The great hall of the mansion was long and high with a cavernous fireplace at one end, a singing gallery at the other. One of its walls was decorated with cracked, patched, and very faded frescoes. Opposite these stood a suite of tall, round-headed windows.
Elizabeth entered a step ahead of her partner. The dress that she wore was of cut velvet, patterned with Baroque scrolls, green-black in color. It had a long narrow bodice that drove to a deep V at the base of her torso and rose like the calyx of a lily to her breasts, forcing them together, up, and outward. The skirts of the dress assumed a form not like the woman's own due to a substructure of panniers. The sleeves left her shoulders bare, but were long and full, covering her arms to the first knuckles of her fingers. These fingers were loaded with old rings, supports for garnets and rubies, so that her hands were crimsoned like a murderess's. Her neck and clavicles bore another weight of jewellery, a massive collar of enamelled gold liberally studded with malformed pearls.
Elizabeth was masked, or half-masked. The headdress that she wore, a black iridescent crest of cock's feathers , swept up and back from her face in a glittering pompadour. Her forehead, cheeks and nose were covered by a glossy black fur like that of a well-fed, well-groomed cat.
By contrast her husband attending her was more humbly clad. He wore the brown cassock and black cloak of a Compostela pilgrim. A broad-brimmed hat with a scallop-shell at its crown cast a dark shadow over the features of his face, rendering him as anonymous as any mask could have done for so prominent a man as the bearer was.
The company assembled in the hall was not large, but it was extraordinarily various. Despite the limited numbers almost everyone was there, everyone who matters, and sometimes in more than one copy. There were Caesars and Cleopatras, Napoleons and Josephines, Sapphos, Cyranos, Romeos, a whole squad of Mad Ludwigs. Regardless of the pretended provenance of the masquers, they all spoke English.
At first Lizzie stayed close to him, presenting to her acquaintances as one by one they recognized her despite her mask which was not difficult because of her small stature and the perfection of her breasts. These presentations were not real introductions, but only formalities although playful and ambiguous, in keeping with the spirit of the evening.
But later when music began to play the pilgrim had excused himself from dancing on the grounds that he did not enjoy it, she left him alone. She loved dancing, she said, and could not resist the opportunity to indulge this love a bit. Before she went away she established him at a buffet with a glass of wine in his hand, assuring him that she would find him later, certainly before they went in to supper.
The pilgrim nodded agreement to all this and watch tolerably as a Robespierre took his wife by the arm and danced away with her.
The music seems to him peculiar, peculiar in this setting anyway for it was Beethoven. Not in a lot long time had he heared anything like it but he remembered the title of the song that was being played. More of these tunes followed and the Pilgrim begin to wonder if the band might not be German. But time he had finished his glass of wine and allowed himself to be served another, he was convinced that music of this sort could only be played by Germans. With his third glass of wine in hand, he set off to find them, expecting to discover several genial Germans with whom he could chat between sets.
As he made his way through the mingled dancers towards the music, he passed his wife. She was now dancing with Gilles de Rais.
"Are you having a good time, my dear?" Lizzie called out to him above the clamour.
He smiled and nodded almost as if he really were.
The band was gathered on a low platform beneath the singing gallery. It was a sextet. The musicians seemed genial enough but they were not German. Nor were they English. They spoke nothing but French. Even before he heard him speak the pilgrim knew they were not what their music made them seem to be, for they were dressed in grey livery and wore powdered wigs like the footmen serving wine.
He turned back towards the buffet but, feeling the press of the dancers, took the long way around beside the Frescoed wall with its struggling warriors and shattered chariots, its battlements and banners, it scurrying nude women. Only when he came upon a horse with a trap door in its belly did he realize that the paintings narrative dealt with the Fall of Troy. Several times he searched among the dancers for his wife, but the floor was ever more crowded, and he failed to pick her out from the others in the throng.
Back at the buffet he drank more wine and took looked about again. Now his wife in green velvet was dancing with Macbeth, but as he watched, she left him to dance away with still another partner, a king Louis.
He was beginning to feel the effects of the wine, or of the long ride into the country, or the overheated house, or the strange party, or of all of these combined. He was mildly dizzy and more than mildly bored, and acutely aware of his disassociation from the activity about him. The sound of it had become oppressive - this uneven medley of music, laughter, and incomprehensible talk, of drumming and scraping feet, of glass rattling against glass, and against jeweled fingers. Almost palpably the walls of noise rose up about him, separating him from the room's activity, from the revel and the revelers, isolating him, as folding screens isolate an invalid in a hospital ward .
To make matters worse, he had begun to be bothered by his wife's abandonment of him. just as he was admitting this bother to himself, she danced by again still in the embrace of her king. When she saw him, a smile broke beneath her mask. She waved a hand gaily, then disappeared into the surge of bodies.
