Description: Chapter 1 He first heard of her when he was a child. Some called her the Red Queen, though she was others had titled her the Red or Scarlet Lily--or the Ruby That Sings. So many names, so much eccentric description hiding what it displayed. By the age of nineteen he was familiar with her history, and by twenty had read several esoteric books concerning her. Seventeen years after, he stood on a street, gazing at the Palace where she had lived. He acknowledged he had been blindly if intermittently seeking her all that intervening time. And now he had arrived. But he was no longer a romantic of twenty. And she was almost four centuries dead. * * * * My name is Edmund Sanger. No doubt you will know my father''s name, William Joseph Sanger, the actor-architect, whose memorable performances (Hamlet, Cesare Borgia) left audiences fainting or abject with joy; whose small herd of elegant buildings still dominate certain little towns of the north and west of England. I grew up in a crazy household. I don''t use the term lightly. William had long since driven my pretty, unclever mother mad. Their three daughters copied, or rose against her. I was the late son, appearing when everyone else was old enough to know better. I led a lonely, and perpetually astounded life, reliant on witch-like nurses, and drily erudite, if sometimes pederastic, tutors. At sixteen I escaped and took ship for France. The first book of my travels, which I then wrote, I was lucky enough to have made into a great success. Conqueror''s Road , was and is my only truly popular work. But still in print, even now, it set my sails for me, both financially and in the sense of preference. I could go where I wished, and travel so often very happily alone (yet frequently involved in brief if exotic adventures with other human things). I could live almost in any mode I desired, save that of richman. I could escape from whatever bored or horrified me. I was able to become--not my father''s son, or my family''s irrelevant annoyance, let alone any villain''s plaything--but Myself. God bless the written word, Amen. * * * * How did I first hear of Cremisia Ranaldi? No doubt from one of the better tutors. But rather than being some tidbit of intriguing history I was lessoned in, it seems more to me that her name fell like a pearl seed into my mind and heart, and there grew of itself into a glorious tree. She, unlike my at-one-time ever-present jailor family, was my verified connection to the world. Of course I fell in love with her, soon with all the raw sexual energy of my youth, and next with my even more voracious brain. She was desire incarnate, genius rising like Venus on the waters of imagination. If it ever entirely came clear to me, in my very earliest years, that she, as had I, had needed to elude enslaving family chains, I don''t think I was aware of it fully. Rather than the flag of rebellion, she was the sunrise that ends the dark. And she was safe as sun and star, too, miles off in the past. * * * * "Ah, you are a lover of the Red Lily," he said to me, my sudden traveling companion on the long, hot, near-noon road to the old city of Corvenna. All about were the round hills, with their groves of somber cypresses, and topiary poplars like rounded, curled-into-a-ball black-green cats. High up, rock and burned grass flared an extraordinary topaz. Sometimes colossal shadows, like sorcerous flying machines from some unthinkable future (hawks), swept over the slopes, and down, hunting across the wide, white, throat-of-dust road. They reminded me, such shadows, oddly of the decapitating passage of a guillotine''s blade, even to the airborne swish . I glanced at my companion, who had attached himself to me in the day''s beginning. A fellow walker. They were not always suspect, or to be swiftly sloughed. And he looked so like a rogue, I mostly doubted he was one. It was his role, his act perhaps, to keep him secure (whereas my disguise was only, and often truthfully, to look very shabby and poor). Curled hair he had, black as oil, eyes the metallic ochre of old bronze. But young, rather less than my own age, I surmised. An Italian, native to the area? Why not. The earring in his right ear was a gold coin rubbed smooth of its identity. He wore the typical red scarf at his throat tight enough to strangle him, I thought--practice for others? His name, he had instantly told me, was Anceto. "I have met many," Anceto said, "who were deeply enamored of the Lady Cremisia Ranaldi. Yet how can a woman keep such influence over our sex for so many years after she has left the mortal state? What can you hope