Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (31 page)

* * * *

Leaving the showboat, they had walked out into the woods that overhung the River.

His arm had been about her. She could feel nothing else, but also strangely was aware of everything else, every leaf that brushed another, the grass under their feet growing, the flavour of the dark. No night had ever been so liquid black, but the River shone jade. Fireflies or stars sometimes washed through the trees. Somewhere he turned her to him, and kissed her, mildly, then deeply. And Ghisla had become all the night, full of a power like flight. She had held him, and taken his kisses like the feast they were, a banquet after starvation, and also
familiar
,
known
to her, as if they had kissed like this forever—somewhere, in some other region or condition, and as if now, here again they came home to each other, he and she.

After a while he spoke to her very seriously.

“You won’t believe me; please try, my darling. Listen. I’m older than you, and no boy. I’ve had—forgive me—many love affairs.” At this gently she shook her head, smiling. Of course what else, for a man so beautiful and fine? It did not matter. He held her closer, he said, “There was never one like you. This is a cliché, and very trite, but I’ve no other phrase to explain it. The instant I saw you—did you feel this too?” “Yes,” she answered. “Then you’ll understand me,” he said. “I want you and will have you,” he said, “providing always that you’ll agree—not to be my sudden companion as suddenly given up. I want you with me, my love. I want you with me until I die, which event I intend not to let happen less than a hundred years in the future.” She laughed at this, not in silly amusement or mockery. She laughed because she thought, that moment, it was possible, and that she too, now he had found her, would also live another hundred years. “So,” he said, “our best course is to marry. Do you think so?” he asked. She had gained such confidence. She had become another person, or perhaps become herself opening like a flower. But she only nodded again. He, trained in words and their delivery, was the one who said, “We are already married, I think, elsewhere. We’ve only to formalize the state. Oh, Ghisla—” by then he knew her name—“We will be so happy.”

And after that they had made their plans, or he had outlined
his
plan, which was both bold and sensible enough. He explained that he had noted something was going awry with the mechanical doll from the play, and so tomorrow he would need to get that taken care of, and, should the doll be beyond help, coach the rest of the company on how to nurse the play to its end without overly disappointing their audience. After the performance it would be too late to go calling. But the day
after
tomorrow he would arrive at her mother’s shop at noon. He would sweep the mother off her feet, being able, too, financially to sort out her overworked situation. He was completely confident the mother would not stand in their way. He had always been lucky, he said, and tonight was the proof of that for he had found Ghisla, had he not?

So they were to part, and one whole night, and then another day and night must go by until that third day, the noon when he would come to claim her. Would she wait for him, he asked her, smiling. She said she would. Otherwise Ghisla’s Prince did nothing to endanger or offend. His passionate and prolonged kisses, which had so thrilled and reformed Ghisla, had not in any way infringed what her mother might have called Ghisla’s ‘chastity’. There had been no rabid seduction, no betrayal. And there would never have been any betrayal, not by him, her lover, Prince Lutz Alvarek. When he spoke of loving her he spoke sincerely and from the deep of a heart and mind equally clever, sly and genuine. Every word uttered to her was truth. He had “loved” often, hut never
loved
. Now he did. And maybe it might even have lasted a lifetime, even a lifetime of one hundred and twenty-two years. Maybe, as he had felt also, blindly, sublimely, their love had begun in another time, on another planet perhaps, an elsewhere as real or more real than mortal life.

He intended to escort her home, but Ghisla refused this. She assured him the woods thereabouts were safe and she had only a brief journey. She told him too she would need to compose herself, and although by now the spectre of her mother had shrunk very small, Ghisla did not want to alarm or shock her. Ghisla had, during this magical interlude, learned to pity her mother greatly.

Their last embrace, meant only to be a promise, continued for hours and was over in a split second. But she took down her hair for him so he could kiss that too, and gave him her green combs to keep, when he asked for them.

She went away through the trees like the white ghost she already seemed. He watched until she vanished, then walked back to the boat. The
Vilya
. As in all his endeavours, or most of them, Lutz had known success. Only his professionalism had made him prepared to organize the business of the faulty doll. Otherwise he would never have wasted a single day.

