The Lily Garden - Tanith Lee, ebook
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The Lily Garden
Tanith Lee
There is a wisdom to youth which later gives way to a different wisdom,
of age. To have one usually precludes the other. Both are valid, and both,
in their manner, sad. When Camillo was young, and a student at the great
university of Ravenal, he took a room which overlooked, as it happened
none of the other apartments in that building did, an ancient garden
belonging to an impressive but ruinous house of very ill-repute. I do not
mean it was a brothel, nothing so simple. No, a magician was said to live
there, whose name was known but seldom spoken. For general purposes he
was called The Alchemist, and his dwelling The Alchemist's House.
At first Camillo was only interested in the garden, which was overgrown
by oaks, ilex, and a great pine, because it represented to his imagination,
straying from his books, a wild forest. Late at night, when he had blown
out his candle, he would stare upon the moon caught fast in the pine tree.
If a dog howled from some neighbouring tenement, he would think of
wolves treading the trackless undergrowth beneath the high wall.
Sometimes strange sounds came from the garden itself. Doubtless owls,
bats, rats, and hedgehogs caused them, but to Camillo, who had never left
the city, they were the noises of a wilderness. He liked the garden very
much, and if he had been four years younger, he would have found a way
at once to get over into it. But now he was a student, a young man.
Already responsibility had laid hold of him.
The Alchemist was reportedly never seen. But he had an elderly servant.
One day Camillo saw this servant on the street leading from the
marketplace, and recognized him from description. Accordingly he
followed the servant, discreetly, and not unaptly, since he himself lived
close by, back to the House. Sure enough the servant came to the building,
but ignoring the great door fronting the street, went around to a smaller
door set into the garden wall. This he managed with a key. As the door
opened, Camillo was afforded a tantalising glimpse into the garden's
 forest: Vast trees of darkest green and coppery black, some rotted
statuary.
Thereafter Camillo, when free from his studies, would loiter between
the market and The Alchemist's House—there was a convenient inn.
Came an afternoon when the elderly servant, returning, dropped in the
street a great package of some unguessable nature. Camillo hastened to
his side. "Good sir, pray let me assist you."
"That is very kind," said the old servant, who was hunched in the back.
Camillo retrieved the package—which felt pliable in a most unpleasant
way, perhaps being a portion of a body purchased from some graveyard
dealer for alchemical experiment.
They came to the door in the wall.
"Allow me to carry this inside for you."
"Alas, young sir, I must return a churlish response to your courtesy. My
master—you may have heard of him—" and here the servant spoke the
forbidden name— "does not permit any but myself to enter here."
"At least let me bear your burden up on to that terrace there. Who will
know?"
"My master," replied the servant simply. He spoke without fear, but it
was the fearlessness of one who needs not fear as never does he trespass.
So Camillo was once again shut out. By now, of course, he was mad as
the snake to enter the garden. On this occasion he had seen the terrace,
mossy steps, a fountain of naked nymphs—and all about this clearing the
enormous ravenous trees.
Someday I shall make my self rich. Such a garden, such land will be
mine.
But he knew even then in his heart that these riches were unlikely, and
here he was quite right.
Camillo began to brood on how he could get into the garden of The
Alchemist.
 He was not afraid of The Alchemist, this being an aspect of the wisdom
of his youth. Yet also it was a figment of the
unworldliness
of his youth.
There might have been much to tremble at. But Camillo discounted the
dread name. He troubled only not to fall foul of the city's laws regarding
property. And this meant that he must find a way to open the garden door
by stealth, unseen, unknown, and doubtless by night.
Camillo therefore contrived to steal the key of the elderly servant. He
did this by distracting the fellow at the wall with the gift of a
pomegranate—a wicked deception, for the old man's eyes actually filled
with tears at the supposed gift. The key was then removed from the door
by Camillo, the old man ushered inside, already forgetting he had not
retrieved it.
Camillo then took himself to a place where keys were copied, and had
this service done for him.
Returning at dusk he cast up the original over the wall so it should land
on the grass beyond—he had prudently locked up behind the servant—as if
it had been dropped there.
Thereafter Camillo impatiently waited for one whole night and one
whole day before daring his enterprise of invasion.
