to practice the discipline of silence to those who have not seen our Work. Ours is a secret Work, about which nothing is revealed. You have done well,' he repeated, and that seemed to be the end of the liturgical blessing, because Bennett leapt in again and insisted, 'But she hasn't been cleansed and she hasn't taken her vows. You can't just turn her loose.'
Anne narrowed her eyes, not liking the sound of that, but Jonas just threw up his hands.
'All right, Marc, do what you have to. But remember, I told you, Ana isn't following the usual Work here.'
Which statement did not please Marc one bit. Still, it did seem that they were to be allowed upstairs once she had taken whatever vows were required; poor Dulcie would be overjoyed.
They followed Jonas down the stone passageway to the outer door with Bennett bringing up the rear. They paused to watch him lock the door, and when he straightened and looked meaningfully at Jonas, Anne braced herself. Bennett marched over to the door of Jonas's washroom, drew it open dramatically, and told her to go in.
'What? No, I'm not going to—'
'Ana,' said Jonas. 'Go.'
She looked from one man to the other, but could read no threat in either of them. Bennett might be looking forward to teaching her a spiteful lesson, but it would not go beyond that, and Jonas, inscrutable as always, nonetheless seemed to be on her side. She did not want to be locked in that small space, but she had to admit that her nervousness did not justify frightening the boy by making him witness a doubtless futile struggle. She dredged up a smile. 'Don't worry, Jason,' she told him. 'I seem to have gone about things backward, so I can't go upstairs until I've been through the starting rituals. It'll be okay. Go and find Dulcie—she'll be biting the carpets, wondering where we both are.'
To save him from having to protest, she stepped forward into the small bathroom, then heard the key turn in the lock. Footsteps and voices faded as she examined the close space; with her luck lately, she thought in disgust, they'd forget all about her until Jonas needed to pee. And no doubt the ceremony was something that couldn't begin until midnight.
Still, there was plenty of water to quench her raging thirst, and a toilet, and she had gone without meals before. The water in the tap even ran nice and hot, and she set about cleansing her body, if not ritually then certainly in fact. In exploring the cupboards, she was pleased to find a bottle of aspirin with codeine, which made movement of her stiffening shoulders more bearable, and a cache of thick towels to cushion the floor.
She should have been so exhausted that she would welcome sleep, even in the cramped setting, but sleep would not come. Her muscles refused to relax, her mind leapt and skittered at every small noise, her eyes would not focus on the books of erotica even when the print was large enough to read without glasses. Her body wanted to throw itself noisily at the door, kicking and screaming, and her fingernails itched to peel away at the crack until they could insinuate themselves into the opening. Her lungs even tried to insist that they were low on air, that she was dizzy with lack of oxygen, although she knew it could not be so. More than anything, she longed to pace like a caged beast, but she could take no more than two steps before being trapped by the shelves or the toilet. It was all a part of their absurd alchemical ritual, she told herself again and again. Once she had expressed the proper awe and submitted herself to their masculine authority, they would be satisfied and let her go.
Long hours crept by. The noises of dinner built up overhead, feet slow and quick, heavy tread and the light patter of children. She found herself salivating like one of Pavlov's dogs when the sounds paused for the evening meal, and then the feet sounds resumed for the after-dinner chores. There was another pause during evening meditation, a lesser buildup of noise when that was finished, and finally all the noises faded away. The house quieted. Water, hot or cold, did nothing to satisfy hunger. The muscles of her shoulders and back burned in any position, and even the volumes of erotica lost their ability to distract after the first half dozen. She found herself eyeing the delicate Japanese pictures of couples (and more) coupling, wondering if the pictures were printed on edible rice paper.
She hadn't heard a footstep overhead for at least half an hour, which put it close to midnight, when a noise came from outside the door. Struggling stiffly to pull herself upright from her nest of towels, she waited, her heart racing. A single pair of heavy feet descended the wooden stairs; half a minute later a key scraped in the lock. The door opened. Jonas stepped back, allowing her to emerge.
