“Her husband held an administrative position; I wasn’t associated with the family then, so I can’t say what it was exactly. Evidently he overdid it, worked himself too hard. A trip to Cadassis and back in the snow gave him brain fever and he died in her arms, up at the house.”
He pauses and glances out the window. Someone seems to be strolling by.
When the stroller is gone, Orvar says, tonelessly, “Her daughter was away at the time. She was alone in the house with her husband. She was very attached to him. She deeply loved him.”
The sun goes below the horizon, and darkness closes around the carriage like the wings of a cape. Orvar is looking very dim there across from me.
“I don’t think she could bear to lose him.”
I measure with my eyes the distance between my hand and the door latch.
“Mr. Collumn—her husband’s physician had passed word of his death to the embalmers, as a matter of course.”
He inhales through his mouth.
“And they went to the house within three days’ time of his death. They only found his bones, mostly, in the bed ... and her there with them ... and nothing else.”
After long silence, Orvar coughs quietly and I hear the jostle of fluid in the bottle.
“Well, there was a scandal, as you can imagine. You see, everyone knew she had lost a baby boy a few years before. Crib death. Happened when she was away. Evidently too much. Too much for her. Her husband was supposed to be looking after the boy when it happened; he fell asleep, it seems, and when he next checked on the child, it was already over. Boy was fine before. The child was buried privately, on the grounds. Grounds of their estate. She refused the embalmers. Very unusual. Everyone remembered that
then
, you understand? She was very attached to the boy. Couldn’t stand to lose him.”
I nod, unsure he can see me in the gloom. My mind is not in motion.
“She blamed her husband. Apparently was cold with him after that. I was not yet in her employ then, but this is what I gather. She still loved him, you understand. When she knew he was dying, she repented it—her coldness—but he was so low by then that she really couldn’t tell if he could know that or not. Forgive her. She’s so sensitive ... and the uncertainty ...”
He makes a face I can’t quite make out. Now, finally, my mind takes a step or two, and I remember.
“They called her the Cannibal Queen.”
He starts at that.
“Please, sir!” he says sharply. “
Honestly!
”
He sits back, disapproval radiating from his invisible face. “She deserves better than that. It made her so ill, she suffered so—and for a woman like that, to be
ostracized
... made a
pariah
... Or worse, to be slandered. Made a figure of infamy. Of ribaldry—it’s cruel, sir.”
“No,” he says a moment later, as if I had asked him. “You see there was an inquiry, and certain arrangements were made. The judgement, you understand, was sealed, out of respect for the family—not that there’s anyone but her left, now her daughter’s gone away. After that ... it’s all nothing but vulgar speculation.
“... She’s free. She could leave the city, if she pleased. But she won’t abandon her graves. There’s no question of punishment, at least ... not exactly, as she was, it was felt,
ill
at the time.”
“No one thought to ... if she’s ill ...” I say without really knowing what I mean.
He looks at me gravely.
“I mean that, if she’s so ill, as you say ...” Now he is looking forbidding, face thrust forward in the shadows, and I falter, “—well, how is it she’s free to—you’re her keeper,” I realize.
“I’m her keeper,” he says, and his face goes up and down once, lips moued out.
“Her daughter disappeared, you know, and she couldn’t help but think it was as a consequence of the rumors, although the girl absolutely refused to countenance them.”
He leans forward again and looks me in the eye. His voice has become insinuating and confidential, a strange contrast with the man.
“So, you see, she’s a
very lonely woman
. It’s been
years
since anyone came to the house.”
The fur slides down the seat, volubly sighing out its scent, and that delectable smell just landslides over me. I see again her cheek outlined in a green flash through the veil, and his voice is an echo the wind carries to me from below the horizon as I stand in the cemetery lane below her, in the past.
“She saw you in the cemetery, and she has seen you in the street. She asked me about you. She asked me very particularly. She instructed me that, if I were to see you again, I should invite you, in her name, to call at the house.”
I am on the street beneath windy sky, and Orvar is speaking to me from the roof of the carriage.
“She receives in the late afternoon, past three.”
There is a crisp card in my hand, pale lavender with metallic print, an address in the death district not far from here.
“Come soon, won’t you?” he says almost merrily.
I hold the card up to my face and that scent unfolds its petals for me again. A rattle of hooves, and then no sound but the rustle of wind against the eaves. A tin can clambers down the street behind me.
*
What at a distance I took for rags of hanging moss prove instead to be enormous veils festooning every bough of every tree on the grounds. I have wasted my time wondering how I will get inside the high stone walls, if there will be a bell or if I will have to stand in the street and shout like a fool, because Orvar emerges from the small door in the elephantine wooden gates pimpled over with bronze busses as I approach. He is thumbing his keys in his palm. As I approach, he looks up without surprise and stands away from the door.
“Go on through. The Girl will show you in.”
He seems brisk and cheerful as he pulls loose from the house.
“Good of you to come,” he says even jauntily now, and waving. “So long.”
I have to raise my feet high to get through the door, and the greasy black lock snaps noisily as I draw it to behind me. There is no gap in the wall here, I see as we go through, rather the walls fold inward to form a causeway leading to the front of the house, where they fold again to form a high, narrow gravel court. The fluttering trees appear to be imprisoned, like zoo animals, behind these unbroken walls. The branches are robust and beneath the floating veils the soil sports a rich pelt of luxurious black grass soft as sable. The house presents a flat and undemonstrative front of windows shuttered in discolored ivory and a bronze door and footplate level with the ground. Above this, a bronze canopy, its outer ring studded with round baubles, and topped with two life-sized bronze foxes, mirrored, creeping along the edges of the canopy with the far forepaw raised and matching sidelong looks. A human expressiveness has been inharmoniously grafted onto their faces, and the resulting look mingles derision, rapacity, idiocy and yawning in equal parts.
