Free The Narrator by Michael Cisco Page B

buried privately, on the grounds. Grounds of their estate. She refused the embalmers. Very unusual. Everyone remembered that then , you understand? She was very attached to the boy. Couldn’t stand to lose him.”
    I nod, unsure he can see me in the gloom. My mind is not in motion.
    “She blamed her husband. Apparently was cold with him after that. I was not yet in her employ then, but this is what I gather. She still loved him, you understand. When she knew he was dying, she repented it—her coldness—but he was so low by then that she really couldn’t tell if he could know that or not. Forgive her. She’s so sensitive ... and the uncertainty ...”
    He makes a face I can’t quite make out. Now, finally, my mind takes a step or two, and I remember.
    “They called her the Cannibal Queen.”
    He starts at that.
    “Please, sir!” he says sharply. “ Honestly! ”
    He sits back, disapproval radiating from his invisible face. “She deserves better than that. It made her so ill, she suffered so—and for a woman like that, to be ostracized ... made a pariah ... Or worse, to be slandered. Made a figure of infamy. Of ribaldry—it’s cruel, sir.”
    “No,” he says a moment later, as if I had asked him. “You see there was an inquiry, and certain arrangements were made. The judgement, you understand, was sealed, out of respect for the family—not that there’s anyone but her left, now her daughter’s gone away. After that ... it’s all nothing but vulgar speculation.
    “... She’s free. She could leave the city, if she pleased. But she won’t abandon her graves. There’s no question of punishment, at least ... not exactly, as she was, it was felt, ill at the time.”
    “No one thought to ... if she’s ill ...” I say without really knowing what I mean.
    He looks at me gravely.
    “I mean that, if she’s so ill, as you say ...” Now he is looking forbidding, face thrust forward in the shadows, and I falter, “—well, how is it she’s free to—you’re her keeper,” I realize.
    “I’m her keeper,” he says, and his face goes up and down once, lips moued out.
    “Her daughter disappeared, you know, and she couldn’t help but think it was as a consequence of the rumors, although the girl absolutely refused to countenance them.”
    He leans forward again and looks me in the eye. His voice has become insinuating and confidential, a strange contrast with the man.
    “So, you see, she’s a very lonely woman . It’s been years since anyone came to the house.”
    The fur slides down the seat, volubly sighing out its scent, and that delectable smell just landslides over me. I see again her cheek outlined in a green flash through the veil, and his voice is an echo the wind carries to me from below the horizon as I stand in the cemetery lane below her, in the past.
    “She saw you in the cemetery, and she has seen you in the street. She asked me about you. She asked me very particularly. She instructed me that, if I were to see you again, I should invite you, in her name, to call at the house.”
    I am on the street beneath windy sky, and Orvar is speaking to me from the roof of the carriage.
    “She receives in the late afternoon, past three.”
    There is a crisp card in my hand, pale lavender with metallic print, an address in the death district not far from here.
    “Come soon, won’t you?” he says almost merrily.
    I hold the card up to my face and that scent unfolds its petals for me again. A rattle of hooves, and then no sound but the rustle of wind against the eaves. A tin can clambers down the street behind me.
     
    *
     
    What at a distance I took for rags of hanging moss prove instead to be enormous veils festooning every bough of every tree on the grounds. I have wasted my time wondering how I will get inside the high stone walls, if there will be a bell or if I will have to stand in the street and shout like a fool, because Orvar emerges from the small door in the elephantine wooden gates