Possession by A.S. Byatt Page A

sure to kill Horrible or he would destroy them all, which was duly done. And she comes back to the Counts of Lusignan to foretell deaths—she is a kind of Dame Blanche, or Fata Bianca.
    “There are all sorts of symbolic and mythological and psychoanalytic interpretations, you can imagine. Christabel LaMotte wrote this long and very convoluted poem about Melusina’s story in the 1860s and it was published at the beginning of the 1870s. It’s an odd affair—tragedy and romance and symbolism rampant all over it, a kind of dream-world full of strange beasts and hidden meanings and a really weird sexuality or sensuality. The feminists are crazy about it. They say it expresses women’s impotent desire. It wasn’t muchread until they rediscovered it—Virginia Woolf knew it, she adduced it as an image of the essential androgyny of the creative mind—but the new feminists see Melusina in her bath as a symbol of self-sufficient female sexuality needing no poor males. I like it, it’s disturbing. It keeps changing focus. From very precise description of the scaly tail to cosmic battles.”
    “That’s very useful. I’ll look it up.”
    “Why do you want to know?”
    “I came across a reference in Randolph Ash. There’s a reference to almost everything in Randolph Ash, sooner or later. Why did I make you laugh?”
    “I became an involuntary expert on Christabel LaMotte. There are two people in the world who know all that is known about Christabel LaMotte. One is Professor Leonora Stern, in Tallahassee. And the other is Dr Maud Bailey in Lincoln University. I met them both at that Paris conference on sexuality and textuality I went to. If you remember. I don’t think they like men. Nevertheless I had a brief affair with the redoubtable Maud. In Paris and then here.”
    He stopped and frowned to himself. He opened his mouth to say more and then closed it again. He said after a time, “She—Maud—runs a Women’s Resource Centre in Lincoln. They’ve got quite a lot of Christabel’s unpublished papers there. If you want anything out of the way, there’s where to look.”
    “I might. Thanks. What is she like? Will she eat me?”
    “She thicks men’s blood with cold,” said Fergus with a lot of undecodable feeling.

4

    The Thicket is Thorny
    Up snakes the glassy Tower
    Here is no sweet Dovecote
    Nor plump Lady’s Bower
    The wind whistles sourly
    Through that Sharp land
    At the black casement
    He sees her white hand
    He hears the foul Old One
    Call quavering there
    Rapunzel Rapunzel
    Let down your Hair
    Filaments Glosses
    Run trembling down
    Gold torrent loosened
    From a gold Crown
    The black claws go clutching
    Hand over hand
    What Pain goes shrilling
    Through every strand!
    Silent he watches
    The humped One rise
    With tears of anguish
    In his own eyes
    —C HRISTABEL L A M OTTE
    W hen Roland arrived in Lincoln he was already irritated by having to take the train. It would have been cheaper to have taken the coach, if longer, but Dr Bailey had sent a curt postcard telling him it would be best for her to meet him off the noon train; the campus was some way out of town, it would be best that way. On the train, however, it was possible to try to catch up on what there was to know about Christabel LaMotte. His college library had provided two books. One was very slim and ladylike, written in 1947 and entitled
White Linen
after one of Christabel’s lyrics. The other was a fat collection of feminist essays, mostly American, published in 1977:
Herself Herself Involve, LaMotte’s Strategies of Evasion
.
    Veronica Honiton provided some biographical information. Christabel’s grandparents, Jean-Baptiste and Emilie LaMotte, had fled to England in the Terror of 1793 and had settled there, choosing not to return after the fall of Bonaparte. Isidore, born in 1801, had gone to Cambridge, and toyed with writing poetry, before becoming a serious historian and mythographer
    much influenced by German researchers on folk-tales and