The Secret Book of Paradys (7 page)

Books all over the floors and I stepped on them. Where the Italian chest squared across the window, a movement, too. Then she stood on glass-paned red fire, black-cloaked, cowled like a priest – Yes, the Devil was in it.

I felt her eyes, before I saw them; they drew me forward. If I had been bound, unable, physically, to go to her, my spirit would have gone to her in spite of the flesh, and my heart leapt out of my body. No. There was no need of that. No chain could have held me, seeing her there, her eyes looking into mine.

“I have been waiting for you,” she said. Her voice was very low, very dark. It did not seem to come from her at all, but out of the light, the shadow. “Since the funeral, I have come here each evening. Seven days, seven nights.”

There must have been a key he had given her. Or did she melt through walls, the way her kind might do – not her
kind
. There was only Antonina.

“Such protestations,” she said. “Then to make me wait.”

“I was here with you,” I said. “I must have been.”

“Yes, I think you were. Sometimes, a flicker of the edge of your sleeve, your hair catching a burnish. There, or there. Your ghost. But now, it is you.”

There were also books scattered round the chest. Standing on them, careless of them as I had been, had made her taller than me. She stood above me, in the halo of the dying window, like a madonna. I could only just make out the pallor of her face, which I had kissed, the pale mouth, but the eyes, like the voice, were in a separate dimension. They lived and blazed on their own.

I did not ask her why she had changed to me. It was superfluous; besides, only this made any sense. The denial was the lie.

“Your husband?” I inquired, with no conviction.

But she answered stilly, “He will do as I tell him. He is only my servant. He serves me. Him I may tell and instruct what he may desire of me.”

“What now?”

“Whatever you wish,” she said.

“And you?” I said. “You, oh, you.”

She put out her hand and touched me then, first my forehead between the eyes, next the base of my throat, then above the heart. Finally she took up my left hand and touched the ruby ring. I felt each touch, cold flame, like a kiss on my forehead, starting a race in my breast. Even through the stone of the ring, I felt her.

She said, “I divine that you understand, Andre St Jean.”

Her eyes held me, close to her, held me far off. I could do nothing to her yet, she would tell me when, and very soon.

“Philippe’s not watching,” I said.

“I thought that you imagined he might be.”

“No. He believed in nothing. No god. Nothing beyond himself as he was. Nothing after death. He’s dead then.”

“But you believe differently. In God, do you believe in God, Andre?”

“Death is God,” I said. “Life is Man. The day we are born begins our love affair with death.”

Now
, said her eyes.

I stepped up on the books with her and she slipped down to a little height, her head against my shoulder, tilted back, her lips parting. Her hair was like a river flowing through my hands, and the hooded cloak, and under it her skin, only some silken thing between us, and her small, her beautiful breasts –

We slid down beside the carved chest, on to the dust and the books, with the window turning wan and grey above us. We slid into the dark –

(Once, somewhere on the shores of those black spaces, the rocking-horse stirred, settling, as if someone had climbed up on to his back.)

How slow the rhythm, now, the rhythm of Death’s River – it was she who guided me, through the deep spirals of the river’s course, its deepest pools. Stars filled the attics, splashed on the air.

Ecstasy was always near, it came and went, swelling, singing, widening, never finished, never begun. Her coldness was warm now, like the snow. Her lips which had come to my throat so quietly, had begun to burn. Her lips were fire. She drew me down and down, into the caverns of the night, where sometimes, far away, I heard myself groan, or her murmuring voice like a feather drifting – Her mouth was fire and her body was snow and the cradling night held both of us. The long endless resonant spasms came and went and came and went like the throb of strings, like the circling wake of the slender boat. She was the ferryman. It seemed to me I had not ceased to look at her. That never once, meeting mine, her burning eyes had closed.

It was almost morning, and all the stars had died … Whose face was this,peeking into mine so dolefully? And these damned hands, fiddling with me,worrying at me.

I struck him off. He recoiled.

“Oh monsieur. Christ knows, I thought you were a dead man.”

