“What do you want to know about her?”
“Well, how did you come to live with her at this farm?”
“Didn’t Luke tell you that story?” Luke’s head came up, then he seemed to find the fire a magnet for his gaze.
The Doctor said, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Mary shrugged. “I was on my way from Portland to Shiloh Beach when my bus was attacked by a road gang. I managed to escape, but I was shot in the leg. I ran into the woods and finally came to a road, but I was too weak to go on. If Rachel hadn’t found me, if she hadn’t taken me into her home and gotten medical help for me, I probably would’ve died. She saved my life, just as she saved Luke’s.”
That at least garnered a direct look from Luke and even a nod before he turned to stare into the fire again.
The Doctor rocked back and forth monotonously. “Sister Mary, how long did you… live with Rachel?”
The inflections in that aroused the first hint of anger, but it was little more than annoyance sharpened by apprehension. “You say that as if you thought we were doing more than simply sharing a house.”
“Is that what you think I meant?” When Mary didn’t fall into the trap of defending her assumption, but remained silent, he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“How long was I at Amarna? Well, about eleven years. I’d been there less than a year when the—when Armageddon came.”
“You must have been very fond of Rachel.”
“I am fond of her. We went through a lot together, and she’s an extraordinary human being.”
“Ah. How was she extraordinary?”
What was he after? Mary found it difficult to keep her voice under control. “Rachel is the kindest, wisest person I’ve ever known; the most knowledgeable, the most… wonder-full.” Then to be sure he understood that, “I mean, full of wonder.”
“What did she wonder at?”
“At everything. At all of creation.”
“Did she wonder about… God?”
He stopped the movement of the rocker, leaned toward Mary. She hesitated only for a split second. “Of course. We all wonder about god.”
“Those of us who believe in Him do, certainly.”
A chill hovered at her back as annoyance gave way to anger edged with fear. “Do you think Rachel doesn’t believe in god?”
“I want to discover the truth of that.”
She looked past the Doctor. “Luke? What did you tell him to make him doubt that?”
Luke looked up at her. “I didn’t… I only told him the truth.”
The Doctor cut in. “And what he told me I find very disturbing, Sister. For instance, he told me there’s a tree she worships.”
No more testing feints, Mary thought, yet she still couldn’t understand his motive for this attack on Rachel. She brought out a derisive laugh. “That’s ridiculous. Luke, you couldn’t have said that.”
“Well, what I meant—what I said was that place, the tree, it was… like a church to her.”
The Doctor ignored that. “The woman Rachel also showed Luke books filled with pictures of idols made by heathens!”
Books. This was a thrust to the heart.
“Rachel is an artist and a student of art. Because she has pictures of idols doesn’t mean she believes in them. She is a god-fearing, god-loving woman, and in her every act and thought a good Christian!”
Rachel would be appalled at that, but Mary was ready to lie like a trouper for her.
She didn’t understand the motive behind the Doctor’s hostility, but she was beginning to understand what it could mean to Rachel. It could mean he wouldn’t accept her at the Ark.
“God-fearing Christian? Yet one night she told Luke that the light from some of the stars took a million years to reach the Earth!”
At least, he said nothing more about the books. Did that mean Luke hadn’t told him about the even more damning books on geology and evolution? Still, starlight a million years old was damning enough to a man who believed the universe was created in seven terrestrial days only six thousand years ago.
“Rachel likes poetry,” Mary said, trying to keep her tone light. “Sometimes—well, she takes a bit of poetic license with what she says.”
“The truth,” the Doctor pronounced, “needs no poetic license.” And with that he rose, crossed to the chest at the foot of the bed. The empty chair still rocked, its shadow rising and falling on the wall. When he returned, he was carrying a small, black-bound book.
Rachel’s sketchbook.
Mary’s impulse was to snatch it out of his hands. He had no right to touch it. But the anger and pain knotted under her ribs was paralyzing: the anger of realization, the pain of betrayal. Her world, which had assumed a semblance of order based ultimately on the keystone of Luke, began to shiver toward collapse. The keystone had cracked.
She spoke finally, the words hissing like the rain on the windows. “Luke, you took that sketchbook without asking me. You stole it from me!”
Luke’s eyes were wide in blank confusion, but he didn’t have a chance to answer her accusation. The Doctor said flatly, “Luke didn’t steal this book. I asked him to bring it to me.”
“Does that make it right, just because he stole it at your request?”
“Sister Mary!” The whip crack in his voice brought her up short and reminded her that she existed in this community at his whim. He could exile her with a word—and her child. If there was a child.
But now he was willing to be placating. He sat down again, crossed one long leg over the other. “Sister Mary, at the Ark no one owns anything, so it’s not possible to steal anything.”
She eased open her fisted hands. “That sketchbook was Rachel’s because she made the drawings. It’s mine because she gave it to me, and it’s precious to me for the same reasons. Luke was wrong to take it from me without asking. If he’d only asked…” She saw the misery in Luke’s always legible features, and she couldn’t go on.
He hadn’t intentionally betrayed her; it had never occurred to him that by taking that sketchbook he was betraying her.
She had misjudged her keystone. It was made of friable clay.
Mary ordered her mind into calm, but anger lurked like a shark under the surface of her thoughts. She asked the Doctor, “Why did you want to see that sketchbook?”
The firelight turned golden the gray of his hair and beard, glowed in the glacier blue of his eyes. “You find the contents of this book precious, Sister Mary? You say the woman Rachel was an artist?”
“Yes, I do, and yes, she is an artist.”
He opened the sketchbook, riffled through the pages. “And this—this is her handiwork?”
“Of course, it is.”
“And you approve of this, even admire it?”
“Brother, what game are you playing?”
She heard Luke’s quick intake of breath, but the Doctor wasn’t distracted. There was a timbre of triumph in his voice. “The Second Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’”
For a moment Mary could only stare at him, staggered. All the art of humankind from its exquisite beginnings in Lascaux and Altamira, all the striving of genius over the millennia to create visual images that expressed the yearnings and insights of the human mind—all that with a few words rendered sinful, and thus to be despised, and now, for the first time, she realized that she had never seen an object of art at the Ark, not even a representation of the gods of the Flock.