condemned to the scaffold, and he reached out, easily closing the gulf between them, and pushed the hood down from her hair.
She didn’t move away. She wasn’t afraid. Not even when his fingers caught in her stiff waves, forcing the gathered strands apart, and closed on the back of her head. She came near.
And suddenly rising on tiptoe, she gave her whole young body to him under its wrapping of thin wool and lace, and he felt the buttery softness of her little chin, her lips so innocent they had no hardness, no skill for the kissing, and then felt her tenderness dissolved suddenly as her body was shot through with the most palpitating desire.
It invaded him, it infected all of his limbs, his mouth drawing it up out of her lips and the warm sweet flesh of her throat and then from the roundness of the tops of her covered breasts.
He stopped, pressing her head to him so hard he might have hurt her, and then it seemed he buried his face in her hair, lifting it in glancing handfuls that even in this dark wintry room gave off their glints of yellow. He felt the tiny tendrils on his face, and stopping again, he let out a soft sound to the air.
She drew back and, taking his hand, led him to another room.
Even her fingers felt strange to him and precious, sheathed in that soft liquid flesh. He caught her hand and put it to his mouth.
A bed was before them, set against the far wall, a distant jumble of shrouded furnishings surrounding it, as if the room itself were never used.
“Candles,” he whispered to her. “Light.”
She stood still as if she didn’t understand. And then shook her head.
“No, let me see you,” he whispered, and drawing her up again on her toes, he tossed her very lightly up and caught her so that he was holding her eye to eye. Her hair fell forward as if to conceal them both and for a moment, he did nothing except feel the trembling inside himself, and her little tremors passing into his own.
Carrying her cradled in one arm, he was barely conscious of latching the door. And finding a small candelabrum, he brought it with him up into the bed itself, which he closed all around, its heavy velvet curtains giving off the thick smell of clean dust. And then as he struck the match and touched the flame to one candle, and another and another, the light filled up this entire little room of drapery and softness, and she was kneeling there in front of him, her face a marvel of lovely contrasts, her eyes that smoky blue with dark gray lashes that were wet as if she’d been crying, and her lips a virgin pink that had never been rouged. And now quite by surprise, he saw her dress beneath the black cloak she wore was that exquisite violet silk casting its ethereal glow on her cheeks, giving her rounded breasts a preternatural whiteness as, mounded above the ruffles of her bodice, they seemed almost to glow. Violet tinged the edges of her, made the palest shadows in her cheeks that were covered with the tenderest white down.
But though he saw all of this in a glance, it was her expression which went to his soul. And it frightened him, quickened his already driving pulse, because he perceived in the flesh a spirit harbored there as steely and as fierce as his own. She was not afraid of him; she was enrapt and brave and full of will, and she reached out now and, catching the candles, implored him with her eyes to blow them out.
“No…” he whispered. He reached out and hesitated, wanting to touch her face. How much easier it was to touch the rest of her in the dark; then his fingers felt that faint white down, and the flesh under it which made him grimace as if with pain. And then her face lost its seriousness; the smoky eyebrows, caught in their frown, became long and like strokes of the pencil above her radiant eyes. And the tears rose, blurring and magnifying the blue color and holding it as if afraid to flow.
He snuffed the lights, and drawing back the curtains on the dim illumination of the room, turned to her, mad for her, and even as she shrank back, alerted by his urgency, he stripped off her silk and ruffles and saw