Free The Secret Book of Paradys by Tanith Lee Page A

the fireplace.
    Antonina stood there.
    It was not Antonina.
    A man in a white satin coat, all in white but for the long black loosely-curling hair that was the Freedom mode of Paradys for both male and female. Her black brows, perhaps a little more thickly accented, her heavy-lidded eyes, heavily and blackly fringed, blackly burning in the pale triangle of the face that was larger and cut with a bolder hand, and as hard now as white granite.
    He looked at me, out of a different distance, for he was some inches taller than I. He said nothing, did nothing, only the left arm, leaning on the mantle, the left hand with a pair of white kid gloves in the long fingers – her hand exactly, grown a size or two, a man’s hand, elegant, ringless – that gave a little flick, a little omen of gesture.
    I cannot say how long this moment lasted, while he looked at me, and I at him, seeing her, losing her.
    Gradually I became aware that von Aaron stood to one side, and two other men with him, advisers or lawyers, or merely witnesses. But even then, I could not look away, look at them. My arms had fallen to my sides. They weighed on me like lead. The boom of my heart shook me. And the black eyes went on burning into my skull. That was all there was.
    Then the Baron spoke soflty, maybe even timidly, from the wings.
    “Monsieur St Jean. I can’t prepare you. The news is bad. My wife – we lost her a few hours ago. I see that you already knew it. Well. This gentleman –” He did not go on, I sensed him slip away again, only his mute gaze on us.
    Then the man in white spoke to me.
    “I am her brother. Perhaps that is obvious to you?”
    “Yes, quite obvious.”
    He nodded, as if I had done something clever, a clever trick.
    “And you,” he said, “what are you? In my eyes, what are you? It chances,” he said, in his exact and musical voice, “that I arrive here and find this. Her husband,” he did not glance aside, “will do nothing, but, Andre St Jean, I am not insensible to my sister’s honour, or to the cause of her death.”
    She could not die. I could not proclaim as much.
    The light and the dark came with the crashings of my heart, ocean on to rocks.
    Well, let him get on with it.
    “What do you say now?” he said.
    I shrugged, and let the spray of flowers fall to the floor as I did so.
    “I will give you my name,” he said. “It is Scarabin. Anthony Scarabin. You got hold of a certain ring, I believe. A ruby scarab. Yes, well you will give it back, I will take it back tomorrow, after I’ve finished with you.”
    “You mean to kill me,” I found I said. “Will it be so easy?”
    “Nothing,” he said, “easier.”
    He moved from the hearth. He walked across to me, and with his gloves slapped my cheek, so lightly, it might have been an idle caress. He smiled. Her mouth, changed. And the skin, fine and fresh as hers, but more dry, and roughened by shaving.
    “What will you have?” he said.
    “Whatever suits you.”
    “Pistols, then. That is the vogue in your city, I think. Pistols at dawn. Can you come by a gun? How splendid. Will six in the morning be convenient?”
    “Most inconvenient. I’m not by choice an early riser.”
    He raised one of the black brows at me. Cold, as once she had been.
    “Don’t play,” he said. “Answer me.”
    “I will accommodate you,” I said.
    He said, “The choice place, I hear, is the wood below the Observatory. Bring your seconds,” he said, “I shall have mine.”
    No one else spoke a word. There was not a noise in the house. Only the sunlight seemed to scrape faintly, as it crept down the windows.
    What next? I need only turn and leave the room. It had all been arranged, and now there were things to do besides. How mundane this was. I had not predicted the deadly ordinariness of death.
    I would not request that they let me see her body. There was no body. All that remained of her was here, was
him
, this other.
    I felt neither exhilaration nor fear. As I walked from