Dark Dance (37 page)

‘I know. Have you noticed, Ruth, that people are often kind to you, nice, when they want you to do something for them?’

Ruth looked at Rachaela. Her look was frankly speculative. And what do
you
want? She replied, ‘Sometimes.’

‘And that people let you down.’ Rachaela waited, and thrust home the dart. ‘Like Emma.’

Ruth did not flinch. Her eyes were black and impenetrable. ‘Yes.’

‘I want you to think about this, Ruth. The Scarabae are being nice to you because they want something.’

They want me to stay,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m Adam’s daughter.’

‘And have they told you what they expect of you and Adamus?’

Ruth did not answer at once.

Then she said, ‘They told me I’m going to be betrothed to him.’

Rachaela recoiled. She held herself level.

‘Do you know what that word means? Betrothed.’

‘It means bind with a promise to marry.’ Ruth added, ‘Anna showed me in the library, in the dictionary.’

‘Do you understand what was meant?’ Ruth watched her. ‘That they mean you to marry him?’

‘Oh yes.’

Rachaela said, too loudly, ‘Daughters don’t marry their fathers.’

‘Yes they do. The Egyptians did.’

Rachaela cursed Miss Barrett, Mr Walker and the primary school with its unsuitable gobbets of knowledge. Or perhaps Ruth had got it from some book.

‘You’re not Egyptians.’

‘The kings did it. The important families. To keep the bloodline pure.’

‘And that’s what the Scarabae told you you would be doing?’

Ruth smiled, secretively, and looked at the grass.

‘Have you thought,’ said Rachaela, ‘about what you would have to do as his wife?’ Be taken by him, broken into, forced to experience a hell of sweetness—
Don’t think of it. ‘Ruth.’

‘No, Mummy,’ said Ruth.

‘You’d have to bear his children,’ said Rachaela. ‘And do you know what
that
means?’

‘You told me about babies.’

‘All right.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Ruth. ‘Anna explained. The line has to go on.’

‘You don’t mind because there’s no way you can understand. My God, I can’t make you realize in five minutes. It’s painful and degrading, Ruth. It means your body isn’t your own,’
Christ
, she thought,
I sound like Jonquil.
‘And you’ll be expected to do it again and again. Do you follow what I’m saying?’

‘It will be easy, Anna said.’

‘Oh Anna’s explained about babies too has she?’

‘We’re special,’ said Ruth. ‘You’re different. You don’t understand about
that.’

Rachaela gathered her wits. She saw again Ruth kneeling on the floor in her shawls and lipstick, while the child Lucile snivelled on the blue bed.

‘You mean this family legend about vampirism.’

‘They are,’ said Ruth. She corrected herself. ‘We are. There’s no daylight in the house. They only go out of doors at night. Apart from Cheta and Carlo, the servants, who aren’t pure Scarabae, and they have to muffle up.’

‘Then why are you sitting here in the sun, Ruth?’

‘I haven’t changed yet.’

‘And when will you change?’

‘When I marry Adam.’

Ruth writhing, kicking and screaming on the black piano, Adamus on top of her, his mouth at her throat, a tiny trickle of scarlet.

‘I
married
Adam. Nothing happened to me.’

‘You’re not like us. Your mother was a stranger.’

‘Ruth, I need time with you. I want you to come back to London with me.’

‘No thank you,’ Ruth said, ‘Mummy.’

Rachaela saw Ruth alter inside her flesh. She became concentrated, dangerous, as Rachaela had seen her once before. There was a light to the eyes, the teeth looked sharp and the fingernails long. Try to touch now, and this creature would bite and scratch. It would punch into a breast as it had when a baby, and wriggle away and get free. There was a demon in Ruth. The Scarabae demon, but given a fresh and hybrid life.

A blot of darkness on the sunlight made Rachaela turn her head.

Carlo had come out of the house and was standing, clear of the trees, without any pretence, watching them.

He wore his outdoor things, his hat and scarf and sunglasses, in the broiling heat.