This fleeting appearance made the pilgrim of more peevish than ever. It also decided him that he had had enough, that he had to get out, at least into the air. With sufficient force to break it's stem, he set his glass down on the buffet, turned on heel, and stalked to the nearest door with his cloak and cassock flaring dramatically behind him.
Unfortunately the nearest door was not one which let outside. Instead it opened into a small retiring room. On a couch in one of its corners he glimpsed a heap of clothing in extravagant disarray, struggling limbs, a flash of naked moon-white haunch.
"Sorry," he said, averting his eyes and immediately withdrawing.
A hoarse, panting voice followed him.
"Je vous en prie," he heard it say as he pulled the door shut.
He tried another door only to find it locked. A third door opened readily, but still there was no escape. There was however a dining room and at the center of it, a long refectory table covered with radiant linen and set for many diners with old porcelain, bright silverware, bright glass. Fires burned at one end of the salon. Beyond the table was a buffet burdened with food and drink.
Not wishing to disturb more lovers, the pilgrim peered cautiously about him before entering the room. It was empty, a refuge at last. He squared his shoulders and stepped inside.
Immediately he felt better. The music seemed remote now, and the jarring sounds made by the masquers. The tranquility of the dining room soothed his nerves and mended his temper. What had seemed to him only moments before his wife's perfidy now seemed perfectly natural behavior. This is a party after all, and people were meant to amuse themselves at parties. That he himself had no talent for such amusements should not, could not, be blamed on his wife.
In a benevolent mood he crossed the room to the buffet. If it had been painting it might've made the reputation of some minor master. It was heaped with many good things, but principally with crustaceans: lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, and sea spiders. There were also mounds of oysters already open, exposed on the half-shell. In great bronze tubs at either end of the sideboard, champagne bottle reposed in beds of cracked ice.
Cautiously, like Goldilocks sampling the three Bears larder, the pilgrim reached out and took an oyster. He sampled them but rarely and without being convinced that he liked them. This one somehow was different. As soon as he raised it to his lips he whiffed the sea air in which it had been harvested - the dark, difficult Atlantic. After a moment of savoring this aroma he tossed the oyster off, as he might have done an ounce of gin. What followed was an extravaganza of sensation brief but elaborate, an amalgam of tastes and touches, of excesses really, ranging from the instant of repulsion he felt when the glistering oyster flesh first came in contact with his tongue, to the excitement he knew when it filled his mouth with its rich textures and perfumes and tastes to the profound satisfaction, the fulfillment in fact, that he enjoyed when it slipped down his gullet and beyond his ken.
The fulfillment endured a moment only. Very soon he wanted another oyster. He selected one, ate it voluptuously, and then went to a champagne bucket and drew a dripping bottle from it.
He managed the cork clumsily, but successfully, wasting only a few drops of wine in the process. Pouring it proved to be more difficult. His hand let the wine flow too rapidly into the tall flute provided for it, so that the lively liquor boiled up from the bottom of the glass, brimmed over, cascaded down the outside, dousing the pilgrim's fingers and the sleeve of his cassock . Quickly he raised the overflowing vessel and stemmed the tide with his lips. By comparison with the vintages he drunk earlier, the champagne seemed a miracle of legerity, so light and good that he finished the glass directly. As he was doing so, he set the bottle down on the buffet, or partly on the buffet. Unfortunately the part of the bottle that was not on the buffet was considerably heavier than the part that was, so that the whole bottle tumbled to the floor as soon as he released its neck. It struck the parquet with a terrible clatter, but bounced instead of breaking. Then, liberated from every restraint and propelled by the effervescence of its contents, it bowled wildly about, spewing white froth in all directions.
The pilgrim bounded after it, breaking another wineglass on the way. The bottle eluded him by rolling beneath the dining table. He looked frantically around. There was wine everywhere underfoot. Since it was obviously too late to stop the spilling, he got to work cleaning up what was spilt. Down on his knees he went, and with the tail of his costume began mopping the floor. Inevitably the liquid left behind by the runaway bottle led him to the table. Still mopping he pushed aside a chair, lifted the linen tablecloth, and crawled into the long tent-like space underneath. There he found the fugitive bottle, quiet now and almost empty. He was attacking the puddle in which it lay with his sopping skirts when he heard a door open across the room.
"Ah!" someone said, "the smell of good wine!"
