Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (29 page)

The novelty of the doll was what had brought Ghisla to the boat. She was yet child enough, you see, and had possessed no doll since her father’s death. For the past week she had offered extra assistance to customers - sewing on lace, replacing buttons - and kept back the payment for her ticket. True, she had felt guilty about this, but only in a vague and childish way which now she put aside. She had had great practice in doing so, since her mother had always made a point of ensuring Ghisla would suffer guilt whenever possible.

When Prince Lutz appeared and then went away again, Ghisla still longed to see the moving doll. But also, with a peremptory and sore desire, to see again Prince Lutz. Unlike guilt, in her deprived existence she had never before experienced such a feeling.

Perhaps you will believe that, even when he instantly appeared once more in the thick of the play, and her heart leapt up as if it had caught fire, even then she did not realize she had fallen in love at first sight with him. She had never seen a man like him, obviously, had no chance to. And he was very wonderful to behold, Prince Lutz Alvarek, anyone will tell you that.

The play went on, with some intervals, quite a time. But it was full of sensation—poisonings, stabbings, the lurid uncovering of secrets—only its high moral tone had made permissable giving it a public airing at all.

Perhaps Ghisla was bemused. Or did she properly notice the dramatic events? Bithida the doll was herself very captivating, though in the end rather disappointing. Not least because clouds of steam tended to furl out of her whenever movement was required. Beyond the doll’s initial entrance, and one subsequent exit, her motion was soon limited to slow turns of the head, wafting gestures of the hands, and the occasional blink of two cobalt eyes.

The audience thrilled to everything, however. The atmosphere buzzed and sparkled, cheers, groans and involuntary oaths scorched to the roof, and echoed out into the riverine night, where the lanterns by now guttered and only golden and crimson fireflies spangled the trees.

But in the end the play finished, as all plays, and all things, eventually do.

By then, you might imagine, Ghisla was wrung out, in a sort of trance or dream. Not wanting the play ended, of course, for then he too would vanish from the stage and from the world. Without thought even, she grew aware that then—now—this inexplicable joy somehow caused only by him, would leave her with him. Surely, surely she did now grasp that what she felt was love—or was this fact unavailable to her, poor girl? Had it not seemed to her that, during the concluding act, he had looked up into her eyes very often, held her gaze which, in any case, could not look away from his, even if his eyes were blue lightning, or shards of silver glass—But all her usual dreary and meaningless existence was crowding back to her, smoking over her heart and mind, as she sat alone on the gilt gallery, and the mass of other theatre-goers ebbed, like the dry ice and steam, away into the bar, and so into the firefly dark, returning to all their own realities, arduous or horrible or sweet. And when the last of them had gone, and the last internal lamp was fading, as if fading too, still Ghisla sat there. She must have forgotten how to stand up and independently move. Or, like steam-driven Bithida, was restricted from anything more than the slow turn of her head, meaningless flick of her hand, the infrequent blinking of her eyes.

* * * *

Prince Lutz turned himself to find Heine in the doorway of the dressing-cabin.

“They say there’s a young woman sitting up in the gallery still.”

To Heine’s curiosity Lutz Alvarek, who had sloughed his make-up, paled.

“Where on the gallery?”

“At the very front . . . that pretty one with dark hair and the white dress. Maybe you noted her. Oh, no doubt you did, Lutz, knowing you.”

“You know nothing about me, Heine,” said Lutz, in the cold and arrogant manner he could suddenly adopt, often taking his fellow actors by surprise. Though they failed to like these turns in him, they checked at the signal, for he was not only their star but their banker, and mostly they had no wish to anger him.

“I meant no offence, Prince.”

“Good. Then tell me why she’s there.”

“Ermelind says she thinks the girl may be unwell—”

“In God’s name—” said Lutz. Next moment he was out of the cabin and running up the ladder to the higher decks. Doing that he heard the low thrum of the boat’s pod, and too the whispery drinking of its sipper-tube, working now in the black River below. But reaching the upper levels where such noises were less, they were with him still. He knew then it was the tension in him. For he had indeed noted the girl on the gallery. Once or twice during the performance he had looked steadily straight into her eyes. It was not the first, naturally, he had ever done such a thing. Maybe seldom with such purpose. But she was so young. So fragile. What had befallen her?