I was lying flung across the volumes and the old carpets of the attics. Above me towered a hill of carven chest, and over there the wooden horse
with its mad and pitiless eye. Between, miles up above me, the carter with a candle, and the bloom of false dawn on him from the window.

“I waited for you, monsieur. And then, I confess, I went and got myself a drink or two. A cold study it was, waiting out there. But I thought, Well, he knows what he’s about I suppose. But then, having come back, and nothing in the cart, the bell goes for midnight. I knock on the door. No answer. So then I curl up, in my cart, see, and I take a mite of sleep. No trouble. Once some woman passes. I think to myself, Did she come out of the house, now? Is
that
it? But then she vanishes away and I forget her. Then I’m blowing on my fingers for the cold, wishing I could do the service for my toes, and finally I hear five o’clock. Up to the door again, and now it’s open. So I think then you meant me to come up, and up I come. What a house, monsieur. Horrible, so dark, and empty. They said in that drinking-place, it’s haunted by the young man that died here. Vicious murder. But you know that. Then I can hear a noise. I nearly perish of fear I don’t mind admitting.”

Through all this I had lain on my back, smiling, my eyes taking in the beams in the pointing ceiling, watching the light begin to return from the dead, the sky deciding if it would put on pinkness or only paleness. What sound could he possibly have heard? Some moan from me, perhaps, sprawled here with my shirt open and my breeches unbuttoned, a ludicrous shambles of some dream I had been having of a woman I wanted to possess.

“It was that rocking-horse,” said the carter, “creaking and bucking away. No one on it, unless it was you, monsieur, and you fell off. Well, then, here you are. I reckoned you’d been set on. Blood-stains on your shirt. But there’s a bite there, on your neck. That will be a rat, no doubt of it. The house is full of them, all rustling away behind the walls. Now if you’ll listen to me, you should go straight to a doctor with that bite. Nor you shouldn’t have brought a lady here.”

Still on my back, I took out some money, and tossed it to him. He caught it, but looked at me reproachfully.

As he watched me, I sat up and put my clothes to rights. The blood that spotted my shirt had dried to the colour of rotten plums in the half-light. It was the way Philippe’s blood had appeared to me. When I tried to rise, I fell.

The carter aided me down all the stairs.

It was true then. Not a dream. Not, not a dream. Antonina –

“And you have a fever, you’re burning,” the lugubrious carter congratulated me.

I had not collected my bequest. The carter, not I, closed the door of Philippe’s house with a senechal’s attention. Then, strong-armed, he put me into his cart, where I lay semi-conscious, euphoric. In this manner I was trundled home, to my landlady’s dismay.

I threw myself on my bed, clothed and stupid. Let them have the day, any who wanted it. Sleep, let me sleep. Tonight I would go back to her. And she would come to me.

Thinking of her, as she had been for me, all of it rushed up and overpowered me. Down I fell, through the abyss of the bed, past a grinning rocking-horse with the spectre of Philippe cavorting on its back, past Baron von Aaron in a waiter’s uniform, past pages of my books, my childhood, past all the hours of my life, seen as when drowning.

Unfinished, the manuscript lay on the table before the window. There was no need to write any more of it. Let me live it now, quickly through, to the last sentence. And there end. Amen.

When I woke again, it was very late. I wakened with the knowledge of having made a grievous error – oh God, the midnight bell was sounding from Our Lady of Ashes over the river. What had I done?

I must get up, find myself clean linen, run across the City to the house –

I remember I reached the table where the manuscript lay. Nothing else.

I woke again, as in a nightmare, somehow on the bed and dawn was returning. Someone must help me now. Some demon or angel. My head seemed full of the galloping of hoofs as I hurried about. But I was stronger. I could wash myself, I could look into the pitted mirror and even pick up the razor with a steady hand.

How long before I could be ready, how long before I could essay the stairs, the streets? My plan was already made. I must go directly to the house on Clock-Tower Hill. She had said, he was her servant, nothing else. The only impediment had been Antonina herself, when she was afraid of me, before she surrendered herself to the truth.

