The Book of the Beast Read online

  "Heros," said Lady d'Uscaret, and then, after a second, "you should have been a priest. If I had had any say - '

  "And I mine, mother. It was the only chance for me."

  "That drunkard I wed, that disgrace to our name, that clod. A fool in everything." In the umbra of the statue they hung, neither looking at the other, not speaking.

  Then she said quickly, "We must never fear shadows. It strengthens them. What are the nightmares of your childhood? What, you and I to credit a delusion?" But suddenly she seized hold of him. She clung to him, and her flat hardness was like petrification. And he, he bowed his head until it rested on her

  shoulder. One could not see his face. Yet they were like any mother and son in a scene of awful grief. And then they drew apart, and this might never have happened.

  "In a month," he said, "I'll be in another country."

  "As you think fit," she said. "Yes. We're in accord." When they had vacated the garden, Helise stayed rooted in the tree.

  Her stomach heaved as if she were indeed pregnant. But all she had truly discovered was that Heros would soon leave her.

  That night, the door of the bedchamber opened. Heros entered. Behind the screen with its running of white dogs and grey hawks, the gentleman undressed his master. Then the gentleman, as ever, discreetly left. Heros approached the bed in his silken robe. And Helise ceased to breathe or think.

  "Sad little wife," said Heros, looking at her not in complacency, or pity, definitely without excitement or intent. "We did you an ill-turn. I'm sorry for it, Helise. Will you forgive me, and pray for me sometimes?"

  "Yes," she murmured.

  "Have they told you? In a few days, I'll be away on the Duke's errands." Someone must have told her, superfluously after she had spied.

  "Yes, my lord."

  "You'll be glad to see me gone," he said. "Believe me, your disappointments weren't my aim."

  Helise let out her breath in a shivering sigh. She did not look at him any more, and he went about the room as usual, dousing the candles, so the dark tide came sweeping from the stones, and followed him to the bed's foot, and there he blew out the last candle, and blackness filled the room and the bed alike.

  And he and she were alone inside that blackness, like two birds shut inside a cage.

  Never before, not even on the first night, had she been so conscious of him, his proximity, as he joined her in the bed. The movement of his flesh and limbs against the sheet, the whisper of his hair over the

  pillow. She felt a warmth from him like the radiance of a cool flame.

  He did not speak to her again. In a short space, his respiration assumed the levelness of sleep. Could he really render himself to oblivion so readily? It was some cantrip he knew, this knack for slumber.

  But she must lie awake and think of him. Of his nearness. And if he slept, might she not approach him more closely? Would he wake and chide her?

  Helise swam through the sheets and her hands encountered him, as the swimmer in sightless deep ocean encounters another living thing, with a galvanic shock.

  He was naked. Like Cupido, like the god. With her palms she had contacted his flank, the architecture of ribs under its suit of skin.

  He had not woken, no, he had not. Therefore might she discover him once again? Or, more crazily, lawlessly, why not, like Psyche, look at him?

  No sooner had the fancy taken hold of her than it seemed she must do it. She could no longer control her need, or savagery.

  She slid from the coverings and sought her way by touch along the bed, a mile of stuffs and ungiving framework, until she found the chest, the candle, and the tinder set by.

  She struck the spark. She might say she had heard some noise, or - at long last - that she could not sleep.

  But not a murmur of protest issued from the bed. And when the fire leapt up on the wax, shielding it with her own body, she glanced about. He had not moved.

  Like Psyche, and with all her stealth, Helise stole back again, along the length of the couch, cupping the candle flame. The curtains of the bed were drawn back, she had no necessity, as Psyche had, to lift them away. It was the sheet, the covers of brocade, these she meant to pull aside.

  She must kneel up on the bed. She did so. The candle palpitated and steadied, flickering only with her rapid pulse, as if illumination itself sprang from her heart.

  She leaned over him, her left hand now on the coverlet.

  His head was turned from her, the blond hair rayed upon the pillow. Bare, the shoulder presented itself to her for the scald of spilled burning matter. She must be wary.

  And as she leaned there, her left hand getting its slow grip on the sheet, he stirred.

  Helise started away. Instinctual precaution made her thrust the candle aside to the length of her arm. The flame bent, flattened, sputtered - and the room reeled. But he, after all, did not wake. He had merely pressed his face further into the pillow, away from a light unconsciously perceived.

  The walls and ceiling settled, the candle-flame resumed its steady trembling. Helise looked down on the sleeping man, and saw the hair had been caught away now from the nape of his neck. A strange shadow emerged at this place, from the roots of the hair, coiling along the spine, to dissolve between his

  shoulder-blades.

