Mistress of Night and Dawn Read online

  MISTRESS of NIGHT & DAWN

  Vina Jackson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1. Hunting Ghosts

  2. Great Expectations

  France 1788

  3. A Prick of Blood

  4. The New World

  Venice 1847

  5. The Fantastic Aerialists

  6. A Beating Heart

  7. The Island of Doctor Wells

  New Orleans 1916

  8. Story of A

  9. A Game of Two Halves

  New Zealand 1964

  10. A Congregation of Pleasure

  11. The Illustrated Woman

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also By Vina Jackson

  Copyright

  Prologue

  A Child by The Lake

  The child was sleeping.

  A sliver of moonlight peered through the motel room window while the hushed, liquid sounds of the nearby lake were carried on a carpet of night towards them. They lay motionless on the narrow bed. Both the Engineer and the Mistress-in-Waiting were silent, absorbed in thought, listening to the regular rhythm of the baby’s breath as it cruised alongside the background chatter of the cicadas.

  ‘I didn’t know cicadas sang at night,’ she remarked.

  ‘It could be because of the light on the jetty,’ the Engineer said. ‘Or the heatwave.’

  ‘Yes, it is hot . . .’ She instinctively smoothed the sheet that covered their bodies with her damp hands, as if ironing out the creases would alleviate the suffocating heat. ‘Or maybe they’re crickets or katydids,’ she added.

  ‘No, definitely cicadas,’ the Engineer informed her. ‘It’s a distinctive chorus. I recognise it.’

  The young woman fell silent and turned towards him, allowing her fingers to brush against his skin.

  The Engineer sighed, overcome by an uncontrollable feeling of gratitude swelling inside his chest. They were side by side, eyes wide open, the baby’s basket set on the floor at her side where she could keep an eye on it and reach its handle without having to move more than an inch.

  He turned towards her. His wife.

  Of two weeks only.

  Her blond hair spilling freely over the cushion, golden, regal.

  In his mind, he replayed the short wedding ceremony in the town hall of the picturesque village where they had first found refuge after fleeing the Ball. The same village where their child had come into the world. Their shelter from the storm, a small community in a distant valley dotted with lakes, which they had stumbled upon by chance.

  They had debated furiously whether this was the right place to hide, a pretty but touristy gathering of picture-postcard cottages, gift shops and a circle of cabins surrounding a partly isolated minor lake, but it had felt right. Hiding in plain sight amongst the ever-changing flow of visitors. It had been late spring and her pregnancy was due to come to term in early summer. They had noticed a small hospital on the outskirts of the village as the Greyhound bus they were travelling on had driven by and they knew they couldn’t run for ever. It was as good a place as any, they had reckoned.

  The ceremony hadn’t been much of a ceremony. The official had worn a black suit with a dark tie and their witnesses had been the local midwife who had presided over the baby’s arrival and the owner of the bed and breakfast where they had initially taken refuge. They knew no one else in town. It was all over in ten minutes and the only touch of colour had been a few bouquets of red roses the Engineer had scraped together at the last minute. In her Moses basket, the child had remained silent through the proceedings as they exchanged vows, parroted all the right words and ended up so quickly as man and wife.

  The Engineer extended his hand and passed his fingers through her long hair, like travelling through silk, a sensation he found both arousing and soothing. He took a deep breath in an attempt to immerse himself in the moment, to make it last.

  Had the child been a boy, he knew, there might have been an opportunity to remain here for a while, or somewhere else, and maybe settle down, to get away from the road and their headless flight. But that opportunity was now denied them. The Ball would never allow the offspring of a Mistress-in-Waiting to escape her destiny.

  ‘You can’t sleep, can you?’ his wife asked him.

  ‘No.’

  She shifted nearer to him, effortlessly sliding over the central dip in the mattress, the imprint created by the hundreds of couples who had preceded them in this bed before they had inherited it, and snuggled up against his side. He slept naked, and she usually wore a thin cotton nightgown, which had now bunched up at her waist.

  The contact was electric. It always was. Since the first time their bodies had met, when they both worked at the Ball on a summer’s night a whole year ago.

  Their lips made contact.

  Just as they had on that fateful evening as the fireworks roared through the sky in the distant fields setting a signal for the bacchanalia to begin, a rainbow palette of fire, sparkles and flames bathing the landscape in a blanket of magic.

  Their hearts beating in unison.

  Then and now.

  The Engineer took his wife in his arms, banishing the imagined sounds of the final Ball they had participated in. Remembering how they had relished that first embrace, how it had seemed to go on for ever and everything around them had somehow disappeared, leaving them at the centre of a cocoon of silence and affection, in sway to each other, suspended in the fleeting breeze of their breaths, the softness of their skins, the yearning in their eyes.

  And they had both known, in an instant, that this was what they had been waiting for all their lives.

  She had said his name softly, as if shielding it from the ears of others. The Engineer had whispered hers, lingering on every syllable, caressing every sound.

  Still holding on to each other as if their lives depended on it, they had looked at each other, searching for words, the right words, the wrong words, something to hang onto.

