The Book of the Beast (4 page)

On all sides the trees of the garden groaned and foamed like rivers.

The quick-growing weeds which, if trodden down and broken, in a day or night of fecund summer would reweave themselves, had formerly concealed any other excursions through the garden. It had seemed unvisited for years. But perhaps she walked here often, under sun and moon, under downpour, in the winter snow—

He had continued forcing himself forward through the night, and now he glimpsed the great yew ahead, where the mausoleum gaped from the foliage, the little house of Helise the dead bride.

The rain all at once slackened, and was lifted up like a swag of heavy curtaining. He heard the fountain breath of the drenched trees, and the individual notes of oval glass beads falling from branch to branch.

The moon struck suddenly from a cloud like a spear. In the entry of the tomb stood a woman in a black gown, with dead-white hands clasped upon a dead candle, a white stalk of throat and a white face in a powdery bloom of hair.

In those instants she was uncanny, the dead one risen from her grave.

Because of this, he could not make himself move or speak.

And then, the shadowy features of her face (like the smudged shadows on the face of the moon itself) realigned themselves. It was she who spoke to him.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

A fundamental inquiry, perhaps a fearful one, given the time and place, and since she was not a phantom.

Raoulin took some random steps nearer. There was no explanation he could offer that would in any way humanly excuse his action.

Thus he said, “And you, lady, why did you come here in the rain?”

She leaned out of the porch of the tomb at him, her face tilted upward. He saw it was the face of the dream and that, even in the moon’s colourless ray, the discs of her eyes, lent only a hint of proper light, would flood with greenness, like the trees.

“Who are you?” she said again.

“My name is Raoulin,” he said, wondering if she had been told of him. That must be so. For she had come seeking him that first night, and stared into his sleep when he dreamed. “And you, demoiselle?” he added, for it appeared she was young, after all the speculation, and yet, being moon-like, ageless and old, under her surfaces.

“I?” she said. “Who am I?” She lowered her lunar-emerald eyes. “You may read my name above me.”

He looked irresistibly above her head, and there on the stone banner ran the letters, as he had seen before:
Helise d’Uscaret
.

“A namesake of the dead girl,” he said.

“Oh no. This tomb is mine, which naturally is why I visit here. I’m long dead, Sieur Raoulin. And therefore why should a storm deter me?”

For all her reality, her body, her shadow going away from her on the path, again the skin crawled over his bones.

Harshly he said, “The rain wets your gown. You drink wine from a glass and need a candle in the dark.”

“Do I? You mean to say I’m flesh and blood. Yes. But yet, I died. I died and was awarded this black box. I went down to the court of death as they so prettily describe it, or so I take the Latin to mean, and perhaps I decipher wrongly. You are the scholar, Sieur Raoulin. Do I have the message right?”

He said, “You questioned the old woman about me.”

Then she smiled.

“It’s been many years,” she replied,” since there was any life in the house. And suddenly, a young man from the provinces. I confess the fault of curiosity.”

“Do you confess, too, stealing into the room and watching me as I slept?”

“You are unchivalrous, sieur. Asking that I admit such a thing.”

“The dead can’t expect much courtesy,” he answered boldly.

Her glancing conversation irked, but also flattered him. She was very beautiful. It was very strange.

“Perhaps,” she said then, “perhaps I shall resolve this riddle for you. If you have the will and wish to listen.”

“What else,” he said.

Her eyes fixed upon his. Even in the darkness now he saw that they were green.

“You may not believe the story I tell you. It’s incredible and utterly exact. I can’t lie. That is my - atonement.”

“I’m all impatience,” he said.

“Then, I invite you to my chamber. With me, no codes of propriety remain, to be upheld or sullied. As you say, the dead can hope for slight courtesy.”

“I won’t harm you,” he said.

She smiled again. “Don’t trouble. It’s understood.”

She went before him through the garden, the skirts of her gown brushing off rain-opals from the bushes.

Such jewels were strewn in her hair, grey gems in a white web, for she wore it quite loosely, carelessly.