  With caution, she brought the candle close again. The shadow dimmed but did not move. Helise leant nearer. She inhaled the clean maleness of his flesh and longed to brush her lips against the flax of hair, and

  saw the shadow on him was a scar, a curious plating, a trail of tarnished studs - she could not make them out. Like a lizard's scales.

  It was a birthmark. (Had not her own maid had a raised discoloured nubbin on her knee, the shape of a star?) Helise put out her hand to finger the mark, the sweet flaw in his beauty - stayed herself, reached again for the edge of the sheet.

  She stripped the covers from him deftly, in a leisurely receding wave, inch by inch, her heart hammering in her breast.

  Would he wake now? No, he would not. His sorcerous sleep was like a breathing death.

  She had never seen a man's nakedness, save in a statue or a painting, there never fully. He had the appearance of both statue and painting as he stretched there in the light amid the shores of darkness, adrift in the bed, his skin more swarthy than the linen, the smooth musculature carved and scarcely

  troubled with breath. Not stone, perhaps, but some strong ashen wood, tinted faintly to the hues of life, in order to deceive, and equipped with quiescent manhood, something at which the young girl had guessed, dismaying to her more in its first-seen familiarity than by anything alien, the tempter, the serpent of sex.

  Careless of the glimmering, burning tallow, Helise bowed over the body of her husband. Her kisses printed themselves along his arm, his side.

  But the hot wax did not drop upon him, and her mouth, the helpless small noise she could not now keep herself from making - these did not break in the membrane of his slumber.

  He was enchanted. And she dared do no more.

  Helise quenched the candle, and removed herself from his vicinity. He did not rouse even at that.

  The chamber seemed distended and tinderous with her solitary sins.

  It was because of his aversion to her that he made the opportunity to be gone. He did not want her. If she had been able to cause him desire, how could he have resisted? He would then have remained. He would have been her lover.

  But it was a witchcraft on him.

  Did a woman then have no skill in such magic? It was the most ancient sorcery, Eve's art, practised at the foot of the apple tree in Eden, that which brought down the race of rnankind.

  They said, at d'Uscaret, they muttered that Ysanne… that Ysanne was clever in women's business. "Cherish," had said fat old Ysanne, "she must overcome her blushes."

  "I'm unsure what is meant. The lady should be plainer," said Ysanne. Her beady eyes were cunning. Helise sat in her chair and her humiliation, clenching herself to endure.
/>   "My Lord Heros is tired of me. Now he departs the City. How shall I provide an heir if - if - '

  "If he doesn't assist you. Yes. A woman's lot is a rare fix." Ysanne had changed her tune. Now she and

  Helise were co-conspirators against the masculine order, conceivably the masculine God.

  "They say - '

  "And what do they say?"

  "That you can make a potion that will - enhance - '

  "That will make a girl too good to be left .alone. That will swell the male member so it must get busy. I

  can do that. And several other things." "I think - he won't visit me again."

  "Ah, that's tricky. I'll give you a charm. It will call him. If he doesn't arrive directly, then you must find some excuse to bid him. The charm will render him pliable. Then something for his wine, and an unction I'll give you to rub in your skin, very fragrant. Leave it to me," said Ysanne. "I've always relished that little chain you wear, with the pearl."

  Helise removed the chain. She held it out to Ysanne.

  "No, no. Are you offering that to me? But lady, I serve the house. I'm your slave." Then seeing the chain flutter, knowing Helise inept, Ysanne quickly added, "You're too kind, madam. I thank you. It's always safer to seal a bargain. Naturally, this is a secret." And with the pearl in her bosom off she went, leaving Helise to pace about, between repentance and vaunting, dread and disbelief, praying with untame transgression for Heaven to grant her profane hope.

  She wore the charm, a mouse's sack of herbs, under her shift. Not seeing Heros d'Uscaret by night, morning, afternoon, she sent him word. Through servants, she entreated he would speak to her before his journey. The servants said they had not found him. Further inquiry told her that her husband was dining at the house of this family and that. That her husband was dining at the palace with the Duke. That her husband was in his tower, where they did not venture to bother him except at the summons of his father, or his mother.

  Days ebbed. She stitched them into her embroidery, and picked them out again, but still they were lost. Ysanne's herbal charm did not work. Her other mixtures would be as useless, the unction, the drug for

  the wine. She would not address herself to Ysanne again.

  Then, from a dry husk or two let fall by the voice of Lady d'Uscaret, Helise had made known to her that in three nights, Heros would leave the City. She did not even recall - perhaps they had never mentioned it to her - where he was bound. Whether by ship or overland route. The date of his return had not been coined.

  There was a page who sometimes waited on Helise when the household gathered. She supposed he had been designated hers. On the stair she beckoned him.

