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Apparently it is her intention to attract attention to-day, to make conquests, and she succeeds completely. She is the lioness of the Cascine. People nod to her from carriages; on the footpath people gather in groups to discuss her. She pays no attention to anyone.
VENUS IN FURS, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
A LETTER, sent from a Spa in the Caucasus, to Bel Tempo Manor in Sicily, addressed to Lord O. MERRYWEATHER
My dear Husband,
Having been sent here to cool my ardor in the hot springs, I have been delaying writing you, in part because writing you is (to be expected) an Inflammatory Act upon my mind and my body and in part because I have little to tell. The water here is full of minerals I am sure are doing me good, the gardens lush and their sculptural arrangements splendidly snatching at Classical, and the company largely quiet. What is a woman to do here but read and bathe and ruminate? I examine my body by candle-light to see if the change of scenery is doing me as well as I am told. If I think of you while the candle burns, well—I shall not tell you my thoughts. As Husband, you may imagine well enough.
I write you now because at last the company has borne up something interesting: a new female guest here, golden-haired and magnificently restless. She is renting the rooms above my own, and I could hear her pacing up and down all that first night. I realised, contagiously wakeful, that I was no longer the most bored woman present, and as such, I resolved at the once that we should become acquainted.
The next day I could see her walking into the sculpture-garden below my window (and I suppose hers as well) and found myself for want of anything better to do than to follow her there. I found her alone, at the bench under the statue of Venus. Her head was bowed, and she was examining her fingers, which were long and white and crested with rings. Even here, where simplicity (or at least its pretence) is so much prized, she is not a minimalist: her gowns are red and gold, and she continues to wear her jewels.
“At prayer?” I asked her in jest, and she rose from her seated position.
“No—hardly!”
She cast a glance around, and seeing no one but me, and nowhere particularly to go but here, contented herself with pacing at the front of the statue, skirts awhirl. “No good in prayer whatsoever,” she said, “not here, at the end of the world, where it would be the profoundest waste of thought.” She looked up and saw the statue, as if for the first time. “And not to this marble Whore, in any case.”
You know my weakness for pagan charm, Husband, and she simply exuded it. There at the foot of the statue, she had the look of an angry empress. She is splendidly, almost scandalously young, but she has the canniest eyes, and she tilts her chin with perfect authority, even when she is in childish distemper. I saw at once why she had been sent here, of course! tho’ it could just as easily have been that the setting, which so expected distemper, had made her temper careless. I, who have been trying with such earnest durance to make my soul quiet and my body sufficiently tepid, was quite thrilled with her. I only wished that we had gladiators here, that she might send them off to execution and cool her ardor in their blood. I tell you this with marital frankness: I rather think that might be a better remedy for the soul’s tempests than these little mountain towns and their endless supply of mineral water.
I told her of my, or our, sculpture garden at Bel Tempo, which of course is full of secular marble harlots, and she seemed cheered by the idea. She likes an English garden, or her family does. I asked her her name and she, as a sort of unlikely joke, told me it was Circe. “Not Medusa?” I asked, and her face went dark again.
“My father’s library is quite full of the stories of the ancients—don’t seek to trip me up among them! I shall not be bested like Medusa in my own story, with my head on someone else’s sword, and what’s more, I shall not turn men to a better form than they deserve. Women are transfigured in and out of stone in this story or that, but men are only ever this or that kind of swine,” she said to me. Then, cheering: “Besides which, I have been told my face is quite a delight to look upon.”
I reassured her that this was so. Indeed, she was the only woman I have ever met who could dismiss Venus herself as a mere harlot and seem to come off the better. I expect she knew it. I expect she knows exactly the measure of what she is capable. We beautiful women learn to catalogue ourselves early.
She asked me how far it was to the nearest Town. I told her not very, tho’ it was not very much like a Town. She asked me when the next regiment of Soldiers would be coming through. I thought it a strange request for a woman who had only just been declaiming against the porcine male will, when it is well known that soldiers outside of society are the most debased of them all, but she had such splendid authority when she asked, and such a great expectation of Plots ticking away in those twitchy fingers and bright eyes of hers, that I told her we had been warned of their proximity as likely within the month.
“A month!” she said, “too long—much too long!” But she fell into silence and permitted my company to distract her. She ate with me—one of our meagre, tasteless meals; I tell you, Husband, the Caucasian cuisine is nothing at all with the spice taken out—and spoke no more of the Soldiers.
I have so been wanting for company. How nice it shall to be to have—even temporarily—a makeshift sister in the shape of this Circe.
Your T.
An ENVELOPE, sent from Casterly House, Bath, to Casterly Manor, Lannis-on-the-Port; its contents numbering as follows:
one TELEGRAM (RETURNED)
K — C’S REENTRY INTO SOCIETY A REASONABLE SUCCESS STOP EXPECT SHALL REMAIN SO AS LONG AS WE KEEP HER COMPANY RESTRAINED STOP NOW FOR GOD’S SAKE KEEP HER GOOD AND QUIET STOP HAVE SENT J OFF TO FIGHT STOP MEET C AT TRAIN STOP HAND HER INTO GENNA’S CARE AND BE ON YOUR WAY — T
one LETTER (RESEALED)
Dear Uncle,
I do not oppose my Father’s will, of course. I do, however, VERY MUCH oppose being sent to a Second-Rate Country Cure to Calm my Nerves in this most Trying Time of my Widowhood. If my Brother is off calming HIS nerves at War then I can at the very least elect to Calm my Nerves somewhere far more Genteel, Discreet, and Exotically Diverting than Bath, where you can find just EVERYONE at this time of the year.
