The Witching Hour

  "I do not care to spend the night here," I said to her, "and if you will not provide me with a coach, I shall walk to Port-au-Prince."

  "Explain this to me, that you do not like pleasure," she said gently, tugging at my coat. "Surely you are hot in these miserable garments. Do all Dutchmen wear such clothes?"

  "Stop those drums, will you?" I said. "I cannot bear the sound." For the music seemed to come through the walls. There was a melody to it now, however, and that was a slight bit reassuring, though the melody kept putting its hooks into me and dragging me with it mentally so that I was dancing in my head against my will.

  And somehow or other I was now on the side of the bed, with Charlotte removing my shirt. On the table but a few feet away sat a silver tray with bottles of wine and fine glasses, and to this she went now, and poured a glass full of claret and brought this to me and put it in my hand. I went to dash it to the floor, but she held it, and looked into my eyes, and said:

  "Petyr, drink a little only that you may sleep. When you wish to leave you may leave."

  "You are lying to me," I said. Whereupon I felt other hands upon me, and other skirts brushing my legs. Two stately mulatto women had somehow managed to enter this chamber, both of them exquisitely pretty, and voluptuous in their freshly pressed skirts and ruffled blouses, moving with ease no doubt through the general fog which now shrouded all my perceptions, to pound the pillows, and straighten the netting of the bed, and take my boots from me and my trousers.

  Hindu princesses they might have been with their dark eyes and dark eyelashes and dusky arms and innocent smiles.

  "Charlotte, I will not have this," I said, yet I was drinking the wine, as she held it to my mouth, and again there came the swoon. "Oh, Charlotte, why, what is this?"

  "Surely you want to observe pleasure," she whispered, stroking my hair in such a way that I was very disturbed by it. "I am quite serious. Listen to me. You must experiment with pleasure to be certain that you do not care for it, if you know what I mean."

  "I don't. I wish to go."

  "No, Petyr. Don't now," she said as if talking to a child.

  She knelt before me, looking up at me, her dress binding her naked breasts so tightly that I wanted to free them. "Drink some more, Petyr," she said.

  I shut my eyes, and at once lost my balance. The music of the drums and the horn was now slower and even more melodic, and put me in mind of madrigals though it was far more savage. Lips brushed my cheeks and my mouth, and when I opened my eyes in alarm, I saw the mulatto women were naked and offering themselves to me, for how else could their gestures be described.

  At some remove Charlotte stood, with her hand upon the table, a picture in the stillness, though everything was now quite beyond my grasp. She seemed a statue against the dim blue light of the sky; the candles sputtered in the breeze; the music was as strong as ever, and I found myself lost in contemplating the two naked women, their huge breasts and their dark fleecy private hair.

  It then came to me that in this warmth I did not mind at all being naked, which had seldom been the case in my life. It seemed quite fine to be naked, and that the women should be, and I fell into contemplating their various secrets, and how they differed from other women, and how all women were alike.

  One of them kissed me again, her hair and skin very silky against me, and this time I opened my mouth.

  But by then, you know, Stefan, I was a lost man.

  I was now covered with kisses by these two and laid back on the pillows, and there was no part of my anatomy which did not receive their skilled attentions, and each gesture was prolonged and rendered all the more exquisite in my drunkenness. And so loving and cheerful they seemed, the two women, so innocent, and the silkiness of their skin was maddening me.

  I knew that Charlotte watched these proceedings but that did not seem of importance any longer, so much as kissing these women and touching them all over as they touched me, for the potion I had drunk was working no doubt to remove all restraint and yet to slow down the natural rhythm of a man under such circumstances, as there seemed all the time in the world.

  The room grew darker; the music more soothing. I grew more impassioned, slowly, deliciously, and completely consumed by sensations of the most extraordinary sort. One of the women, very ripe and yielding in my arms, showed me now a band of black silk, and as I puzzled what this could be, this broad ribbon, she put it over my eyes, and the other tied it tight behind my head.