His dark eyes studied her, looked in at the small room, and came back to her face. 'Did you enjoy my library?' he asked he:.
She gaped at him. 'Did I—? Well, no, to tell you the truth. Not under the circumstances. I didn't even have my reading glasses.'
He nodded as if that were the only consideration, then asked, 'Did you wash yourself?'
'Not very well, but—'
'That should do it, then.'
'What?'
'Good night, Ana.' He reached forward then, immobilized her head between his powerful hands, and bent to kiss her mouth, briefly but with a thoroughness so reminiscent of Aaron that it made Anne's scalp tingle. Before she could react, before she knew whether the tingle was lust or revulsion, the bearded mouth left hers. Then she felt his thick fingers enter the neck of her polo shirt to draw out the buckskin pouch and pull it over her head.
He picked open the drawstring top with surprisingly delicate fingernails and shook the contents onto the palm of his hand, turning them over curiously with one thick finger. The bead, tufts of fur from the dogs, stones, and bee pollen he funneled back into the pouch, but he took the silver crescent that she had bought in Sedona between two fingers and turned it back and forth, watching the light play across the low indentations of its beaten surface.
'The moon revels in the reflected glory of the sun,' he mused. 'In alchemical allegory, Luna reaches the height of her existence in her conjoining with the sun.' He turned the pendant around again, and said, 'Come.'
She followed him reluctantly past the stairs that led to open air and back into his study. He went over to the strange collection of bones and objects at the third window, detached one item from the rest, and brought it back to her, displayed on his palm, its leather cord dangling down the back of his hand. It was the rough moon-shaped object she had noticed earlier, an elongated, worn silver nugget threaded onto a thong. He smiled to himself, the same private smile she had seen as he caressed the altarstone in the abbey ruins with his fingertips, and then he curled the thong around the moon shape and pushed it into the buckskin pouch and drew the bag shut.
'I'd like you to take that,' he said. 'It is… appropriate that you should have it.'
Anne studied him, and asked slowly, 'Why? Whose necklace is that?'
'It belonged to Samantha Dooley, who is no longer with us,' he told her. 'She did not, shall we say, live up to expectations.'
Still smiling to himself, he tied the pouch snugly shut and dropped the cord back around her neck. He tucked the medicine bag inside her shirt and then tugged her collar up to hide it, a gesture that was somehow even more intimate than the kiss he had given her. 'You may wear it,' he said.
And then he walked out of his study and disappeared through the door to the laboratory.
Anne stood rubbing her hands across her mouth and scalp, trying to wipe away the tingle, to scrub away the taste of Aaron that Jonas had left behind, shocking, unexpected, and just too damn much, on top of everything else. She felt punch-drunk, and not only because of the painkillers she had swallowed. The past few days had been one long, deep plunge into the terror of her past ending with the abrupt euphoria of anticlimax, sleepless nights thinking she was balanced precariously over a bottomless abyss, only to discover that it was all a fake, constructed by tricksters and fed by her own dark imagination. All in all, it was more than she could deal with. She felt like a jigsaw-puzzle person scattered across the landscape, and she craved only to have Maria Makepeace standing over her, gathering up the pieces one by one and putting her together again. She wanted to go after Jonas and draw his mouth down onto hers. She wanted to vomit at the idea. She thought about dashing her head against the stone wall until she lost consciousness. She felt as if she would never be rational again. She felt as if she had just faced death and walked away again. She felt… she felt monstrously hungry, and would have killed for a cup of English tea.
She raided the refrigerator and gulped down a bowl of cold red stuff that looked like spaghetti sauce and tasted like Swedish meatballs, and followed it with a cup of scalding, strong tea. In the dim kitchen of the silent house, life seeped back. She palmed a couple more of the painkillers from the bottle in her pocket and swallowed them gratefully. She might even manage to sleep tonight.
She went upstairs, aware of the silence and of the simple well-being that food brought, conscious of the
