Memory and Desire (42 page)

Several human bodies burst in the door, driven onward by Kate, who with her blond hair flying loose looked like a pint-sized Valkyrie. Richard thrust the hose at them. When he spun toward the door Claire was right behind him, slipping on the wet floor, her clothes cold and damp, her skin hot. She pulled the bottom of her sweater up and held it across her mouth and nose, making the air she breathed not only harsh with smoke but fuzzy with wool.

They ran by the tapestry frame in the gallery. Richard had basted a new piece of canvas work onto it Friday afternoon, Claire remembered. She'd never looked at it. It'd smell of smoke, its fine old colors would be smudged by smoke, the grit of the smoke would abrade the delicate yarns ... More was at stake here than needlework.

They were through the gallery and in the far corridor. Richard wrapped the tail of his jacket across his face and felt his way through the opaque fog of smoke, recognizing each door by touch. Claire hung onto his back belt loop, coughing, sniffling, gasping. Funny, it seemed perfectly natural for her to be risking her life for a pile of stone ... No. For a work of art. For a work of memory and of desire.

In a large bedroom Pakenham was ordering a crew of townspeople and constables, including Rob Jackman, to tear down the curtains and trample out the fire. It wasn't until Claire and Richard had run past that she realized Pakenham was in shirtsleeves, his face dirty, his hair tousled. She'd spot him one redeeming feature then, but only one.

In a small bedroom a fire smoldered on the ancient carpet. Richard and Claire smothered it by rolling the carpet around it.

“Now what?” she wheezed. “Where's Diana?"

Richard's fiery red eyes in his soot-blackened face made him look like a demon. Or an avenging archangel. He turned toward the attic stairs. “This way."

In two of the servants’ rooms they found charred wood and scorched fabric. The fires were already out. Alec? Claire asked herself. The windows stood open and the wind was starting to dissipate the smoke. He'd know better than to open the windows if Diana was still setting fires—the fresh air would fan the flames. He must know where she was.

As one, Richard and Claire turned toward the secret room.

They found Alec standing in the closet outside the closed door of Elizabeth's secret room, holding a couple of paint buckets filled with water and a singed drop cloth. He looked around, not at all startled. “Thanks be for a rainy day and indoor plumbing. She's in there."

Elizabeth? Or Diana?
“Diana said something...” Claire coughed, “...about that room. I bet she was spying on you and Elizabeth."

“I hope she learned something, then,” Alec returned.

“Let's have her out of there.” Richard reached for the sliding panel.

Alec caught his hand. “Feel the wall."

Richard touched the wall. “It's warm."

“She's set herself a funeral pyre,” Claire said.

“No, she can't do that. It's not right.” Alec peeled off his jacket, stuffed it into one of the buckets, and yanked it out streaming water.

There were a lot of things that weren't right, Claire told herself, and Alec saving Diana's life might be one of them ... No. Diana's melodrama had come to an end, not with a bang but a whimper. She deserved compassion. She was going to get compassion whether she wanted it or not, damn it.

“Let me,” said Richard.

“No. This is mine,” Alec told him, and reached again for the catch that would open the door.

It slid aside. Smoke billowed from the opening. Holding the jacket in front of his face, Alec leaped through. Claire picked up the buckets and Richard the wet drop cloth. Between them they drowned and pulverized this fire as well, all the while caroming off Alec's large, solid body half-concealed in the smoke.

With his toe Richard nudged an empty can of benzene out the door. Claire stamped the charred remains of the box of matches into smeared ash. That for murder, that for deception, that for history corrupted—the elements themselves couldn't destroy the truth. Not one of all the truths caught in this room. Which was not a priest's hole but a priestess's.

A gust of fresh air dispersed the smoke. Alec materialized from the haze protecting Diana's sagging body with his own. A length of thin rope hung from a ceiling beam, its end frayed and torn. The other end circled Diana's neck and dangled down the front of her shirt like an ugly necklace. The bench lay on its side against the toppled table.

“She set the fire,” Alec said hoarsely, and coughed. “She set the fire, then fixed the rope and stood on the bench. She couldn't have tossed a match into the benzene and kicked the bench away until we were just outside the door. I pulled her down."

Not many men could have torn that rope in two, Claire thought. Alec did have his supernatural moments.

