was the sound she heard, wasn’t it?
That and the slow measured song of Michael’s breathing. She felt foolish for having flung the stone away. She sat with her hands over her mouth, knees up, staring into the shadows.
“Well, didn’t you believe the old tales? Why are you shaking like this? Just one of his tricks, and no more difficult for him than making the dance of the wind in the trees. Or making that iris move in the garden. Move. It did more than move, though, didn’t it? It actually … And then she remembered those roses, those strange large roses on the hall table. She had never asked Pierce where they had come from. Never asked Gerald.
Why are you so frightened?
She got up, put on her robe, and walked barefoot into the hall, Michael sleeping on, undisturbed, in the bed behind her.
She picked up the jewel and wound the two strands of broken chain around it carefully. Seemed dreadful to have broken those fragile antique links.
“But you were stupid to do this,” she whispered. “I’ll never put it on now, not of my own free will.”
With a low creak of the springs, Michael turned over in the bed. Had he whispered something? Her name maybe?
She crept silently back into the bedroom, and dropping to her knees, found her purse in the corner of the closet and put the necklace into the side zipper pocket.
She wasn’t shaking now. But her fear had alchemized perfectly to rage. And she knew she couldn’t sleep any more.
Sitting alone in the living room as the sun rose, she thought of all the old portraits at the house, the ones she’d been going through, and wiping clean, and preparing to hang, the very old ones she could identify which no one else in the family could. Charlotte with her blond hair, so deeply faded beneath the lacquer that she seemed a ghost. And Jeanne Louise, with her twin brother standing behind her. And gray-haired Marie Claudette with the little painting of Riverbend on the wall above her.
All of them wore the emerald. So many paintings of that one jewel. She closed her eyes and dozed on the velvet couch, wishing for coffee, yet too sleepy to make it. She’d been dreaming before this happened, but what was it all about-something to do with the hospital and an operation, and now she couldn’t remember. Lemle there. Lemle whom she hated so much.…
And that dark-mouthed iris that Lasher had made.…
Yes, I know your tricks. You made it swell and break from its stem, didn’t you? Oh, nobody really understands how much power you have. To make whole leaves sprout from the stem of a dead rose. Where do you get your handsome form when you appear, and why won’t you do it for me? Are you afraid I’ll scatter you to the four winds, and you’ll never have the strength to gather yourself together?
She was dreaming again, wasn’t she? Imagine, a flower changing like that iris, altering before her eyes, the cells actually multiplying and mutating …
Unless it was just a trick. A trick like putting the necklace on her in her sleep. But wasn’t everything a trick?
“Well, boys and girls,” said Lark once as they stood over the bed of a comatose and dying man, “we’ve done all our tricks, haven’t we?”
What would have happened if she had tried a couple of her own? Like telling the cells of that dying man to multiply, to mutate, to restructure, and seal off the bruised tissue. But she hadn’t known. She still didn’t know how far she could go.
Yes, dreaming. Everyone walking through the halls at Leiden. You know what they did to Michael Servetus in Calvinist Geneva, when he accurately described the circulation of the blood in 1553, they burnt him at the stake, and all his heretical books with him. Be careful, Dr. van Abel.
I am not a witch.
Of course, none of us are. It’s a matter of constantly reevaluating our concept of
Nothing natural about those roses.
And now the air in here, moving the way it was, catching the curtains and making them dance, stirring the papers on the coffee table in front of her, even lifting the tendrils of her hair, and cooling her. Your tricks. She didn’t want this dream anymore. Do the patients at Leiden always get up and walk away after the anatomy lesson?
But you won’t dare show yourself, will you?
She met Ryan at ten o’clock and told him all about the plans for the marriage, trying to make it matter-of-fact and definite, so as to invite as few questions as possible.
“And one thing I wish you could do for me,” she said. She took the emerald necklace out of her purse. “Could you put this in some sort of vault? Just lock it away, where no one can possibly get at it.”
“Of course, I can keep it here at the office,” he said, “but Rowan, there are several things I ought to explain to you. This legacy is very old-you have to have a little patience now. The rules and rubrics, so to speak, are quaint and bizarre, but nevertheless explicit. I’m afraid you’re required to wear the emerald at the wedding.”
“You don’t mean this.”
“You understand, of course, these small requirements are probably quite vulnerable to contest or revision in a court of law, but the point of following them to the letter is-and has always been-to avoid even the remotest possibility of anyone ever challenging the inheritance at any point in its history, and with a personal fortune of this size and this … ”
And on and on he went in familiar lawyerly fashion, but she understood. Lasher had won this round. Lasher knew the terms of the legacy, didn’t he? He had simply given her the appropriate wedding present.
Her anger was cold and dark and isolating just as it had always been at its worst. She gazed off, out the office window, not even seeing the soft cloud-filled sky, or the deep winding gash of the river below it.
“I’ll have this gold chain repaired,” Ryan said. “Seems to be broken.”
It was one o’clock when she reached First Street with lunch in a little brown sack-two sandwiches and a couple of bottles of Dutch beer. Michael was all excited. They’d found a treasure trove of old New Orleans red bricks under the earth on the back lot. Beautiful bricks, the kind they couldn’t make anymore. They could now build the new gateposts with the perfect material. And they’d also found a stash of old blueprints in the attic.
“They look like the original plans,” he said. “They may have been drawn by Darcy himself. Come on. I left them up there. They’re so fragile.”
She went with him up the stairs. How fresh it all looked with the new paint; even Deirdre’s room was lovely now, the way it should have always been.
“Nothing’s the matter, is it?” he asked.
Wouldn’t he know? she thought. Wouldn’t he have to sense it? And to think she had to wear the damned thing at the wedding. Her great dream of the Mayfair Medical Center, and everything else would go right out the window if she didn’t. He’d go crazy when she told him. And she couldn’t bear to see the scared look in his eyes again. She couldn’t bear to see him agitated and weak, that was the truth of it.
“No, nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I was just downtown all morning with the lawyers again, and I missed you.” She threw her arms around him, nuzzling her head under his chin. “I really really missed you.”
Thirty-eight
NO ONE SEEMED the least surprised at the news. Aaron drank a toast with them over breakfast, and then went back to work in the library at First Street, where at Rowan’s invitation he was cataloging the rare books.
Smooth-talking Ryan of the cold blue eyes came by Tuesday afternoon, to shake Michael’s hand. In a few words of pleasant conversation, he made it clear that he was impressed with Michael’s accomplishments, which could only mean of course that Michael had been investigated, through the regular financial channels, just as if he were bidding on a job.
“It’s all sort of annoying, I’m sure,” Ryan admitted finally, “investigating the fiancee of the designee of the Mayfair legacy, but you see, I don’t have much choice in the matter … ”
“I don’t mind,” Michael said with a little laugh. “Anything you couldn’t find out and you wanna know, just
