Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(42)
Author: Anne Rice

“It was the man, wasn’t it? He’d come for me after he’d been with my mother. Must have been that way. When he tried to get in, it woke me up And then I went to her and she was already dead.”

“Was it strong, the scent?”

“Very. Sometimes I can still smell it in the living room here, and upstairs in the bedroom. Can’t you?” Rowan didn’t reply.

“I want you to do something just because I ask you,” Rowan said. “What’s that?”

“Don’t tell Michael about the baby until the usual tests have been done. There is someone you can confide in, isn’t there, someone who can be like a mother? There must be.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Mona. “I have my secret gynecologist, I’m thirteen.”

“Of course,” said Rowan. “Look, whatever happens, I’m going to be back here before you have to tell anyone at all.”

“Yeah, I hope so. Wouldn’t that be something, if you could finish it that quick? But what if you never come back and Michael and I never know what happened to you or to Yuri?”

Rowan thought about this, apparently, and then she merely shrugged. “I’ll come back,” she said. “One more caution, if you don’t mind.”

“Hit me with it.”

“If you do tell Michael about this baby, and then decide to get rid of it later, that will kill him. Twice before, this has been promised to him and taken away. If there’s any doubt, any whatever, don’t tell him till that doubt is resolved.”

“I can’t wait to tell him. I can get my doctor to see me this afternoon. I’ll tell her I’m having a nervous breakdown and I’m on my way over. She’s used to this stuff with me. When the tests come back okay, nothing’s going to keep me from telling him. And nothing, I mean nothing, is going to keep a baby of mine from being born.”

She was about to get up when she realized what she’d said, and that Rowan would never face this particular dilemma again. But Rowan seemed not at all offended by her words, and certainly not hurt. Her face was very quiet. She was looking at the cigarettes.

“Get out of here so I can smoke in peace, will you?” Rowan asked, smiling. “And then we’ll wake up Michael. I have an hour and a half to make the plane.”

“Rowan, I … I’m still sorry about doing it with him. I just can’t be sorry about the child.”

“Neither can I,” said Rowan. “If he comes out of this with a child of his own, and a mother who’ll let him love it, well, maybe he’ll find a way to forgive everything as the years pass. Just remember. I’m still his wife, Jezebel. You’ve got the emerald and the baby. But Michael is still mine.”

“Got it,” said Mona. “I really like you, Rowan. I really, really like you. That’s aside from loving you because you’re my cousin and we’re Mayfairs. If I wasn’t pregnant I’d make you take me with you, for your sake and Yuri’s and everybody else’s.”

“And how would you make me take you, Mona?”

“What were your words? Secret weapons of my own.”

They looked at one another, and then slowly Rowan nodded and smiled.

Seven

THE HILL WAS muddy and cold, but never had Marklin made this slippery climb, either in winter or summer, when he had not loved it—to stand on Wearyall Hill beside the Holy Thom and look down upon the quaint and picturesque town of Glastonbury. The country round was always green, even in winter, but now it had the new intense color of spring.

Marklin was twenty-three, and very fair, with blond hair and pale blue eyes, and thin clear skin that chilled easily. He wore a raincoat with a wool lining, and a pair of leather gloves, and a small wool cap on his head that fitted well and kept him warmer than one might expect from such a little article of clothing.

He’d been eighteen when Stuart had brought them here—he and Tommy both eager students, in love with Oxford, in love with Stuart and eager for every word that dropped from Stuart’s lips.

All during their Oxford days, they had honored this place with regular visitations. They’d taken small, cozy little rooms at the George and Pilgrims Hotel, and walked High Street together perusing the bookshops and the stores that sold crystals and the Tarot, whispering to each other of their secret research, their keen scientific approach to things which others held to be purely mythological. The local believers, called variously the hippies of yore or the New Age fanatics, or the bohemians and artists who always seek the charm and tranquillity of such a place, held no charm for them.

They were for decoding the past, rapidly, with all the tools at their command. And Stuart, their instructor in ancient tongues, had been their priest, their magical connection to a true sanctuary—the library and the archives of the Talamasca.

Last year, after the discovery of Tessa, it had been on Glastonbury Tor that Stuart had told them, “In you two, I have found everything I ever sought in a scholar, a pupil, or a novice. You are the first to whom I truly want to give all I know.”

That had seemed a supreme honor to Marklin—something finer than any honors awarded him at Eton or Oxford, or anywhere in the wide world where his studies had carried him later on.

It had been a greater moment even than being accepted into the Order. And now, in retrospect, he knew that that acceptance had meant something only because it had meant everything to Stuart, who had lived all his life as a member of the Talamasca, and would soon die, as he so often said, within its walls.

Stuart was now eighty-seven, and perhaps one of the oldest active men alive in the Talamasca, if one could call tutoring in language an activity of the Talamasca, for it was more the special passion of Stuart’s retirement. The talk of death was neither romantic nor melodramatic. And nothing really had changed Stuart’s matter-of-fact attitude to what lay ahead.

“A man of my age with his wits about him? If he isn’t brave in the face of death, if he isn’t curious, and rather eager to see what happens, well, then, he’s wasted his life. He’s a damned fool.”

Even the discovery of Tessa had not infected Stuart with any last-ditch desperation to lengthen the time remaining to him. His devotion to Tessa, his belief in her, encompassed nothing so petty. Marklin feared Stuart’s death far more than Stuart did. And Marklin knew now that he had overplayed his hand with Stuart, and that he must woo him back to the moment of commitment. To lose Stuart to death was inevitable; to lose Stuart before that time was unthinkable.