He followed her back into the house and up the stair. His pulses beat, insisting on carnal matters; but his brain stayed wholly clear. It was not for a tryst he companioned this one.

The room that she led him into was unlike the rest of the house. Eight candles burned and lit a painted floor of squares, and showed the ceiling too was figured with scrolls and smouldery fruit. The posted bed stood partially away behind a curtain, and guarded by a chest of carved ebony. There was the window, to glow its marsh-light on the City. There, a broad fireplace bordered by columns, with a pale fire frisking in it. This, after the rain, was solacing. Two black chairs, with footstools, faced each other across the hearth, a table between with a book upon it, and also a silver pitcher and two glass goblets of the valuable kind he had seen before.

He could not fail to be aware this room had some resemblance to the make-believe bedroom at the brothel. Or that it too had been prepared for a guest. Madly it came to him that everything that had gone on, since his first entry to the City, was in the nature of a dance-measure, and none of it quite real, or what it seemed.

“Be seated,” said Helise d’Uscaret, if so she was, and why should she not be so?

He obeyed her, taking the right-hand chair.

In the window-embrasure, another book lay, and a little casket. Here and there were scattered small tokens of life, of femininity—a hand-mirror of polished metal, a ribbon, a flaxen bud in a thimble of water.

(Nowhere, that he could see, a skull.) Charmingly, from under the bed-curtain, a satin slipper peeped out.

And like the attitude of the table and two chairs, these items had an air of considered arrangement.

Into his glass she poured a dark wine.

He caught the scent of it, and of her, as she bent over him and drew away. Certainly, she was a living woman.

Beauty. Strangeness.

She seated herself in the opposing chair, and sipped from her own glass a vintage like ink. But now he could see the impossible colour of her gaze.

“Be at ease,” she said.

“Your eyes,” he said, as if he could not prevent himself, “never in the world—
so green
.”

“Long ago,” she said, “my eyes were not green at all. That is the badge of what befell me. The mark on me. My eyes are my scar, after the battle.”

It seemed to Raoulin he would not move now, not even to raise the fine glass to his lips. This stasis did not distress him. His mind was alert, to be instructed. Nothing else was of importance.

The Bride

And what will ye wear for your wedding lace?

One with another. A heavy heart and a hidden face,

Mother, my mother.

—Swinburne

A girl is grown like a flower in the house of her kindred. She is nurtured for her hues and perfume. At the blossoming she will be plucked from her native soil and planted elsewhere. In other earth she will give fruit, fade, wither, and finish. This is all the usefulness of such a flower, the well-born girl among the great houses of Paradys.

Helise la Valle knew, as she had learnt her alphabet and orisons, that this was her destiny.

Indeed, she had looked forward to the event of her transplanting, once she became conscious of the future. Rather than be afraid, it seemed to her child-mind like the festival of Christmas or the New Year, a season of celebration, dressing-up, the giving and receiving of gifts. Late to these images came a dreamlike icon: the bridegroom.

It was not until her adolescence, actually her saint’s day, in her twelfth year, that this procrastinate shape at last stepped forward to overwhelm, to
crush
all the others, and fill her with pervasive dread.

On that day it was that she heard his name for the first time. What is named, in the oldest rituals of witchcraft, takes power.

“Heros d’Uscaret,” sang out the youngest cousin.

And at this, all the elder cousins fell entirely silent, as if a wind had passed over that robbed them of speech and motion.

“Who is he?” asked Helise.

She was a fey girl, whose quiet attentiveness led adults to think her docile. She had never been discouraged in asking questions, for she asked so few.

“You’re to be wed to him,” said one of the elder cousins, looking abashed, for propriety had been breached. “You are betrothed.”

“Am I?” said Helise, merely interested.”

But just then one of the most senior cousins came briskly into the room, clapping her hands and frowning.

The maidens were disbanded. Only the Name was left.

It was at the hour of candle-lighting that Helise approached her mother.

“I am to marry Heros—d’Usc—d’Uscaret?”

