The Secret Book of Paradys (39 page)

In fact, he had not thought her a servant, not for one minute. It had been a test.

Now the hag said again, “Only us. And yourself.”

“And M’sire No One. Yes, I recall. But in the corridors I passed this lady. A maiden, I believe.”

Then the groom spoke. He said, “That can’t be, for let me tell you, sieur, there’s no other living soul in this house saving we and you.”

“Oh, a ghost, then,” said Raoulin.

His heart jumped, not unpleasantly. He did not believe in ghosts, therefore longed to have their being proved to him, like the existence of God.

He had of course lost himself on emerging from his apartment. There were no lights anywhere, only the worm-runs of windowless corridors on which the occasional door obtruded. Now and then, from perversity, he had tried these doors. Three gave access to barren chambers, empty of nearly anything. One had a shuttered window, another a candle-branch standing on the floor. (The branch was of iron, worth little. The candle-stubs had long ago been devoured by vermin.) A few other doors resisted his impulse. He fancied they were stuck rather than locked. Presently he reached an ascending stair he was certain he had not seen on entry with the hag. He paused in irritated perplexity, wondering if it would be worthwhile to climb. Just then a woman appeared and went across the stair-top, evidently negotiating the corridor which ran parallel to that below.

She did not carry a candle, and that he saw her at all was due to his own light, and the pallor of her hair and skin which caught it. Her gown was of some sombre stuff, high-waisted as was now not always the fashion, and she held her hands joined under her breast. A stiff silver net contained her hair; it glittered sharply once as she glided by. That was all. She was gone literally in that flash. Her face he did not really see, yet her slightness, something about her, made him think her girlish.

Anyone else, going over the unlit upper corridor, must have glanced downward at his light. Not she.

He had lacked the impertinence to pursue.

He waited all through supper to see if any reference would be made to the fair passager – he had decided she was attractive; she had to be, being mysterious.

“And if she is a ghost,” he continued, “whose ghost?”

The groom and the old woman exchanged looks. Raoulin had seen such before. The camaraderie of age against youth, stupid cunning against stupid intelligence, the low against the better who was not better enough to get respect.

“There’s no ghost here,” said the old woman at length. “You were dreaming, your head full of scholar books.”

“All right,” said Raoulin, pleased by the heightening Stygian shade of deception, faithfully observed as in any romance. “Probably a trick of the candle.”

Returning towards his rooms, he tried for the fork of the corridor where he had lost himself and found the stair.

He could not regain it.

Having gone up and down and round and about for quite an hour, having peered into further fruitless rooms of dust, mouse-cities, broken furniture, he only rediscovered his rightful corridor with difficulty. His heart, which had begun by beating excitedly, was now leaden with weariness. Reaching his bed, thank God aired with hot stones, he flung himself among the sheets and barely had space to blow out the candle before he was asleep.

Here, unconscious, he dreamed the door to his apartment was stealthily opened. A slim shadow drifted over the outer chamber. He sensed it examining as it went the closed travelling chest, the books he had already set out, a small reliquary his mother had pressed upon him. Then, entering the bedroom, all in black night, the shadow cast around. White fingers, that glimmered in the void, traced his doublet where he had thrown it down, a purse of coins – he heard them chink – his dagger – he longed to warn her to be careful, the edge was newly honed.

Then to the brink of his bed she stole, this immoderate phantom.

In utter black, through sleep and closed eyelids, yet he made her out.

A mask of Parsuan porcelain floated above him in a silver-grilled aureole-light of blondest hair. As he had known it must be, the face was lovely, and cool as snow. And the eyes – ! Never had Raoulin seen such eyes. Wide-set, carved a touch slantingly, fringed with pale lashes, and very clear. And oh, their colour. They were like the jewels he remembered from a bishop’s mitre, two matching emeralds, green as two linden leaves against the sun.

Asleep, miles off, Raoulin attempted to order his body to speak to her. But the words could not be dredged up from the sea, his lips and tongue refused obedience.

Drowning, he could only gaze on her as she drew aside from him, swimming far away, over the horizon of night.