Therefore, make it known to my Father that I have taken myself to a Private Locale that is far more suitable for a Young Lady In Repose. I’m sure I don’t blame YOU, Uncle. You can hardly be expected to know the particulars of Feminine Care.
C—
(Signature otherwise illegible, blotted with ink)
one NOTE (RESIGNED)
God d—t.
K
A LETTER, sent from a Spa in the Caucasus, to Bel Tempo Manor in Sicily, addressed to Lord MERRYWEATHER
My dear Husband,
Things continue reasonable well here. The nights begin to take on the September nip, but I am quite warm. My newfound sorceress-sister keeps me warm.
Shall I tell you of her? I suppose you would like nothing better. Very well: she is very fair and I suppose that does our friendship well, as I am dark and we both quite like being set off. She is very Circe indeed: was not that same island witch the daughter of some bastion of the sun? The sun has come to hide out in our little niche of the Caucasus. I take great pleasure in watching her shine, even shine in frustration, perhaps especially in frustration. Her discontents suit her—they speak of something specific beneath, not only distemper. There is a furnace beneath her simmering, tho’ I have not yet discovered it.
I am some comfort. She takes well to clever female company. She is literate but impatient with novels, fondest, as she had presented herself, of the Classics, and therein fondest of their wars. We spoke of Homer over a bottle of thin Georgian wine in her borrowed room, and she would not have a thing to do with pretty Helen or her simpering boy in a leopard pelt. “Not even an Aphrodite!” I said to her, and she laughed.
“Aphrodite bled on the field. I see no good in being a goddess if a man can strike you down so easily.”
She put up her feet, which were bare, on the couch. Her robe—she has a most marvelous robe that she retires to in the evening, red velvet, its collar fur and tawny as a lion’s—fell back just so, along her calves, baring her white ankles. “Hera?” I teased, and she gave me a dark look.
“Do try to be less simple. Achilles, of course.”
How funny—to see one who cut a figure so utterly Female proclaim herself the greatest of Achaean warriors! But her eyes were cut emeralds and I chose not to laugh. I thought of Achilles in his tents, wine in his mouth, sick fury in his stomach, dutiful lover at his knee, and my swallowed laughter melted away in the back of my throat. I thought of Achilles athlete-naked on his battle bed, limbs in golden sculpture, and I thought of my dear Circe’s elegant lineaments beneath her robe, and I found myself very stirred indeed.
You know my Nature, Husband. It is my Nature keeps me here, decadent in my fasts as I shall be in my feasts. If I position myself in the Classics, it is hardly as a Goddess. I place myself among the Hetairae, those cleverest of women, with Ovid in their minds and grapes in their mouths and lyres in their hands and soft rugs from Turkey cushioning them as they lay naked and ready on the floor. You shall someday dare to be a Pericles, darling, and when you do I shall be your most willing Aspasia. Until then, I must comfort myself with the company of sorceresses with the sun beneath their skin.
I offered my continual presence: “Are you cold, my dearest?” I said to her.
She looked me over with those gemstone eyes and said: “I have my fur, my velvet.”
“I have no such finery, alas! I came in silks, in the latest part of spring. I weathered out a summer panting in the baths and wished I could wear nothing at all. It is different now that autumn is approaching.”
I was wearing my watered silk dressing gown and was, of course, shivering. You know I have no taste for cold. (I expect I shall be home soon, tho’ you understand my need to stay out this Venture.)
“In that case, you must of course stay with me.”
She extended her hand, like a concession. I took it and put it to my heart.
We gossiped freely by candle-light after that—or as freely as such a resolute Mystery could. The regiment is hard by on their way to the nearest town, fresh from bloodying up the Crimea. At talk of the Soldiers, she brightened up, visibly biting back the edge of her glee. When I asked why, she shook her head. “No reason,” she said, “none! Or if there is an Adventure to be had, you shall just have to wait and come along.”
I have an appetite for adventures of all sorts, and a dread curiosity to see what she is about. You shall be written of it. She shook off all talk of the Soldiers as Men after that and talked only of them as Warriors, of bayonets and body counts. She has an appetite for the stuff and an astonishing head for figures.
When the lamp guttered out, she drew back her sheet, and I accompanied her to bed. She is a little furnace of a woman; she would be just the thing in winter.
I put my lips to her neck, in inquisition, and she lay in my arms hot and still as a poker. I waited, for you know I have patience for all things Interesting, and nothing is quite so Dull as lack of ardour—I waited to see what would come of her, and slowly she began to move. Her eyes were closed when she kissed me, and she bit quite savagely at my lips. How pleasantly Unnatural I found her! While she is not the first of her Sex that I have had—you well know—she is the one who is most utterly consumed with her own abnormality in the act of having Me. I have never felt quite so uncanny and depraved as I did with the Sorceress against my breast.
I began to make inventory of her with my hands, lips, &c., but when I drew back the robe to unveil her flesh, she slapped my hand savagely. She drew back, drew the robe from her shoulders, was quite as sculptural as I had thought. I made to compliment her, and then thought of her talk of Marble Whores and contented myself with surveying the art-work of her body standing at the fore of the bed. “It is My bed,” she said, “and this shall be an exercise of My Will.”
“Of course it shall,” I said, and lay back on the sheets, and made myself a wonderful odalisque at her bequest.
Her hands were swift and there was even a kind of clumsiness enacted even in their graceful shape, but I was ready for her and it did not at first seem an ill thing, to be taken upon so. You know I am not—a Quiet woman, that I tend toward Reactivity—and the sounds I made seemed to excite her. She was Young, I thought, and the young are rough, impulsive and unlearned. Her fingers were peremptory: a child-queen’s. A child-tyrant’s it turned out. I am a Quick woman, even with such an untaught pupil, and found it possible to manipulate myself to a kind of comfort, and then to a kind of Ecstasy under her sleek-fingered rough-maneouvring lovely hand.
