Bath, she thought. Rinse his blood, his touch, his semen from my body. She knelt by the tub and spun knobs, splashing the first hot gush of water over her arms and letting the crimson tendrils swirl down the drain before setting the plug.
"Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" she murmured, flashing back to Shakespeare. She flopped back on her heels and waited for the water to rise.
Coffee twitched her nose again. An insulated pot waited, on a marble counter by the fireplace. Her clothes lay on a chair nearby, cleaned and folded. They'd even cleaned her boots. She drew a cup of caffeine, hot and black, and swallowed the heat of it to settle her belly, and stared at the fire.
Fire. Her memories of Brian and Liam, of the winter alley, played like a videotape in her brain. With all she'd done, was Dougal really, truly dead? He hadn't burned, and those teeth kept clacking curses at her . . . .
She rummaged through cabinets and drawers, dumping towels, bottles, tins, and boxes on the floor. Oil, scented, for massage, and rubbing alcohol. A shelf of booze: brandy, whiskey, rum, vodka, unopened bottles without tax seals on the corks. She carried armloads of bottles back into the blood-drenched room--once, twice, a third time--and smashed them on the bed, the wooden paneling, and the floor.
Swinging the knife with grunting frenzy, she hacked chairs into splinters and piled them over the body. The severed hand tried to clutch her when she threw it on the pyre. She buried it with drawers jerked out of a tall oak dresser.
The water had nearly filled the tub when she dropped the knife and sheath on the bathroom floor. She shut the taps and searched in vain for matches. Finally, she growled in frustration and grabbed a flaming log from the fireplace. The coals didn't even warm her hand.
The alcohol caught fire with a greedy surge of flame, leaping blue tongues spreading across the soaked cloth and dripping to the wooden floor. Yellow flame joined the blue as the oil caught, and the silk, and the wood. She stared at the hungry blaze for a minute, as the pieces of Dougal twitched in the pyre. Smoke billowed up, and the smell of burning hair filled the room.
She turned and studied the bathroom door. Nearly three inches of ironbound cross-ply oak and a frame set in solid stone, it looked like it was designed to hold against battle-axes. She closed it behind her and set the latch. Fire could gnaw on that for hours before breaking through.
Blood. Her reflection in the mirrors disgusted her, the sticky runnels and smears of drying crimson. Soaking in that would make her puke. She flicked levers in the shower and felt the water grow hot immediately, and sluiced Dougal from her body, out of her hair.
Muffled thuds shook the wall, as if something had exploded in the bedroom beyond the stone. She thought of windows blowing out and letting in fresh air, just like Backdraft.
Let fire purify his bed of the stains of rape.
She shut off the shower, dumped bath oil in the tub, and slipped into the lavender-scented water. She looked up, through the skylights, and saw tendrils of black smoke drifting across the morning sun.
She scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, Lady Macbeth and her spots of blood. "Out, damned spot! out, I say! What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" And then she realized it wasn't his blood she sought to wash away.
She stared at her belly, underneath the foam. Nothing she did to her skin would cleanse that.
Was she pregnant?
The crackling fire beyond the door answered her. It said, "The moon is right." It said, "You can ask your body, ask the flow of blood to your womb and the balance of your glands." It said, "You have the power to cleanse yourself of his seed, just as you have purified this room."
Something scratched at the door, as if that severed hand was fighting to escape from the flames. A crash shook the floor, and the scratching stopped.
She climbed out of the tub, steaming, only half clean. The outer half. The part the world could see. Dripping on the tile, she finished her coffee and stared at the mirror. Maureen stared back, pink and naked and defenseless.
Smoke seeped around the door to the bedroom, puffing and sucking back as the fire searched for fuel and oxygen. There was a solution. Open the door and let the fire burn her clean of him.
Father Donovan's voice joined the chorus in her head, the babbling of schizophrenia. "Suicide is a mortal sin," it said. "So is abortion. The baby didn't rape you. The instant egg and sperm are joined, the soul is formed. You have a human child inside you. Thou shalt not kill."
Her coffee-cup smashed the mirror.
"This! Baby! Isn't! Human!" The growl of the fire swallowed her scream, turning it into a whisper.
She dried herself, and dressed herself, and shoved the sheathed knife into the waistband of her jeans. The cold leather rode against her belly, against the unanswered question of her womb. Meanwhile, Padric still waited for her, somewhere out in the tangled stone of the keep and outbuildings. She refused to look at the unbroken mirrors. The woman they showed was a victim, not an avenger.
The other door was still cool to her touch. She braced her foot against it and slipped the latch, nervously. Dougal might yet laugh at her from the flames, if the fire had spread to block her other exit.
The landing yawned at her. Worn stone stairs spiraled down around a central column, no hand rails, irregular treads guaranteed to trip any stranger trying to fight his way up. No connection into the bedroom. The stair should lead to the kitchen, to where the coffeepot lived.
And to the dungeons, as well, the faint