One day remained to Raoulin before he must present himself at the university. How he regretted its brevity. He had meant to use the time in exploration of
the wicked City of Paradys, but now a morning sufficed for this. He visited the markets, and pried amongst the crannied shops, saw the shining coils of the river straddled by bridges, gazed on the great grey Temple-Church of the Sacrifice, where he must hear at least one Mass and report the fact to his mother.

By early afternoon he had strayed back south-west of the City, to gloomy House d’Uscaret.

In daylight, the upland streets – the mansion was on one of the many hills that composed Paradys – were not appetising. Nothing fell so low as the highmost. There were other large houses and imposing towers in the area, now gone to tenements, tiles off, stones crumbling, strung with torn washing. In the alleys was disgusting refuse. Every crevice seemed to hold debris or the bones of small deceased animals.

Having gained the house by a side entry, to which the hag had given him a key, Raoulin set himself to master the building.

He had determined to recover the ghost’s corridor, and all through the hot post-noon he sought it, and, wide-awake, finally found it, too. The corridor seemed redolent yet of her ghostly fragrance. And shivering slightly, he started along in the direction she had chosen. Soon enough it gave on a further flight of ascending steps – perhaps the spectre had a lair … But the solitary door above was disappointingly jammed – or secured – Raoulin could only concede that this kept up the best traditions of romance.

Then came another fall of stairs leading down, with, at their head, a slit of window covered by a ‘grill’. Looking out, Raoulin realised himself to be in a tall tower of the house. He saw the pebbled slope of roofs, and, to his surprise, noticed the distant miniature of the Temple-Church adrift like a promontory in soft haze.

Taking the downward stair, he next arrived against a low door, which for an amazement opened.

There lay a garden, walled apart from the rest.

It had been made for a woman, he supposed; even through the riot of weeds and ivy, a map of vestal symmetry was apparent. A garden of more southern climes, modelled, maybe, on the classical courts of the Roman. Clipped ilex and conifer that had burst from shape, a tank of marble all green with lichen and with a green velvet scum upon it. The wrecks of arbours were visible, and a charming statue, a young girl in a graceful tunic, holding up an archaic oil-lamp which once it had been possible to kindle.

Raoulin trod down paths, breaking the skeins of creeper with his elegant shoes, the ivy trying to detain him by clutching at the points of his sleeves and hose.

No birds sang in that garden of emerald green. He knew it had been made for her – or that she had made it her own.

Therefore, he was not startled, reaching the end of an avenue, to confront the bank of yew in which gaped a black frontage: the arched portico of a mausoleum.

The tomb was not very big, nor very old, quite fresh. He read with ease the name on the arch in its bannering of stone. While, student-scholar that he was, he had no trouble either with the Latin underneath.

Helise d’Uscaret
Brought a bride to this House
Now at the court of Death below

A huge lock maintained the entrance of the tomb. But, thought Raoulin, leaning on a tree, a ghost could pass straight through all walls, of wood, iron or granite.

Useless then to fasten up his own chamber. Even had he dreamed of doing so.

He wished to be served his supper that night in his rooms. He did not question the hag. He told her nothing. He did not even note she had put some morsels of beef into his stew, as requested.

During the evening, he glanced upon a few books, and partly turned his mind towards the morning. But the Sachrist had lost its stature.

In a strange condition he took himself early to bed, soon after the City bells had rung the Hesperus. (He would need to rise at Prima Hora.)

He lay on his back, besieged by sensuality, and lovely listless desires that had no need to exert themselves or to hold back. Lethargy stole slowly but certainly upon him, the harbinger. Sleep came in drifts, easily, totally, before the window had quite darkened.

But she,
she
did not come at all.

Though he had been trained to be something of a thinker, Raoulin was not properly a dreamer. Where he inclined to poetry, it was the cadence of the moment.

The ghost had failed to keep their assignation, and continued to fail.

Within a month, unsupplied by anything further uncanny, and by then thoroughly embroiled in the student life of the university, Raoulin had put the green-eyed haunt aside. It is true that he referred privately to the house as “bewitched” and even once in conversation with a fellow student had described his address as “d’Uscaret the ghost mansion.” But the fellow student had only absently remarked that among the desuetudinous old houses of Ducal times, there were scarcely any that did not have either a phantom or a curse.