I exclaimed—God knows what—and she put her other hand up in my hair, pulling it hard up from my ear. “Stop!” she said in my ear. “Be silent, be still. I did not give you leave to cry out.” Her other hand continued on the soft battleground she had made of me: I emitted a gasp, then, not in pleasure but in Pain, and I saw her eyes glow like a jungle cat’s. She drove at me again, and while there was something to be said for her utter lack of care for me or any other soul, the kind of careless brutality that only ever belonged to long-dead gods, it could not go on so for very long.
“Pretty Sorceress,” I said to her, touching her wrist. “I am none of the men who shipwreck themselves rough upon your shore, and I am not to be spitted so like a Swine.”
She took her hand back with a kind of disgust and turned her body away from me, her face lifted in fine high profile. She straightened the robe on her body, the fur framing her face. “I imagined you took pleasure in the degradation.”
I considered it. There would be pleasure in submission given, I told her, but not taken.
Her eyes were bright and terrible and accusatory. “You lay back as one accustomed to Degradation.”
“And you, Circe, when you lay back, is that an offer to be degraded? For a Ulysses to come and take you at sword-point, whereupon you shall lie on your back and give him his fill?”
I saw her teeth in the dark. “No! it is quite certainly not! but I have been schooled in the ills of my Nature, and while I have yet to repent one of them, I have been told they are ills all the same. Thus, if I am such an Unnatural form of Woman, then it stands to reason that the Natural takes pleasure in being an abject body, in compliance, in docility, in—yes!—degradation. I am a student of men, and of women in men’s regard, and I have been Taught. And you did offer yourself with such womanly submission that I imagined you would enjoy being treated as such—as a woman, that is.”
I would rather have liked to tell her a thing or two about the wedding night. Prudent yet, I bit my lip and told her no: that subjugation was an art higher than her vengeful little hands had learned to appreciate, as yet. I offered her my mouth as a kind of recompense, and she turned away, tossing her bright head.
“Well!” she said. “I see no good in what it is to Have you if I am not to Claim you. You may as well go to bed.”
I stretched, straightened my dressing-gown and gave the erstwhile Messalina a last look. “And shall I see you in the morning?”
“Yes—of course! Go off—dream quiet dreams.”
She said this last like a curse and lay her head down on the pillow. I shall see if the morning does not see her in a better temper, and if she is still ill at ease I shall cajole her back to my side. I am still greatly—how shall I say?—Occupied by the vicious little thing, and would not yet like to lose her friendship.
Keep me apprised of things at home, and on the Town.
Your T.
A NOTE found the coat pocket of one Corporal J. LANNISTER, worn soft with much touching since receipt
LOOK INTO THE CORNER.
(Unsigned, but smudged with what might be the stain of rouge from a pair of lips)
A LETTER, sent from a Spa in the Caucasus, to Bel Tempo Manor in Sicily, addressed to Lord O. MERRYWEATHER
My dear Husband,
Thank you for the Society Articles. They were most edifying.
You will be pleased to know that my dear friend Circe recovered her spirits after the Incident I so detailed to you last, and was quite as sociable as she ever was the next day. Indeed, she was almost merry, and we were able to pass the time between us quite placidly, all things considered. Her conversation never wavered and nor did her will: I had the constant sense of a calendar within her, ticking ever-presently toward the arrival of the regiment.
We were in and out of the nearby country-place that calls itself a Town a great deal the week before they arrived. It was pathetically meager, as we had both taken stock of upon our arrival in this part of the world, but she was all-of-a-sudden quite eager to go. I think, now, that she was taking stock of things, that she was making a map in her mind as best she could. By the time the soldiers arrived, she could sense the change in the air. I felt her, as we walked down the thin worn country street the day they arrived first, bristling in the wind. She was wearing a red habit, trimmed with marten. I have quietly put my reds away since choosing to spend my time with her, tho’ they look quite fetching. Her hand was in my arm, and she pressed close, as she is not wont to do.
I commented upon her change of mood, and she wrote it off as an effect of the weather. “I have always been pleased when the wind changes,” she said to me, “and it’s been ever so Dry here, have you not found?”
That night, I listened to steps flurry over my head until they were quiet. When they were quiet I saw a small dark indistinguishable shape make its flurrying way down the footpath outside. Well and so: I did not question my friend. I saw her the next morning and if I had thought my disagreeable friend a beauty, I had thought the sun glorious behind clouds. She was smiling—I have rarely seen her disposed to do the like. She was Summer itself, and comfortable company for the rest of the week. Yes: this continued for the week, and you will be proud of me and shocked by me, for I did not ask a thing! I only condescended to compliment the high colour in her cheeks. I waited, of course, for her to boil over. She was perfectly lovely, of course, and even capable of great Cunning, but she was not Subtle.
At the end of the week, her smile was slightly thinner and more brittle. She sat with me by the fountain beside Cupid and Psyche and glared at them, said something of the folly of young lovers and the story’s many fabricated Complications to keep them apart. O! I thought, and I thought it rather delightful to imagine the young Sorceress enamored. I asked her a tactful question or two about how frequently she had been in and out of Town and she put her hands in the fountain stream, demurring and stroking at the cool stream.
“You’re so restless,” she complained, tho’ of course it was She who could not set her limbs to rest. “Shall we play a game this evening?” she asked me. I, with the only interesting company to be found in all the Caucasus pressed to my arm, of course agreed.
She was wonderfully feigning, all the while. I was almost charmed, that she believed I could be so foolish as to believe I was truly was complicit in her plot. A game! she promised, fairly humming, as we retired to the spa. I took a late afternoon nap but I could hear her pacing up and down over my head. I waited out the afternoon with a novel in yellow paper and hot bath and a bunch of grapes until the sun went down, and I heard her rapping at my door.
