She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin by Boris Akunin Read Free Book Online Page A

stop him distracting her by slithering round her neck, and she became all ears.
    The celebrated poetess declaimed wonderfully, intoning with real passion.
When will Night come, rapturous and enticing,
When will he make his entrance through my door,
Entering swiftly, without knocking,
This darling Guest that I am waiting for?
     
How luminous, in jail or roaming free,
The flame with which my chosen lover glows
But in the sacred darkness here with me
His eye will not descry the lone black rose .
     
And then the sonorous Word shall be proclaimed
Sundering the dense silence like a pall.
Let it be so: what is not fated
Will then be gone once and for all .
     
    Just think of it, she had heard a new poem by Lorelei Rubinstein, one she had only just written! She and these few chosen ones were the first!
    Columbine began applauding loudly, but immediately broke off, realising that she had committed a faux pas . Applause was apparently not the done thing here. Everybody – including Prospero – looked at the enraptured young woman without saying a word. She froze with her hands parted and blushed. She had muffed it again!
    The Doge cleared his throat and said to Lorelei in a quiet voice: ‘Your usual shortcoming: elegant, but unintelligible. But that black rose is interesting. What does the black rose mean to you? No, don’t tell me. I’ll guess for myself.’
    He closed his eyes and lowered his head on to his chest. Everybody waited with bated breath, and the poetess’s cheeks flushed bright crimson.
    ‘Does the Doge write poems?’ Columbine asked Petya quietly.
    He put a finger to his lips, but she knitted her brows angrily and he whispered back almost silently: ‘Yes, and they are works of genius, for certain. No one understands poetry better than he does.’
    She found this reply strange.
    ‘ “For certain”?’
    ‘He doesn’t show his poems to anyone. He says that they’re not written for people to read and he will destroy everything he has written before his departure.’
    ‘What a shame!’ she exclaimed rather more loudly than was necessary.
    Prospero glanced at his new guest again, but once more he said nothing.
    ‘I have it,’ he said, giving Lorelei an affectionate, sad smile. ‘I understand.’
    Lorelei beamed and the Doge turned to a spruce, quiet little man with a pince-nez and a Van Dyke beard.
    ‘Horatio, you promised to bring some poems today at last. You know there’s nothing to be done about it – the Bride accepts only poets.’
    ‘Horatio’s a doctor,’ Petya told Columbine. ‘That is, he’s a dissector – he cuts up bodies in the anatomy room. He took Lancelot’s place.’
    ‘And what happened to Lancelot?’
    ‘He departed. And he took some companions with him,’ Petya replied obscurely, but this was no time to ask questions – Horatio was ready to recite.
    ‘This is actually the first time I have tried my hand at poetry . . . I studied a manual on versification, made a great effort. And this, mmm, as it were, is the result.’
    He cleared his throat in an embarrassed manner, straightened his tie and took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. When he was just about to begin, he evidently decided that he had not explained enough: ‘The poem is about my professional, so to speak, line of work . . . there are even a few special terms in it. The rhyme has been simplified, just the second and fourth lines, it’s very hard when you’re not used to it . . . After our esteemed, mmm . . . Lioness of Ecstasy, of course, my efforts in verse will seem even less accomplished . . . But anyway, I offer them up for your strict judgement. The poem is called “Epicrisis”.
The girl swallowed a hundred needles
To still her heart’s torment and pain.
Slicing neatly into her abdomen
The scalpel brings them to the light again .
     
‘You do not know if you should laugh or cry,
It’s like a hedgehog in the rain,
The way the human stomach shudders,
Flabbily trembling over and