One dog-tooth showed out of his crooked smile. “Not altogether bad,” he replied. He gave her the platter of mutton roast. “The northerly tracks are little more than cow-paths and wretched after a rain. Witching Hour is in need of a wash, but he is indefatigable. A little rotten track doesn’t deter him.”
Margaret gave a painful, forced smile and ate her mutton. The watchful silence continued a few minutes more, then, stirred to breaking it once more, still with that odd calm, Margaret said,
“Rupert?”
He looked at her directly but did not say a word.
It was worse that he was silent. Her words seemed to fall into the quiet like drops of glass, drops that shattered on the ear. “Rupert, I’m not going with you tomorrow.”
There was no sound, it seemed, in all that screaming, storming, silent house but for the enormously hollow, unbearably mocking rhythm of the clock in the entryway. Margaret felt swallowed up in Rupert’s gaze. His pale eyes did not waver—his whole face did not change from its careful, attentive lightness—but she knew the mocking glint was gone from behind them. She did not know how long that horrible moment lasted, but she was glad for one thing: Rupert did not press her. He had sketched her nature well enough to know she was in earnest.
“Margaret, my dear,” he said at last, gently, as much in earnest as she was, “go to bed.”
The calm was gone. The clarity was gone. In total numbness, like an enchanted doll, Margaret rose from the table, put aside her napkin, and left the room. She was almost to the top of the stairs when a sconce, overfilling, dropped hot wax on the back of her hand and sent a jagged crimson streak of pain into her brain, clearing it for one moment. She had been certain he would kill her. He was not one to let anything stand in the way of his ambition. She stopped at the head of the stair and looked back down into the well of darkness.
Does he mean to murder me in my sleep?
Rupert was a killer if he had to be, she knew that, but she did not know what
kind
of killer, and that made it worse. Completely mazed she went to her room, found herself alone there, and began pacing, trying to rally her wits.
She had not expected to live out the interview. That had been her
tertium quid
, her way out—and Rupert had not given it to her. She passed a stiff, shaking hand across her forehead, feeling her nails drag at her skin, as if to rip the cobwebs from her brain. What was to be done? She had thrown the dice back in the devil’s face and the devil had not flinched. Horribly, acutely, through all the numbness of shock and despair and uncertainty, she felt she was in Rupert’s hand still, playing along with his little game, helpless to break free.
She had the strong desire to cross the dimly lit room, ball up her fist, and put it through a pane of glass.
Instead she passed into the washroom and began undressing once more, mechanically, drawing a bath for herself. Sitting on the cold edge of the tub, watching the water fill it—watching the water shake and roil with its own movement and the lights darting fish-like in it—she thought suddenly of the Channel, and of the Tyrrhenian Sea. She ought to have long been in Naples by now. The sun would still be warm, and Rupert would not be there…One hand slipped into the water and, as it flowed around her, the water-sensation, the silvery voice, of the wind and the panpipe came to her. A headache was coming on, and the thoughts of her earth seas and Naples and the beauty of the fells, all thoughts of places that shut her off and would not let her share their beauty, only added to her agony.
What is wit?
she thought.
What is cunning, what is beauty, what are love’s pleas and hate’s rages? They all come to dust, and the devil is by far a better player at them than I
.
She got into the bath presently and sank up to her neck in the water, feeling it close her in its warm embrace, and she thought that never in the history of mankind had any convert to Christianity felt so keenly the water’s symbol of being buried in the earth.
There were still two hours until a reasonable retiring time when Margaret finished her bath. Her body was clean but the ache of straining was still present. She needed to sleep, and sleep a sleep of death, before the hard knots of anxiety unwound in her muscles. But it was far too early to retire, so she sat in her nightgown and robe of velvet Tyrian purple and put herself to an idle game of chess with the little white and crimson morse-ivory chess-pieces on their board of obsidian and mother-of-pearl.
A storm had come up during her bath, an idle storm, as idle as the game she played, and it filled her room with a gentle, melancholy music that seemed to speak her mind better than her own words. She moved her pieces, and moved Rupert’s—Rupert was red, devil-red, and unaccountably winning though she moved his pieces for him—with the light and the shadows chasing each other in smudges across the board.