The mother started. She was seated in her chair before a glowing hearth (it was autumn, and the nights already were cold) idly combing the long hair of her little lap-dog. At its mistress’ start, the tiny animal growled. Helise did not like the dog, for it had once bitten her with its sharp rat teeth. She blamed the dog for this, and not the sickly cosseting and ill-temper of her own mother, which had formed it.

“What did you say, Helise?”

“That I’m to marry—am betrothed—’

“Very well,” said the mother. “You are. It’s a distinguished match.”

Helise stood between excitement and disarray. She had always known her life would alter, but here was sudden proof.

“Heros,” she said again,“d’Uscar—et.”

“Someone has been twittering,” said the mother. Her sallow proud face was unkind. “Your cousins.”

“But Mother, mustn’t I know?”

“In good time. You mayn’t wed tomorrow. It will be three good years before you are fit. Your father is strict.”

“But shall I know nothing of it?”

“The suitor is young enough, twenty years when you are fifteen. Sound, not a cripple. Fair, I have heard.

His house is of the best. They’ve the favour of the Duke.”

Helise, at twelve, had already been in love, with a painting of Jehanus the Baptist on the Martyr Chapel wall of the Sacrifice. She understood that it was futile to love a saint in such a manner. But since her own sensuality was to herself undivulged, she did not perceive it for what it was, and had never realised she sinned in her wild thoughts. In her head she pictured to herself the court of Herod, where she saved the saint from death (thereby depriving him, of course, of his martyrdom, maybe of his sainthood) and the clutches of Herod, shameless Salome, and the Romans. She accompanied Jehanus into the desert where, respected among his followers, she wove him garlands from the locust tree, tended him in sickness, swooned and revived in his miraculous embrace, and, in the river to her breasts, was baptised by the fiery water spilling from his hands. The face of Jehanus in the fresco, formed by an artist of genius, had often become the subject for some young girl’s fantasy. The .arched throat, mane of hair, and great upraised eyes, were tautly luminous with that agony of suffering or joy inherent in worldly pain. Or pleasure. Kept ignorant, the perceptive instincts of Helise had already been a trifle warped.

It was her whimsy perhaps that Heros d’Uscaret, described, should resemble her first love.

But the Lady la Valle would not describe Heros d’Uscaret.

It took a maid in the closeted bedroom to do that.

She was crying, this girl, only a year or so older than her mistress. Helise, having been well-educated in many alternative areas, beat her maid’s hands with an ivory comb, to come at the cause.

“Oh madam—they’ve promised you to a monster!”

“What do you mean?” said Helise.

“There’s a curse on that house.”

The maid snivelled, and Helise raked her again with the comb.

“Madam—Satan claims all the men of their line—and the women. But the men are—shape-changers - they are
things under the skin
.”

At this nonsensical, beastly phrase, Helise left off her interrogation. Her immature mind had now quite enough to play upon.

For five days she was in a fever and the physicians despaired of her life. Then she recovered, and they congratulated their own skills.

The talk of betrothal and terror seemed sloughed with illness. It was not referred to. Helise resumed her former habit, and never asked.

(The maid was gone. There was a new maid, a country girl who was not acquainted with the City.) What one does not speak of need not be believed.

So Helise continued until her fifteenth year, near the end of which they informed her that, soon after her birthday, she was to wed a noble lord of the City, whose name had already been made known to her. By then she had all but forgotten the awful words, her fever dreams. Therefore the icy hand that gripped her heart seemed to have no source.

In the assembled months before her wedding-day, Helise was wan and languid. Her mother and aunts chided her. She would lose her good looks and demean her house. She must eat this and drink that, she must have these unctions applied to her skin and those pastes to her hair.

At fifteen. Helise had mostly dispensed with questions. Her native indifference to the outer world was augmented by realisation that what might be answered was invariably told without inquiry—and what would not be answered would not.

At night in her narrow virgin’s bed, Helise offered vague prayers to a fate that was unavoidable; she prayed as a man prays to be spared death. Perhaps delay was possible.

But the months clambered over each other and the wedding-day came hurrying nearer. The bride was not afforded a single glimpse of the groom.