I was quite astonished when I opened my door and saw her. She was bundled up in grey worsted, and with her hair tucked under a sensible bonnet that kept her face in floral shadow she made for an absolute English mouse. I made some exclamation or another and she passed inside the room, holding a small Satchel demurely.
“Come now,” she said. “You must have some suitable masquerade—I know your affinity for the Low.”
Well! I made do with a brown twill from last season and I followed her down the way to the footpath. The town really ought to be reached by carriage, but she marched on sure and silent for mile after mile and I kept up with her pace. Finally we reached the cluster of roofs and streets and alleyways and I followed her to red shutters and a sign in curling Slavic letters.
I caught her before she knocked. “What would you have Me do?”
She shrugged her grey shoulders. “Follow me in—follow me out—but take care, do not know me inside!”
I would have asked how this was meant to be executed, but she had squared herself forward and I thought I was quite sly enough to manage whatever was inside on my own, and could easily keep myself occupied among—what was sure to be—a packet of Soldiers.
Let no one say you married a dull woman. I knocked a pace after her and was let inside, where the air was thick and packed and smoky. I sat down at a wooden table and was beset in a near instant by a man with a moustache that he had waxed into marvelous profusion. He offered me clear liquor from a fat brown clay bottle—I accepted. His companions joined us, for soldiers follow soldiers where alcohol and women are to be found, and I was quite delighted by them on the whole: the Spa is very Quiet company, and its men, where there are men, are Thinkers. It was very pleasant indeed to be surrounded by Doers. They were glad to share their battle tales, their Vodka and the smoky sweetness of their rolled Cigars, and I was glad to partake in as much as they would give. Soldiers are generous at the least bequest, really: they gave and gave. Tho’ in very plain Attire I felt myself much admired. What must they have thought of me, of my companion and myself with no chaperones and no other female company to speak of? O, I think you know, I think we both know! And if I was sensible to their collective musk and sweat under the smoke, well, you shall not be surprised. I have a good nose.
I was not unaware of my partner in Gaming, after a time. I had not seen her when I had come in: to my Shock, she had tucked herself in the corner quite effectively. It was in taking stock of the men that I was drawn to her, for my eyes were drawn to the center of the room, toward a huge golden Lion of a man. I saw him only from the back—the span of shoulders, the gleam of hair, the lazy cat’s grace of his movements—and then he was moving toward the shadows where I saw my companion waiting like her very own shadow, still as the grave.
Damn Cupid and Psyche for lesser indeed! thought I, and proceeded to laugh at the nearest Corporal’s jest, tho’ I had not heard a word of it. She had damned the stone Goddess for a Whore and the immortal Lovers for Triflers; she was more than any of them, in this she was obviously greatly certain. I waited for her with temporal pleasure: there was smoke in my clothes and on my tongue, their Vodka like a bandit’s intimate knife at the back of my throat. After a while, I saw the man shadowing her slip toward the back, and she made her way back through the rows of splintering soldier-crowded tables, and I stood up and left my packet of Men. She glanced toward me just once, for a searing second. I daresay if I had not caught her eye then and there, she would have left without me and never looked back. Hardly a Hell—but better to be acute to my task. I am suited to my Business here—shall we call it my Mission?
The girl in the shadow took her bonnet from her hair and at once was my Sorceress again. She touched my arm once, thoughtlessly, her mind quite absent from her body, and led me up the street—or shall I say, she walked and I followed. There, the shadow of a man was waiting for her, and she reached up, body lissome, eyes clear, reaching out. He cut a lovely outline, tho’ his face was still somewhat obscured by the Night.
“This is—”
She paused, fumbling for a Name, then shrugged. “Well, what does it matter? Shall it not be a better Game if we leave it unsaid?”
My dear Sorceress, supposing I could possibly be unwise to her total control of the Game! Even so, I followed her, for she was beautiful and laughing and captivated. She reached up to draw her hand over her Soldier’s cheek. I thought she would not turn this one to swine.
“Is this gaming?” he asked, voice low and suffused with the same natural disdain as hers. “And who’s She, anyhow?”
He meant, of course, me. Our shared Circe only shrugged and smiled, fantastically. “Does it matter?”
In answer, he took a kiss from her. I say Took, for it was a conquest. His hands clasped her face in hers and he drank from her as a man out of the desert. Her body was bent in the act of being Taken, and she allowed it, she reached into it, she reveled in it for however brief or long the kiss was to last. For a moment she was subsumed into his outline, and he into hers, the lightlessness taking the two of them in Division and making dark Unity out of them: what had been Circe and Soldier were now Lovers, etched with constellation clarity against the deep, starry sky. It lasted a moment, or an hour, and then her hands went to his wrists and drew them back from her face.
“You brute,” she whispered in a tone of perfect, controlled rapture. “I will have you punished for this.”
Her Soldier took it in stride.
We walked back to the Spa Gardens, an odd sort of Trinity on the path. I felt myself the Ghost between them—the better to watch them by, better equipped than either of their ostentatious golden selves to slip into the dark wheresoever I found it needful. I supposed that she would bring him Inside, and there an end to the evening, and that I would hear them—Carry On—above my head. If I am to lose sleep, that is a sweet enough way. Instead, she led us deeper into the Garden, into its labyrinthine heart, until we arrived at the statue of Venus once again.
“Did you want to show me this?” her Soldier said. “Where you’ve been staying? I can’t see a D—d thing.”
She tilted her head back, catching the moon in her smile. “I will show you plenty, but you may put your eyes to rest.”
“And I?” I asked.
“You!” she laughed and gave me the Parcel. “You shall help me.”
