Perfect. Like the plan for the hospitals built upon the Mayfair legacy. Perfect.
He wasn’t sure why he was hesitating. He couldn’t resist. Yet it was all too good to be true, too sweet actually, her openness and her love, and the pride it engendered in him-that this woman of all women should need and love him just the way he needed and loved her.
“Those cousins of yours will draw up all the papers to protect you … you know, the house, the legacy. All that.”
“It’s automatic. It’s all entailed or something. But they’ll probably manufacture a storehouse of papers of one kind or another.”
“I’ll sign on the dotted line.”
“Michael, the papers really don’t mean anything. What I have is yours.”
“What I want is you, Rowan.”
Her face brightened; she drew her knees up, turning sideways on the couch to face him, and she leaned over and kissed him.
Suddenly it hit him, grandly and deliciously. Getting married. Marrying Rowan. And the promise, the absolutely dazzling promise of a child. This kind of happiness was so completely unfamiliar to him that he was almost afraid. Almost. But not quite.
It seemed the very thing that they must do at all costs. Preserve what they had and what they wanted, against the dark current that had brought them together. And when he thought of the years ahead-of all the simple and heartbreakingly important possibilities-his happiness was too great to be expressed.
He knew better than to even try. After a few moments of silence, bits of poetry came to him, little phrases that barely caught the light of his contentment the way a bit of glass catches light. They left him. He was contented and empty, and full of nothing but a quiet inarticulate love.
In perfect understanding, it seemed, they looked at each other. Questions of failure, of haste, all the what if’s of life, did not matter. The quiet in her was talking to the quiet in him.
When they went into the bedroom, she said she wanted to spend their wedding night at the house, and then go on to Florida for the honeymoon. Wouldn’t that be the best way to handle it? A wedding night under that roof, and slipping away afterwards.
Surely the workmen could get the front bedroom ready in a couple of weeks.
“I guarantee it,” he said.
In that big antique bed in the front room. He could almost hear the ghost of Belle say, “How lovely for both of you.”
Thirty-seven
UNEASY SLEEP. She shifted, turned and put her arm over his back, drawing her knees under his, warm and snug again. The air-conditioning was almost as good as the Florida Gulf breeze.
But what was it tugging at her neck, tangling in her hair, and hurting her? She moved to brush it away, to free her hair. Something cold pressed against her breast. She didn’t like it.
She turned over on her back, half dreaming once again that she was in the Operating Room, and this was a most difficult procedure. She had to envision carefully what she meant to do-to guide her hands every step with her mind-commanding the blood not to flow, commanding the tissues to come together. And the man lay split open all the way from his crotch to the top of his head, all his tiny organs exposed, quivering, red, impossible for his size, waiting for her somehow to make them grow.
“Too much, I can’t do this,” she said. “I’m a neurosurgeon, not a witch!”
She could see every vessel now in his legs and arms as if he were one of those clear plastic dummies threaded through and through with red, to teach children about circulation. His feet quivered. They too were small, and he was wriggling his toes trying to make them grow. How blank was the expression on his face, but he was looking at her.
And that tugging in her hair again, something pulling at her hair. Again, she pushed it away, and this time her finger caught it-what was it, a chain?
She didn’t want to lose the dream. She knew it was a dream now, but she wanted to know what was going to happen to this man, how this operation was to end.
“Dr. Mayfair, put down your scalpel,” said Lemle. “You don’t need that anymore.”
“No, Dr. Mayfair,” said Lark. “You can’t use it here.”
They were right. It was past the point for something so crude as the tiny flickering steel blade. This was not a matter of cutting, but of construction. She was staring at the long open wound, at the tender organs shivering like plants, like the monstrous iris in the garden. Her mind raced with the proper specifications as she guided the cells, explaining as she went along so that the young doctors would understand. “There are sufficient cells there, you see, in fact, they exist in profusion. The important thing is to provide for them a superior DNA, so to speak, a new and unforeseen incentive to form organs of the proper size.” And behold, the wound was closing over organs of the proper size and the man was turning his head, and his eyes snapped open and shut like the eyes of a doll.
Applause rose all around her, and looking up she was amazed to see that they were all Dutchmen here, gathered at Leiden; even she wore the big black hat and the gorgeous thick sleeves, and this was a painting by Rembrandt, of course,
“Ah, but you have the gift, my child, you are a witch,” said Lemle.
“That’s right,” said Rembrandt. Such a sweet old man. He sat in the corner, his head to one side, his russet hair wispy now in old age.
“Don’t let Petyr hear you,” she said.
“Rowan, take the emerald off,” Petyr said. He stood at the foot of the table. “Take it off, Rowan, it’s around your neck. Remove it!”
The emerald?
She opened her eyes. The dream lost its vibrancy like a taut veil of silk suddenly torn free and furling. The darkness was alive around her.
Very slowly the familiar objects came to light. The closet doors, the table by the bed, Michael, her beloved Michael, sleeping beside her.
She felt the coldness against her naked breast, she felt the thing caught in her hair, and she knew what it was.
“Oh God!” She covered her mouth with her left hand but not before that little scream had escaped, her right hand snatching the thing off her neck as if it had been a loathsome insect.
She sat up, hunched over, staring at it in the palm of her hand. Like a clot of green blood. Her breath caught in her throat, and she saw that she had broken the old chain, and her hand was shaking uncontrollably.
Had Michael heard her cry out? He didn’t move even as she leaned against him.
“Lasher!” she whispered, her eyes moving up as if she could find him in the shadows. “Do you want to make me hate you!” Her words were a hiss. For one second the fabric of the dream was clear again, as if the veil had once more been lowered. All the doctors were leaving the table.
“Done, Rowan. Magnificent, Rowan.”
“A new era, Rowan.”
“Very simply miraculous, my dear,” said Lemle.
“Cast it away, Rowan,” said Petyr.
She flung the emerald over the foot of the bed. Somewhere in the small hallway it struck the carpet, with a dull impotent little sound.
She put her hands to her face, and then feverishly, she felt of her neck, felt of her breasts as if the damnable thing had left some layer of dust or grime on her.
“Hate you for this,” she whispered again in the dark. “Is that what you want?”
Far off it seemed she heard a sigh, a rustling. Through the far hallway door, she could just barely make out the curtains in the living room against the light of the street, and they moved as if ruffled by a low draft, and that