  "Where is my Lord Heros?"

  "In House Lyrecourt, across the City."

  "You will follow me now and I will give you a letter for my lord. Then go with it to the door of d'Uscaret and wait for him. Wait all night if you must."

  "He'll be home at midnight," said the page, perkily privy to the doings of her husband as she was not. "That's as may be. Only behave as I tell you."

  In the bedchamber-by the void hearth, the great chimney-piece with its falcons either side, she wrote:

  'Call upon me tonight, my lord, or, such is my misery, I shall kill myself and damn my soul for ever."

  What fashioned these words, succinct and awful, she could not decide. The Devil? It could not be her own desperate mind. She was a fool, but Satan was wise.

  But then, would Heros attend to her threat? It seemed Satan ascertained he would.

  She handed the letter to the page, folded in a scarf which she had smeared with Ysanne's unction.

  Alone, she anointed her body, rubbing the spicy-smelling oil into her breasts, her thighs, her throat and belly. The friction maddened her. She sprinkled the powder into some wine. She wondered in alarm at all she did. But now, as if a bell had struck the hour, she knew that her prayers were heard in Hell.

  She heard too, finally, the midnight Matines tolled from the Sacrifice, and not many minutes after, a dog barked under the wall. It seemed then she felt the reverberation of the shutting of a door.

  Time passed, or else time was stilled. And in the midst of the candles' shining, as if in a slab of crystal, Helise waited.

  Until the great door of the bedchamber was opened.

  On a frame of dark, her pale husband stood looking at her. "What is it, madam, that you want of me?"

  Some feminine slyness had kept her in her gown, her hair bound in its metal caul. The same slyness stayed her on the spot, staring at the floor, her hands clasped under her breast.

  "My letter to you," she said, "told everything."

  "No, nothing. Are you so desperate?" he said coldly. "You seem in command of yourself."

  "I die of sadness." she said. "But since you don't care for me, I strive to hide the hurt. What do I want? Only courtesy. Not to be the mock of the house. That you should say farewell before you leave me for ever."

  Ah, Satan, her tutor.

  Now Heros had closed the door and advanced into the room. Helise did not lift her eyes, although he was before her.

  "It isn't to be helped," he said quietly. "But since you wish it, I'm here to say farewell. And for this talk of death…"

  "To kill myself? Why not? What should I live for?"

  "You are God's. What worse insult can you offer the Creator than to fling back His present in His face? Do you think He would ever forgive you? Through the endless centuries until Doomsday, He would not."

  He spoke as sternly as any friar. She recalled the conversation between himself and his mother in the garden. To be a priest, his only chance. He was wrong. She was his chance. Her love, so strong and vital that it seared, this would set him free.

  "You must be my guide," she whispered. "Then cancel every idea of self-destruction."

  "I will remember your words. If you were here to guide me - '

  "Helise, I can't remain. Sweet girl," he said, suddenly very tenderly, "you must guide yourself. Let your own angel instruct you. You're so young - not one iota of blame…' And he ceased speaking, and she knew that his concentration was centred wholly on her. Either her vehemence, or Ysanne's ointment, possibly both together, had taken hold of him. She had come to life for Heros, with all that implied.

  Saying nothing she turned from him and poured the wine into a glass. She offered it to him, meekly, still her eyes lowered, afraid he would glimpse the fires in them.

  "The cup of parting," said Helise. She employed the phrases of courtly songs, these came with facility, now she needed them, or Satan sent them, for how could she have a vocabulary to manage this?

  He accepted the wine slowly. He did not drink, but stood regarding her. Then, at last, at last, he raised the cup.

  She looked, and saw him swallow, once, twice.

  "What wine is this?" he said absently. His eyes were fixed on her. At their intensity a wonderful terror submerged her. Never, in any of their dealings, had he studied her in this way. It was the gaze of desire, or so it seemed. He drank again, not taking his eyes from her. And then he frowned, and said, "There's something in the wine - did you mean to poison me?"

  "Oh no!" she cried. Her heart seemed cloven by its hammering. "But - what is it? What have you done to me?"

  "A love potion," she said. The admission was safe now. "Then, there's no choice."

  He smiled, grinned with the deadly dead mirth she had witnessed once before, and tilting the glass he drained it, and let it go. It crashed in bits upon the floor.

  "Perhaps, Helise," he said, "perhaps you haven't been sensible. Come here." And when she took a step, he took several more to meet her, and caught her between his hands. "Love potions," he said. "Did you think I didn't want you? For every night spent in bed with you, first a draught to make me sleep. So that I shouldn't be tempted. For you're adorable, my white wife. Better than any dream. But perhaps the dreams won't matter now - '