"Sleep, Pale Sister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Joanne)

13

You see, she needed me. Call me a villain if you like, but I made her happy, which was more than your preaching ever did. She was lonelier than anyone I have ever known, trapped in her ivory tower with her cold prince and her servants and everything her heart desired except love. I was what she needed-and however much you might despise me, I taught her everything I knew. She was a quick enough pupil and quite without inhibitions. She accepted everything without reserve, without shame or coyness. I never corrupted her-if anything, she corrupted me.

We met as often as we could, mostly in the afternoons when Henry was working and I had finished the day’s sitting. His canvas was progressing very slowly and he worked until about seven every evening. This gave me plenty of time to see Effie home safely before he got back, so that he never knew how long she had been gone-and if the old Tabby suspected anything, she never said so.

This went on for about a month, with me meeting Effie either in the cemetery or at my rooms. She was moody-sometimes highly strung and tense, sometimes recklessly bright; never twice the same. Her lovemaking reflected this, so that she gave the illusion of being many different women and I suppose that was why she held on to me so long; I’m terribly easy to bore, you know.

She told me she had dreams in which she travelled all over the world; sometimes she described the strange and distant places she had visited and wept at the lost beauty of the dream. She also said that she could step out of her body at will and watch those around her without their knowledge; she described the physical pleasure of this act and urged me to try it. She was certain that if I were to learn how to perform this feat too, we could make love outside our bodies and be joined together for ever. Needless to say I never managed, although I did try, using opium, feeling rather foolish at believing her. She believed it, however, just as she believed everything I told her. I could make her shiver and grow pale, cry, laugh or flush with rage at my stories, and I took some innocent pleasure in doing this. I told her tales of ghosts and gods, witches and vampires dredged up from my earliest childhood, amazed at her childish hunger for all that knowledge, at all her wasted potential for learning.

I told you, she was a new experience, disarming me from one moment to the next. However, her real talent, like all women, was for emotion, and I sometimes pitied Henry Chester who had not been able to use and appreciate the reserves of passion in his poor little Effie.

The change came the day I decided to take her to the travelling fair which had camped on the Islington road. All women like fairs, with the little knick-knacks on sale, the Tunnel of Love and the fortune-tellers predicting dark handsome men and large families. For myself, I had heard that there would be on display a large collection of human grotesques, something which, since my earliest childhood, I have scarce been able to resist. They have always been a subject of fascination for me, these poor wretches, playthings of an uncaring God. In China, apparently, such shows are so lucrative that natural occurrences are not thought common enough, and parents of large families often sell young babies to fairs at birth to be used as freak attractions. The babies-usually the despised girls-are deliberately deformed by being kept in a small cage, in which their limbs are not allowed freedom to grow. The result, after some years of this treatment, is the comically atrophied creature so much loved by young children, the dwarf.

I told this story to Effie as we set off for the fair and it was a full fifteen minutes before I could stop her tears. How could they, she was crying, how could they be so cruel, so inhuman? To deliberately create something like that! Could I imagine the inconceivable hatred which such a creature would feel…Here she broke down hysterically and the coachman glared accusingly at me through the glass. It took all of my arguments to persude her that none of the freaks in this fair were so obtained; they were all of them honest errors of Nature, doing well for themselves in their chosen trade. Besides, there would be other things to occupy her mind: I would buy her some ribbons from the pedlar, and maybe some hot gingerbread if she wanted it. Inwardly I grimaced and made a mental note not to tell her any more stories about China.

At the fair, Effie’s despondency lifted, and she began to take an interest in what was going on around her. Pedlars with brightly coloured wares; an old man with a barrel-organ and a dancing monkey in a scarlet coat; some jugglers and acrobats; a fire-eater; and some gypsy girls dancing to pipes and tambourine.

She lingered for some time in front of the dancers, her eyes fixed especially upon one girl of about her own age, but with the dark skin and loose blue-black hair of the gypsy race, her feet bare and her ankles-nicely turned ankles, I noticed-ringed about with jangling bracelets. She was wearing a gold-embroidered skirt, scarlet petticoats, and a multitude of necklaces. Effie was enchanted.

‘Mose,’ she whispered to me as the girl ceased her dance, ‘I think she must be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’

‘Not as beautiful as you,’ I said to reassure her, taking her hand.

She scowled and shook her head irritably. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’

Women! Sometimes there’s no pleasing them.

I was ready to move on; the freak-show had begun, and I could hear a crier extolling the marvels of ‘Adolphus, the Human Torso’, but Effie was still watching the gypsy. She had moved towards a faded blue-and-gold tent by the side of the path, and a crier now began to announce that ‘Scheherazade, Princess of the Mystic East’ would tell fortunes using the ‘Magickal Tarot and the Crystal Ball’. I saw Effie’s eyes light up, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Summoning up a smile, I said: ‘I suppose you want to know your fortune?’

She nodded, her face vivid with eagerness. ‘Do you think she’s really a princess?’

‘Almost certainly,’ I said with great seriousness and Effie sighed with rapture. ‘She has probably been cursed by a wicked witch and is reduced to living in poverty,’ I continued. ‘She has lost her memory and disguises her magical powers as fairground charlatanry. But at night she turns into a silver swan and flies in her dreams to places no-one but she has ever travelled to.’

‘Now you’re laughing at me,’ she protested.

‘Not at all.’

But she was hardly paying attention. ‘Do you know, I’ve never had anyone tell my fortune? Henry says that kind of thing is witchcraft in disguise. He says that in the Middle Ages they would have been hanged for it, and a good thing too.’

‘Pious Henry,’ I sneered.

‘Well, I don’t care what Henry says,’ said Effie with determination. ‘Would you stay out here and wait for me? I won’t be long.’

Anything to keep the lady happy. I sat down on a stump and waited.