I looked inside, thinking that was as good an invitation as any to do so, and found the tasseled silk ropes used to tie back curtains in our rooms. She must have left her Draperies quite undone. There was a riding crop, tho’ we had not taken Horse or Carriage into town—a fine precaution. When I looked back up, she was in the arms of her Soldier again, happily clasped. His hands were greatly Familiar on her body, and greedy with it, greedy as when he had kissed her.
“I want,” she said, waist arching back from him like a bow, “to See you.”
Her hands began to work at his blazer, his sashes, and he was certainly quick enough to help her. He did what she said without asking, and I, bemused, sat down on the bench, making an audience alongside the stone Venus. The pair of them worked together to see him out of his Military Signifiers. His badges and his Epaulets went to the grass, his sword and pistol, and their scabbard and holster, taken from his hips. Those Articles beneath followed, and soon enough his torso was lain bare to the night, making for a second perfectly serviceable Grecian bust in the grove. She called me over, and I came. “Bring the Bindings.”
I brought over the curtain-tassels. Her hands were on his shoulders, calmly guiding him back until his shoulders were pressed to the Goddess’s Pedestal. She whispered in his ear and he put his arms behind his back. “Well!” she said. “Have him Restrained.”
So this was to be the Game. The ropes were silk in my hand, familiar with a marvelously incongruous domesticity. I touched his wrists and he shivered. “Circe,” he said in complaint, “this is quite ridiculous. Have Her sent off and we shall do much better for ourselves alone.”
“Be Quiet!” she ordered, and called my name in apology. “Continue. If he protests, take up his sword and put it to his throat.”
The Soldier laughed out loud, shaking his head. He was fiercely strong, I could feel it at once, and he could have thrown me to the ground at any time, whether or not I had taken up any one of his weapons. Yet he did not, and he consented, half-shivering and half shuddering, to be tied to the Pedestal. I bound his arms and then his Chest—and only then did I get a fair glimpse of his face.
You will forgive me if I have withheld certain Details until this moment, Husband, but it was only in the moment that I saw him clearly. Up until then I had catalogued his Bodily Lineaments alone, and the rest of him had been gold and shadow.
His face—you will not be surprised to hear—was remarkable in its finely honed golden beauty. I knew it, not for having ever seen him before, but for having seen the young woman Circe as often as I have. I knew it to the detail. I think you will not be surprised to hear this, either.
Well and so: I did not say a word. They say that lovers begin to resemble each other if the love is strong enough, and if that is so, as in this moment it must be, then no two have ever loved as these two have loved. They were as Narcissus in his dreams together, as Eve looking into the stream before she learned that there was any such thing as an Adam. I cannot imagine any fate happier than learning that one’s beloved Mirror loves them back.
Having sufficiently restrained my Circe’s Soldier, or her Male Shadow, her What-You-Will, like he was so much Drapery, I stepped back and sat back on the bench. Indeed, I took up the sword and put it on my lap, if only to be holding it. I considered the little cruelties that the Sorceress had enacted upon me and thus considered the option of baring the blade like a Shaving-Razor against his equivalent marble throat, and it was enough that it was there for consideration, with the blade in my lap. She did not call for it. She thanked me, as if at a great distance.
While I had been making short curtainish work of Him, She had been removing her cloak and unpinning her hair. It spilled over her shoulders, and even the shadows could not strip the gold away. With loose hair and bright eyes, she moved in toward him and kissed him as rapaciously as he had her. She moved in against him and drowned him briefly in grey worsted, clasping him in her arms and pulling his hair in her hands. He struggled against his bindings, kissing her back as much as he was capable, but here and there she pulled away, laughing, only to return. Her body moved with sinuous ease against him, familiar as he had been with her, and she was the voracious one now, as he could not. He struggled marvelously—how he struggled!—but I can tie a knot, and each of his protestations she kissed into silence, until she drew back.
The moon was wonderfully clear on them now, and I wondered how I had not regarded their faces before, how indeed I had resisted dwelling on it. Even in her plain grey, she was Helen, burning, with a Clytemnestral husband-slaughtering smile on her lips, and he was worth Two men, as good as a Castor and a Pollux put together. Together they were all the children of Leda, all her many sets of god-borne Twins.
She took up the hairpins, tipped in gold, which she had removed from her hair. Slowly, she drove one into the bare muscle of his shoulder. He roared like a caged lion and she smiled.
“Stop that,” she said, voice suffused with love. “You make such an unbearable noise—are you not fresh from the battlefield? Are you not a Paragon of Man among the blood there?”
“I did not leave the battleground to revisit it with you.”
“But I am as good as the fight, and as equal to it as you.” She drew out the pin. It had not stuck deep, but blood edged the tip of it. She touched the place she had pricked softly, gently. “It is only what you Deserve,” she said— “for leaving me to be their little Girl, and their Marriage-Pawn, while you went off to fight and I was meant to live in a world without you. You may as well take the pain for what it is worth, for it is Mine, and we cannot be unequal.”
“Why then.” He drew himself up higher, put back his shoulders. “Again—another. Give me all that you have.”
She put a pin to the edge of his clavicle and he only laughed, which was just as much of a roar as the sound before. Her dominance with me had been skill-less, but this was practiced, a kind of Art that had become Artless. He threw his head back, bared his throat to the sky and let her bite at it, scrape it with the sharp edges of her teeth, precisely because they both knew he could have thrown off the ropes and had her by the neck in a second. She smiled as she worked, adoring him unequivocally, knowing he would not.