  How can I explain how this sudden bondage fanned the flame in me, how, blindfolded like Cupid, I lost whatever decency remained to me, as we tumbled together in the bed?

  In this intoxicating darkness, I finally mounted my victim, feeling my hands fall gently upon a great mass of hair.

  A mouth sucked at me, and strong arms drew me down into a veritable field of soft breasts and belly and sweet perfumed female flesh, and as I cried out in my passion, a lost soul, unquestioning, the blindfold was ripped from me, and I looked down in the dim light to see the face of Charlotte beneath me, her eyes closed demurely, her lips parted, and her face flushed with an ecstasy equal to my own.

  There was no one but the two of us in this bed! No one, I saw, but the two of us in this little house.

  Like a madman I was up and away from her. But it had been done. I had reached the very edge of the cliff, when she came after me.

  "What would you do!" she cried miserably. "Jump into the sea!"

  I could not answer her but clung to her lest I fall. If she had not pulled me back, I would have fallen. And all I could think was, this is my daughter, my daughter! What have I done?

  Yet when I knew it, my daughter, and repeated it, my daughter, and looked full in the face of it, I found myself turning to her, and catching hold of her, and bringing her to me. Would I punish her with kisses? How could rage and passion be so melded? I have never been a soldier in a siege but are they so inflamed when they tear the garments from their screaming female captives?

  I only knew I would crush her in my lust. And as she threw back her head and sighed, I whispered "My daughter." I buried my face in her naked breasts.

  It was as if I had never spent my passion, so great was it then. Into the room she dragged me, for I would have taken her in the sand. My roughness held no fear for her. She pulled me down onto the bed, and never since that night in Amsterdam with Deborah have I known such release. Nay, I was not even checked by the tenderness I knew then.

  "You foul little witch," I cried out to her. And she took it like kissing. She writhed on the bed beneath me, rising to meet me, as I came down upon her.

  At last I fell back into the pillow. I wished to die, and to have her again at once.

  Twice more before dawn, I took her surely unless I had gone completely mad. But I was so drunk then I scarce knew what I did, except that all I had ever wanted in a woman was there for the taking.

  Close to morning, I remember that I did lie with her, and study her, as if to know her and her beauty, for she was sleeping, and nothing came between me and my observations--ah, yes, I thought bitterly on her mockery of me, but that is what they were, Stefan, observations--and I learnt more of a woman I suppose in that hour than ever in my entire life.

  How lovely in its youth was her body, how firm and sweet to the touch her young limbs and her fresh skin. I did not want her to wake and look at me with the wise and cunning eyes of Charlotte. I wanted to weep that all this had taken place.

  It seemed she did wake and that we talked for a while, but I remember more truly the things I saw than the words we spoke.

  She was again plying me with her drink, her poison, and had added to the mix an even greater inducement, for now she seemed deep and saddened and more eager than ever to know my thoughts. As she sat there with her golden hair falling all about her, the Lady Godiva of the English, she puzzled again that I had seen Lasher in the stone circle in Donnelaith.

  And it seemed the trick of the potion now, Stefan, that I was there! For I heard th
e creaking of the cart once more, and saw my precious little Deborah, and in the distance the thin image of the dark man.

  "Ah, but you see, it was to Deborah that he meant to appear," I heard myself explain, "and that I saw him proves only that anyone could see him, that he had gathered by some mysterious means a physical shape."

  "Aye, and how did he do it?"

  And once more I pulled out of the archive of my head the teachings of the ancients. "If this thing can gather jewels for you ... "

  "--that he does."

  "--then he can gather tiny particles to create a human shape."

  Then in a twinkling, I found myself in Amsterdam in bed with my Deborah, and all her words to me of that night were spoken again, as if I stood with her in the very room. And all this I then told to my daughter, the witch in my arms, who poured the wine for me, whom I meant to take a thousand times before I should be released.

  "But if you know then that I am your father, why did you do this?" I asked, while at the same time seeking to kiss her again.

