, was awful. Kate stared at her reflection in the mirror and despaired. Her new haircut, a sharp asymmetric bob with chestnut highlights, looked wrong on her: too tailored, too harsh, more like a wig than her own hair. The dress was the opposite: too loose, too soft. She had steadfastly refused to try it on again since buying it, and now she was paying the price. Plus, she had lost weight in the past month; she smoothed the satin over her hips but still it hung like a sack, and one false move would have the bodice sliding down around her waist. It was no surprise, she thought. She’d been working flat out on the cottage and down at the new shop, in an attempt to hold back thoughts of an existential nature. Not eating enough either, since that meant sitting down with James at a table and talking (he refused to eat with a tray on his knees in front of the TV, as she was used to doing: in fact, having a television at all had provoked a major fight between them). In just two hours she’d be walking down the aisle.

  For one mad, fleeting moment, she glanced out the window at where her car sat parked on the road and considered running downstairs and jumping into it. Her car, the boot packed with all the things that didn’t fit into the cottage—modern paintings, knick-knacks and her coffee machine, which James refused to use, deeming coffee a filthy foreign drink. She could drive to an airport and run away. Anywhere would do. She imagined herself turbaned against the sand-laden winds of the Gobi Desert, swaying between the humps of a camel. Living in a treehouse in a Scandinavian forest; sunglassed and incognito at a café table in the sunlit plaza of some southern Spanish town…The last idea was so alluring she could almost taste the coffee.

  “Kate!”

  Jess’s voice downstairs. It was too late now. She’d allowed herself be carried along by James’s strength of will, and as Jess had said, it was time for her to grow up. She did not know how she had ever become such a passenger in her own life. Besides, he loved her so much—he kept saying it over and over. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you: you are everything in the world to me, Kate.” How could she be so ungrateful, and so stupid, to cast such love away? James was a clever, courtly, handsome man with a successful business. He’d bought her a beautiful cottage in a lovely village. He had a vision for their shared future that was truly seductive. Of course she loved him. Of course she wanted to marry him.

  “Up here!” she called back, as brightly as she could manage.

  Jess, with her special combination of flair and practicality, had saved the day, ruthlessly chopping the hem off the veil to make a halter strap to pass around Kate’s neck and fasten to the bodice at the front with pinned silk roses. For good measure, she pinned another silk rose at the waist so it seemed a deliberate part of the design.

  “There.”

  Evan turned when she entered the front garden, as Jess, bossy as ever, gave instructions to the limo driver. His eyes went wide. “You look gorgeous, Kate. James is a lucky man.”

  Kate’s eyes welled up at the compliment, and Evan was alarmed. “God, don’t cry—Jess’ll blame me!” He handed her his handkerchief. “Quick, blow your nose.”

  At that instant the other car arrived and from that moment Kate had no time to think about anything other than avoiding tripping over the hem of her dress or dropping her bouquet.

  In what seemed mere minutes she emerged a married woman. She appeared—and felt—dazed. The photographer caught her perfectly: large eyed and nervy, smiling uncertainly, once looking entirely forlorn. In every photo James had the same expression: one of jovial victory, his hand always on his bride’s waist or elbow, as if to guide her across stepping stones over a fast-flowing stream.

  There was champagne and Bellinis, a string quartet playing French Baroque music, a buffet table with roasted guinea fowl, beef and Yorkshire puddings, coleslaws and salads and jewel-like vegetables. And as a centrepiece, a cherry-red suckling pig with mournfully clouded eyes and an apple in its jaws.

  Kate stared at it, appalled. It seemed a throwback to a medieval age. She went back to the top
table empty handed. “Lost your appetite?” James chuckled. “We can’t have that. You’ll have no energy for later.” He gave her a knowing look.

  She smiled at him, a little too brightly. “Too much excitement,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well last night. Sorry, I’m being a bit feeble.”

  James leaned in and put his arm around her. “It’s a big day for both of us.” He paused. “A big night too…” He pushed a large glass of red wine her way. “Here, drink this. It’ll relax you.”