I was quite out of the Game. I along with the Goddess had been relegated to Observance. It was not, I dare say, a Cold Seat. When he had been sufficiently Pricked, his wrists sufficiently Chafed with straining, I watched her Kneel to him—as she would only ever have condescended to do with such a man in such a posture—he was straining in pain and ecstasy and quite at the mercy of his pretty equal in brutality—and the night drew a kind of Veil around them, or if it did not, I shall from you, Husband. You know all that you Need, and if you have aught to ask further, I daresay I can Elaborate in Person.
Yes!—I think I am coming home very soon indeed. Await me by and by. You shall receive this letter, and soon enough after it, you shall receive Me. I told you that I should know when it is time—I told you it would come to good.
Your T.
A postscript: I have told Circe that she may visit any time she would like to see Sicily. You see, then, why it is prudent that I leave so soon? I think she may have a will to see Sicily not too far in the future.
A NOTICE, hastily and badly refolded among belongings of General A. DAYNE, in the Crimea
TELL LANNISTER TO REPORT TO ME THE MINUTE HE’S BACK IN CAMP.
A NOTE, left crumpled among belongs of Lieutenant-General B. SELMY, in the Crimea
YOU LET LANNISTER LEAVE?
A LETTER, written on a train from Germany to England, sent to High Gardens, London, addressed to Miss M. TYRELL
Dearest Marg,
Mother and I are on our way from Carlsbad and on a new train that just came through from the Caucasus. Its clientele are quite a wonderful panoply, and I could make a catalogue for you, but really I would only be enacting Dramatic Tension. While I greatly loved the novels you left with me—I have devoured them and I shall simply die if we cannot speak of that Gaskell soon—I do not think I am up to the stuff of writing my own. My own ideas are not worth yellow-paper. I have to live like a girl in a novel and let the story happen to ME. Or near, at the very least.
I shall tell you first that we have a compartment all to ourselves, which is very peaceful and pleasant but I do sometimes find myself, when my eyes have grown tired of the endless green hills and blue sky and pretty painted roofs outside the window (they are so very beautiful, but they go by so fast, and I cannot get a sense of one perfect little farm-house before I am looking at another, and then ten more!), disappointed that we did not have any kind of company. Suppose—and I can say such suppositions to you—supposing that a handsome stranger needed a cabin and wanted a window to look out upon the panoply of farmhouses? Suppose a gentle-hearted fellow was coming home from Wittenberg, or on his way to Cambridge after a tour abroad, and wished to keep his cleverness sharpened on the ready mind of a travelling girl, the sort of girl with an agile mind and a docile demeanor that hides a wide and yearning heart? Suppose a travelling queen was in this very train, and fancied herself in need of a ward with impeccable manners and a fresh but some-have-said fetching face?
I did not, of course, tell Mother of any of this. She would have laughed, and she is rather anxious, though she would rather I did not know it, about returning to England. I’ve tried to talk to her about the Season, and getting down to London, and her face only goes pinched in that way of hers—well, you’ve met my mother, and she has so many cares since the awful business about Father, and the boys are such trouble, and now that Rob’s in the Crimea I don’t like to vex her a bit. You see, darling, if it is any imposition at all, I want you to tell me right off—but if you really meant what you said about my staying with you for a bit, I’d just be the happiest girl alive!
And so you won’t think me a really awful friend, I’ll tell you about the compartment beside ours, which has captivated my spare time quite entirely.
Its occupant is a woman. She’s a widow! She’s done up in blacks, at least, with a veil and a very sour look under it, but I’ve never seen a woman so beautiful. She is quite a paragon, and though widowhood is of course meant to hide such innate vanities she does not work very hard at it. I would not either. She swans up and down the cars like a queen in exile, and I only want to talk to her! I thought perhaps she would be in the dining-car when Mother and I went down, but she was in the corner and I of course was in Mother’s company and as a consequence reluctant to talk to strangers. She is terribly forbidding, of course. I envision talking to her, but what in the world would I say? She is regal and absolutely exudes quality and society—and she travels utterly alone except for her porter.
Oh, M! do not think too badly of the things I am about to say, for they are only fancies, but—her porter! He is an absolute Adonis, even in his hat and coat, and he is travelling in third class but is up and down to see her at all hours, such that I wonder whether or not he sleeps at all. Even the other night, I had bad dreams and was up at an absolutely Gothic hour to get myself a drink of water, and I put my head outside the door and saw him going to her. She must be awfully demanding, but I have said how like a queen she is! I thought, when I saw him—oh, I can’t write it, I shan’t turn this paper yellow. But I will say, for the first time in all of my life and all of my reading (oh, please, I pray you do not think me utterly ridiculous) I understand how a woman of rank and status might be—tempted—by those below her. I think I would allow myself some sort of novelish indiscretions with such a fellow.
He looks, to an almost strange degree, like her! Well, they say dogs resemble their masters, and he keeps his cap tipped very low, and with such fine half-shadowed features the only thing to do is to fill in the blanks with her features in my mind’s eye. Perhaps he does not look like her at all. But they are beautiful, beautiful! They are paired in sheer artistry, like a sort of aesthetic star-cross.
I pity him, that he is below her, when he seems so clearly destined to be her equal. Do you think, Marg (oh, don’t laugh, it’s only with you that I can be as fanciful as I please), that he could perhaps not be a servant at all, that he could be somehow bound to her and better than his station? He looks ever so much better than his station, in the way he holds his shoulders and the way he tilts his chin, and his face, in all glimpses of it I have been able to make out, has always been an absolute storm-cloud. If he is a servant, he is a terribly insolent one. Then again, even Adonis was insolent to his goddess. But Adonis died!
In any case, they are awfully present all up and down the train and I cannot but become preoccupied by them. No one else is half so lovely, and it is a special kind of loveliness—a storyish kind, that betokens all sorts of dark, delicious secrets I am too young to know. I am being foolish! (I hope not too dark.)