  She held me off as she might hold off her child. "I need your height and your strength, Father. I need a child by you--a son that will not inherit Antoine's illness, or a daughter that will see Lasher, for Lasher will not show himself to a man." She considered for a moment and then said to me: "And you see, you are not merely a man to me, but a man bound to me by blood."

  So it was all planned.

  "But there is more to it," she said. "Do you know what it is to me to feel a true man with his arms about me?" she asked. "To feel a true man on top of me? And why should it not be my father, if my father is the most pleasing of all the men I have ever seen?"

  I thought of you, Stefan. I thought of your warnings to me. I thought of Alexander. Was he at this moment mourning for me still in the Motherhouse?

  Surely I shed tears, for I remember her comforting me, and how touching was her distress. Then she did cling to me, like a child herself curled beside me, and said that we two knew things that no one else had ever known save Deborah and Deborah was dead. She cried then. She cried for Deborah.

  "When he came to me and told me that she was dead, I wept and wept. I could not stop weeping. And they beat on the doors and said, 'Charlotte, come out.' I had not seen him or known him until that moment. My mother had said: 'Put on the emerald necklace, and by its light he will find you.' But he did not need that thing. I know it now. I was lying in the darkness alone when he came to me. I will tell you a terrible secret. Until that moment I did not believe in him! I did not. I had held the little doll she gave me, the doll of her mother ... "

  "It was described to me in Montcleve."

  "Now that is made of the bone and the hair of Suzanne, or so my mother claimed it was, for Lasher, she said, had brought the hair to her after they cut it from Suzanne in prison, and the bone after she was burnt. And from this she had made the doll as Suzanne had told her to do, and she would hold it and call upon Suzanne.

  "Now, I had this, and I had done as she had instructed me. But Suzanne didn't come to me! I heard nothing and felt nothing, and I wondered about all the things which my mother had believed.

  "Then he came, as I told you. I felt him come in the darkness, I felt his caress."

  "How so, caress?"

  "Touching me as you have touched me. I lay in the darkness, and there were lips upon my breasts. Lips upon my lips. Between my legs he stroked me. I rose up, thinking, Ah well, this is a dream, a dream of when Antoine was still a man. But he was there! 'You have no need of Antoine,' he said to me. 'My beautiful Charlotte.' And then, you see, I put on the emerald. I put it on as she had told me to do."

  "He told you that she was dead?"

  "Aye, that she had fallen from the cathedral battlements, and that you had thrown the evil priest to his death. Ah, but he speaks most strangely. You cannot imagine how strange his words are. As if he had picked them up from all over the world the way he picks up bits and pieces of jewels and gold."

  "Tell me," I said to her.

  She thought. "I cannot," she said with a sigh. Then she tried it, and now I shall do my best to recount it. " 'I am here, Charlotte, I am Lasher, and I am here. The spirit of Deborah went up out of her body; it did not see me; it left the earth. Her enemies ran to the left and to the right and to the left in fear. See me, Charlotte, and hear me, for I exist to serve you, and only in serving you, do I exist.' " She gave another sigh. "But it is even stranger than that when he tells me a long tale. For I questioned him as to what happened to my mother and he said, 'I came and I drew together, and I lifted the tiles of the roofs and made them fly through the air. And I lifted the dirt from the ground and made it fly through the air.' "

  "And what else does this spirit say as to his own nature?"

  "Only that he always was. Before there were men and women, he was."

  "Ah, and you believe this?"

  "Why should I not believe it?"

  I did not answer her, but in my soul I did not believe it, and I did not know why.

  "How did he come to be near the stones of Donnelaith?" I asked her. "For that was where Suzanne first called him, was it not?"

  "He was nowhere when she called him; he came into being at her call. That is to say, he has no knowledge of himself before that time. His knowledge of himself begins with her knowledge of him, and strengthens with mine."

  "Ah, but you see this could be flattery," I said to her.

  "You speak of him as if he were without feeling. That isn't so. I tell you I have heard him weep."

  "Over what, pray tell?"