  Kate blinked and stared upward at the canopy of the four-poster bed in the bridal suite. She couldn’t remember how she’d got to their room, let alone onto the bed without—she realized now, feeling a flicker of air brush the skin of her naked belly—a stitch on. Had she passed out and been carried here? She cast a glance around. There were candles everywhere, giving off a heavy scent, causing the room to dance and spin. She made to move her hand to rub her eyes and found that it would not reach. Something was stopping it. Panicking now, she turned her head, to find her wrist tied with gold-and-violet velvet. What?

  She pulled against it, and the knot tightened. The same on the other side. She was bound to the headposts of the bed.

  Sex is all about strange kinks—wasn’t that what Jess had said? But James had never shown any interest in bondage before. She began to feel unnerved, the more so as she realized there was a muttering in the room, chanting in a foreign language. Kate’s skin rose in gooseflesh. She craned her neck. At the foot of the bed, gilded by candlelight, his hands clasping the extravagant counterpane, James was praying: “Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae. Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae. Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle…”

  Was that Latin? “What the hell are you doing?” She could hear her words slurring. How had she got so drunk?

  At the sound of her voice he raised his head and smiled beatifically at her. “We are about to consummate our union. I am praising the Blessed Virgin before I do what I must do. It’s the least I can do after not entering the priesthood as I promised her. You are the holy receptacle for my seed.”

  Kate tried to sit up onto her elbows and force the fumes from her head. “What do you mean? Why am I tied up?” She kept pushing against the restraints. This all felt so wrong.

  There was a fervent light in his eyes as James got to his feet, revealing a long white shirt she had never seen before. It reached his knees and looked as if it should be in a museum. “We have been brought together as man and wife in the eyes of God: and now it is my holy mission to bring our union to true fruition. Tonight we shall make a son.”

  He shrugged his way out of the shirt and stood before her with his erection protruding proudly. She had never seen him so aroused. Kate felt repulsed. “Untie me, James. I’m not having sex with you tied up like this!”

  By way of response, he climbed on top of her, his breath against her neck. She wriggled and tried to bring her legs together, but his knee was between them; then both knees, forcing her wide. “No!” she cried, and his hand closed over her mouth.

  “You’re mine forever now. Marriage is a sacred bond and nothing shall ever break us apart. Mine, mine, mine!”

  He fell asleep immediately afterwards, leaving her sobbing and sore, staring into the darkness in a sort of terror.

  She should have left him the next day, told her friends and her sister; gone to the police, pressed rape charges and walked away. But she didn’t. Partly because she realized with an awful sinking feeling that she didn’t really have any friends she could go to: over the past months she had become detached from them both emotionally and geographically. And Jess and Evan were out of the country, on a second honeymoon, trying to mend their marriage. But she stayed mainly because when she had demanded of James why he had raped her, he had simply punched her in the face, so hard that she thought he might have broken her jaw. He hadn’t, it turned out, but she couldn’t speak or even eat for a week without excruciating pain.

  She felt so…stupid. Stupid to have married such a man; stupid for having allowed him to isolate her so successfully from every aspect of her previous life; stupid for not seeing him for the monster he was. Stupid because—well, just look at her, all bloat-faced and bruised, with a bloodshot eye and stringy hair because she couldn’t even bear the touch of water on her head. They would all laugh at her—she could imagine it with hallucinatory clarity—and she knew she deserved their derision. And so the moment passed and the abuse continued, with James glorying in Kate’s increasingly meek, if stony, acceptance of the treatment he meted out to her, as he ceremonially emptied himself into her night after night, as the bruises flowered and faded and she became all but mute.

