Noon In The House Of Doom'd Desires

There had been no blood left, hardly anything left when the Duke had done with her but dry bones, tired thin limbs like dry bones unstrung – he had not kept her long, but he had used her cruelly. Her sun-bleached skull had been scarcely heavier in the hand upon its recovery than one of those gossamer glass balls kept to ward off witches. Bleached, scorched. She had torn loose the shutters and let the light in; their contamination had already spread to the heart of her. Gloriana burned.

Vindice might run a lazy finger along the knobbled ridge of her molars; he might probe for the absence of that rare organ, a woman’s seemly tongue, where death had snipped it off at the root. With fatal certainty his living skin might find the sharp points of the new dog-teeth, doubled up behind their honest well-worn originals. Like an adder’s tooth strung on a string of pearls. She would have lost those, the blunt teeth, as time went on; the old Duchess was said to have kept a little lacquer box of all her children’s fallen milk-teeth, more likely as material for sickly charms than out of tender sentiment. A whole nest of serpents, thankless. Snug now in their waxed winding sheets, scarcely dreaming of their father’s sins.

Vindice, now living, might do well to spend his days at court awake – though it be out of fashion, other enterprising red-cheeked upstarts of the court having taken to imitating their betters and retiring to their curtain-tangled beds at daybreak. His nights are turned to skulking intrigue and false faces; his day is turned to industry and remembrance. Vindice and Piato, a candle lit at both ends, spitting its wax.

He might touch a fingertip to her bare shattered jawbone and remember a smile, or a grimace. The way she had held her head. Now, on an armature of brazen wire, her head will be held in any way the viewer pleases. Brazen wires and hollow bones. Gloriana had shone like the sun, and the lusty tremor-handed Duke had snuffed her out. He had drunk her up.

Gloriana burned and dazzled every man that saw her; that was no evidence of a discerning palate in the devourer. Put a wig on her pate now and rouge the bare bone – he’d fall to just as greedily. Like a old man sawing the gray marrow from a cracked bone, rooting out the last shreds of precious matter to satisfy his own cringing appetite. There’s some matter yet here to interest the old man – he’ll paint her cheek in holy water, daub her grimacing lips in poison, and watch her thirsty paramour burn.