* * * *

By now it was well after midnight, nearer one in the morning. The smoke-cloud of her mean life had completed its re-conquest of Ghisla.

She had stood up, bemused and uncertain still, but able to move, able to leave the boat with the strange unlucky name, to pick her way back along the black wooded bank, to reach the town streets and the loveless apartment behind her mother’s shop, slip into her cramped and loveless bed, into her loveless and unlovely place in the real world.

As she went up the gallery towards the exit, a man’s tall figure abruptly filled the doorway.

Ghisla stopped. She felt a little sad twinge of fear.

She had stayed too long, was in the wrong as always, and would now be scolded and abused. Perhaps even she had broken the law—

“My God,” he said, “in this dark you seem—Are you a ghost?”

For a second she did not know who spoke to her. Or she did, surely? Yes, she must have done, that marvellous voice of his that had filled her ears for three hours and more.

She became less fearful. More terrified. She said nothing. Was afraid to speak.

And then he stood directly in front of her, so much taller than she, and still in the flamboyant clothes he had worn for the play. He carried a scent too of the stage—the steamy footlights, the metal doll, the grease-paint and candlewax, sawdust and fire.

She looked up into his face and his pale gem-stone eyes burned out of it as they had from the flamelit stage.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” Mundane words, such as might be spoken by handmaidens when a dead god rose and appeared before them, and was known.

“Yes. And it is
you
. Are you well?”

“Oh, yes . . . no—”

And what indeed was she, this young girl that no one had ever spoken to in such a caressive, meaning-filled way, that nobody ever asked of whether she was well or not, or if she was a ghost, that nobody had ever greeted with such evident ardour: It is
you
.
You
.

Prince Lutz led her quietly out, across the darkened and vacant bar. Elsewhere the other actors, the stage-hands and boatmen, held their own follies, a dim rumble of noises, chink of bottles; while the sipper sipped the River and the River rocked the boat gently, so he caught the girl’s arm to steady her. And as they moved on across the scene-shifting half-light, under the beam of a single lamp on deck he saw her face, her neck and shoulders, her piled-up hair with its River-green combs, her eyes now cool black, now the warm of copper and bronze. He halted her there, in that soft beam, and said, so softly to her, “How beautiful you are. More beautiful even than I thought you from the stage. I’ve been waiting for you a long while. Did you know that? No? Well, my love, now you do.” And now she did.

* * * *

The dead live in the trees, or in the waters. No doubt they watch the final scene of this First Act.

It occurs about three in the morning, there in the darkness of the wooded bank, some way upstream from where the golden showboat
Vilya
is anchored.

There is a rustling and snapping to begin with, a sound of torn cloth and small tearing branches, undergrowth that is trampled, however lightly. And breathing, fast respiratory stabs.

And then the white figure appears, with a flurry of combless undone hair like new tearings from the material of the night. Straight to the brink of the bank, the brink of the River she runs, the young woman in her torn white dress. And then she stands quite motionless as if, all over again, she has forgotten movement, even—now—how to flex her wrists or turn her head.

Tears stream from her eyes.

She stands there on the brink, holding her hands like frozen steel against her breasts, weeping, her emotion so colossal it seems she smiles or laughs. And then a spasm of movement after all quakes all through her, and her eyes shut. Weightless as a swan’s feather she drifts over from the bank and falls floatingly into the dark below. Which opens like many pale arms, unearthly out of the black, receiving her, drawing her in and down to sanctuary and oblivion.

They
know. Those ones who have dropped down here before. The girls betrayed, the girls like Myrra, they know how the heart breaks, and the taste of deep water.

Only ripples then, only silence then. It never changes, in the end, the way we mislay things in the dark.

* * * *

Lutz Alvarek came back to the town and to the River five years later. He travelled firstly down to the city in his big steamwheeler car, that had once been painted and trimmed, green and gold, like the
Vilya
, but which by now was plain black and chrome. At the city he stabled the ‘wheeler and, with just twenty others, boarded the steambus, that old panting rattler only some of us anymore remember; she was nicknamed
Puffing Pankra
.

Alvarek did all that to avoid too much notice in the town. Then it was a small place still, and quiet.