  "The death of my mother. If she had allowed it, he could have destroyed all the citizenry of Montcleve. The innocent and the guilty would have been punished. But my mother could not imagine such a thing. My mother sought only her release when she threw herself from the battlements. Had she been stronger ... "

  "And you are stronger."

  "Using his powers for destruction is nothing."

  "Aye, in that I think you are wise, I have to confess."

  I puzzled over all of it, trying to memorize what was said which I believe I have done. And perhaps she understood, for next she said sadly to me:

  "Ah, how can I allow you to leave this place when you know these things of him and of me?"

  "So you would kill me?" I asked her.

  She wept. She turned her head into the pillow. "Stay with me," she said. "My mother asked this of you, and you refused her. Stay with me. By you I could have strong children."

  "I am your father. You are mad to ask this of me."

  "What does it matter!" she declared. "All around us there is nothing but darkness and mystery. What does it matter?" And her voice filled me with sadness.

  It seemed I too was weeping, but more quietly. I kissed her cheeks and soothed her. I told her what we had come to believe in the Talamasca, that, with or without God, we must be honest men and women, that we must be saints, for only as saints can we prevail. But she merely cried all the more sadly.

  "All your life has been in vain," she said. "You have wasted it. You have forsworn pleasure and for nothing."

  "Ah, but you miss the depths," I said. "For my reading and my study have been my pleasures, as surgery and study were the pleasures for my father, and these pleasures are lasting. I do not need the pleasure of the flesh. I never did. I do not need riches, and therefore I am free."

  "Are you lying to me or to yourself? You are afraid of the flesh. The Talamasca offered safety to you as convents offer it to nuns. You have always done what is safe ... "

  "Was it safe for me to go into Donnelaith, or safe for me to go to Montcleve?"

  "No, you were brave in that, true. And brave I suppose to come here. But I speak not of that part of you but the private, secret part of you which might have known love and known passion and shrank from it for fear of it, disliking the very heat. You must realize that sin such as we have committed tonight can only strengthen us and cause us to grow more solitary and willful and cold toward
s others as if our secrets were shields."

  "But my dearest," I said, "I do not want to be solitary and willful and cold towards others. I am that enough already when I go into the towns where witches are to be burnt. I want my soul to be in harmony with other souls. And this sin has made of me a monster in my eyes."

  "And so what, then, Petyr?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't know. But you are my daughter all right. You think about what you do, that much I give you. You ponder and you consider. But you do not suffer enough!"

  "And why should I?" She gave the most innocent laugh. "Why should I!" she cried out, staring right into my face.

  And unable to answer that question, sick to death of my guilt, and of this drunkenness, I fell into a deep sleep.

  Before dawn I awakened.

  The morning sky filled with great pink-tinged clouds, and the roar of the sea was a wondrous sound. Charlotte was nowhere about. I could see that the door to the outside world was shut, and I knew without testing it that it was bolted from the outside. As for the small windows in the walls on either side of me, they were not large enough to allow a child to escape. Slatted shutters covered them now, through which the breeze ran, singing; and the little room was filled with the fresh air of the sea.

  Dazed I stared out at the brightening light. I wanted to be back in Amsterdam, though I felt tainted beyond reprieve. And as I tried to rouse myself, to ignore the sickness in my head and belly, I perceived a ghostly shape standing to the left of the open doors, in the shady corner of the room.

  For a long time, I considered it, whether it was not some product of the drug I had imbibed, or indeed of the light and the shadow playing together; but it was not. A man it appeared to be, tall, and dark of hair, and gazing down upon me as I lay there, and wanting to speak or so it seemed.

  "Lasher," I whispered aloud.

  "Fool of a man that you should come here," said the being. But its lips did not move and I did not hear this voice through the ears. "Fool that you should seek to come between me and the witch whom I love, once again."

  "And what did you do with my precious Deborah?"

  "You know but you do not know."

  I laughed. "Should I be honored that you pass judgment on me?" I sat up in my bed. "Show yourself more plainly," I said.