Other voices joined in, dozens of them. Before the pilgrim had time to consider alternatives to his sudden preposterous situation, people began to draw chairs and seat themselves along the table. In a matter of moments he was walled in on both sides by five colonnades of legs. His predicament was made even more outrageous by the fact that he could do nothing about it. To reveal himself, wine soaked and disheveled beneath the table would be absurd. He could only be silent, lying in the dark, waiting for the oysters to be eaten, the champagne to be drunk
The babble above and about him swelled like a tuning orchestra. Toasts were proposed, drunk, applauded; anecdotes were told. Waves of laughter swept up and down the board in the wake of these conversational cadenzas, which the pilgrim presumed to be witty, although he heard them imperfectly. Champagne corks exploded in rapid fire. Inspired by this sound, he felt about the floor for the bottle responsible for his plight. When he found it, he put his head back against one of the tables sturdy legs, pulled up his knees, and, like an owl worrying a captured mouse, began to take tiny tastes of its remaining inch or so of wine.
It took a while, but eventually the pilgrim's eyes became accustomed to the gloom beneath table. To pass the time he tried to identify the diners by what he could see of them. King Louis, with his sceptre at his feet was easy. So was Gilled de Rais, with his particolored tights – one like black, the other red – his pointed shoes, his prominent codpiece. Most of the others were not. There were too many white knee stockings too many buckle shoes, too many jackboots, too many Empire gowns, whether Roman or Napoleonic.
He was about to lose interest in all of these netherparts, when he spied near the head of the table, or the foot of it, his wife's cut velvet skirts.
The effects of this discovery on him was instantaneous. Without the least hesitation he set out for the velvet knees, enthusiastically and with rekindled hope, as the shipwrecked sailor sets out for the lighthouse that suddenly brightens his horizon. Even so, he took care along the way not to alert the dinner party to his presence. To be able to move more silently he stripped off his sodden cloak and lay aside his heavy sandals. Hampered by stealth he made slow progress down the coridoor of legs, but he did progress.
At last he achieved his goal, spatially at any rate. The green skirts were within easy reach. For a while hesitated, wondering how he could make himself known from his peculiar position without giving his wife too great a shock, but finally he threw his caution to whatever winds circulated beneath the table and simply lay his head in her lap.
She started violently, but did not cry out. Very tentatively her slender hand came to investigate the shape of his skull, the features of his handsome face. Evidently the searching fingers found what the woman hoped they would, for in time she let them settle on the nape of the pilgrim's neck, where they toyed affectionately with this badly mussed hair.
For the rest of the evening, for the duration anyway of the champagne supper, the pilgrim stayed where he was, sheltered by soft velvet and other softnesses. Occasional bits of conversation drifted down to him, dead leaves of talk, but these he perceived only remotely and paid little attention to. Had he attended more closely, he might have heard his wife's neighbor, an ancient Gaul judging by this cross-gartered tartan breeches and his goatskin boots, express concern about her condition.
"Are you alright, Madam?"
But the lady in green velvet was as oblivious to him as her pilgrim was. Like a person in the grip of a nervous seizure, she looked away and to some middle distance of her own determining. Her eyes, already obscured by her furry mask, we're vague and cloudy, the eyes of someone gazing into a log fire and lost in the deepest of daydreams, or someone mesmerized. Her lips were slightly parted; a drop of moisture from her tongue set a diamantine highlight on the lower one. She seemed almost not to breathe.
"Madam!" the man beside her persisted, looking about for help. "Elizabeth!"
When he turned again to her, the clouded eyes were closed. He watched in alarm as she suddenly stiffened and was delivered of a long, quiet, rasping, sigh.
He muttered a phrase of worry and pushed back his chair. He was about to get on his feet and demand of the assembly whether there might be a doctor in the house, when the lady put her hand on his arm and held him firm in his seat.
"Don't worry, don't worry, Mister Darcy." she said breathlessly. "I'm in absolutely no need of any help."
"Are you sure, Mrs Collins? The baffled Mr Darcy replied .
"No, Mister Darcy... on the contrary..." Lizzie said.
Evidently the malaise or whatever it was, had passed. The velvet-clad Lizzie showed no further signs of being incapacitated. Her speech was a bit languid, but concise and clear enough. Her eyes were lively now and gay. She smiled as if gently relishing he man's consternation, then went on talking in a manner so normal that nothing at all seem to have happened to her. The only peculiarity that Mister Darcy could detect was her subject, which did not refer in any way to their previous topics of conversation.
"I'm convinced," said she earnestly, almost passionately, "that those who died in their sleep, do not die peacefully, as is always assumed by the living. I believe, rather, they die of fright, of the terror that we experience in nightmares. They are assassinated, don't you see, assassinated by their dreams..."
Mr. Darcy then laughed and called to the nearest footman. "My good man," he said, "go outside and see if you can find Mr. Collins. Let's see if he would like to interpret whatever the devil his lovely wife is is going on about."
As the footman departed to begin his futile search of the mansion, Mrs Elizabeth Collins' head lolled her head on the back-rest of her chair, and gazed at the ceiling blissfully.