Eliza

Eliza

Last night, I dreamed of a black horse. Upon waking, I looked in the dictionary of dreams I keep in my bedside table, to see if there is any significance to this particular night time vision. It seems a dream of a black horse is a dream of passion. Considering all that has happened in the past weeks, I am not surprised.

I should never have been a Good Samaritan. It's against my nature. But the woman's screams were so - so piercing, they touched my very soul.

What month was it? November? November, yes. One of those cold dank nights, on just this side of frost, and a clinging fog was swirling down the hill from the village to my cottage. That afternoon I had been constructing a set of wardrobes up at the Manor for the new Mistress who was due to arrive any day, but I had made sure I was home early, armed with bread from Mrs Potts and a bowl of vegetable soup that Mrs Hetherington the housekeeper spices with something delicious - something whose recipe she refuses to reveal.

She says this with a twinkle in her eye. It is, yes, a modicum of invitation, for I would not have you think I am an unattractive man, merely because I like to live alone and am called gammy on account of the left leg that trails forever after me, like a reluctant pet. Mrs Hetherington, for whom the reference to marriage in her title is apocryphal, has offered me more than vegetable soup of a winter's night.

But I needs must live alone. Something happened once and I am best left to my own devices.

Why, then, did I open my door to the screaming?

I was in the midst of my soup, studying my manuscript. I thought at first there was simply a strange soprano note to the wind. Sometimes, when it shifts to the east instead of the prevailing west, a clump of trees may moan in an ecstasy of complaint. I looked out. I saw nothing untoward. The distant light of Lea Moor Farm was barely visible in the gathering fog. As I settled down to another sentence and another mouthful, that was when the banging and the most fearful screaming began. Did I hesitate? Perhaps I should have. Perhaps then I would not have fallen. Instead, I opened the door and there she was, a wild-eyed woman dressed in nothing but torn rags. I glimpsed tears, blood. Her grey-green eyes. 'Hide me! For the love of God, Michael, hide me! You know who's had me. You have a cellar, don't you?'

'Yes, but...'

She slammed the door behind her. Some superhuman effort had brought her thus far. She looked at me, with unspeakable sadness. I reached for her, and she fainted away into my arms.

I held her there. Eliza. Eliza Rathbone, who had been missing since the summer. 'Eliza.' I hadn't spoken her name for so many years. I held her, limp, against me, inhaling the scent of her: fear, dirt, blood, and something else that I couldn't define.

I lifted her up. She was light in my arms. I had only ever held one another woman in my arms like this. The feeling was intoxicating.

You have a cellar, don't you? Yes, yes, I must hide her. Make her warm. Keep her safe. 'Eliza,' I said again, and got myself busy.

+

It had once been a sort of scullery, the room below the room where I lived, so there was a fireplace with a chimney opposite the main one. No-one passing by would be able to tell, I thought, which fire was which. So I laid her down on some old cushions that I'd kept meaning to throw away, and lit a fire down there. She was stirring, but like a woman in a fever. I watered down the soup I'd been drinking, and reheated it, and knelt beside her, helping her drink some.

There were terrible wounds on her body, yet I must admit that every touch of her was exquisite.

There was a moment then - a wise moment, had I but followed it, ah but wisdom is easy when the lamb's long born and the ewe is wild - when I considered running to my half-sister's. It wasn't decent, I knew it wasn't, to have this woman here. It was dangerous, foolish, crazy.

I decided she would have to be washed.

Voices crowded in on me as soon as I had made the decision. I hurried about setting the tin bath before the fire and heating water and they said, Don't wash her , that was the one thing the voices repeated, like some religious chant, over and over again. But was it rape, to clean someone's wounds? Was it assault, to comfort someone who had sought sanctuary with you?

I loved her body. She had been whipped, and burnt here and there, and punched and kicked so that bruises swelled on her right thigh, and her ribs, and her left upper arm. I disliked the bruises but I loved the burns, and the welts of the whip. I traced the lines of them across her buttocks, and upper back, and the insides of her thighs, as I washed her with my clean white rag. My fingers circled the burns around her right nipple. I wept, wept for her pain and her terror.

I wept for my own terrible appetites. It was like a dream, that Eliza had been sent to me thus.

I must be good to this woman. I must be good to this woman. I must be good to this woman.

I chanted to myself like the monk my mother had once wished me to become, drying Eliza, finally dressing her in an old cream nightshirt of mine. She had come to me for sanctuary. But had she come to me because we had once, when we were scarcely more than children, read the manuscript together?

+

I didn't sleep. I must be good to this woman . And yet on a magic lantern show in a corner of my imagination, strange tableaux appeared, like hallucinations, like visitations from a devilish kind of god. I saw her whipped. I saw her burnt, tormented.

I felt my own guilty pleasure.

I listened for her. I raised the flap to the cellar steps and heard nothing. Once, the stertorous sound of her breathing.

It wasn't yet light when I finally warmed some more broth and went down to her with a candle. She was awake, and listening for me. She lay on the cushions, her head on her right arm, neither shy nor brazen. I could see she wasn't afraid, and for that I was glad. I knelt and poked at the remnants of the fire. She took several spoonfuls of soup before either of us spoke.

