Iron Chamber of Memory (15 page)

Of course, the word
charming
in French also meant
cunning
.

Memory struck. They were in each other’s arms, kissing with mad ardor. But her eyes blazed; there was anger mingled with her passion.

Suddenly she twisted out of his embrace. Laureline fended Henry off, one slim arm against his broad chest. Her eyes were narrowed and gleamed with green fire. “You don’t want me!”

“I don’t?” Henry wiped the sweat from his eyes. “Why would you say that?”

He started to undo the back of her dress, but he moved his hand carefully, not wanting to tear the fragile silk loops holding the pearl buttons. She learned forward and bit his earlobe hard enough to make him yelp.

“Are you crazy?” He shouted at her and grabbed at his ear. It was bleeding.

Laureline eyes were filled with wrath. “If you really wanted me, you would not be so hesitant and delicate. You would not carefully disassemble every fastening of my dress! You would be a caveman, and tear it off, and
take
what you wanted! Bite me! Bruise me! Leave your mark on me! That way, when I walked out of this chamber, with my dress ripped to bits, and my neck bruised, I could not forget, would not forget, because I would know!”

Henry looked at the scars on his own arm where he had written his words of love with a knife. “No, Laureline. It won’t work.”

She growled low in her throat like a hungry lioness. “You let
everything
stop you! You won’t tear my dress, you won’t bend the rules or taste the wild side of love, and you will not wound the fragile feelings of Manfred!” There was no longer anger in her eyes, but the contempt women hold for the men they despise as weak.

It was more than he could bear. He took her in his arms and threw her down to the tiger rug. She gasped, then laughed in triumph as he tore the bodice of her dress and sent pearl buttons scattering like hailstones across the floor. Underneath, she was wearing a black corset that barely covered her breasts.

He looked in surprise. “English girls really are rather racy!”

“Cornish,” she said with a lift of her eyebrow. “And an off-the-shoulder dress would leave my bra strap showing. Don’t you know anything about women?”

“I know they like
this
–”

Then, without warning, she pulled away from him. When he reached out for her, she slapped his hand away. Her face was frozen with alarm. She whispered, “What’s that noise?”

Henry looked toward the door, surprised, and his hard grip on her wrists relaxed. She twisted like a snake, breaking his hold on her, and slid out from under him.

Laureline leaped to her feet and rushed over to the door. Her heels clattered on the floorboards. She glanced back, green eyes gleaming over the naked curve of her shoulder. “Aren't you coming? Or will you just sit there and watch me slip out of your hands.”

Henry said, “No, wait!” He knew what she was about to try would not work. If he followed her out of the chamber, he would find himself with his best friend’s fiancée, with her wearing nothing more than her underwear, and him wracked with false guilt. Their love, their reality, would be erased from both their minds.

Laureline said, “Oh, come on! The curse of the world outside cannot possibly make up an explanation for
this!
You
will
recall you love me! I’m going out!”

He shouted, “I did recall! I remembered I love you! It came back to me–”

She stepped through the doorway.

“–and it did not help at all. Nothing changed.”

She had left the door open, so he could see her, taking a few, hesitant steps up the stairs. Her movements were tentative, fawnlike, bewildered. She looked down at herself, rubbed her neck, looked left and right.

“Laureline!” He said. She was less than four feet from him, and she should have heard him clearly. “Come back inside!”

Her eyes had a dreamy, unfocused look, as if she were trying to remember something. Or as if—a dread certainty gripped him—as if a dream were being poured into her brain by some invisible source, erasing and rewriting her conscious mind. Then she looked down and grasped the diamond pendant with her fingers, and her gaze grew sharper, more focused, like a sleepwalker about to wake.

He leaned out the door. His head passed over the threshold, but he did not lose his memory. He could feel a tension in the air like a bubble about to pop. He reached out with one hand while holding the doorframe with the other. She was only inches from his fingers. He shouted and waved. It was like shouting and waving at the moon. She simply did not see him.