  ‘It’s wrong,’ she had said, but wouldn’t let go of him. ‘Us.’ She shivered. ‘You know what is happening at dawn, don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ the Engineer had confessed. He had designed the ceremonial console. There was no way he could pretend not to know.

  The first time she would be inscribed.

  Marking her once and for all as the Mistress-in-Waiting.

  And they had fled.

  Knowing they would inevitably be pursued.

  To the ends of the earth.

  ‘Hold me,’ his wife said, and his mind was returned to the present. To the suffocating bedroom where the wide open windows brought no relief from the curtain of leaden heat. His fingers lingered in the wake of her hair and tiptoed down to her bare shoulders. Her skin was damp.

  Her small hand glided across his bare back, her nails gently trailing across his skin, pulling him tighter against her. His heartbeat accelerated. They hadn’t made love since the child’s birth. It wasn’t something they had discussed, it had just happened. Waiting for the right time.

  That morning, he had watched her shower when she had left the door to the bathroom half-open. The porcelain white of her body had shone under the pearling water like a jewel and the Engineer had felt his chest tightening in response. He was overrun by the soothing familiarity of his desire for her. Knowing it would never die.

  There was a muffled sound. The baby had burped or hiccupped.

  Their bodies parted.

  ‘Is she waking?’

  His wife looked over the side of the bed.

  ‘No. It’s still a bit too early, I think.’

&nb
sp; Right then, as if responding mischievously to her mother’s statement, the baby opened her eyes wide, revealing dark-brown orbs that lit up her chubby face.

  Her parents smiled.

  The baby peered out at them, silent, querying.

  ‘Hungry?’ her mother asked the child, pulling down her nightgown’s strap and uncovering her swollen breast and its delicately pink nipple. The expression on her face unaltered, the baby began sucking.

  ‘She always is,’ the Engineer said.

  His wife leaned over the side of the bed, picked up the baby and brought the child to her chest.

  ‘We still haven’t given her a name,’ he said.

  So far they affectionately called her ‘dumpling’, but hadn’t settled on the right forename. Every time they tentatively agreed on one, they ended up discarding it the following morning as uninteresting, inappropriate, banal or downright wrong.

  ‘We’ll come up with something,’ the Engineer stated and kept on watching his wife and new-born child with unerring fascination.

  Fed and changed, the baby quickly fell asleep again.

  ‘She’s good for a few hours now,’ his wife said.

  Dawn was peering through the cabin’s wide-open windows, bathing the room with shimmering light. Already, the temperature was rising and the monotonous sound of the cicadas was growing in crescendo.

  In her basket, the child appeared unaffected, not even sweating, at peace, her thin trails of dark hair unevenly distributed across her small head, her breath reassuringly regular.

  ‘I need some fresh air,’ his wife remarked, wiping the dampness away from her forehead.

  ‘I don’t think it’s any less stifling outside,’ the Engineer pointed out.

  ‘By the lake, maybe?’ she suggested, her eyes casting a longing glance in the direction of the calm spread of water beyond the wall of trees that enclosed the perimeter of the motel and its circle of cottages. There wasn’t a single vehicle in the car park at the front. They were the only visitors today.

  He looked down at the baby’s basket on the floor between the unmade bed and the wall. ‘What about the child?’

  ‘She’s just eaten,’ his wife observed. ‘She’ll sleep until midday, at least eleven,’ she added. ‘She’ll be okay. We don’t have to stay more than an hour at most.’

  ‘Okay,’ the Engineer reluctantly agreed.

  As if seeking absolution for their temporary desertion, they both leaned over the basket and kissed the baby’s forehead before walking out and jogging the few hundred yards or so to the lake.

  ‘We’re close enough that we’ll hear her if she cries. She has powerful lungs, our little one,’ the Mistress-in-Waiting remarked as they held each other’s hands and trampled barefoot through the grass and across the patchy curtain of tall oak trees before emerging onto the dry mud bank of the small lake. A small, rickety jetty extended into the peaceful waters, and a weak, gossamer breeze rose magically from the water’s shallow depths and brushed against their skin, weakly diverting the mounting heat of the new day.

  The irregular wooden planks felt warm under their feet and they walked a length away from the pontoon’s edge.

  At this distance from the trees and the fields, the insistent sound of the cicadas singing had faded away, and the young couple were bathed in an eerie stasis of silence.

  Skimming across the roof of the trees behind them a gust of wind rose, born out of nowhere, and the sudden sound of branches creaking and leaves shaking in its wake reached the Engineer’s ears. Out of instinct, he swiftly looked back, and thought he saw a shadow run between two of the trees, before disappearing out of sight like a ghost. His heart dropped.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked him, sensing him tense at her side.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought for a moment there was somebody in the trees, watching us.’

  ‘Your paranoia, again,’ she said. ‘And, anyway, who cares if we are seen? We’re married, remember, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’d been seen naked, would it?’

  His gaze lingered, fixed on the thin gap between the trees, and he then turned back to her. ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry.’

