“And he knew about the Talamasca.”
“Yes, I didn’t talk much to my students about the Order, except for those who seemed as if they might want to …”
“Like those boys,” said Yuri.
He watched the light jump in Stuart’s eye, as if the lamp nearby had jumped, and not Stuart.
“Yes, well, those boys.”
“What boys?” asked Rowan.
“Marklin George and Tommy Monohan,” said Yuri.
Stuart’s face was rigid. He lifted the mug of tea with both hands and drank deeply.
The whiskey smelled medicinal and sickening.
“Were they the ones who helped you with this?” asked Yuri. “The computer genius and the Latin scholar?”
“It was my doing,” said Stuart, without looking at Yuri. He was not looking at any of them. “Do you want to hear what I have to say, or not?”
“They helped you,” said Yuri.
“I have nothing to say on the subject of my accomplices,” Gordon said, looking coldly at Yuri now, and then back again into empty space, or the shadows along the walls.
“It was the two young ones,” said Yuri, though Michael was gesturing to him to hold back. “What about Joan Cross, or Elvera Fleming, or Timothy Hollingshed?”
Stuart made an impatient and disgusted gesture at the mention of these names, hardly realizing how this might be interpreted in relation to the boys.
“Joan Cross doesn’t have a romantic bone in her body,” Stuart said suddenly, “and Timothy Hollingshed has always been overrated due simply to his aristocratic background. Elvera Fleming is an old fool! Don’t ask me these questions anymore. I won’t be made to speak of my accomplices. I won’t be made to betray them. I’ll die with that secret, be assured.”
“So this friend,” said Ash, his expression patient but surprisingly cold, “this young man in India, he wrote to you, Mr. Gordon.”
“Called me, as a matter of fact, told me he had a mystery for me. He said he could get her to England, if I’d take over once she arrived. He said that she couldn’t really fend for herself. She seemed mad, and then not mad. No one could quite analyze her. She spoke of times unknown to the people around her. And when he’d made inquiries, with a view to sending her home, he found she was a legend in that part of India. I have a record of it all. I have our letters. They are all here. There are copies in the Motherhouse as well. But the originals are here. Everything I value is in this tower.”
“You knew what she was when you saw her?”
“No. It was extraordinary. I found myself enchanted by her. Some selfish instinct dominated my actions. I brought her here. I didn’t want to take her to the Motherhouse. It was most peculiar. I couldn’t have told anyone what I was doing or why, except for the obvious fact that I was so charmed by her. I had only lately inherited this tower from my mother’s brother, an antiquarian who had been my family mentor. It seemed the perfect place.
“The first week, I scarcely left at all. I had never been in the company of such a person as Tessa. There was a gaiety and simplicity in her which gave me inexpressible happiness.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” said Ash softly, with a trace of a smile. “Please go on with your story.”
“I fell in love with her.” He paused, eyebrows raised, as if amazed by his own words. He seemed excited by the revelation. “I fell completely in love with her.”
“And you kept her here?” asked Yuri.
“Yes, she’s been here ever since. She never goes out. She’s afraid of people. It’s only when I’ve been here a long while that she’ll talk, and then she tells her amazing tales.
“She’s seldom coherent, or I should say chronological. The little stories always make sense. I have hundreds of recordings of her talking, lists of Old English words and Latin words which she has used.
“You see, what became clear to me almost immediately was that she was speaking of two different lives, a very long one which she was living now, and a life she’d lived before.”
“Two lives? Then you mean, simply, reincarnation.”
“After a long while, she explained,” said Gordon. He was now so passionately involved in his tale, he seemed to have forgotten the danger to him. “She said that all her kind had two lives, sometimes more,” he went on. “That you were born knowing all you needed to know to survive, but then gradually an earlier life came back to you, and bits and pieces of others. And it was the memory of this earlier life that kept you from going mad among human beings.”
“You had realized,” asked Rowan, “by this time, that she wasn’t human. She would have fooled me.”
“No. Not at all. I thought she was human. Of course, there were strange characteristics to her-her translucent skin, her tremendous height, and her unusual hands. But I didn’t think, ‘No, this being isn’t human.’
“It was she who said that she wasn’t human. She said it more than once. Her people lived before humans. They had lived thousands of years in peace on islands in the northern seas. These islands were warmed by volcanic springs from the depths, by geysers of steam, and pleasant lakes.
“And this she knew, not because she herself had lived at that time, but because others she had known in her first lifetime could remember a former life in this paradise, and that was how her people knew their history, through the inevitable and always singular remembrance of earlier lives.
“Don’t you see? It was incredible, the idea that everyone would come into this world with some distinct and valuable historical memories! It meant that the race knew more of itself than humans could possibly know. It knew of earlier ages from, so to speak, firsthand experience!”
“And if you bred Tessa to another of her race,” said Rowan, “you would have a child who could remember an earlier life-and then perhaps another child and another life remembered.”
“Exactly! The chain of memory would be established, and who knows how far back it would go, for each one, remembering some earlier existence, remembering the tales of those he had known and loved in that time who remembered having lived before!”
Ash listened to all this without comment, or any perceptible change of emotion. None of it seemed to surprise him or offend him. Yuri almost smiled. It was the same simplicity he’d observed in Ash at Claridge’s, when they had first spoken.
“Someone else might have dismissed Tessa’s claims,” said Gordon, “but I recognized the Gaelic words she used, the bits of Old English, the Latin, and when she wrote down the runic script, I could read it! I knew she told the truth.”
“And this you kept to yourself,” said Rowan, neutrally, as if merely trying to quell Gordon’s annoying emotion and get back on track.
“Yes! I did. I almost told Aaron about it. The more Tessa talked, the more she spoke of the Highlands, of early Celtic rituals and customs, of Celtic saints even, and the Celtic church.
“You do know that our church in England then was Celtic or Briton or whatever you want to call it, founded by the Apostles themselves, who had come from Jerusalem to Glastonbury. We had no connection with Rome. It was Pope Gregory and his henchman, St. Augustine, who thrust the Roman church on Britain.”
“Yes, but then you did not tell Aaron Lightner?” asked Ash, raising his voice just slightly. “You were saying …?”
“Aaron had already gone to America. He had gone there to make contact once more with the Mayfair witches, and to pursue other paths in psychic investigation. It was no time to question Aaron about his early research. And then, of course, I had done something wrong. I had taken a woman entrusted to me as a member of the Order, and I had kept her for myself, almost a prisoner. Of course, there has never been anything stopping Tessa from leaving, nothing but her own fear. But I had closeted this woman away. I had told the Order nothing about it.”