He looked over his shoulder and rummaged in his pants, looking for something to throw. He pulled out the keyring. But a still, quiet voice inside him warned him not to throw her the keys to the house, not those keys.

That made him freeze for a moment, blinking in confusion. When he was out of doors, his true self, Henry, was able at times to speak out of the subconscious mind of Hal, and whisper warnings to him.

He remembered telling himself to study with Manfred this afternoon rather than return to the passion of the Rose Crystal Chamber. It would be unwise to let himself be alone with the ever-more-desperate Laureline. If Manfred’s doubts grew, and Hal’s love continued to grow as well, the mysterious triangle of amnesia torturing them would resolve itself naturally in time, but returning to the chamber would force matters to a head, and that might ruin all.

Buried under the layer of amnesia, the real Henry had been present, or partly so. He had felt then as he felt now: having forgotten her so often in the past, he was not willing to forget her again. So he could not leave the chamber. He was trapped.

So he himself had been the source of the warning not to go with Laurel on a tour of the house.

Who then was the source of the warning not to throw the keys?

He heard a voice. Manfred was at the top of the stairs, out of Henry’s line of sight. Laurel tossed her head, straightened her hair, and put on an unreadable expression, and began walking slowly up the stairs, swaying her hips provocatively.

Seeing how artfully Laurel, when she thought no one was looking, had simply assumed her expression and body language, an actress playing a role, filled him with disgust.

He heard his friend and his lover talking, heard the tones of their voices, but could not make out the words. Manfred was sharp and impatient at first, and Laurel’s voice was softer, nearly a whisper. Manfred’s tone gradually grew warmer, reconciled, and then Laurel laughed. Henry heard the rapid clicking of Laurel’s heels on the floorboard, followed by his friend’s heavier tread.

Henry stepped back and closed the door, sinking to the divan, putting his head in hands. Had she gone to Manfred to claim what Henry would not give her? Henry hated her at the moment. He hated Manfred too.

And even more, he hated himself.

Because who was he to judge her, when outside this chamber, she acted in the same ignorance that he did? If women were vain and shallow, was it not men who made them so, by looking only at their most superficial beauty? If a woman had to put on an act to perform the mating dance, how was that different from any other animal on Earth? Love was not a contract, an agreement sealed with a handshake, but a divine madness, sealed with a kiss, and solemnized with closer, deeper, intimacies. Love was irrevocable, eternal, the only thing akin to heaven on earth. Why should it not have its rites and mysteries, its strange gestures and genuflections, and rituals performed for the sake of form, not because they were always and utterly true?

Henry knelt. He prostrated himself on the rug that still smelled of her scent, and lay facedown, weeping like a little boy. He was angry, and hurt, and ashamed of his own weakness. And yet here he was, helpless, trapped, unable to win the woman, or protect her, or even protect his own heart.

He burned with shame and anger at his failure. She had thrown herself at him, repeatedly, and by pushing her away, he had shamed her in her own eyes. He had cut her to the quick by rejecting her, by placing his self-regard over his regard for her. That was why she had run. That was why she had tried to force his hand, only to find herself back in the filthy clutches of her false fiancé. The caveman claims the cavegirl by chasing her, and the cavegirl by alluring the man to the chase. It was only by virtue of being claimed as the prize that a woman could consider herself prized. All the trappings of civilization were little more than confusions and gift-wrapping and safety belts meant to contain that essential truth about sex. But there was nothing that could change it. It could not be changed.

How could it be otherwise? And that meant Henry truly was trapped. If he left the room, he would recall that he loved her, but he would be deceived into thinking she neither knew it, nor returned his love. Betraying Manfred was out of the question: this was not merely a code of honor for Henry, it was his character. He could no more cheat his friend of marriage and life-long happiness than he could force his own elbow into his mouth and bite it off.

But would they be happy? Laureline was getting more impatient, more desperate, as the wedding date loomed. For her, for any woman, to be chained for life to the wrong man, to bear the wrong man’s children, to be expected to love and give and sacrifice for the wrong family, was the deepest nightmare of the feminine mind. Laureline, too, was trapped.