She jumped and cursed as much as she knew how when a sudden knock disturbed her. Picking up her castle where it had fallen and reasserting its threat on Rupert’s knight, she turned in her chair and called out.
It was Rhea who entered, sweeping in, Margaret noticed, without the marked deference that a maid should give to a lady of Margaret’s potential station. The lack of gesture stung.
“I’ve come to take the ball gown,” said Rhea, “and give it the last touches for tomorrow. I will have it boxed for the journey.”
“That will not be necessary,” said Margaret icily.
Nothing changed in the maid’s face—she was as careful as her master—but behind that pool-dark, pool-deep pair of eyes Margaret felt a hostile spirit. “Nevertheless, I will take the gown.”
“Do,” said Margaret.
And burn it behind the kitchen wing
.
Rhea dropped her eyelids and moved to take the dress away. Some of the over-sheet slipped off as the maid moved it, and Margaret saw again the startling crimson of the gown. Crimson. She, dressed in crimson like one of the crimson pawns on the chess board—one of Rupert’s pawns. Her stomach twisted.
Rhea departed, gown in her arms, and with the door shut once more the room was filled with the tinselly rustle of the rain and, when Margaret roused herself to think, the harsh click of a chess-piece set down. She played with a strangely renewed vigour, as if to beat Rupert by means of proxy, as if the genius of the chess game on this stormy night that was the threshold of winter, the threshold of a new moon, might cast its power over them and let—oh, God, might
let
—Margaret win.
But something went awry. The stars were wrong, or providence unhappy, for as the clock began chiming downstairs that it was time to turn in, that the hour was late, she found herself looking down on a helpless stalemate. Their pieces were useless, unarmed but for little daggers, circling each other like dogs. A confused rage welled up in her, blinding her. Her throat tightened and her eyes were blurred suddenly by unreasoning tears. Heedless, she jerked out her arm, sending the pieces flying with a choked cry of anger. They fell somewhere, far away, thumping with white and crimson noises across the carpet.
The blow was strangely relieving. She leaned on the table, panting, crushing her eyes shut to kill the tears, and somehow found herself again. When her vision cleared she saw, not white and crimson, but darkness and a few small points of sullen golden candlelight. How dark everything had grown! She straightened, staring blankly about her. The last notes of the clock died away. The storm broke against the windowpanes. The curtains were drawn, but the racing, fitful silver light of earth still made it through the storm-clouds and chinks in the fabric; in desolate patterns the light showed up on the floor, broken by the windward leaves that plastered against the glass and stuck there, forlorn. She laughed softly, genuinely, and like a madman. This was something the fells could share with her: this was something she understood. She put aside her heavy robe and stood in the middle of the floor in her nightgown, the strings of the neck draped in her transfixed hands, watching the way the light played on the glass and the floor, the way the wind bore the rushing shadows of the leaves around her. The nightmare taste of white and crimson was clearing away. She breathed deeply, shakily, and breathed in the far-off mountain thunder. It echoed inside her, loud and empty, and she distilled some strength from it.
The thunder was hushing away, the storm dropping to a blowing rustle that was more wind than rain, and she was just turning to the knowledge that she must sleep when of a sudden her bedroom door flung open and harsh yellow light split the darkness. With a cry Margaret started back and recovered, blinking through the broken gleam to see Rupert’s face.
For a moment he was a mere wild silhouette, framed in the black doorway and fierce yellow light, his head up, his hand gripping the knob as if to strangle it. Then she saw he was in his shirtsleeves, dishevelled and disreputable, hair racked upward into disarray. He was clearly drunk. Her stomach clenched within her.
“You are coming, Margaret,” he ground out low and dangerous. “You are going to come at my biding and do what I say. There is an end to it.”
She swallowed. Her dry throat caught on the taste of crimson. “Go back to bed, Rupert,” she said in as soothing a tone as she could muster with her heart beating wildly in her chest. “You are drunk.”
He swung into the room, steady and fast on his feet, and had her by the wrist before she could pull away. She knew better than to struggle in that grasp. She had tried it before to no avail. She held still as death, staring up into the storm-lashed paleness of those wide, furious eyes.