Mama is calling me. Off to dinner-time and I hope that I shall be able to watch them idly when I am there. There are no young men on the train, you see, or charming older ladies who would like to tell me the story of their lives. Only weak-bodied folk from the spa, stolid folk from the East, and—them!
Your sweetest Sansa
A NOTE, in an Envelope containing also the previous Letter, left in the antechamber of Dame O. TYRELL:
Grandmamma—read this.
M
A LETTER, sent from Bel Tempo Manor, Sicily, to Casterly Manor, Lannis-on-the-Port, to Sir T. LANNISTER
Dear Sir Lannister,
Don’t you think it is a terribly long time since you and my husband spoke? I daresay you and he have a great deal to talk about. He is a quiet soul, terribly temperate, and therefore I write you on his behalf. He would never wish to Impose, but I—only a Woman, after all—surely cannot take up so much space as to constitute an Imposition. Our dear friend Signior Martelli told us you have been Troubled of late, and I know you would like to have as many Friends as possible in all times of tumult.
We were so sorry to hear of your son-in-law’s Passing. Had we been in the country, we would have been at the funeral, of course.
Most sincerely yours,
Lady T. MERRYWEATHER
A TELEGRAPH, sent from High Gardens, London, to Paddington Station, anticipating the transfer to the trains heading North, addressed to Miss S. STARK
DARLING EXCLAMATION POINT NO IMPOSITION WHATSOEVER STOP DO COME BY STOP I EXPECT FURTHER ADVENTURES OF MY DEAR HEROINE ON HER RAILROAD ADVENTURES STOP AND OF COURSE MORE OF HER NEW FRIENDS
A LETTER, sent from High Gardens, London, to Casterly Manor, Lannis-on-the-Port, to Sir T. LANNISTER
Dear Sir,
Would you like advice keeping track of your Children? I have four and would be happy to assist. I shall be in your charming town for the time. I leave my card with you, if you would appreciate my aid.
Yours in friendship,
Dame O. TYRELL
A LETTER, sent from Casterly Manor, Lannis-on-the-Port, to Casterly Apartments, London, to Mr. T. LANNISTER
Son—
Cancel all plans in near future. Cambridge has told me you’re clever enough. You may as well do well by your alma mater and prove that you have a wit or two in that head of yours. There ought to be enough space for a brain in there. Your sister’s vacation has lasted long enough and it is your brotherly obligation to bring her back. Quietly. That infernal old raisin (you know the one) has been making insinuations and I expect you to curb all potential hints of scandal. If you do not, you shall find your land-lord somewhat ambivalent as to the question of your London lease.
Train tickets to Sicily enclosed.
Sir T. LANNISTER
A NOTICE, sent from Casterly Apartments to the Lannister opera-box
Bronn—
Fancy a trip to Italy? I’ve been sent lioness-hunting.
Meet me at the Club-House. We leave tomorrow. Oh, and tell our Friend that you will be writing to her. You shall, in a fashion. I intend to begin to put that letterhead I gave you to use.
T
A LETTER, sent from a hotel in Sicily to an apartment in London, addressed otherwise namelessly to an “S.”
Dearest,
A thousand apologies for leaving without saying goodbye. I promise to be back very, very soon.
My whore of a sister is making a spectacle of herself. Take no offense, darling. You are an honest whore, not a deceitful sort, and if all women were as forthright as yourself, the whole sex would be better off. Where was I? Ah, yes—my deceitful, spiteful, sister-whore in widow’s weeds, who ran off without so much as a farewell to her father, much less a kiss goodbye for her baby brother.
We didn’t know where she’d gone, but it appears she took off for warmer climes, ones that hardly make a veil comfortable, not that she found it particularly comfortable in the first place. She’s made some devoted and as such devotedly amoral friend, and I am barred from calling on them, or even from seeing what I have heard is the finest sculpture-garden in the vicinity. I therefore left my card—think of it, leaving one’s card for one’s sister, as though one had never met her before in one’s life. Would that were true! Thank goodness I have a friend just as cheerful and treacherous, a mutual friend, even, with my sister’s, who has apprised me of the goings-on. Signior Martelli assures me my sister has been a Roman spectacle in the vein of Caligula, though he is taciturn about whether or not this is as yet a secret. Certainly she is defiantly conspicuous even when she keeps to her blacks: she has that look, particularly when she thinks she is being clever and is meanwhile being amorously sated. It comes off her; you can see it at a distance.
I subsequently scheduled to meet her at the Pretoria Fountain as a kind of terra-neutra, and did so, today. I write you now by evening with a distinct sense of having been kept too much in the sun. If I tell you all, you will write it off as sunstroke delirium. I shall therefore tell you all, and my delirium shall be very politick. Keep my sanity under your hat, pet.
I should have cause for sunstroke. She kept me waiting two-odd hours. Naturally, when she came, she was in an appallingly ostentatious borrowed carriage, making a perfect golden fool of herself, even if she was wearing the weeds. Heads were turning in the street, and I really don’t think it was only my stature & charm that was turning them. Of course widowhood suits her. I’m not in the least surprised. However, Father wants her back, and she will go where he needs her to be. I am only the messenger, and it is accordingly my job to get shot as often as possible.
“Enjoying yourself?” I asked her.
She was! Oh, quite! But she was not deigning to speak frankly to me. “I am in mourning,” she said, quite high-hatted. “I am in seclusion, and I have secluded myself amongst women. You shan’t find yourself able to buy this sort of company. I suggest you go home, or perhaps try Naples, or Ischia, if you must remain within these borders.”
“Father wants to bring you out again.”
Her eyes gleamed. I saw them, well enough. “Is that so?” she asked.