By day the university, which was run rather on the classical lines, worked its claws into his brain, and Raoulin caught a fever of learning only before intimated. By night he had now friends of the same feather, unlike his leery brothers, with whom to go debating and drinking. More often than not, as the first month enlarged to a plural, Raoulin did not bother to sup at his lodging, but dined in some cheap tavern with his comrades, went to a cock-fight, or to watch in their season the street players, who would set up their stages under the walls of the Sacrifice, or such commemorative plague churches as Our Lady of Ashes. His head was either burnished with wine or bright with ideas, the licence or strictures of Petronius, Petrarch, and Pliny the Other, the miracles of Galen. Raoulin was aware he was happy, but wisely, like a superstitious savage in some travelogue of the Caesars, did not name his state.

With the wine-shops and bookshops and passing shows, temporal or religious, he was soon familiar. Not so after all with the brothels. Some caution from home had stuck, concerning dread diseases, and heartless females intent only on robbery. Raoulin had been accustomed to the wholesome but difficult girls of the village, or to celibacy perforce.

The ghost had fired his blood, but that was only to be expected. Women were the Devil’s, and if dead or damned, their power must be irresistible. You could not be blamed for fancying a ghost.

But the phantom came no more to tickle him in helpless sleep.

Instead it was Joseph who caught his arm and said, “Tomorrow is a Holy Day.”

“Good. Let us be holy,” replied Raoulin.

Joseph laughed, and the dark sunlight of evening glinted on his eye-glasses and the silver tags of his points – for Joseph was not poor.

“I had another notion in mind. Over the river is a tavern, by name the
Black Smith
. Behind lies a house which calls itself the
Sweet Cup
.”

“Ah ha,” said Raoulin cautiously.

“The girls are clean, you have my word,” said Joseph. “I’ve been there.”

“I have a treatise on the fifth humour –”

“First come and console the possibly non-existent other four. The world is for man’s enjoyment.”

On the board of the tavern was a mighty Nubian – the eponymous smith – who, swinging high his hammer, was about to crush the noddle of a fallen enemy sprawled across the anvil. Raoulin regarded this sign with interest, disfavour, and amusement. They drank no more than a token goblet, however, before going through a hind door and out across a yard. Here a ladder had been fixed, seeming to ascend into a hayloft. “What kind of pastoral cubby is this?” demanded Raoulin jollily: the one goblet had been of the strong kind. “Never fear, you shall see wonders,” answered Joseph.

They managed the ladder and so got into the loft. It seemed bare, and they crossed in near blackness.

The far end of the loft gave them a shut door. Joseph knocked loudly in five spaced raps.

Presently a tiny aperture, like the spy-hole of a nunnery, was opened, and someone looked out at them invisibly. A woman’s voice inquired: “Who is there?”

“Two men.”

“Are you thirsty?” asked the voice.

“For a sweet cup,” said Joseph.

Apparently all this was in the nature of a password. The door of the brothel came unbarred, and they were let through.

Raoulin stared. He was in a lobby, the plaster of whose walls was covered by paintings of a vivid and obscene nature.

There a shepherd disrobed a shepherdess by means of his crook, there a minstrel, his curvaceous viol put by, gently bowed the naked breasts of a lady instead – and there a priapic faun frolicked with two dryads in garlands of grapes and vine leaves. Swerving about from this, Raoulin encountered the door-keeper herself, who was startlingly clad in the draped garment of an antique Roman lady, a thing of such fine gauze that through it every contour, glint and shade of her otherwise nudity might be seen.

This nymph greeted them with an Eastern flourish.

“Will you drink of the bowl of joy?”

“We
will
,” said Joseph.

The nymph ran her glance across Raoulin. Her eyes were edged with kohl and her cheeks powdered. Her face had on more clothing than her body.

“Do you know the custom of the house?”

Joseph nodded. Raoulin, his blood thundering in his ears, was prepared to learn it.