“Cousin Beatrice to you, you gorgeous hunk of man,” she said with a little theatrical pat of her heaving bosom. “Do it!” She shut her eyes tight, and then opened them with another dramatic and radiant smile.
Rowan was merely smiling at them both in a vague, bemused fashion. And now it was time for Beatrice to take her downtown to Ryan’s office. Interminable legal matters. How horrible. Off they went.
He realized the black leather glove had fallen to the grass. He picked it up, and put it on.
Not one of them …
But who had been speaking? Who had been digesting and relaying that information? Maybe he was simply getting better at it, learning to ask the questions, as Aaron had tried to teach him to do.
Truth was, he hadn’t paid much attention to that aspect of the lessons. He mainly wanted to shut the power off. Whatever the case, there had, for the first time since the debacle of the jars, been a clear and distinct message. In fact, it was infinitely more concise and authoritative than the majority of the awful signals he’d received that day. It had been as clear as Lasher’s prophecy in its own way.
He looked up slowly. Surely there was someone on the side porch, in the deep shade, watching him. But he saw nothing. Only the painters at work on the cast iron. The porch looked splendid now that the old screen had been stripped away and the makeshift wooden railings removed. It was a bridge between the long double parlor and the beautiful lawn.
And here we will be married, he thought dreamily. And as if to answer the great crepe myrtles caught the breeze, dancing, their light pink blossoms moving gracefully against the blue sky.
When he got back to the hotel that afternoon, there was an envelope waiting for him from Aaron. He tore it open even before he reached the suite. Once the door was soundly shut on the world, he pulled out the thick glossy color photograph and held it to the light.
A lovely dark-haired woman gazed out at him from the divine gloom spun by Rembrandt-alive, smiling the very same smile he had only just seen on Rowan’s lips. The Mayfair emerald gleamed in this masterly twilight. So painfully real the illusion, that he had the feeling the cardboard on which it was printed might melt and leave the face floating, gossamer as a ghost, in the air.
But was this his Deborah, the woman he had seen in the visions? He didn’t know. No shock of recognition came to him no matter how long he studied it.
Taking off the gloves and handling it yielded nothing, only the maddeningly meaningless images of intermediaries and incidental persons he had come by now to expect. And as he sat on the couch holding the photograph, he knew it would have been the same had he touched the old oil painting itself.
“What do you want of me?” he whispered.
Out of innocence and out of time, the dark-haired girl smiled back at him. A stranger. Caught forever in her brief and desperate girlhood. Fledgling witch and nothing more.
But somebody had told him something this afternoon when Beatrice’s hand had touched his! Somebody had used the power for some purpose. Or was it simply his own inner voice?
He put aside his gloves, as he was accustomed to do now when alone here, and picked up his pen and his notebook, and began to write.
“Yes, it was a small constructive use of the power, I think. Because the images were subordinate to the message. I’m not sure that ever happened before, not even the day I touched the jars. The messages were mingled with the images, and Lasher was speaking to me directly, but it was mixed together. This was quite something else.”
And what if he were to touch Ryan’s hand tonight at dinner, when they all gathered around the candlelighted table in the Caribbean Room downstairs? What would the inner voice tell him? For the first time, he found himself eager to use the power. Perhaps because this little experiment with Beatrice had turned out so well.
He had liked Beatrice. He had seen perhaps what he wanted to see. An ordinary human being, a part of the great wave of the real which meant so much to him and to Rowan.
“Married by November 1. God, I have to call Aunt Viv. She’ll be so disappointed if I don’t call.”
He put the photograph on Rowan’s bedside table for her to see.
There was a lovely flower there, a white flower that looked like a familiar lily, yet somehow different. He picked it up, examining it, trying to figure why it looked so strange, and then he realized it was much longer than any lily he’d ever seen, and its petals seemed unusually fragile.
Pretty. Rowan must have picked it when she was walking back from the house. He went into the bathroom, filled a glass with water, and put the lily in it, and brought it back to the table.
He didn’t remember about touching Ryan’s hand until the dinner was long over and he was alone upstairs again, with his books. He was glad he hadn’t done it. The dinner had been too much fun, what with young Pierce regaling them with old legends of New Orleans-all the lore he remembered but which Rowan had never heard-and entertaining little anecdotes about the various cousins, all of it loosely strung together in a natural and beguiling way. But Pierce’s mother, Gifford, a trim, beautifully groomed brunette, and also a Mayfair by birth, had stared at him and Rowan fearfully and silently throughout the meal, and talked almost not at all.
And of course the whole dinner was, for him, another one of those secretly satisfying moments-comparing this night to the event of his boyhood when Aunt Viv had come from San Francisco to visit his mother, and he had dined in a real restaurant-the Caribbean Room-for the very first time.
And to think, Aunt Viv would be here before the end of next week. She was confused, but she was coming. What a load off his mind.
He’d sock her away in some nice comfortable condominium on St. Charles Avenue-one of the new brick town houses with the pretty mansard roofs and the French windows. Something right on the Mardi Gras parade route so she could watch from her balcony. In fact, he ought to be scanning the want ads now. She could take cabs anywhere she had to go. And then he’d break it to her very gently that he wanted her to stay down here, that he didn’t want to go back to California, that the house on Liberty Street wasn’t home to him anymore.
About midnight, he left his architecture books and went into the bedroom. Rowan was just switching off the light.
“Rowan,” he said, “if you saw that thing you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“What are you talking about, Michael?”
“If you saw Lasher, you’d tell me. Right away.”
“Of course I would,” she said. “Why would you even ask me that? Why don’t you put away the picture books and come to bed?”
He saw that the picture of Deborah had been propped up behind the lamp. And the pretty white lily in the water glass was standing in front of the picture.
“Lovely, wasn’t she?” Rowan said. “I don’t suppose there is a way in the world to get the Talamasca to part with the original painting.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not likely. But you know that flower is really remarkable. This afternoon, when I put it in the glass, I could swear it had only a single bloom, and now there are three large blooms, look at it. I must not have noticed the buds.”
She looked puzzled. She reached out, took the flower carefully from the water and studied it. “What kind of lily is it?” she asked.
“Well, it’s kind of like what we used to call an Easter lily, but they don’t bloom at this time of year. I don’t know what it is. Where did you get it?”
“Me? I’ve never seen it before.”
“I assumed you’d picked it somewhere.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Their eyes met. She was the first to look away, raising her eyebrows slowly, and then giving a little tilt to her head. She put the lily back in the glass. “Maybe a little gift from someone.”