There was straw on the roadway. This meant that someone on that wealthy avenue was seriously ill. They had put it down to muffle the wheels and hoofs of passing traffic, but there was also a liveried man sitting in the gate, to make sure of proper silence, and perhaps to turn away visitors before they jangled the door bell. It was her gateway he was seated in, and he wore the banker’s livery.

I went up to him. “What is the matter? Is the Baron unwell?”

“No, monsieur. It is Madame who is very sick.”

I gaped at him, and he, more circumspectly, at me. I was dishevelled enough. The day, growing hot, beat down on us both.

“You say – she – Madame von Aaron – is sick.”

“Yes, monsieur. Monsieur, please don’t go up to the door.”

“But I – must – I will inquire of the Baron –”

“Very well, monsieur. I will see to it. Who shall I say?”

I swallowed, my throat seemed engorged and hurt me. I glared at the man haughtily. “Say Andre St Jean.”

“Very well, monsieur. One moment.”

And leaving his post, he went in and around out of my sight, presumably to a side door. I waited a few minutes, expecting to be turned away, to make some scene there on the pavement before the house, having a picture of running to a window and smashing through it.

Was it a plague, the ancient one called the Death? Had we both caught it, she and I, in the house near to the Obelisk where they had burned the corpses centuries ago? Only a hundred years ago, it had returned, that plague. Cloaked death had stalked the City. The crematory chimneys had turned the day sky black, the sky of night into blood, with their ceaseless smokes – so many of the writers of the day had left accounts of it in their journals.

“Please come with me, monsieur.”

The doorman was back. He took me up to the front door, which had now opened. Inside, another man led me over the polished floor, into the side-parlour where I had been shown previously, and there left me.

Would it happen again? She, coming in, telling me she was afraid I had had to wait. And then would I fall on her like a wolf, unable to control either lust or terror? Why did you shut up the house this way? Oh, to be free for you, only for you, she would answer me.

The blinds were down. The room sank in a dull parchment shade. Even the little clock had left off ticking. My hands shook, I paced about. Then the door opened. I turned to it with a stifled shout. The Baron entered.

He looked more frightened than I, that was the first, the only thing I really noticed.

“It is very good of you to call,” he said.

I stared at him. We had both gone mad. Dispense with these ramblings then.

“Tell me what has happened –” I cried.

“I regret – an illness, an hereditary ailment. We had hoped –”

“Doctors,” I said, “who is attending her?”

“The most capable physicians, of course, monsieur, I assure you. And among our own household, the use of herbal medicine is not unknown – but in any event –” he broke off. He said, with sudden and sinister calm, “You should not be optimistic, Monsieur St Jean.”

I clutched one of the chairs. I said, “What do you mean? You’d let her die –”

“Oh monsieur, please. You do astound me.”

“Let me see her at once! Where is she? I’ll search your house – throw me
out and I’ll return with the City police. You are not a citizen, Baron. An alien – they can deal with you –”

“Please, monsieur, these threats, these outcries, are uncalled for, and wasteful of your strength.”

“You say to me she’s dying –”

“I tell you there is no hope at all.”

I stood there staring. I stared, but saw nothing, and when he poured the cognac for me and put it in my hand, I drank it down, though it might well have been poison. What did I care for that?

“I will tell you, Monsieur St Jean, what it would be best for you to do. Go away now, and come back, perhaps in the early evening.”

“I must see her,” I said. I took his arm, his hand, imploring him. “Please, for God’s sake –”

“Tonight then, if you wish,” he said. “It’s not possible now.”

“You expect me to go, and leave you to get on with killing her –”

He was so serene now before my ranting. He said to me, “But she has told you my place, has she not?” He withdrew his hand from my grasp, gently. He put his own hand upon my shoulder. “Now do as I say, monsieur. It is beyond any of us, but I’ll assist you as best I can, for as long as I can. You have my sympathies.”

I laughed. This was what I should have said to him.

“I love her,” I said. How vapid, such words. “If you must kill someone, then here I am.”

“I know you love her. I have nothing to do with any killing.”

Without knowing what I did, I walked towards the door. I could dash up the stair, and fling open all the doors – the commotion of that might finish her, if what he said was a fact. But it was all a surreality. She could not die.