“Surely you do not blame me for trying to hurt you,” I said politely to her. “You hold me here against my will.”
“Don’t challenge him again,” she said fearfully, her lip trembling. “I would not have him hurt you.”
“Oh, and cannot the powerful witch restrain him?”
Lost she seemed, clinging to the bedpost, her head bowed. And so beguiling! So seductive! She did not need to be a witch to be a witch.
“You want me,” she said softly. “Take me. And I shall tell you something that will warm your blood better than any drug I can give you.” Here she looked up, her lip trembling as if she would cry.
“What is that?” I said to her.
“That I want you,” she said. “I find you beautiful. I find I ache for you as I lie beside Antoine.”
“Your misfortune, daughter,” I said coldly, but what a lie.
“Is it?”
“Steel yourself. Remember that a man does not have to find a woman beautiful to ravage her. Be as cold as a man. It suits you better, for you hold me here against my will.”
She said nothing for a moment, and then she came towards me and began her seduction again, with soft daughterly kissing, and then her hand seeking me out, and her kisses growing more ardent. And I was just as much a fool as before.
Only my anger would not permit it, so I fought her. “Does your spirit like it?” I asked, looking up and around in the emptiness. “That you let me touch you when he would touch you?”
“Don’t play with him!” she said fearfully.
“Ah, for all his touching of you, caressing of you, kissing of you, he cannot get you with child, can he? He is not the incubus of the demonologies who can steal the seed from sleeping men. And so he suffers me to live until I get you with child!”
“He will not hurt you, Petyr, for I will not allow it. I have forbidden it!”
Her cheeks grew red again as she looked at me, and now she searched the emptiness around her.
“Keep that thought in your mind, daughter, for he can read what you think, remember. And he may tell you that he does what you wish, but he does what he wishes. He came to me this morning; he taunted me.”
“Don’t lie to me, Petyr.”
“I never lie, Charlotte. He came.” And I described to her the full apparition, and I confessed his strange words. “Now, what can that mean, my pretty? You think he has no will of his own? You are a fool, Charlotte. Lie with him instead of me!” I laughed at her, and seeing the pain in her eyes, I laughed more. “I should like to see it, you and your daimon. Lie there and call him to come now.”
She struck me. I laughed all the more, the sting feeling sweet to me, suddenly, and again she slapped me, and again, and then I had what I wanted, which was the rage to take hold of her by her wrists and hurl her onto the bed. And there I tore loose her dress and the ribbons binding her hair. With the fine clothes her maids had put on me, she was just as rough, and we were together in it as hot as before.
Finally it was over three times, and as I lay in half sleep, she left me in silence, with only the roar of the sea to keep me company.
By late afternoon, I knew that I could not get out of the house, for I had tried. I had tried to batter down the door, using the one chair in the place to help me. I had tried to climb around the edges of the walls. I had tried to fit through the small windows. All in vain. This place had been carefully made as a prison. I tried even to get up on the roof, but that too had been studied and provided for. The slope was impossibly steep, and the tiles slippery, and the climb far too long and too great. And as twilight came, a supper was brought to me, being put, plate by plate, through one of the small windows, which after a long hesitation, I did take, more out of boredom and near madness than hunger.
And as the sun sank in the sea, I sat by the balustrade, drinking wine and looking at it, and looking at the dark blue of the waves, as they broke with their white foam upon the clean beach below.
No one ever came or went there on the beach in all my captivity I suspect that it is a spot which could be reached only by sea. And anyone reaching it would have died there, for there was no way up the cliff, as I have said.
But it was most beautiful to look at. And getting drunker and drunker I fell into watching the colors of the sea and the light change, as if in a spell.
When the sun had vanished, a great fiery layer lay upon the horizon from end to end of the world. That lasted perhaps an hour and then the sky was but a pale pink and at last a deep blue, blue as the sea.
I resolved, naturally, that I should not touch Charlotte again, no matter what the provocation, and that finding me useless to her she would soon allow me to go. But I suspected that she would indeed kill me, or that the spirit would kill me. And that she could not stop him, I did not doubt.
I do not know when I fell to sleep. Or how late it was when I awoke and saw that Charlotte had come, and was seated inside by the candle. I roused myself to pour another glass of wine, for I was now completely taken up with drinking, and conceived an insupportable thirst within minutes of the last drink.
I said nothing to her, but I was frightened by the beauty she held for me, and that at the very first sight of her, my body had quickened and wanted her, and expected the old games to begin. I gave myself stern lectures in silence; but my body is no schoolboy.
It laughed in my face, so to speak. And I shall never forget the expression on her face as she looked at me, and looked into my heart.
I went to her, as she came to me. And this affection humiliated us both.
Finally when we were finished with it again, and sitting quietly, she began to talk to me.
“There are no laws for me,” she said. “Men and women are not merely cursed with weaknesses. Some of us are cursed with virtues as well. And my virtue is strength. I can rule those around me. I knew it when I was a child. I ruled my brothers, and when my mother was accused, I begged to remain in Montcleve, for I felt certain I could turn their testimony to her side.
“But she would not allow it, and she I never could rule. I rule my husband and have from our first meeting. I rule the house so skillfully that the other planters remark upon it, and come to me for advice. One might say that I rule the parish, as I am the richest planter in it, and I could rule the colony perhaps if I chose.
“I have always had this strength, and I see that you too have it. It is the strength which enables you to defy all civil and church authority, to go into villages and towns with a pack of lies, and believe in what you do. You have submitted to but one authority on earth, and that is the Talamasca, and you are not entirely in submission even to them.”
I had never thought of this, but it was true. You know, Stefan, we have members who cannot do the work in the field for they haven’t the skepticism regarding pomp and ceremony. And so she was right.
I did not tell her so, however. I drank the wine, and looked out over the sea. The moon had risen and made a path across it. I wondered that I had spent so little time in my life regarding the sea.
It seemed I had been a long time on the edge of this cliff in my little prison, and there was nothing remarkable about it now.
She continued to talk to me. “I have come to the very place in which my strength can be best used,” she said. “And I mean to have many children before Antoine dies. I mean to have many! If you remain with me as my lover, there is nothing that you cannot have.”
“Don’t say such things. You know that cannot be.”
“Consider it. Envision it. You learn by observation. Well, what have you learned by observing things here? I could make a house for you on my land, a library as large as you like. You could receive your friends from Europe. You could have whatever you wish.”
I thought for a long time before I answered, as this was her request.
“I need more than what you offer me,” I said. “Even if I could accept that you are my daughter and that we are outside the laws of nature, so to speak.”
“What laws,” she sneered.
“Allow me to finish and then I shall tell you,” I explained. “I need more than the pleasures of the flesh, and even more than the beauty of the sea, and more than my every wish granted. I need more than money.”
“Why?”
“Because I am afraid of death,” I said. “I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing, I