* * *
It was true that now and then a few dim lights might burn high up in
The Alchemist's House, and on this night too they did so. Only when the
last light, a very high and dim one in a narrow tower, was put out, did
Camillo creep down through the lodgings and cross the street to the
garden wall. It was by now three in the morning and from the old
cathedral the wonderful clock with its figures of knights and maidens,
imps and angels, was striking the dull dark hour. Camillo was not sleepy,
he was wide awake, alert with a light supper and a little wine. And with
his fiendish curiosity, his actual
lust
to enter.
The key proved difficult. It had not been very well made, or else some
extra bar was on the door. If so, ultimately it failed, and Camillo finally
pushed wide the barrier, closed it soundlessly, and was alone in the
moonlit garden of the magician.
The trees towered like steeples, and the house was all but lost in them,
 and anyway silent as death itself. But the terrace glowed under the moon,
and the fountain of the nymphs with their grey-green night girdles of ivy.
Camillo crossed the terrace with caution, keeping to its shadow side.
Something squeaked in the undergrowth, and Camillo did cross himself.
But there again, though this was the wisdom of youth it was also a
foolishness, for if any demons had been left on guard, what use that single
lapsed gesture of a strong young mortal hand?
Then, besides, he jibed at himself. Only some little hog of the
shrubberies was passing. And lo and behold up in the tall pine had begun
to sing a golden nightingale. She was pleased to have a visitor, he had not
heard her previously.
The garden had a night scent on it, but also now the perfume of flowers.
When he descended from the terrace, he found a new wall of yew, and
in the wall presently an arch. Beyond lay a formal garden, as unlike the
wild of the outer place as could be. It was a bower of flowers, of every sort
of night-blooming lily known on earth, and perhaps the lilies too of
Mercury and Venus and Saturn, so strange and fragrant was the odour of
them.
In the middle of the inner garden was a patch of turf, with a sun dial,
now a dial of the moon, and beyond this, under an awning of lilies, all of
which were opened wide, sat a figure. Was it a statue—that of a young girl
deftly tinted by paint, a faint rosiness to the lips discernible even in
moonlight, a darkness to brows and lashes, and on the long and flowing
locks, part plaited and part free, the faintest blondest hint of a colour
almost pink? The robe of the being was fashioned like a dress, which gave
proper evidence of all the feminine sweetness, yet slender and virginal.
And indeed the robe flowed like the hair, down over the ground,
decorously. The face was young and pure—Camillo thought—as that of an
especially beautiful Madonna in the church.
Camillo stared some while, from behind the curtain of the yew hedge.
He stared long enough that he expected no change, had come to the
complete conclusion that the image was indeed a statue—when it moved.
It moved actually very little. It raised one hand, and touched a lock of its
own hair—no more, you might say, than the stirring of a petal. But
Camillo jumped in his skin.
 It must be remarked, there was something to the beautiful girl that was
supernatural. Or so it seemed. After all, Camillo must have succumbed, in
some form, to the idea of The Alchemist's House. He remembered now
strange tales, most of them from books. The wizard in his tower. And in
the bower, stolen forth by night, his daughter, or some princess in his
thrall, who held the secrets of her slave-master's power.
Now, what should he do? In the story the hero stepped forth to confront
the fair damsel. They were at once in love and in league. Camillo was not
ready for either state. He therefore quickly, quietly, and, in later years he
admitted, most cowardly, stepped away instead.
Camillo left the lily plot, hurried over the terrace, and let himself out
into the street. Here he locked up the door of the whole garden again.
No sooner was he back safe in his room across the street than a band of
drunken carousers went down the way below, as if he and The Alchemist's
House were of no import.
Let that be a lesson
, he thought. For the idea
that all over the wall was not worldly had fastened on him. His was this
world, of stones, and drunks, ink and paper, bread and warts and human
things.
Thereby he sealed himself to the lily garden of the magician as Eve did
to the Apple Tree when first warned it was not for her.
Some days and nights then passed, and Camillo did not think of the
garden. That is, he would not allow thoughts of the garden to remain. But
thoughts of the girl did stick to him. What had she been? What? And
some book-memory of a life-size doll, or statue enabled by magic to move,
began slowly and insidiously to obsess him.
It was no use. He must return, and look for her, and see of what sort she
was.
Probably, thought he, some pretty servant of the house, perhaps the
magician's secret mistress, who mooned herself by night for fear of the
prying eyes of day.
So Camillo took the key from where he had hidden it from himself,
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