The witching hour

my entire life.

How lovely in its youth was her body, how firm and sweet to the touch her young limbs and her fresh skin. I did not want her to wake and look at me with the wise and cunning eyes of Charlotte. I wanted to weep that all this had taken place.

It seemed she did wake and that we talked for a while, but I remember more truly the things I saw than the words we spoke.

She was again plying me with her drink, her poison, and had added to the mix an even greater inducement, for now she seemed deep and saddened and more eager than ever to know my thoughts. As she sat there with her golden hair falling all about her, the Lady Godiva of the English, she puzzled again that I had seen Lasher in the stone circle in Donnelaith.

And it seemed the trick of the potion now, Stefan, that I was there! For I heard the creaking of the cart once more, and saw my precious little Deborah, and in the distance the thin image of the dark man.

“Ah, but you see, it was to Deborah that he meant to appear,” I heard myself explain, “and that I saw him proves only that anyone could see him, that he had gathered by some mysterious means a physical shape.”

“Aye, and how did he do it?”

And once more I pulled out of the archive of my head the teachings of the ancients. “If this thing can gather jewels for you … ”

“-that he does.”

“-then he can gather tiny particles to create a human shape.”

Then in a twinkling, I found myself in Amsterdam in bed with my Deborah, and all her words to me of that night were spoken again, as if I stood with her in the very room. And all this I then told to my daughter, the witch in my arms, who poured the wine for me, whom I meant to take a thousand times before I should be released.

“But if you know then that I am your father, why did you do this?” I asked, while at the same time seeking to kiss her again.

She held me off as she might hold off her child. “I need your height and your strength, Father. I need a child by you-a son that will not inherit Antoine’s illness, or a daughter that will see Lasher, for Lasher will not show himself to a man.” She considered for a moment and then said to me: “And you see, you are not merely a man to me, but a man bound to me by blood.”

So it was all planned.

“But there is more to it,” she said. “Do you know what it is to me to feel a true man with his arms about me?” she asked. “To feel a true man on top of me? And why should it not be my father, if my father is the most pleasing of all the men I have ever seen?”

I thought of you, Stefan. I thought of your warnings to me. I thought of Alexander. Was he at this moment mourning for me still in the Motherhouse?

Surely I shed tears, for I remember her comforting me, and how touching was her distress. Then she did cling to me, like a child herself curled beside me, and said that we two knew things that no one else had ever known save Deborah and Deborah was dead. She cried then. She cried for Deborah.

“When he came to me and told me that she was dead, I wept and wept. I could not stop weeping. And they beat on the doors and said, ‘Charlotte, come out.’ I had not seen him or known him until that moment. My mother had said: ‘Put on the emerald necklace, and by its light he will find you.’ But he did not need that thing. I know it now. I was lying in the darkness alone when he came to me. I will tell you a terrible secret. Until that moment I did not believe in him! I did not. I had held the little doll she gave me, the doll of her mother … ”

“It was described to me in Montcleve.”

“Now that is made of the bone and the hair of Suzanne, or so my mother claimed it was, for Lasher, she said, had brought the hair to her after they cut it from Suzanne in prison, and the bone after she was burnt. And from this she had made the doll as Suzanne had told her to do, and she would hold it and call upon Suzanne.

“Now, I had this, and I had done as she had instructed me. But Suzanne didn’t come to me! I heard nothing and felt nothing, and I wondered about all the things which my mother had believed.

“Then he came, as I told you. I felt him come in the darkness, I felt his caress.”

“How so, caress?”

“Touching me as you have touched me. I lay in the darkness, and there were lips upon my breasts. Lips upon my lips. Between my legs he stroked me. I rose up, thinking, Ah well, this is a dream, a dream of when Antoine was still a man. But he was there! ‘You have no need of Antoine,’ he said to me. ‘My beautiful Charlotte.’ And then, you see, I put on the emerald. I put it on as she had told me to do.”

“He told you that she was dead?”

“Aye, that she had fallen from the cathedral battlements, and that you had thrown the evil priest to his death. Ah, but he speaks most strangely. You cannot imagine how strange his words are. As if he had picked them up from all over the world the way he picks up bits and pieces of jewels and gold.”

“Tell me,” I said to her.

She thought. “I cannot,” she said with a sigh. Then she tried it, and now I shall do my best to recount it. “ ‘I am here, Charlotte, I am Lasher, and I am here. The spirit of Deborah went up out of her body; it did not see me; it left the earth. Her enemies ran to the left and to the right and to the left in fear. See me, Charlotte, and hear me, for I exist to serve you, and only in serving you, do I exist.’ ” She gave another sigh. “But it is even stranger than that when he tells me a long tale. For I questioned him as to what happened to my mother and he said, ‘I came and I drew together, and I lifted the tiles of the roofs and made them fly through the air. And I lifted the dirt from the ground and made it fly through the air.’ ”

“And what else does this spirit say as to his own nature?”

“Only that he always was. Before there were men and women, he was.”

“Ah, and you believe this?”

“Why should I not believe it?”

I did not answer her, but in my soul I did not believe it, and I did not know why.

“How did he come to be near the stones of Donnelaith?” I asked her. “For that was where Suzanne first called him, was it not?”

“He was nowhere when she called him; he came into being at her call. That is to say, he has no knowledge of himself before that time. His knowledge of himself begins with her knowledge of him, and strengthens with mine.”

“Ah, but you see this could be flattery,” I said to her.

“You speak of him as if he were without feeling. That isn’t so. I tell you I have heard him weep.”

“Over what, pray tell?”

“The death of my mother. If she had allowed it, he could have destroyed all the citizenry of Montcleve. The innocent and the guilty would have been punished. But my mother could not imagine such a thing. My mother sought only her release when she threw herself from the battlements. Had she been stronger … ”

“And you are stronger.”

“Using his powers for destruction is nothing.”

“Aye, in that I think you are wise, I have to confess.”

I puzzled over all of it, trying to memorize what was said which I believe I have done. And perhaps she understood, for next she said sadly to me:

“Ah, how can I allow you to leave this place when you know these things of him and of me?”

“So you would kill me?” I asked her.

She wept. She turned her head into the pillow. “Stay with me,” she said. “My mother asked this of you, and you refused her. Stay with me. By you I could have strong children.”

“I am your father. You are mad to ask this of me.”

“What does it matter!” she declared. “All around us there is nothing but darkness and mystery. What does it matter?” And her voice filled me with sadness.

It seemed I too was weeping, but more quietly. I kissed her cheeks and soothed her. I told her what we had come to believe in the Talamasca, that, with or without God, we must be honest men and women, that we must be saints, for only as saints can we prevail. But she merely cried all the more sadly.

“All your life has been in vain,” she said. “You have wasted it. You have forsworn pleasure and for nothing.”