Again, he saw her face change like an actress going into character.
She swayed gracefully upstairs, her heels clattering.
Henry heard Manfred say sharply, “What are you doing wandering the mansion at this hour of the night?”
Her reply was in a soft and sultry voice, too low to hear.
“I did not send any note about moving that cot. Why would I ask you and not the Levriers? With all the noise you made, I thought someone had broken in. You know we had trouble last night.”
Henry felt a tremor run through his body. He left the door and followed the curve of the wall, peering behind the drapery every three strides. He finally found a window not like the others. It was larger than the square transparent ones facing north, and, unlike the stained-glass windows facing west, these opened on hinges.
Outside, he saw the south wing, the chapel, the bell tower, and the signal tower. In the moonlight it was impossible to see clearly, but the grass seemed to be torn in places, like the divots left by golfers, and in one spot the grass was blackened and burnt.
Sighing, wondering about sanity and insanity, dreams and reality, and what sort of flamethrower would leave a perfectly circular burn mark on the grass, he returned to the hamper, eager to open his next wine bottle. His hand touched something cold and metallic at the bottom of the hamper. He drew it out, jingling.
It was a pair of furry handcuffs, metal hoops lined with black mink, key still in the lock.
He raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he knew less about women than he thought. A lot less.
Friday
He was awakened by the sound of her footfalls coming down the stairs. There she stood like a vision in the light from the candle she held.
Henry stood, his head spinning. He was not sure of the hour, or even the day. It had been an unexpectedly warm night, so he wore only his shirt, the same he had been wearing for a week. Before he slept, he had imbibed far too much wine in a rush of despair, and the spirits were still in his blood, blurring his speech and fogging his eyes.
But he could see she was pale with horror. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
She placed the candle on the mantelpiece carefully before throwing herself recklessly into his arms. Her shoulders shook. “The wedding plans have been moved up! We only have until the end of the month.”
“What?”
“And I’ve made travel plans to go visit my sisters in Quedlinburg to sew my wedding dress and give Manfred the uninterrupted time he needs to study without distraction. But that is not the real reason. He is worried that I have been prowling the mansion at night, or sleepwalking, especially when there has been trouble in the village. He thinks the house is haunting me, affecting my thinking! He wants me out of the house!”
Henry knew he could not survive for three weeks in this one room, not without an ally bringing him food and drink.
He said, “What if you buy me a plane ticket to—where the heck is Quedlinburg?—to come with you? We’ll have to make up some reason why you’ll return to this chamber with the ticket, where you will remember yourself and give it to me. And then I will write myself a note telling myself to use the ticket, so that when I leave the chamber … I will, uh…”
Laurel raised her head and narrowed her eyes. “Quedlinburg is in Germany, in the Hartz Mountains where the witches live. Are you the kind of man who would spend a week traveling with your best friend’s fiancée in romantic surroundings, and seduce her, and carry her off, and marry her? Or even tell her you love her? No matter what?”
He did not answer and did not need to answer.
She said, “We are out of time and out of options. I am leaving tomorrow for the continent. My outside self thinks you are hiding in your little room in the smokeshop, frantically writing your paper, and I won’t see you until the wedding day. You’ve been a week in here. What has changed?”
“You’ve remembered to come each night….”
“Because I cannot sleep! And I leave things here, like lunch hampers and nightgowns, so I have to get up and retrieve them, thinking I am losing my mind! Which I am!”
Henry said, “If I step outside, I am probably simply going to leave, thinking it best for you and Manfred. Why can’t you just tell him you don’t love him, and you are only after him for his money? Why can’t you come clean?”
“Why can’t you? You’ve never confessed your feelings to me! You barely say boo to me out there! Everything I do out there to draw you closer drives you farther away. You have to be the one to speak, to act! You! I have made a fool of myself throwing myself at you. Here! It is time for you to act.”
And she threw off her nightgown, and once again stood before him, her breasts heaving, her skin flawless, her beauty perfect, maddening, dizzying as wine. She was not wearing any undergarments, and her bottom was bare. There was no barrier of fabric, no matter how slight, between him and any part of her.
He said, “If you walk around the house naked, the curse just tells you that you are trying hard to seduce Manfred, and it sends you to his room.”
“It is my role to put the courage into you,” she said in an implacable voice. “Like a good little cavegirl.”
“You already tried leaving your clothes here. It was a disaster. And when Manfred sees you nude, he does not do as I would—well, damn him to hell.”
“Give me your shirt!” she said.
“It stinks,” he said. “I have not changed it in a week.”
“Well, who knew you were so delicate?” she smiled archly. “And they say smell brings back memories better than any other stimulus.”
“The plan is to wear my shirt outside? Will that force your outside self to remember I am here? I guess it is worth a try.”
“Just hand it to me.”
He did, and so stood there just in his skivvies. She smiled and tossed the shirt over her shoulder out the open door. He shouted in astonishment. “I hope you have a way for me to get that back! It is cold in here at night.”
“Not this night. It will be the warmest of your life.”