for? She''s dust in a tomb. Nothing to embrace. Nor anything at all to see. Her voice, which they say was better than the voice of the harp, or the nightingale, no longer to be heard. Only her poetry remains, cold as soot-marks on the yellowed pages. What use, my young sir, what profit in such a desire, or in faithfulness to such a reclusive muse?" "Her verses are superb," I answered quietly. "So they say," he murmured. "I have never read any--for I can read. Never dared. Where I have heard some ancient song composed by her begin to be played, I stop my ears. I''ve no leisure to be bewitched by the dead, Signore." All this came about because he had asked me if I went to the city, and when I told him I did, he guessed why. Fairly canny by now, generally I didn''t obscure such ordinary matters. Except, maybe, where I suspected some thieves'' ambush might be arranged. We walked on in silence, but for the chorus of cavallettas, and presently an inn occurred at the roadside, as if conjured specially for our benefit. We ate a lean meal, cheese, olives, herbal rice, and drank some wine. In turn he told me of his own interests, which included a farm he yearned to possess somewhere in the hills, an old priest he was fond of, his wife, who was ''not unkind'' to him, and one or two other succulent women he now and then also enjoyed. On this issue he was flattering but decorous. After the afternoon pause, during which the crickets sang on, he slept, and I wrote up some notes on my journey, we continued along the road, still together. The evening began to gather in the distance, while the sun blinded us as it westered, a smashed egg of liquid gold. The gates were in sight by then, and we believed we might make them before the city police closed up for the night. He said, as we climbed the last stony incline, among some carts and donkeys also hurrying to arrive before the lock-up, "Do you know where she lived?" "Who? Oh, Cremisia Ranaldi. The Palazzo Ranaldi, am I correct? I''ve never been quite certain where it lies in the city." "Lucky for you then, my friend. For not many now do know, but I do. It''s not, this house, where most might expect it, though always it was there." Then we were in at the gates, the sky seemed to breath out blue and smoke itself to deepest darkness in a succession of moments. Stars burst in static fireworks, and an answering gust of lamps opened from the ancient alleys and towers of Corvenna. So close about us they drew then, the city buildings, like a crowd--less of men than smooth-furred beasts, silent on vast soft paws, their claws sheathed and invisible, their eyes pretending to be merely narrow windows. * * * * Cremisia''s mother, Flamia; she herself made some kind of magic, so the story had it, in the last months before her daughter was born. Flamia''s maiden name, as with her married one, had been Ranaldi. They were a near-packed family, noble enough and rich enough to demand legitimacy in all its forms. She was, plainly to be seen from that alone, used to order and the rights of a dynastic will. Since she must bear this child, she would have, Flamia Ranaldi stipulated, a daughter, both beautiful and gifted--not only with the female virtues, but the skills and inspirations more normally associated with males. To this end the girl must have the assistance of perfect looks. Hair ebony-black as a night wood, eyes jet-black as a night river, lips as red as fire, skin white as new-fallen snow. Once delivered, the mother would know her other requests had also been granted, through the medium of these extreme china and stained glass pigments. When the hour came--midnight, it was said, to match the wished-for color of black, and winter-snowing also for the white (and too in a sea of blood that might be compared, though wrongly, to the red of fire)--Flamia''s daughter was born. They carried her, washed and new, before her mother. Flamia was too weak, they say, to hold her. But, and again who can be sure, it seems the dying Flamia remarked: "They have done all I asked. I had forgotten that the price could be so very high." She died, evidently, within the next minute. Motherless then, the child was left, flower of night and snow and flame, to flourish or to perish in that house of the God-ordained masters, the male Ranaldis. * * * * The night''s shelter was suggested to me by Anceto, a kind of hostelry of sorts; I suppose I had been doubtful. But curiosity won out. It was in fact a decent house, so far as I could tell, nothing extravagant, but all clean enough and to hand. I had the impression the woman who provided the beds was one of t

Please Wait