A leaf landed on the open book. Mo flicked it away, but it clung to his finger with thin, spidery arms. "Well, how about this!" he said, holding it up to his eyes. "Is it one of Orpheus's leaf-men? His creations obviously spread fast."
"And they're seldom very nice," said Farid. "Watch out. Those creatures spit."
"Really?" Mo laughed softly and let the leaf-man fly away just as it was pursing its lips.
Resa watched the strange creature go and abruptly straightened up. "It's all lies," she said. Her voice shook on every word. "This beauty is only a lie. It's just meant to take our minds off the darkness, all the misfortune – and all the death."
Mo put the book on Meggie's lap and got to his feet, but Resa stepped back.
"This isn't our story!" she said, in a voice loud enough for some of the robbers to turn and look at her. "It's draining our hearts with all its magic. I want to go home. I want to forget all these horrors and not remember them until I'm back on Elinor's sofa!"
Gecko had turned, too. He stared curiously at them while one of his crows tried to snatch a piece of meat from his hand. Snapper was listening as well.
"We can't go back, Resa," said Mo, lowering his voice. "Fenoglio isn't writing anymore, remember? And we can't trust Orpheus."
"Fenoglio will try to write us back if you ask. He owes it to you. Please, Mo! There can't be any happy ending here!"
Mo looked at Meggie, who was still kneeling beside Farid with Balbulus's book on her lap. What was he hoping for? Did he want her to contradict her mother?
Farid glared at Resa and let the fire between his fingers go out. "Silvertongue?"
Mo looked at him. Yes, he had many names now. What had it been like when he was only Mo? Probably Meggie couldn't remember, either.
"I must go back to Ombra. What am I to say to Orpheus?" Farid looked at him almost pleadingly. "Will you tell him about the White Women?" There it was again, like fire burning on his face – his foolish hope.
"There's nothing to tell. I've said so before," replied Mo, and Farid bowed his head and looked at his sooty hands as if Mo had snatched hope itself from his fingers.
He stood up. He still went barefoot, even though there was sometimes frost at night now. "Good luck, Meggie," he murmured, giving her a quick kiss. Then he turned without another word. Meggie was already missing him as he swung himself up onto his donkey.
Yes. Perhaps they really ought to go back…
She jumped when Mo put his hand on her shoulder.
"Keep the book wrapped in a cloth when you're not looking at it," he said. "The nights are damp." Then he made his way past her mother and went over to the robbers, who were sitting around the embers of their dying fire as silently as if they were waiting for him.
But Resa stood there, staring at the book in her hands as if it were another book, the one that had swallowed her up entirely over ten years ago. Then she looked at Meggie.
"What about you?" she asked. "Do you want to stay here, like your father? Don't you miss your friends, and Elinor and Darius? And your warm bed without any lice in it, the cafe down by the lake, the peaceful roads?"
Meggie wished so much she could give the answer that Resa wanted to hear, but she couldn't.
"I don't know," she said quietly.
And that was the truth.
11. SICK WITH LONGING
I lost a world the other day.
Has anybody found?
You'll know it by the row of stars
Around its forehead bound.
A rich man might not notice it;
Yet to my frugal eye
Of more esteem than ducats.
Oh, find it, sir, for me!
Emily Dickinson, Number 181, Collected Poems
Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she'd dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they'd lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings – as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you'd never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.
Elinor had wallowed in misery on the printed page, but she'd never thought that in real life, gray and uneventful as hers had been for many years, such pain could enter her own heart. You're paying the price now, Elinor, she often told herself these days. Paying the price for the happiness of those last months. Didn't books say that, too: that there's always a price to pay for happiness? How could she ever have thought she would simply find it and be allowed to keep it? Stupid. Stupid Elinor.
When she didn't feel like getting up in the morning, when her heart faltered more and more frequently for no apparent reason, as if it were too tired to beat steadily, when she had no appetite even at breakfast time (although she had always preached that breakfast was the most important meal of the day), when Darius, with that anxious, owlish expression on his face, kept asking how she was, she began wondering whether becoming ill with longing was more than just a literary invention after all. Didn't she feel, deep down inside, that her longing was sapping her strength and her appetite, even her pleasure in her books? Longing.
Darius suggested going away to auctions of rare books, or famous bookshops that she hadn't visited for a long time. He drew up lists of volumes not yet in her library, lists that would have filled Elinor with delighted excitement only a year ago. But now her eyes passed over the titles with as little interest as if she were reading a shopping list for cleaning products. What had become of her love for printed pages and precious bindings, words on parchment and paper? She missed the tug at her heart that she used to feel at the sight of her books, the need to stroke their spines tenderly, open them, lose herself in them. But it seemed as if all of a sudden her heart couldn't enjoy or feel anything, as if the pain had numbed it to everything but her longing for Meggie and her parents. Because by now Elinor had understood this, too; A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.
She began spending days on end in bed. She ate too little and then too much. Her stomach hurt, her head ached, her heart fluttered inside her. She was cross and absentminded and began crying like a crocodile over the most sentimental stories – because of course she went on reading. What else was there for her to do? She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn't taste bad, but she was still unhappy. And Orpheus's ugly dog lay beside her bed, slobbering on her carpet and staring at her with his sad eyes as if he were the only creature in the world who understood her sorrows.
Well, perhaps that wasn't quite fair. Presumably Darius, too, knew just how wretched she was feeling. "Elinor, won't you go for a little walk?" he would ask when he had brought her breakfast in bed yet again, and she still hadn't appeared in the kitchen by twelve noon. "Elinor, I found this wonderful edition of Ivanhoe in one of your catalogs. Why don't we go and take a look at it? The place isn't far away." Or, as he had said only a few days ago, "Please, Elinor, go and see the doctor! This can't go on!"