Diana's face flushed an angry mottled red beneath the soot. Only white slits showed between her black-rimmed eyelids. A vicious scarlet welt scarred her throat. She'd identified with Elizabeth to the end, then. To the end of her own bitter near-sightedness.

She trembled violently, her breath a harsh heave and gasp. Alec tried to lever her to her feet. Her body flopped, limbs splaying. Shaking his head—so much for his comment about bloodyminded cow—Richard went to help.

Now came the trial. Now the pretenses and the perceptions, Melinda's as well as everyone else's, would be splattered like road kill across the public pavement. For a moment Claire wished Diana had died here, alone and in pain, as she'd lived alone and in pain.

Then Claire was coughing, hacking up the acrid tastes of fire, brimstone, and hatred. Her ears were still ringing even though the smoke alarms had finally run down. Through streaming eyes she saw shapes wavering at the end of the hallway. Fiends from hell ... No, they were firemen.

Alec and Richard levered Diana out the doorway into the arms of a couple of paramedics. Tears made tracks like a snail's slime trail down her face. She was swearing in a grating mutter—Alec should rot in hell—so should Richard and a fair number of other people, especially Melinda, who was already there roasting—Melinda was a witch, all witches should be done to death—Somerstowe must not suffer witches to live. Claire bit her lip, pity blending with disgust.

The paramedics and the firemen half-carried, half-dragged Diana away. Their footsteps receded into the house and disappeared. Richard set the table and the bench upright. Alec gathered up a cardboard box from the corner of the room. Oh—Elizabeth's shroud. Either Diana had thrown it down or it'd fallen in the struggle.

Alec lifted the lid of the box and peeked inside. “It's all right. Hang on a sec.” He turned toward one of the brick walls, counted up the rows of bricks, and eased one from its crumbling mortar. In the small, dark recess Claire glimpsed a bit of white fabric.

Tucking the box beneath his arm, Alec took the bit of cloth and unfolded it. On his outstretched palm lay two oblong nubbins of ivory ... No. Two bones, one human, one feline.

Richard inhaled, gargled and sputtered, managed to exhale. His voice rasped. “So you're making an end of it, then?"

“It's come to an end.” Alec refolded the cloth—an ordinary handkerchief—and tucked the package away inside the box, deep in the folds of the linen shroud.

A shroud, thought Claire. A winding-sheet. A sheet to wrap lovers on a chilly English morning. Poets had been exploring metaphors of love and death as long as they'd had language to spend on it. So Alec had written a new and particularly poignant verse to that neverending poem. It took a mind like Diana's to twist a poem into the trailer of a B-movie.

Together they walked away from the tiny room. What a trio they made, wet, singed, sooty. If Alec looked bleak, Richard looked stunned. He narrated damage and repair in a slurred brogue, “...oak floor planks, velvet bed-hangings with applique, smoke-damaged plaster—God,” he groaned, caught himself and went on, “...windows, how many windowpanes, marble....” They walked into the long gallery and stopped dead.

Tendrils of smoke coiled like will o’ the wisps through the shadows ... That translucent shape wasn't smoke. It glided down the room toward the tapestry frame, growing more opaque with each step. Voices, engine noises, mysterious thumps and bumps sounded faintly in the distance, but here there was no sound except the soft steady cadence of footsteps.

“Elizabeth,” Alec said, his voice as husky with emotion as with smoke.

Claire dug her glasses out of her pocket and put them on. The lenses were smeary. Elizabeth was crisp and clear. She wore a dove-gray dress with a white collar and a white cap that barely contained the waves of her golden hair. Her skin was the pink of roses in June. Her sunlit eyes looked out from a heartbreakingly smooth and youthful face. She was carrying the cat nestled against her breast. Its purr made a gentle resonance in the wooden floor. The scent of pomander dispelled the reek of smoke and wet wood.

With a soft thud the cat leaped down. It started washing its face, not at all bothered that every lick of its tongue ripped the fabric of reality. Elizabeth bent over the tapestry frame. Her delicate hands picked up a needle and threaded it. She sewed a stitch, and another, and another. The punk of the needle through the taut canvas sounded like a distant heartbeat.