He woke and slept and woke that night, in the inebriation of new love. And saw to business all the next day, and in the second night, lounging vainglorious with the other actors, after they had—by sheer ingenuity, and most of that his—saved the play despite failed Bithida, the doll, he had drunk his fill in a sweet, blurred triumph of anticipation. Thinking of the day after, of noon, of claiming her, his love. And then he heard about the drowned girl, the pretty one in the white dress who had lingered on the gallery. Ghisla. Ghisla drowned. Ghisla dead and lost and gone, and his life with her, all the burning one hundred years of it.

* * * *

What then, in God’s good name, had happened?

That Lutz had not, at the time, tried to discover the true cause of her death—well, who can say why not. The shock had assailed him too terribly, perhaps. And perhaps too, despite the vaunted luck of most of his life, in the past had there been other strokes, which robbed and hurt him, as if to balance the rest? That he went at once away is strange, yet imaginable. That he remained haunted, also.

But she—what, in the name of Hell—what,
what
?

She had felt, the young girl, so filled by rushing delight, remade, reborn, she knew she could not yet go back to the cramped stale little apartment. So she ran, childlike, to the River’s edge, and her dress was torn, but without fear she thought: He’ll pay for it, he’s so kind, and she won’t be cross.

Her head sang and her heart beat crazily, and she stood there on the brink of the dark and she began to weep—not from pain or horror or fright—from pure joy. Joy infused her, set her alight, joy brimmed her over, not knowing, as how could such a lambent thing as joy ever know, that though Ghisla’s soul was well able to encompass it, her young, fragile body—
could not
. Her father’s doctor had guessed and tried to tell them, you will recall, what might have killed her, other than insanity and water. For Ghisla’s father had died, not of a cough, but since his weak heart could not withstand the barrage of coughing. This weakness in the heart had passed, unknown, to Ghisla. And never before had it been so taxed. The joy, the bliss of love, the wonder to come, the rescue—they filled her physical heart, and her heart—broke. It broke, like the clockwork of the doll. And being human, Ghisla was not reparable. A single moment, as if the earth cracked end to end, and then the unfelt drifting fall, like a dying leaf, down into the waters of sorrow, the River made of tears. She was dead before the leaf of her body clove its surface.

* * * *

The flicker-movie is over.
They
have watched and seen all, the vilya horde. And Ghisla they see too, her phantom, seated now on the ground beside Lutz, passing her quiet compassionate ghost hands through and through him, healing, as she said she could, every injury the dance of the damned has caused. And as she does this, also, she has found her four green combs, wrapped up in a piece of clean linen, and lying over his heart.
His
heart that is strong. He will live.

When she lifts her head at last, the finishing shreds of the vilyas, Myrra with them, are fluttering, like skeletal butterflies, away into an eternal shadow. What happens here is, and has been proven, none of their concern. And now they are gone.

Near sunrise he wakes up, battered and sore, as if he has been beaten, but not so very badly, and he sees her looking down at him, his lover, the true love of his life. Her face, framed by the dark river of her hair, her soft breasts that he has never, Prince that he is, ever touched, her mouth that he has kissed and longs to kiss again, but which he knows cannot any more be kissed. He is dreaming her, naturally. Ghosts, superstitious though he may be, are only for the plays.

Nevertheless, he says, “No chance for us, then.”

“No, my love,” she answers, or something lays the words inside his mind.

“Next time we meet, perhaps,” he says. But he is aware it was a miracle they had met
here
. Why should they have the fortune to manage that miracle again when, with all things seemingly on their side, they had failed to capitalize upon it now?

Yet, “Oh, yes,” she answers. And she smiles. “One day it will happen.”

The dawn is coming, that must be the unforgiveable glare that blazes along the hem of the earth, its rays smoking through her, pink as pearl, cruel as knives.

“I believe it will,” he staunchly says. “Till then, my darling girl.”

Already in front of him he beholds himself, trudging off from the River, avoiding the town. The steambus met at some other halt, the return to the cities and the glass-paste theatres and the unreal acted lives. And the dawn smoke turns black and clouds him through.

Despite the fact of impossibility, she leans to him and kisses him on the lips. He feels nothing of the kiss.

He says again, “Until then, my love.”

And as she fades into the light, she answers, “Till then.”