Ruth turned too and jumped up.

There’s Carlo. I’m going to make an apple-pie with Maria.’

She ran towards the house, lifting up her long skirt.

She passed Carlo, who continued a moment to stare down at Rachaela on the grass, before himself turning away and back into the pines.

There was nothing else to do. She must stay. She must be their witness. That way there might be a chance. She must stay.

He was no threat to her now.

And she would see him again.

In parting them, she would have dealings with him. The only dealings she might have.

Anna turned the key in the door of the locked room. Unice held up the lamp.

‘It will be very dark.’

‘We must be careful.’

The old women rustled like crisp paper.

They were all there, the women but not the men. Rachaela stood behind them all, in her place as witness.

Ruth was beside Anna.

The lamp slid into the room and lit it crazily. It was a cave, without windows, full of stripes and bulbs of redness.

Miriam and Teresa slipped ahead into the dark and there came the noise of struck matches, little spurts of flame.

A row of candles had been ignited along the walls.

It was a neglected room. A faded magenta wallpaper appeared to be in the design of pairs of bats hanging upside down—like the graphics of Escher, other shapes seemed formed by the pale-yellow interstices. Nothing was certain. Beams poked forth in the ceiling.

The room was full of red dresses. They stood on dummies down the length and across the breadth of it.

The reds were of every depth and shade, soft and dark, coarse and transparent, like fruits, some bruised and others unripe, some left too long in the sun.

These dresses had never seen the sun.

They were old, or antique, of the styles of other centuries and other lands. They looked frail as insect wings, most of them. A few were sturdy, stuck in time. There was dust on them all.

A perfume rose from the dresses, memories of scent and flesh, through the dust.

‘Come, Ruth,’ said Anna. ‘Look about. Several will be too large. But there are many which fitted young girls like yourself.’

Ruth went forward. In the candlelight her eyes glistened hard as jets.

If Rachaela had stayed, if she had stayed, with the child in her womb, would the Scarabae have brought her here, to choose her betrothal or her wedding dress?

Ruth paused beside a crinolined gown with huge sleeves and trailing bows, looked at it, passed on.

There were dresses like sheaths, beaded with rosy crystal. There were dresses with corseted waists and trains, and dresses with long sleeves sewn with fake red gems. Or perhaps they were real.

Ruth was half-way across the room, among the crimson pillars.

She was choosing carefully for her big day, looking at everything.

Anna had stood aside. Teresa, Unice and Miranda edged down the room after Ruth. Distracted by recollection or mere nostalgia, Alice, Anita, Sasha and Miriam wandered around the room, in their turn seeming to try to choose a gown, as maybe once they had.

Livia remained near the door. Her face contorted. She said to Rachaela, ‘My Constantin,’ and pressed her dry old hands to her face. It was as if she wanted to cry and could not. The rictus of pain left her slowly, and she lowered her hands, and went to a red dress, beginning to smooth its stiff sheer folds with one ringed finger.

Rachaela moved along an aisle of dresses.

Ruth had come to a standstill.

There was a rent in the ceiling above, a hole, and under it a dress posed almost alone.

It was, like the bedroom, a dress of blood. It came from a period of make-believe. The shoulders of the dummy were bare. The waist of the dress pointed like an arrow, with a line of ruby buttons to the navel. The skirt flowed, embroidered in shiny bloody thread like grapes and flowers and foliage. The ruched sleeves fell from the shoulders to the floor, and under them were other sleeves of tight red lace.

‘This one,’ said Ruth.

‘Oh, she’s chosen that one!’ exclaimed Miranda. ‘How lovely.’

‘How beautiful she’ll look,’ said Teresa. ‘I remember —’ and fell silent.

All the women susurrated, a chorus of grasshoppers.

The skirt of the dress moved. It flaunted and bellied, as if an unseen leg had flexed beneath it.

Ruth stepped away.

She stared.

All the women stared at the dress.

And the skirt tossed again, rippled.

What was happening? Was the dress coming to life?