She stepped over to the hamper, drew out the handcuffs, and slid close around him, wrapping her arms tightly around his tall, strong, wide body, her naked curves mashed up against him. He heard the noise of the handcuffs clicking shut behind his back. Then he heard the key tinkle as it fell back into the open hamper.
He said, “It is not going to work. If even we walk out like this, the curse will make up some farfetched explanation.”
She said, “Not if we roll out right in the middle of what we’ll be doing.”
“Wait, what?”
She said, “After the wedding, you are not going to live here, but I am, and I do not want to step into this room one day and remember that I let the love of my life, my true love, get away from me because of his stupid scruples. I don’t care if it is your upbringing, your religion, your childhood trauma, or whatever it is. You have to pick. We are out of time. Choose me or choose your convictions. It is one or the other.”
She started kissing him, but he could not back away, and if he stooped down as if to pull her chained arms over his head, this merely thrust his face into her breasts, and she yelped as if this hurt her wrists, and then there were tears in her eyes, and he could not hurt her, not even to extricate himself from this.
And he was not sure he wanted to be extricated. What was he thinking? This woman was willing to break all the rules of Heaven and Earth for him, literally to chain herself to him and throw away the key. And she was beautiful beyond all comparison.
Weakened by hunger and wine and lack of sleep, besieged and baffled by manly passion and woman’s tears, he surrendered to his desires.
9. The Master of Wrongerwood
Archimage and Architect
Henry woke in the dark, at the sound of approaching boots. He was filled with a warm euphoria, a sense of victory and greatness, before he felt the heat from the girl sleeping next to him, and remembered why.
He had gone to sleep
a boy; now he was a man. Loveplay had been more awkward than he would have thought, elbows and knees in the way, and hisses and grunts and moans and cries that in another setting would have seem absurd, in those moments of supreme passion, were perfect. For the second time, she had knelt. For the third, they had been in each other’s arms, in a position he was sure missionaries taught to pagans so that they could look their wives in the face, as one man should only look to one wife, unseverable, indissoluble, bound together forever…
But why this feeling of guilt, of embarrassment, of shame?
Because she was not his wife. He had looked in the face of a woman pink with passion, her eyes like burning emeralds, mysterious, ecstatic, wondrous, and yet it was a wonder meant for a marriage bed.
“I suppose if this all works out in the end, I can stop worrying about…” he started to murmur to her, as he turned, intending to take her in his arms, and kiss her. He could still smell her scent, feel her warmth, her nearness.
And he fell onto the floor in the tangle of sheets. She was gone.
Now the footfalls sounded again, a man’s heavy tread, not Laureline’s doe-like tip-taps. There was a figure at the door, dimly seen in the starlight from the windows.
The silhouette reached to one side of the door. There was a click as he threw a switch. Suddenly electric lights from a dozen bulbs hidden behind silk panels in the ceiling blazed forth, dazzling.
It was Manfred, fully dressed, and wearing a long tan coat. His hands were in his pockets and he held a hunting rifle tucked in one elbow. He stepped over the threshold, and winced as if a sudden pain had jabbed through his brain. He frowned. He scowled. And this time, it was not merely his heavy brows.
Henry had fallen asleep naked with his head and chest on the floorboards and his legs still half on the divan, twisted in the blankets.
If his friend really had betrayed him—if Manfred’s mesmerism really were the force behind their memory losses—the deadly truth would now be laid bare.
Mandrake, without a word, tossed a rumpled ball of cloth at him. It was Henry’s shirt, which had been laying on the staircase. Mandrake kicked an ottoman closer to the divan, and sat with a sigh, neither taking his eyes from Henry, nor putting his rifle down.
Henry rose to a sitting position on the floor, pulled on the shirt and buttoned it up hastily, looked left and right for his pants, and, not seeing them, seated himself gingerly on the divan, and pulled the blanket into his lap.
“Henry,” said Mandrake in a casual voice, “this question may seem rather odd, given where you presently find yourself, but do you realize you have been living in my house for at least a week, in hiding, here in this room?”
Henry looked at his friend intently, “When you stepped in here, did you remember another life?”
Mandrake paused and then said slowly, “Yes. I knew Dame Hathaway quite well, in fact. I spent my summers here as a child, and I came into this chamber often. It was built by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s Archimage, in the last years of the Sixteen Century, using the instructions smuggled to him by Giordano Bruno. It is a memory mansion. This room in particular preserves memories that charming or cunning otherwise smothers. When I was young, there was not so much forgetfulness at large in the world, and the difference between inside and out was smaller.”
Henry gritted his teeth. “In here, in this chamber, I remember that Laureline and I are truly, passionately, faithfully and eternally in love with each other. She does not love you.”
Mandrake nodded. “I know.”
Simple Solution
“W–what?”
Mandrake said, “When you are outside, how did she and I meet? Compare it to your memory when you are in here. What does that tell you?”
Henry said, “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
Mandrake shook his head. “A week alone to meditate in the Rose Crystal Chamber of John Dee, and you did not use the opportunity to put your thoughts and memories in order? It is a good thing you have me around to help you over the stiles, then. I am being forced to marry her.”