  So warped did her view of this new reality become that every time she thought of picking up her phone to call her sister she could conjure Jess’s voice telling her to “get over it,” that marriage was a series of trials and that she would have to “woman up” and deal with her new life. When she did speak to Jess, it was always in James’s presence on those rare occasions after she had earned enough indulgences, as he termed the system by which she could tot up such special treats as speaking to her twin, and with the hands-free function enabled so that he could hear every word. James removed the landline from the cottage, impounded Kate’s laptop and iPad, took her mobile phone away, monitored the few emails she was permitted to send, put her car up for sale and locked the keys in his safe (though it seemed no one appeared to want a third-hand Fiat). She learned from Jess that her trip away had failed to paper over the cracks of her relationship: Evan had moved out. When Jess had wailed down the phone, Kate had felt nothing: she had descended into an ever more moribund state.

  A profound shame had enveloped her, a desperate, excoriating shame. Shame at her own gullibility, shame that she was so weak as to allow herself to become a victim, shame that she had become complicit in this new life. Shame, also, at the perverse nature of the man she now had to call “husband.” She just couldn’t face speaking to anyone about what he did to her, the ceremonial nature of the sex, the sheer bloody weirdness of it all.

  Four months after the wedding Kate realized with a slow, dull burn of understanding that she had missed her period. And all of a sudden she felt as though she had woken up. The idea of bringing a child into this hell galvanized her as her own fate never had.

  It took her a month longer to escape. She planned it like a military campaign, like a world-class spy, meticulous to the last detail, her analytical brain finally kicking back into gear. One night with shaking hands she added five nightshade berries—Atropa belladonna—picked from the woods behind the cottage into the black-berry-and-apple crumble she made for James (his favourite) and then waited for the vomiting and drowsiness to set in. This number would not kill him, she was pretty sure, because as a child she and Jess had eaten a few of the berries, and though they had been horribly ill for a day, they had survived. After putting James to bed with a bottle of water, a bucket and the number of the out-of-hours doctor by his side, she took the key to the safe out of his trousers pocket, removed her car keys and a bundle of cash. When they had sold her flat, James had transferred the proceeds out of their joint account into his own, leaving only enough money for her weekly shop, and inspecting every bill and outgoing payment with forensic scrutiny. She left her phone, iPad and laptop: all three would, she knew, contain tracking software that could lead James right to her.

  She called Jess from a motorway service station.

  “You left him?” Her sister seemed astounded, which was only to be expected, given how thoroughly Kate had withheld the truth of her existence from her.

  “I’ll explain when I see you.”

  “Are you sure he won’t follow you?” Jess asked.

  Kate thought of how she’d left him, white-lipped and retching. “No,” she said. She started to tremble, a tremor that threatened to turn into a full-blown shaking fit. “And he has no idea where you live.” The one
secret she had managed to hug to herself in all this time. Perhaps deep down she had always known she would need this escape hatch. When she put down the phone, her knees buckled and the tears started. It was late at night, almost midnight. Customers in the service station were sparse, almost all of them single males. She shut herself in one of the ladies’ loos and wept and wept until an attendant knocked on the door and asked if she was all right. Of course she wasn’t all right. She’d been raped every day for five months, kept a virtual prisoner, beaten and belittled. She mumbled something about a tummy bug and managed to muster enough wherewithal to drive the rest of the way to the Peak District.

  Once at Jess’s remote farmhouse, she collapsed as if she had been hanging on to a long rope over a deep drop with the last of her strength. Down she fell, down and down and down, into misery, self-loathing, self-blame.

  Luke was born in hospital in Sheffield. Against all predictions, it was an easy birth, as if her body had been intent on expelling the last trace of James, but that was the last easy thing Kate would experience in a long, long time.

  “Usually it’s a traumatic birth that causes post-traumatic stress disorder,” said the psychiatrist Jess had bullied her into seeing, frowning over his notes. He looked up just as Kate tugged her sleeves down over her hands. “What are you hiding, Kate?” he asked gently, but with the tiniest hint of the intonation James had employed before one of his crueller forms of corporal punishment, having maybe caught her filching a biscuit during one of his imposed fasts.

  The psychiatrist had much quicker reflexes than you’d expect in a sixty-three-year-old man with a hip replacement: the paperweight smashed the glass bookcase behind him, and before Kate could turn his paper knife on herself, he caught her arms and restrained her. She was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Social Services allowed Luke to remain with Jess.