‘No, no,’ said Anna, ‘no.’

She went briskly up the room. Rachaela saw her reach the dress and take up the skirt and shake it.

Suddenly a long seam burst in a puff of red smoke.

A bird flew out.

The dress had been pregnant with the bird.

It flew straight past Anna and dipped over the heads of the old women so they cried out and called.

Rachaela had never seen the Scarabae so discomposed before.

The bird rushed from wall to wall and the women screamed shrilly, warding it off with their hands which flashed with rings.

Then the bird shot suddenly upwards. It vanished into the hole in the ceiling and the beating of its wings was gone.

‘The attic,’ said Anna, pointing up after the bird. ‘Uncle Camillo leaves the window open.’

‘Will it fly out?’ cried Unice.

‘Will it fly away?’ they asked.

‘I expect it will,’ said Anna. She looked at Rachaela. ‘Perhaps Rachaela will go up sometime today, and see.’

‘It’s bad luck, a bird in the house,’ said Unice.

Miranda said, ‘Not for sixty years.’

‘Hush,’ said Anna. The bird’s gone. Ruth. Have you chosen this one? It’s just the right size.’

‘There was a bird in it,’ said Ruth.

The panic of the old ones had not afflicted her, but she was influenced.

‘The bird has gone,’ said Anna.

‘I don’t want it now,’ said Ruth.

The old women blew towards her, statically like rags on a bush. They whispered, conceivably without words.

‘Choose another,’ said Anna.

‘But I wanted that one.’

‘Then forget the bird,’ Anna was smiling and patient.

‘No,’ said Ruth.

Anna spread her hands and waited.

They all waited on the child-woman who was their future.

Ruth stood with her head to one side.

At last she said, ‘All right, I will. This one. But the seam’s torn.’

Alice said, ‘I’ll attend to all the seams. And Cheta will clean the dress very carefully. Especially the lace. Lace is so becoming.’

Ruth said, ‘What about the veil? Will I have a veil?’

‘Yes,’ said Miriam, ‘like a bride. A beautiful red veil.’

‘And Carlo will cut red roses,’ said Miranda.

‘Such a special day,’ said Teresa.

Ruth stood at their core, like the hub of a gradually turning wheel. She had put her back to the dress. She did not look at Rachaela.

When the candles had been blown out, they retreated from the room, to which Michael and Maria would presently come to remove the selected dummy.

Outside in the corridor the cloud of old women bore Ruth away.

Later Rachaela went up to the attic.

Within, among the chests and stands, one red dress had been stranded—the dress of Alice’s mother.

She could not see the hole that led to the room below, but the window stood wide on the fierce sunlight.

Of course, they were vampires, they could not come here.

But Camillo had risen from his bed and come here and flung the window wide to attract a bird to fly into Ruth’s red betrothal dress.

The bird had gone.

Rachaela stood at the window, looking across the roofs to the tower.

The sun blazed on its cone, the window glinted.

Adamus.

He had drunk her blood but he walked in the daylight. Would Ruth be disappointed when she found, after her night of metamorphosis, that the sun did not shrivel her up?

Just before midnight Scarabae’s betrothed came downstairs, She looked like a bride in Hell, in her dress of blood and the veil like melon-heart, wing-spread from its little coronet, and with two scarlet roses in her hand.

Rachaela’s watch had ascertained the time, but really it was only night, the last summer lightness compressed from the sky, the house doors open.

Lighted candles everywhere, beaded ranks of fire giving off a dense and wavering heat.

The old people had gathered in their dinner clothes, their dust and spangles. Only Rachaela in her skirt and T-shirt did not fit. She stood apart, she was only the witness.

Ruth’s made-up face looked totally contained, but she shone with electricity. She was the glowing centre of the fires.

Another room had been opened up, cleaned by the servants and filled with candles and red roses on tall wooden stands.

At the far end was a table draped in red velvet, and on it a huge old book lying open. Behind the table stood Dorian in his dinner clothes and starched shirt.