'You - cleaned me. Dressed me.'

I didn't know how to reply. I was afraid to look at her. In the light of the candle I had seen more horrifying marks: bruises at her neck.

'Thank you,' she said presently.

'You must stay as long as you like. Need to.'

I felt conscious that I sounded like some prim aunt landed with a recalcitrant child. 'It's not decent, Michael,' she replied.

'This is a situation beyond - beyond mere decency.'

I sounded grander than I felt. Suddenly our bodies were in too great a proximity. I busied myself with spurious tasks, I went back upstairs and fussed about moving things hither and thither. Finally I went down to say goodbye to her a full hour before I needed to set out for the Manor. She took hold of my arm as I turned to leave - yes, to flee - and she said: 'Tonight, let us talk frankly. Thank you for taking me in.'

+

She was naked, in the cellar, when I reached home. I had made myself not be early. The fire was ablaze. I warmed the soup Mrs Hetherington had let me have. Eliza wasted no time on pleasantries, or in remembrance of the horrors that had been done to her. Straight away she asked me to tie her in a peculiar way, her hands at her privy parts, one in front of her and one behind, a small length of rope between her wrists, then to feed the soup to her. This, I did, my hands trembling. I was afraid she was a dream that would vanish the moment I breathed too loudly. She showed me her bud, then, which she said was called her 'clitoris', and she asked me if I still possessed the manuscript.

I'd found it one day when I was little more than a child. The Old Master had taken to his bed. A wound in his right thigh from a riding accident had become infectious. The Old Mistress was as drunk as ever, and my mother - Mrs Hetherington's predecessor, the then housekeeper - couldn't control me or the otarWhen I arrived home the next night she was still there in my cellar, naked, her skin glowing in the light of the fire she'd rekindled, her wounds healing, asking me yet again to read to her from the manuscript.

What was I to do? This time I said no. But it wasn't the right species of no. I had been thinking about her every moment of every minute of the day, as I planed, and sawed, and chattered, and affected interest in the rest of humanity. All day I had thought of nothing but her, and her body. And so I said she must be the manuscript, her body must be, and I, I would be the quill, the writer. She asked me to bind her again, in her own particular way, her hands at her privy parts.

I bound her thus. Her own hands touched herself. I turned her over on to her belly. It was something we had both read once in the manuscript. I lit a new white candle from the one on the table. I began to drip wax, from a height, into the wounds across her back that a whip had made....

+

Have I invented that? That the scene in which wax is dripped on the wounds of the whip derives from the manuscript?

I cannot be sure. The dictionary of dreams is all I have beside my bed and it is silent upon this topic. I only know that it seemed like a memory - a shared memory - to myself and Eliza.

Shared, yes. Indeed. Mme darkness.

+

When I arrived home the next night she was still there in my cellar, naked, her skin glowing in the light of the fire she'd rekindled, her wounds healing, asking me yet again to read to her from the manuscript.

What was I to do? This time I said no. But it wasn't the right species of no. I had been thinking about her every moment of every minute of the day, as I planed, and sawed, and chattered, and affected interest in the rest of humanity. All day I had thought of nothing but her, and her body. And so I said she must be the manuscript, her body must be, and I, I would be the quill, the writer. She asked me to bind her again, in her own particular way, her hands at her privy parts.

I bound her thus. Her own hands touched herself. I turned her over on to her belly. It was something we had both read once in the manuscript. I lit a new white candle from the one on the table. I began to drip wax, from a height, into the wounds across her back that a whip had made....

+

Have I invented that? That the scene in which wax is dripped on the wounds of the whip derives from the manuscript?

I cannot be sure. The dictionary of dreams is all I have beside my bed and it is silent upon this topic. I only know that it seemed like a memory - a shared memory - to myself and Eliza.

Shared, yes. Indeed. Mmm.

I must write of it. Michael, do not prevaricate.

It was, I believe, the fourth time that I, the young Michael in the Manor, had intended to peruse the manuscript. The Young Master - the foul man who has hurt Eliza so badly that she must escape to me - had been bullying me again and I'd run, again, to the place I knew he dare not go. To his father's study. To where someone had already lifted the two loose floorboards in the alcove beside the fireplace. To where someone was already reading the manuscript. They had long blond hair, very pale skin, wide grey-green eyes -

Eliza. Her eyes met mine.

And I ran.

And ran.

And ran.

+

And many years later, I ran home, home to my solitary, my once solitary house to meet Eliza's eyes, finally, to enact, finally, the stories we had read about in our youth.

Yes, this is truly how it occurred. Indeed it is. Every night for eight nights Eliza and I enacted scenes from the manuscript, glorious, terrible scenes of torment, humiliation, the infliction of pain, the perverse arousal of pleasure. Was it love? It was more than love. It was like looking into a mirror, and finally recognizing myself, after a long, long period of incredulity. Yes, this is who I am.

It must have been on the ninth day, after the eighjth night when, so distracted was I by the dark joy of our encounters, that I failed to present