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good years before you are fit. Your father is strict.”
    “But shall I know nothing of it?”
    “The suitor is young enough, twenty years when you are fifteen. Sound, not a cripple. Fair, I have heard.
    His house is of the best. They’ve the favour of the Duke.”
    Helise, at twelve, had already been in love, with a painting of Jehanus the Baptist on the Martyr Chapel wall of the Sacrifice. She understood that it was futile to love a saint in such a manner. But since her own sensuality was to herself undivulged, she did not perceive it for what it was, and had never realised she sinned in her wild thoughts. In her head she pictured to herself the court of Herod, where she saved the saint from death (thereby depriving him, of course, of his martyrdom, maybe of his sainthood) and the clutches of Herod, shameless Salome, and the Romans. She accompanied Jehanus into the desert where, respected among his followers, she wove him garlands from the locust tree, tended him in sickness, swooned and revived in his miraculous embrace, and, in the river to her breasts, was baptised by the fiery water spilling from his hands. The face of Jehanus in the fresco, formed by an artist of genius, had often become the subject for some young girl’s fantasy. The .arched throat, mane of hair, and great upraised eyes, were tautly luminous with that agony of suffering or joy inherent in worldly pain. Or pleasure. Kept ignorant, the perceptive instincts of Helise had already been a trifle warped.
    It was her whimsy perhaps that Heros d’Uscaret, described, should resemble her first love.
    But the Lady la Valle would not describe Heros d’Uscaret.
    It took a maid in the closeted bedroom to do that.
    She was crying, this girl, only a year or so older than her mistress. Helise, having been well-educated in many alternative areas, beat her maid’s hands with an ivory comb, to come at the cause.
    “Oh madam—they’ve promised you to a monster!”
    “What do you mean?” said Helise.
    “There’s a curse on that house.”
    The maid snivelled, and Helise raked her again with the comb.
    “Madam—Satan claims all the men of their line—and the women. But the men are—shape-changers - they are things under the skin .”
    At this nonsensical, beastly phrase, Helise left off her interrogation. Her immature mind had now quite enough to play upon.
    For five days she was in a fever and the physicians despaired of her life. Then she recovered, and they congratulated their own skills.
    The talk of betrothal and terror seemed sloughed with illness. It was not referred to. Helise resumed her former habit, and never asked.
    (The maid was gone. There was a new maid, a country girl who was not acquainted with the City.) What one does not speak of need not be believed.
    So Helise continued until her fifteenth year, near the end of which they informed her that, soon after her birthday, she was to wed a noble lord of the City, whose name had already been made known to her. By then she had all but forgotten the awful words, her fever dreams. Therefore the icy hand that gripped her heart seemed to have no source.
    In the assembled months before her wedding-day, Helise was wan and languid. Her mother and aunts chided her. She would lose her good looks and demean her house. She must eat this and drink that, she must have these unctions applied to her skin and those pastes to her hair.
    At fifteen. Helise had mostly dispensed with questions. Her native indifference to the outer world was augmented by realisation that what might be answered was invariably told without inquiry—and what would not be answered would not.
    At night in her narrow virgin’s bed, Helise offered vague prayers to a fate that was unavoidable; she prayed as a man prays to be spared death. Perhaps delay was possible.
    But the months clambered over each other and the wedding-day came hurrying nearer. The bride was not afforded a single glimpse of the groom.
    A priest came to instruct Helise, a