"I told you, I don't know. No one does. She left me with her sister when I was a child and she disappeared. She hasn't been seen again."
"I see. And your father died before you were born?"
"Yes."
"And you are, what, twenty-eight?"
He frowned again. "How do you know that with such authority?"
I smiled. "Because you are six months younger than I am, and I'm twenty-nine." As he started to speak, I held up my hand to silence him. "Ambrose," I continued, "I have a story to tell you, and it is one that you may not enjoy, but you will be able to judge its truth for yourself, in the listening. All that I ask is that you let me tell it without interruption, for if you interrupt, with questions or denials, we'll be distracted and the whole story might not come out. Will you listen? And not interrupt, even though I promise you it will not be easy?"
He straightened up from his slouch and pressed his hands together, breathing deeply and finally emitting an explosive sigh. "You make it sound ominous, but yes, I will listen without interrupting you, even if what you tell me makes me want to kill you."
"I hope it won't," I said, and then I began. I told him the entire tale of Picus Britannicus and the wound he had taken, and the manner in which he had killed his host, Marcus Aurelius Ambrosianus. It took a long time, and before I was half-way through he had turned his back on me, leaning his weight against the stone behind him and staring off into the darkness so that I could not see his face. When I had finished speaking, a long silence stretched between us. I made no attempt to break it, knowing instinctively that he had heard enough of my voice and my words and that, whatever was going on in his mind now, he would take his own time in reacting to my message and the turmoil it had brought into his life. Finally, after a long stretch of utter stillness, he spoke without turning towards me, his voice drifting backward to me over his shoulder.
"So be it," he said. "I accept and believe your story. My mother was a whore and my father an ineffectual fool and a murderer, and your father—who is suddenly my father— killed him. Killed them both, in fact."
I waited, but he said no more, and I realized with mounting disbelief that he had dismissed the major part of what I had told him; had failed, in fact, to consider any part of it other than that sole aspect upon which he had seized. Stung to anger in spite of my resolve to accept whatever he might have said, I snapped, "I made no judgment on your mother! I did not know her, nor did you, so neither of us may presume to know her mind or to impugn her motives. And her husband, your father as you call him, was an old man, driven by an old man's despair to save his honour."
That brought him swinging round to face me, his eyes blazing, even in the moonlight. "What honour? My mother and your father combined to deprive him of all honour!"
I bit back my own angry retort, forcing myself to take a deep breath and hold it before speaking again. Then I chose my words carefully, wishing to give him no cause to fight me, and willing my voice to sound calm and reasonable.
"Ambrose, we have no cause to believe that...and the evidence would seem to indicate that it's untrue, in any case."
"Evidence!" His voice shook with scorn and wounded fury. "What evidence? What need is there of evidence? It is evident—sublimely evident—that my mother was depraved. Her own actions condemn her to anyone with ears to listen to the story of her infamy...."
He subsided into silence and I drew another deep breath, and now when I resumed he did not attempt to interrupt me.
"Listen to me," I went on in a much gentler voice. "I have been thinking deeply about that since I first saw you and realized what must have happened..." I paused, aching with the need to help him. "You have said you believe my tale. Well, if you do, then you must believe all of it. It's not good enough simply to hear the parts you want to hear. The whole deserves examination, not merely the parts."
"That's ridiculous." His voice was the distillation of bitterness. "What is there to examine? To hear it is to believe it at first draught. The woman—my...my mother—was a faithless wanton. Without her faithlessness, there would have been no tale to tell."
"No, Ambrose, you are wrong. That is not so." My heartbeat had surged suddenly, for I had seen his error, and its incongruity, even as he spoke the words, and now I hurried on, trying to articulate die thought that had leaped into my mind. "Without my father's recognition of her—by sheer blind chance—in that marketplace on his way to embark for Italia, there would have been no tale! My father believed until that point he had merely been dreaming, and there is no sin or guilt in dreams. He would have thought no more of his dreams, and the cause of your father's attack upon him while he slept would have remained a mystery, unfortunate and inexplicable. Only that single sight of the woman, by mischance, changed everything for ever. And had that not occurred, your life would not have changed."
"What...what do you mean?" His expression now was one of uncertainty, triggered perhaps by the arrangement of my words. I held up my hand in an appeal for time to complete what I was thinking, for I was using words now that had not occurred to me before this moment.
"We will never know the exact truth of what your mother thought, or what motivated her to act as she did," I said. "But consider this, if you will.... " My thoughts were outstripping my abilities to voice them. "Suppose...just let us suppose, ludicrous though the thought might seem at this moment, that your mother had a deep and genuine love for the old man. He had no son. Is that not so? Only a single daughter in her teens. You were his only son?" He nodded, his face twisted in perplexity. "Then let us suppose also that his age made it impossible for him to father a son. Not to attempt the feat, you understand, but to achieve it. For all we know, he and his wife could have been trying for years. Will you agree to that?"
He nodded, yet I could see he was baffled and still angry. I rushed on with my thought before he could speak. "Now, consider this. A virile, healthy soldier of noble birth, dreadfully wounded in the neck and face but otherwise complete and whole, comes to live in their house. This man is in constant pain from his injuries and his face is heavily bandaged. For much of the time, he is effectively blind, deaf and mute, and is heavily drugged against his pain at all times. He never sees, and seems unaware of, anyone in the household, but is under constant surveillance by physicians, the household staff, the daughter of the house—we know that because my father spoke of her—and therefore, it would seem probable, also by the mistress of the house.
"Now suppose again that somehow, perhaps by overhearing the physicians speaking among themselves about their charge, she learns that the soldier is sexually healthy, purging himself of seed in dreams at night as strong men will in celibacy. Might she not see that, somehow, as a cause for regret, a waste? I mean this seriously, Ambrose, and who can ever tell what thoughts go through the mind of another? And might she not then think of it for long weeks, during which the soldier's strength increased although his wounds did not improve...and might she not devise, in her love, or in her desperation, a means of using—borrowing, one might say—the natural, outflowing strength of one man, all unknown to him since he is drugged at all times, to benefit the flagging strength of another whom she loves?"
Now he did interrupt me. "Wait! Are you implying that my mother might have done what she did out of love for my father?"
I nodded my head. "Yes, I am."
"That is obscene! I've never heard the like—"
"No more have I, but it makes as much sense as the other! Think about it, man! This was no ordinary lust. There was nothing personal in what my father dreamed. It was a vision remembered, nothing more! The hazy recollection of a nocturnal image. To believe your mother capable of such mechanical impersonality, such mindless, self-destructive and aggressive lust, would be to brand her truly monstrous, and I doubt that she was anything like that."