“Yes—there’d be a vested interest in having you out and circulating in polite society. No one trusts your morals when you’re left alone, Sis. You’ve not been out a full year and already there is nothing but talk about what you are doing with yourself.”
Besides which, I daresay Father would like to see her remarried. That would be, of course, one of his hated scandals if he were to broach it now, but we’ll see how the Merry Widow is faring in another year’s time. I clamped my lips around that bet for the time being—I’ve already wagered it with Bronn. “D’you think you’re sufficiently recuperated to consider such a request?” I said instead. My sister has never had a good ear for irony. I looked to the nearest person who wouldn’t begrudge me a moment of commiseration. It happened to be the coachman. Servants can usually be counted upon to be discreet.
I saw who it was and if I swore very loudly, and violently, at the fountain, nobody in the world could have blamed me for it, not God or the Devil or my utter bloody fool of a brother.
He tipped down his top hat and grinned.
Buggering hell I just heard a gunshot. Hang on.
Right. I resume with blood spattered on my collar. Name of God!
I think of you, I steady my hands, I resume. Forgive me, love, for leaving you for one moment longer than necessary. Believe me, this was necessary.
I went up the stairs to my sister’s room and found my bloody idiot brother inside. She was holding his gun. It was smoking, the window was open, and he was laughing, altogether pleased with himself.
I ought to explain that I had castigated her—and him, the great fool—all the way back to the hotel. I urged them to stay with me and minimize the spectacle, which, for God’s sake! is quite bad enough already. That she could make peace with the Merryweather enabling her Merry Widowry from a safe distance. It isn’t her matter, I had to explain, but his. If they didn’t know what sort of crime desertion was to begin with, then my father will really be upset to learn that he’s raised a pair of gilded idiots. Well, now he shall be another kind of upset—I digress! My head is buzzing, sweet, I wish you were here to make it quiet, for I sorely need something quiet, with my ears ringing and gunpowder and blood in my nose.
But I am skipping ahead, am I not? Forward and back. In any case, I went upstairs to the hotel rooms above, saw the gun, inquired—if in a raised and urgent manner—what in the name of God she was doing, exactly, and she turned to me with the gun in her hands. The light was on in her eyes. I saw what my brother saw, the bright gleam of green, the way the candlelight caught in her hair. They’re not any of them wrong that call her beautiful, only incomplete. She is, of course, out of her bloody head, as you shall soon see.
She said: “He can’t go back unwounded.”
“You put the idea in her head,” my brother said all too lazily for someone who had just given up his gun. “You have only yourself to blame. I’ll be reminding you of that, when she shoots me.”
I was quite beyond words. To my gibbering, he waved a hand. “Only a flesh wound. It’ll heal quick enough. I would not have been at war if I quivered at a Damned little shot.”
He had his leg up on the bed and she was training the gun upon it, biting the tip of her tongue between her teeth. There was a strange ease with which she held the gun, and the way he offered his leg, leaning back on the bed and watching her. He looked up at her in a sort of half-glance and I was suffocated by gunpowder and intimacy.
This, thought I, was ridiculous. “No,” I said.
She paid me no mind, looked at the doorway clean over my head as if responding to the wind, and then turned back, and that was the last of it for me. She began to approach him, steadily, with the pistol. I went to her, or, more accurately, at.
In retrospect, this wasn’t, perhaps, my cleverest moment.
Of course she shot at him all the same, maybe pulled the trigger that much tighter because I was coming toward her. I collided with her bodily, felt her hip and leg knock off balance, and the gun went off. My brother howled the sky down. The shot had missed his leg. It had gone into his hand.
I think it was not my fault. I would very much like to say that it was not my fault, that it was my twisted sister’s bad aim, and it was not my fault, I was not the one who had thought it up or had the clever idea of giving her a loaded pistol. It was not my fault! You see, it was really not at all. The bullet was his, the mark on his body branded hers, the causality—not mine!
I left them with bandages and water and clear alcohol and a parcel of hotel-workers whose silence could be bought. My absence was requested, and though largely it was requested by her I still obliged, for it went in accordance with my desires, which were deeply discomfited and nauseated. I looked quite expectantly for gleaming tyranny in her eyes and found it quite washed out. She was weeping, you see—really. I have never seen the like from her, and I do not want to dwell on it for long. I am drinking, now, and trying not to consider it any more deeply than the bottom of my glass. My fool of a brother! They are brutes and fools, the pair of them.
Our mutual friend thinks all of this is hilarious. I have told him to go hang.
We are going back on a train in two days’ time, the Merryweathers likely alongside, the old bat in Tyrell gardens can suck lemons, and on the train, we shall make up a very clever story indeed about my brave brother and his heroic survival of the Crimea, how he recuperated in the East and took the waters in the Carpathia. Thank heaven my sister was in Sicily all the time—the Merryweather woman will, I think, corroborate this. And soon I shall be yours again, your own Lion
A LETTER, written in haste and left at Bel Tempo Manor, addressed to Signior O. MARTELLI
Dear Sir—
I leave the estate in temporary care of you. Of course your charming Daughters may make it their own, to whatever end, so long as it is Presentable upon my return.
The Lion has got a thorn in his Paw. The Lioness’s bloodthirst is quite Quenched by the event. I am sorry for it. I already rather miss it. She has gone into an Aristotelian Fit of womanhood, and is very cold and wet these days. All the same, I am their constant Companion, as much as I am ever yours.
I shall give Sir Lannister &co. your Warmest Regards.
With Love,
T.
From an ARTICLE, published in the Society Pages of the London TIMES
Seen with her family and the MERRYWEATHERS (an intriguingly private and discreet choice of persons, having returned from a long stretch abroad) the LANNISTER daughter has at last returned to the town to provide a bit of sun—as though in recompense for the long winter sure to come.