And in her distress, she was taking greater risks, desperately trying to provoke Henry into assuming his proper manly role, into throwing everything aside, into proving his love by chasing her and not giving up the chase. For what woman wanted a man who would not throw everything aside for her, and trample every obstacle in his way, and slaughter all her foes?

A horrible thought struck Henry then, sharp as an arrow to the heart. He had not warned Manfred of the talk he had heard in town, the desperate mutterings, the suspicions that Manfred had murdered his aunt and cousins to acquire house, land, and title. He had held his tongue at dinner, not trusting the ears of the scar-faced butler, and then things had happened so quickly.

He sat up, wiped his eyes, and reminded himself that at least when he left this chamber, he would forget this shameful moment of childish weeping. At least he would be a man again, out there.

But a man in love with a woman promised to another.

And once he crossed that threshold, he would become a man who was an evildoer, a traitor, and a seducer, when in fact, in here, inside this small chamber of truth, he had behaved with utmost honesty, denying himself happiness for the sake of his friend. If he left, he would hate himself once more, but that self-hate would be false, an illusion planted in his mind by a curse.

Henry walked over and closed the door. He found a chair and placed it before a window he found hidden behind the silk drapery covering the walls. It was jammed, and he battered the latch with his walking stick until he could work the latch and swing it open. He found himself looking out at the sunlit lawns and gardens and outbuildings of the mansion grounds, at the forest and the cliffsides and the sea. This window was facing to the east, which should have been impossible, unless the Rose Crystal Chamber in the west wing curved like a snake all around the central tower holding the priory. But he was too weary to worry about one more impossibility, one more madness in a world filled with loss, and with memory loss.

What he knew was simple and clear. If he left this chamber, would lose both love and self-love. It was a fair and large world outside. And there was nothing in it.

He watched the shadows of the house reaching out eastward as the sun set, never moving from the chair. After that he watched the stars rise.

Later, the large crystal lamp shaped like a rose began to flicker and sputter and die. He realized he did not know where the oil bottle was to refill it, or where the chain was to lower it. It gave one last flash of rose light and went dark.

Eventually his chin came to rest on his breast, his eyes without permission fell shut, and without knowing how it happened, he slept.

He awoke. He recalled his dreams with a particular vividness he never had known before. The vivid dreams still gripped him.

He had seen mermaids singing to a half-sleeping sailor to open the stopcocks on the yacht, and flood the bilge.

He had heard the gaunt, gray man giving orders to a pack of talking animals, who crouched and whined like dogs within a sea cave that boomed like a drum with the waves. The cave walls were adorned with paintings of crowned and antlered god-kings, and leaping Irish elk or mastodons, and images to glorify the demon-gods that savage Man served in the neolithic ages.

In another part of the dream was a knight who wed a fairy maiden, and was given wealth, glory, and victory in war and tournament, if only he never boasted of his unearthly paramour; but gray-eyed Guinevere, seeking him as her lover, and in anger at his repulse of her, challenged him to name his lady; and he did so; and in an instant, with a single word, all his riches, honors, and worldly goods were forgotten.

In a fourth part of the dream, he saw King Arthur, golden of beard and crowned with gold, the mighty sword Excalibur in his hands, pointed downward in the ground, and the king leaning on it, panting, exhausted, smiling. The sword was covered with blood from tip to hilts, and so were the hands and forearms of the king, and his mail was broken in a score of places, and a dozen shallow wounds leaked, and his surcoat was so thick with blood that the Dragon of the West was mingled and unseen, red within red. Arthur spoke, too weary to raise his head, but not too weary to smile, and put heart into his men, “Sir Gawain and Gaheris, Sir Ywain and Sir Agravaine, Sir Caradoc and Sir Cai, Sir Lamorak and Sir Lanval! Father Sampson of York, wisest Merlin, and you, Sir Bedevere! We have by the grace of God slain the flower of Saxon chivalry this day, and routed the others, but you well know, ye Christian men, that to slay slays nothing, for men are as immortal as elves, although cloaked in the clay of Adam. Each night these wights will return, and fight again.”