“I am sober when I am drunk,” he hissed. The scent of his breath was scarlet. “All other times I am beset by this strange sense of conscience.” His eyes lowered, fixed, unfocused. His hand loosened a little on her arm and the fingers gently worked the skin as if to atone for the pain they had inflicted. His body shuddered. “There is a dark art at work inside me.” His eyes lifted to hers. “Will you release me?”
She met those eyes, those hateful, pale blue, beautiful eyes. That odd, unreasoning calm in the face of terror, a calm that was oddly white, washed over her. Her voice came as if from a long way off. “What you call darkness and I call darkness, Rupert, are two completely different things.”
The eyes hardened into glass. The lips parted, revealing the teeth on edge as if they were fangs. The hand on her arm remained light. She did not see it coming, for he had the knack of hiding his thoughts behind the glassiness of his eyes: of a sudden he snapped her forward, his free hand behind her head, and bit her lip with the violence of his kiss. She gave a muffled shriek of pain and kicked, hurting herself more than she hurt him. She forgot that it was no use to fight. Instinct to protect herself clawed at her mind and she clawed at him, writhing in his unforgiving grasp. The long angry whine of tearing fabric filled the air. Renewed thunder boomed overhead. Lightning lashed across them, lashed across Rupert’s down-turned face, turning it into a snarling mask. She tasted blood. She tasted her own blood. The sweet scents of wine and blood and tears mingled and, with an upsurge of rage, Margaret somehow found his hand and she bit it to repay him. She bit as deeply as her jaw would allow and revelled high and viciously in the cry of pain he gave.
He picked her up around the waist and hurled her through the air with surprising force. She fell with a shriek, her fall cushioned by the mattress of her bed. Something was in her mouth. She spat it out. It was too dark to see what it was. She pulled herself together lest Rupert should come after her.
He stood his ground. He clutched his bleeding hand to his chest and watched her coldly, rigidly. His worst anger, his cold anger, rested on his brow. The thunder growled and fell away. The light flickered and broke up around him. Only the sound of her heavy breathing filled the room.
“Good night, Margaret,” he said quietly, and with a silent tread he left the room, shutting the door with a little click behind him.
“
Oh!
” cried Margaret, bursting into heedless, furious tears. “Oh, you worthless, p-pitiless, filthy creature! I despise you! I d-d-despise you!
I despise you!
” Her raging words fell into sobbing—furious, terrified sobbing. She crumpled into the bed-sheets and sobbed mingled tears and blood; with every hysterical gasp she smelled her own blood, tasted it, felt the cut agony of her own broken lip. She held the torn neck of her nightgown close in a grip that even Rupert could not have pried loose. Through the broken, jagged images of pain and his face, the horror lashed her with the thought: what if he had? He was a man who could kill, a man who would get his own way. The sound of tearing fabric screamed and screamed in her memory, the heat of his touch seared her arms. If he truly wanted her, as he said he did, what was stopping him? The thread that she had taken for granted which held Rupert back seemed suddenly horribly thin.
In the last raging throes of agony she reared back, strangling the bed-sheets in her hands, and let loose one long agonized scream, wrenching it out of the depths of her soul. In her own ears it was blood-curdling. She screamed that single scream until she no longer had breath, and then she fell, like a bird which has suddenly lost all wind, plummeted into a pit where even the shadows seethed. Her body was cold. She knelt in her thin gown in the fireless, cheerless, empty room, listening to the silence and her own sobbing breath, shivering as with a fever.
No one came at the sound of her scream. She knelt and waited, expecting someone to come to her, but no one came. She felt like a child lost in the dark, woken by nightmares that no one cared to chase away.
You have always been alone...
…You have always been alone…
…You have always been alone.
The echo of her scream died away into the empty depths of her soul. The house, mockingly, was silent—pressing silent, like a pillow smothering her. She knew he would not come back, but that knowledge did not serve to comfort her. Did she dare sleep? Did she dare close her eyes? Her hand fumbled on the coverlet and her mind, child-like, pitiful, fumbled into her past.