'Lily Juice'

                                         by

                                Liz Williams

                                          I
write to summon her. She drifts up through the page, swimming in words: first mist,
as the letters that I have so recently inscribed begin to blur and dim, shadowy in the
flicker of the lamp. Then the air above the page starts to curdle and congeal. Her
eyes are always the first to appear, black as a nightjar's wing, rimmed with kohl.
She knows how little I can resist those eyes. She murmurs that all I need to do is to
stop writing, stop drinking, and then she cannot come. But she knows, too, that I
cannot stop.


                                        *****


The house is old. The current building is, so my patron told me, Venetian, but the
cellars are clearly more ancient: great blocks of roughly cut marble, cool as snow in
the summer, but icy to the touch when the winter storms reach the Cyclades to lash
up the straits around the island and whip the olives into leafless frenzy. I do not like
to venture into the cold shadows of the cellar in winter, but I am obliged to do so,
for that is where the wine is kept, and without the wine, I can no longer write. My
host and patron, whose name must not be revealed, was most particular on the
subject of wine, as befits a Venetian and an aristocrat, no matter how far he may
have fallen.

"You have my permission to broach any of the reds," he instructed me when I first
arrived, indicating the racks of dusty bottles with a sweep of a languid hand. "Many
are old vintages, laid down by my ancestors in the last century, from our vineyards
here on Naxos. There is no limit to what you may touch. Also, here - the rose, with
which you may care to refresh your palate. But these - the whites - these you must
leave alone."

I replied that this was in perfect accordance with my tastes, which did not - as far as
the matter of wine was concerned - run to the light and delicate, but to the broodier
heaviness of claret and port. I explained this to my patron and thought that I
detected a distant flicker, deep within his gaze, of something that I could not
identify.

He said, "And your work - the stories, the poems... do these, too, mirror darkness
and blood, sweat and senses, rather than the delicate, the pretty and the refined?"

I forced a laugh, answering, "That depends entirely upon your own - predilections. If
your literary desires are directed toward the saltiness of the lash, seaweed odours,
of musk and pain, then I shall take care to tailor my work accordingly. But if you
prefer oblique imagery, the flutter of petticoats and the revelation of an ankle, then
this is what I shall take care to give you."

In response, I received only a chilly, complicit smile. He turned to go, then turned
back. "You know why I have been confined here, why I can never be permitted to
leave, why I must have some outlet, at least, for my desires?"

I nodded. I knew very well. The trial had been sensational and its outcome had
even reached London. I remembered reading a pamphlet that depicted the case:
the sketch of the woman, her ruined face concealed behind the betraying charity of