Henry nodded. “I knew I remember Dame Hathaway was pushing the arrangement.”
“Pushing? Blackmailing. But I had to be made to forget that, because otherwise I would have resisted too much.”
Henry’s heart leapt as his doubts evaporated. It was not Manfred who was responsible for their situation! His friend was as much a victim as he and Laureline were.
For the first time, it occurred to him that perhaps Manfred was studying mesmerism for the same reason Hal studied Giordano Bruno: His friend’s real self was urging him to work to break the spell.
Mandrake continued, “I had to be placed under a love charm, and dote on a woman I can barely stand to be around, a snide and sarcastic demimonde.”
“Don’t speak that way of her! I love her!”
“You can have her!” said Mandrake impatiently. Then, with a sour smile. “Unless, of course, if I read this right, you already have had her.”
Henry felt the black anger that possessed him before stirring in the depths, reaching out for him, but at the same time, a bright bubble of laughter burst from his lips.
Mandrake scowled all the more. “Explain the joke to me?”
Henry said, “It is all gone! It is all fixed. I have been living under such a weight!”
“What the devil are you going on about?”
Henry said, “Well, you and she are not in love and she and I are. I can take her from you with a clean conscience.”
“More than that. With my blessing! You have no idea how much trouble she’s caused for me just so far. The old caretaker, Mr. de Jardinier, was so offended with her, for the way she mocked Dame Hathaway, that he resigned on the spot rather than be the one to unlock the doors for her. You have his keyring.”
Henry said, “I suppose that if my outside self seems to steal her from you, that is it not really a betrayal, if you, deep down, really are pulling for me.”
“The curse cannot last past a proper marriage ceremony. As soon as you put a ring on her finger, and you are man and wife, the charm on me will snap like a twig, and I will come to my senses! Betray me? Breaking up my marriage to that woman will save me, and her as well.”
“Then my problem is solved! Thank God!” said Henry with another bright and cheerful laugh. “What a load off my mind! But—hold on a moment—if you think she is such a bad woman, why aren’t you trying to save me?”
“She is marrying me for my money, Henry! But if she marries you, she trades all of the great and ancient House of Wrongerwood for living in your rathole above a smokeshop in Blackbird Leys. Good Lord, man! If she does that for you, she’s more faithful than Penelope! You’ll never deserve her.”
Henry remembered the first time he danced the waltz, how the ballroom spun. It was like that now with his thoughts. But if he held his eyes on one fixed spot in the room, turning his head to keep it in view as he twirled, he could dance without being dizzy. He fixed his eyes on one thought.
“Then you don’t want her.”
“Not a bit.”
Henry pulled up a bottle of wine from the hamper. “Then let us toast!”
Coven of the Countess
Mandrake said, “You will forgive me if I don’t feel like celebrating. It should be clear that my cousins were murdered, and my great Aunt.”
Henry said, “I thought it odd that you mourned them so. Your true self knew them well.”
“It was my habit, each time I came here, to meditate and pray in this chamber. So stepping in here again immediately brings them to my thoughts. Not only did the charming make me forget about this house—you recall that I told you that I never clapped eyes on it?—you were caught up in the charming as well, because you are my friend. Your previous visit here last summer, and the one before that, had to be blotted out, as well as your memory of how and where I met Laureline. Also erased, I assume, were the memories of any number of lawyers and record keepers, in an attempt to throw m
y claim to Wrongerwood into disarray, and carry off the furnishings, turn off the power—all this was done to make me not want to stay here. I am glad I had enough strength of character to resist that charming impulse.”
“How is the power back on?”
“The spell is breaking. Mr. Twokes, that stubborn old bluenose, turned out to be hard to charm. The lawyers are able to read and remember the will, clear up liens, get matters back in order. The power company turned everything back on at midnight on the dot. It is Saturday morning just now, before sunrise.”
“And the lightbulbs?”
“I suppose the Rose Crystal Chamber hid itself from the eyes of the workmen who came to strip the mansion during the months after Aunt Sibyl’s death, and before anyone remembered that I was the heir next in line. I assume Countess Margaret wanted the time to search the place.”
“Who? No, wait, I remember her: She is the one who introduced you to Laureline.”
“She is rather more than that. Countess Margaret is one of the coven of the Witches of England who preserve the island. She made you and Laureline forget your growing love for one another because it interfered with her plans.”
“But I thought she was Dame Hathaway’s friend?”
“I wager she snared Aunt Sybil during those long stays in London, convinced her no longer to return here at regular intervals and break any witchcraft clouding her thoughts. I need proof that Countess Margaret killed my family, but once I have it–” He lowered his eyes to the floor, teeth clenched, and left the threat unspoken. Henry, at that moment, lost any doubt that Mandrake was capable of murder.
No Such Thing
“But there is no such thing as witches,” said Henry.
“No?” Mandrake looked up sharply. “If Morgan le Fay was not a witch, how did she contrive to shatter the Table Round?”
“That is just a story.”
“A story of history, yes. And Merlin?”
“He—just a legend, some Christian retelling of pagan tales of heroes and gods.”