In the gloom under the canopy I am injected with nervous excitement. How do you knock on a bronze slab like this? Now I see the metal rod to one side; I have to hold it in the fingers of my left hand, while my right turns a crank at the end. I’m not sure I hear any responding action from inside; I wait.
A few wisecracking birds, a slurred gush of wind over the ground.
The door opens silently, all the way back, and the Girl, smiling shyly at me and a little shielded by the door, waves me in with an easy sweep of her left hand. The Girl closes the door as I come in to the dim house. Everything is shining and dark, polished wood and metal. The entryway is round and not very wide, with a flight of many low steps rising three or four feet to the level of the hall. The house is perfectly still, as if it and everything in it were one completely solid block. The Girl’s skirts rustle, and the trailing white ribbons of her apron, which stream from both the small of her back and the top of her spine, leave trails of fragrance behind them.
The door closed, she steps in front of me and repeats her gesture, still smiling shyly, and I follow her up the steps. She is indiscriminatably young, with dark hair. Her dress seems unusually sumptuous to me, and I note the large, dark stones dangling from her ears. While cinched very tightly into this dress, and most likely into a corset, her waist moves with athletic elasticity. She flows ahead of me, guiding me to the staircase. The hall is neither deep nor wide, but it is evidently tall—just above the staircase all is pitch dark. The ceiling could be hundreds of feet overhead.
The Girl leads me across the second floor landing and into the wings. Though the house is large, I get the feeling it has no spacious rooms; it’s all narrow halls, closets and chambers. Everything gleams beautifully, not a speck of dust, not a trace of the earwax smell of old mildewed houses, rather an odor like generations of incense smoke molded into wood and brass. The Girl turns and stops me with an outstretched palm and a smile, knocks softly on a door, her shoulder nearly against it and her head leaning in. If there is a reply, I don’t hear it, but the Girl opens the door and gestures me through it.
I step into a small room filled with pale, even light. The ceiling is less than a foot from my head, the walls papered above the wainscotting with faintly violet fronds on an ash background ... potted ferns, a screen, a virginal ... The windows are all on the left, a continuous bank of glass like the wall of a greenhouse. As I turn that way, I see that
she
sits there at a round table by the windows, a book open in front of her. She only that moment lifts and her eyes.
The dress is the same, or nearly.
I am wafting forward into the room, confusedly aware that the door has been closed quietly behind me, and that I am in the hold of a undertow of light from the windows, which streams past her face toward me.
*
“Have you ever seen a ghost?”
The words come out from under her parasol, which she holds low enough to conceal her face from view. Not from my view, however. We are crossing an enclosed area, a walled space around a monument tower which is now open to curiosity seekers. Coming here was her idea.
“No,” I say.
“How do you know you’ve never seen one?”
“I suppose I’d know that!”
“Why do you suppose? I think they are there to be seen all the time. I roll through the streets here, and the people flash by my carriage. How can I know that every one I see is solid flesh and blood?”
“Wouldn’t there be something otherworldly about them? I thought ghosts were always obviously ghosts.”
“Sometimes I lie awake and hear noises in the house, and despite myself I’m frightened. Then I hear some familiar sound—a clock strikes, or a train whistles somewhere—and my fear abates. But why should those sounds comfort me, and others frighten me? Why couldn’t a ghost make the sound of a train?”
The wind rises along her length where she parts its current, and there stream from her head two or three calligraphic locks. Her hair is a deep black with grey spun in almost imperceptibly.
She squeezes the money into my palm, and I pay our way into the tower. We ascend slowly, past suits of armor and tapestries woven specially to exploit the curvature of the tower wall. There is only one floor, a bare round room at the summit with a stone bench to the right of the entrance. An archway leads out onto a windswept promenade where we take in the view together.
I feel her distraction.
I place my palm lightly on the center of her back, expecting her to step forward toward the battlement, and moving forward a little myself. She doesn’t move forward, but allows me to come up near to her, my hand sliding a little forward toward her right shoulder. I am within her warmth now, and the climate of her breath, her hair, and she seems to bend slightly into me, so now she is leaning with her shoulder and part of her bosom on my chest. I feel her hand gently alight on one of my shoulder blades. I drop my gaze to her face, but meet only the sight of her lowered eyelids; her features taper away from me, her lips are parted. She is strangely well-preserved, her face is unlined. A ghost lifts my left hand from my side, and I watch it settle uncertainly at her waist. She turns a little more in my direction, still not looking at me. Sparkling fingers touch my left hand, and she guides it smoothly up her body; I feel the sweep of her ribs flow beneath my palm, and flex out with her breathing. She tosses back her head, I am looking down into her shadowed mouth, and the lips I kiss are plated with cold over warm. The tip of her nose is cold, and draws a line like a stylus on my cheek.
Now she looks into my eyes. Hers are nearly black, with a deep light in them.
“Let’s get inside, you might be seen with me.”
Hand in hand we go back into the tower. I walk right over to the stone seat, pulling her. I sit, and draw her to me. She seems to feel this daring but drapes herself sidesaddle on my lap and twines her arms around my neck; her eyes are warm, luminous black. A fleeting look that tugs one sharp corner of her mouth up in a smile expresses pleasure and surprise at me. A few moments later there is a step on the stair below and instantly she bounds away from me. Straightening herself, she steps out again into the air.