Alec handed the cardboard box to Richard. He walked forward, extending his hand. Leaving the needle dangling from its thread, Elizabeth raised her own hands in a gesture partly of welcome, partly of puzzlement and pleading. Her smile wasn't the naive and self-absorbed smile of a nineteen-year old girl. It was the world-wise and world-weary smile of an old woman. Her voice was the melody of a flute. “Ah, Alec, would you have me wait upon you still?"

As one, Richard and Claire turned toward the door.

“Please,” Alec asked them, “don't go.” He reached out, taking Elizabeth's hands and cradling them between his own. “These are my friends, Richard and Claire."

She looked toward them. At them. She curtsied, her dress rustling. “Good day to you."

“How do you do,” said Richard faintly.

Claire managed a similarly faint, “Hello."

Elizabeth's head barely came to Alec's jaw. Even though she looked up at him with her chin thrown back, the tilt of her head and the slope of her shoulders suggested not pride but a sorrow out of time and beyond space. Beyond reason, if not at all beyond emotion. “You have spoken to me of love, Alec. You have taught me the pleasures of love and for that I am grateful, for your gentility eases the memories which burden me. And yet, even then, I am spent, encumbered with those same memories. I would leave this shadow of a life and sleep in the bosom of our mother, and in time be born again and know joy without encumbrance."

“Yes,” Alec told her, “I know."

Elizabeth's upturned chin exposed the length of her throat. The fragile flesh was bruised, swollen with the mark of the rope. And yet it was her mind, Claire thought, her spirit, her soul, which were truly scarred by the horror of her death. Melinda now, Melinda hadn't known what hit her.

“We shall yet meet again, you and I, in another life,” Elizabeth told Alec. “This life is yours, not mine. My life is but a withered shoot, yearning for the dust. Yours blossoms within your heart at this moment. Do not deny your life in favor of mine, I beg you."

Alec lifted her hands to his lips. “I should never have called you."

“If you had not awakened me then we would not each one have known the other. Should we turn away from love and laughter because neither is perfection?"

“No,” Alec said. “No. Not a bit of it."

Richard sighed, his warm breath stirring Claire's hair. She knew what he was thinking. Here they were, two relatively normal human beings, with no entanglements, free to get together mind, body, and soul ... Well no, there were issues, ones of life and death if you counted Melinda's—not ghost. Memory.

“I'll remember you,” Alec told Elizabeth.

“If I should take any image even unto another life, it shall be that of you.” Standing on tiptoe, her skirts rustling, she pressed her lips briefly against his and with a smile whispered, “Do not, however, allow my memory to mar your joy of this life."

He smiled back. “I won't."

The cat was batting at the dangling length of thread. The thread glinted red in the shadowy room, like a stream of blood. Pulling her hands away from Alec's, Elizabeth scooped up the cat and stood waiting.

With his right hand Alec sketched a graceful, flowing symbol in the air. His hoarse voice murmured something. Claire heard the feeling behind the words rather than the words themselves, just as she'd hear a particularly evocative passage of music without analyzing what the individual notes were.

Elizabeth's shape wavered and thinned, less like smoke than like sparkling mist. Only her eyes remained distinct.

Alec picked up the scissors sitting beside the frame. He took the dangling needle in his other hand and looked up at Elizabeth. Her eyes smiled at him, lit like a summer's afternoon.

He cut the thread. The tiny metallic snip seemed as loud as a slamming door. In a swirl of light and shadow Elizabeth vanished.
Sympathetic magic...

For a long moment Alec stood considering the place where she'd stood. Then he put down the scissors and the needle. “Richard, Claire, have a look at the canvas...” His voice broke. He began coughing, deep, racking coughs torn from his gut and forcing tears to run down his cheeks.

Richard tried thumping his back. But what Alec was trying to cough up, Claire thought, wasn't anything as simple as smoke.

She turned discreetly away and leaned over the needlework canvas. The muted colors depicted Penelope, dressed in a seventeenth-century dress and seated in a seventeenth-century room before a needlework frame, waiting for Ulysses to return either from Troy or from the Civil War battles at Naseby or Marston Moor. Beneath the figure of Penelope was stitched the word, “Faith,” and the frayed initials, “ES.” Below that monogram was another, freshly sewn in red thread, identical to the first.
Elizabeth was here.

Oh yes, Claire thought, she'd been here all right. Just like Diana. Just like Melinda. Just like me.