  He hadn’t told her that the previous day when he had walked into the village to pick up fresh milk and provisions, he had come across a couple of strangers whose attire was unlike that of the customary tourists who visited the area. And, out of the corner of his eye, he’d caught a glimpse of the woman looking at him somewhat quizzically. However, neither she nor the man accompanying her was familiar to him from his time at the Ball. He’d quickly dismissed the idea they might be acolytes tasked with running them down, but the kernel of the thought had embedded itself in his mind and suddenly returned.

  ‘I love you,’ the Engineer said.

  His wife turned to him and smiled in that way that always melted his heart and, almost as if in slow motion, pulled the straps of her nightgown to the side and allowed the flimsy garment to fall to her feet. She was naked underneath. The early rays of the sun ran through her long blond tresses, crowning the strands of gold with a delicate haze.

  Riven to the spot by the beauty of his wife as she stood, feet slightly apart in a pause of expectation, the Engineer held his breath, his attention locked on every single detail of her unveiled body, the indescribable shades of pink of her nipples, the trace of her rib cage beneath the white skin, the dark yellow fire of her thatch, the elegant curve of her hips, the exquisitely thin circle of her ankle and the gold chain he had always known her to wear there. Then he looked up and their eyes met and his soul plunged into the green depths of her life.

  He went to her and kissed her, abandoning himself to the cushioned softness of her lips, her bare skin wrapping itself around his own. This seemed to go on for ever, time around them falling to a standstill.

  Finally, she broke away. His eyes were closed.

  The sun was rising over the trembling horizon behind him, growing stronger with every passing minute, its fierce rays washing over his bare back and, for a brief moment, he felt dizzy, unsure what was hotter, the slow, sharp fire travelling across his shoulders or the cauldron of her mouth as she wrapped herself around him and teased and played with him as only she knew best.

  The Engineer gasped. ‘Not now. Not like this,’ he protested. ‘I want to be inside you.’ It would be the first time they would make love since the birth and he wanted to enjoy it to the full, make it unforgettable.

  His wife detached herself from him and he joined her on his knees, the rough texture of the jetty’s wooden planks an unwelcome burst of reality and discomfort. He stretched out and reached her discarded nightgown and spread it out on the jetty floor and then delicately positioned her across it and parted her legs.

  Her arms stretched out from her side and her body opened like a cross, preparing herself for his imminent but welcome invasion.

  They were sprawled out on the wooden jetty, spent, exhausted. The sun was rising over the trembling horizon behind them, growing stronger with every passing minute, its fierce rays washing over their bodies.

  ‘Come on,’ she chided him, getting to her feet. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  And with that she faced the end of the jetty and took flight, causing a thousand ripples to shimmer across the broken surface of the lake’s dormant waters as she dived in.

  The sound of her laughter echoed through the air.

  The Engineer hesitated briefly and then followed her in, the impact of his body creating a further galaxy of concentric circles to race wildly across the already rippling skin of the lake.

  The cool water felt invigorating and they splashed around like wild children in a playground, enjoying the way their hot skin was bathed with relief with every successive moment that passed.

  ‘Catch me,’ his wife called out, swimming towards the centre of the lake.

  Seeing him approach, she jumped up and plunged under the water to hide from him, prolonging the game they were playing.

&nb
sp; By the time he reached the spot where she had submerged herself, she hadn’t returned to the surface. He realised this was the deepest part of the lake, unlike the shallow edges where they had set off from. He waited for a moment but, overcome by a rush of fear, he lowered himself fully in the waters, below the surface. It took an agonisingly long time for his eyes to adjust to the submarine murk and he had to force himself to keep them open, against all his instincts.

  Spinning around in panic in an attempt to see where she might be, he could feel his lungs bursting as he attempted to hold the air inside and not be expelled. He thrashed uncontrollably, the lake around him tightening its grip like hard wool around his body.

  Finally, just as he was about to launch himself upwards to the surface of the lake in a bid to take in fresh air and make a further attempt, he noticed a blurred form floating just a few arms away from him. It was her. His wife.

  Fixed in time. Her eyes were wide open and pleading. Her golden hair floating like an explosion above her head, her arms beating a metronomic rhythm by her sides. He knew she could see him. He made an attempt to reach her but the weight in his chest became unbearable and felt like it would saw him in two.

  He looked down. Her ankle was caught in a jungle of weeds on the floor of the lake and she was frantically trying to set it loose but her energy was visibly waning and every successive tug only appeared to tighten the plant’s hold on her leg.

  He was only half-conscious by the time he reached her and was unable to summon the physical will to untangle her from the weeds in which her ankle was held captive.

  He gave her a last look and he knew she understood.

  As resignation engulfed him, he first thought with a sense of relief that what was happening was not the fault of the Ball, and his final one was for his daughter who was sleeping peacefully just a stone’s throw away.

  Slowed by the sheer weight of the water, he struggled to raise a hand and reach her cheek in a final gesture of tenderness but he failed to do so and his fingers grazed her left nipple. Then everything grew black around him.

  East of the lake, a cloud passed across the sun.

  In the cabin, the child had woken up and was now crying.