Probably some of us did recall Prince Lutz. No doubt a number of the women did, would you say, those that watched him on the showboat. But by then too
Vilya
was long gone with Alvarek’s former employee, Heine. Some people said that Heine was gifted the Vilya by Lutz, to keep Heine dumb about something or other, though this gossip had never come so far as the town. In any event, even without his boat, Lutz had kept his career all glowing bright. He had stayed a success, a great actor many claimed, and he was as handsome as he ever had been, they said too, even the ones who reckoned he had committed some crime. But we need to remember anyway, he was only twenty-two years of age on his earlier visit. And now he was only twenty-seven.

It seemed he went first of all to the registrar’s office, but why and for what nobody guessed. And then, very oddly, he turned down one of the town’s curling streets and fetched up by, of all unlikely spots, a haberdashery.

“I was never so astonished,” said the lady who now ruled the shop. She had had to explain to Prince Lutz also that the former owner had sold up and gone away five years before. “I said, it was after her daughter died so young, poor little Ghisla who fell in the River and was drowned.” But Prince Lutz had brushed that aside, rather callously, the present shop owner decided: “which was peculiar, since until then he was the perfect gentleman. A lovely handsome man he was, though,” she added. “And he was nicer again presently, and asked me a question or two. I confess, I watched him as he strode off up the street.”

It was a fact Ghisla’s mother had sold this woman the shop. Ghisla’s mother had been mourning the loss of her bondslave Ghisla, without whom she could not, she said repeatedly and bitterly, manage. No one knew where Ghisla’s mother had since taken herself, and perhaps nobody cared.

Lutz spent little more time in the town. He went off into the country land beyond. The ones who had identified him wondered why he had come back, and hoped he might be going to stage another drama there. But he never did that. It was the last any of them saw of him.

* * * *

There had been a scene with Heine, however, all those long short five years before.

It happened on the night following the night already described—that night when Prince Lutz and Ghisla met in the theatrical afterdark.

The next evening’s performance was once more done, but it had ended earlier on this second night, around eleven, owing to a mechanical failure of the steam doll Bithida, which had needed improvising over.

Everything settled, and the patrons having left, most of them not realizing they had missed anything much—the actors sat about the public bar to toast their genius on pulling the occasion through. And it was then that Ermelind gave up her news. Did they know, she asked, a town girl had gone missing, that very pretty one who had lingered on the gallery after yesterday night’s show? It seemed her name was Ghisla. At which another of the players cried did
Ermelind
not know the poor girl’s body had been found this evening, in the River farther upstream. She was drowned dead as a stone.

Possibly Heine glanced round at that point, to see if the Prince reacted at all. If so, Heine was rewarded. For Lutz, even
under
his make-up now, had gone white as a cleaned bone. Then, getting up without a word, Lutz walked quickly from the bar.

Until then he had been his usual self, better than ever maybe. But most of them were trained to his sudden moods, as mentioned. Heine as well, but this time he too rose, and went to see where the Prince was heading, and what the Prince might do there.

Heine found him soon enough. Lutz had reached the ladder to the underdecks but not got on to it. Instead he lay, slumped against the inner ribs of the boat. He was, Heine said, out cold, in a faint like death.

It seemed Heine waited, but next Ermelind bustled up, and perhaps at that Lutz stirred, and uttered some moaning noise, and then sat up, his eyes half-shuttered and swimming still, staring at them as if he had no idea in the world who they were, or who he
himself
was, come to that.

Well, Heine could not resist, he later reportedly said. He bent down and murmured like a lover into Lutz’s ear. “Must have been a shock to you, Prince,” murmured Heine, “her being found so soon after you had her, and then killed her and threw her in the River.”

But it was Heine who got the proper shock. For instantly, like one more doll set going by clockwork and steam, the recumbent Lutz sprang off the deck, and getting hold of Heine, shook him. “His eyes had gone red as rubies,” Heine reportedly said. But they were the last things Heine saw for a while, because Lutz then clouted Heine such a blow on the jaw it knocked him clear across the space and down the ladder to the deck beneath. Unlike the Prince, Heine did not recover his wits for forty minutes, and beside bruises he had three teeth loose for a week.