Murder was an old art; older than the beating of blades. He would find some means by which to do the deed before the moment was upon him: a rope, a hammer, a pillow. And if all else. failed, he had his hands. Yes, perhaps that was best, to do it with his hands. It was honest, and simple, and like the error that would be connected with the deed, the work of flesh and flesh. The neatness of this pleased him and, in his present state a little pleasure, however it was won, was not to be despised.
XIII
There had been no butcher’s shop in Burnt Yarley since the passing of Delbert Donnelly, and since the demolition of the Courthouse, no Donnellys either. Donnelly’s daughter, Marjorie, and her family had gone to live in Easdale, and his widow had departed for the high life in Lytham St. Annes. The shop had passed through several hands—it had been a hairdresser’s, a thrift shop, a greengrocer’s, and was now once again a hairdresser’s. The Donnellys’s residence, however, had never been sold. There was no suspicious reason for this—Delbert was not reported to walk its bare boards, chomping on pork pies—it was simply an ugly, charmless house that had been overpriced for the market. For a buyer interested in privacy it was an ideal purchase; however, surrounded as it was by a seven-foot privet hedge that had once been Delbert’s pride and joy. Had he paid as much attention to his personal appearance as he had to his hedge, some had observed, he would have been the smartest man in Yorkshire. Well, Delbert was probably more unkempt than ever, under St. Luke’s sod, and his hedge had run riot. These days the Donnelly house could barely be seen from the road.
“Whatever made you think of bringing Rosa here?” Frannie asked Sherwood as he pushed open the gate.
He gave her a guilty look. “I’ve been coming here on and off as long as it’s been empty,” he said.
“Why?”
“Dunno,” he said. “So I could be on my own.”
“So all those times I thought you were out walking the hills you were here?”
“Not always. But a lot of the time.” He picked up his pace to get a little ahead of Frannie and Will, then turning said, “I have to go in without you. I don’t want you frightening her.”
“Frannie should stay out here by all means,” Will said. “But you’re not going in alone. Steep may be in there.”
“Then the three of us go in,” Frannie said. “No ifs, ands, or buts.” And so saying she strode on up the gravel path to the front door, leaving the men to catch up. The front door was open, the interior relatively bright. The source of illumination was not electric light but two gaping holes, the larger six foot wide, in the roof, courtesy of the storms that had raged the previous February. Ninety-mile gusts had stripped off the slates and icy rains had pummeled the boards to tinder. Now the day shone in.
“Where is she?” Will whispered to Sherwood.
“In the dining room,” he replied, nodding down the hall.
There were three doors to choose from, but Will didn’t have to guess. From the furthest of them came Rosa’s voice. It was weak, but there was no doubting its sentiments.
“Don’t come near me. I don’t want anyone near me.”
“It’s not Jacob,” Will said, going to the door and pushing it open. There were shutters at the window, and they were almost closed, leaving the room murky. But he found her readily enough, lying against the wall to the right of the chimneybreast, her bags around her. She sat up when he entered, though with much effort.
“Sherwood?” she said.
“No. It’s Will.”
“I used to be able to hear so clearly,” Rosa said. “So he hasn’t found you yet?”
“Not yet. But I’m ready when he does.”
“Don’t deceive yourself,” she said. “He’ll kill you.”
“I’m ready for that, too.”
“Stupid,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I heard a woman’s voice—”
“It’s Frannie. Sherwood’s sister.”
“Bring her here,” Rosa said. “I need tending to.”
“I can do it.”
“You will not,” she said. “I want a woman to do it. Go on,” she said.
Will returned to the hallway. Sherwood was closer to the door, eager to be inside. But Will told him: “She wants Frannie.”
“But I—”
“That’s what he wants,” Will replied. Then to Frannie,
“She says she needs tending to. I don’t think she’ll let us take her to a doctor. But try to persuade her.” Frannie looked more than a little doubtful, but after a moment’s hesitation she slid past Sherwood and Will, and entered.
“Is she going to die?” Sherwood said, very softly.
“I don’t know,” Will told him. “She’s lived a very long life. Maybe it’s time.”
“I won’t let her,” Sherwood said.
Frannie was back at the door. “I need some gauze and some bandages,” she said. “Go back to the house, Sherwood, and bring whatever you can find. Is there still running water in the house?”
“Yes,” said Sherwood.
“You can’t persuade her to let us take her to a doctor?”
“She won’t go. And I don’t think they’d be able to do much for her anyway.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s not just that it’s bad. It’s strange. It’s not like any wound I ever saw before,” she shuddered. “I don’t know if I can bring myself to touch her again.” She glanced at Sherwood. “Will you go?” she said.
He was like a dog being sent from the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder as he went to be certain he wasn’t missing a scrap.
At last, he made it to the front door and slipped away.
“What do we do once she’s bandaged up?” Frannie wanted to know.
“Let me speak to her,” Will said.
“She said she didn’t want either of you in there.”
“She’s going to have to put up with it,” Will said. “Excuse me.”
Frannie stood aside and Will stepped back into the room. It was darker than it had been a few minutes before, and warmer, both changes, he guessed, brought about by Rosa’s presence. He couldn’t even see her at first; the shadows around the mantelpiece had become so dense. While he was trying to work out where in the darkness she was standing, she said, “Go away.” Her voice gave him her whereabouts. She had moved four or five yards to the corner of the room farthest from the door. The shutters, which were to her left, remained open a little way, but the daylight fluttered at the sill, stopped from entering by the miasma she was giving off.
“We need to talk,” Will said.
“About what?”
“What you need from me,” he said, attempting his most conciliatory tone.
“I killed your father,” she said softly. “And you want to help me? You’ll forgive me if I’m suspicious.”
“You were under Steep’s influence,” Will said, taking a tentative step toward her. Even that stride was enough to thicken the atmosphere around him. Though he stared hard into the corner where she stood the murk resembled a picture taken in too low a light level, a patch of granular gray.
“Under Steep’s influence? Me?” She laughed in the darkness. “Listen to you! He needs me a lot more than I need him.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. He’s going to go crazy without me. If he hasn’t already. I was the one who kept his feet on the ground.” Will had perhaps halved the distance between the door and the corner of the room while she spoke, but he was no closer to seeing Rosa. “I wouldn’t come any nearer if I were you,” she warned.
“Why not?”
“I’m coming apart,” she said. “I’m unknitting. It’s a dangerous place for you to be right now.”
“And Frannie?”
“She’s fine. Women are a lot less susceptible. If she can seal me up, I may survive a day or two.”
“But you won’t heal?”
“I don’t want to heal!” she replied. “I want to find my way back to Rukenau, and I’ll be happ
y . . .” She drew a deep, ragged breath. “You asked me what I needed from you,” she said.
“Yes—”
“Take me to him.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“On the island.”
“Which island?”
“I don’t think I ever knew. But you know where he is—”
“No, I don’t.”
“But in the garden.”
“I was bluffing.”
There was a sound of motion from the corner of the room, and a wave of heat came against Will’s face. He felt slightly sickened and was sorely tempted to retreat to the door. But he held his ground, while the murk in front of him coalesced, and he began to see Rosa. She was like a phantom of her former self, her once luxurious hair falling straight to either side of her hollow-eyed face. She had her hands clamped to the wound, but she could not entirely conceal its strangeness. There were motes of pale matter, some glinting like gold, skittering over her fingers.
Some trailed up her body, clinging to her breasts. Others flew like sparks from a bonfire and, exhausting themselves in their flight, were extinguished.
“So you can’t deliver me to Rukenau?” she said.
“I can’t take you straight to him, no,” Will confessed. “But that doesn’t mean—”
“Just another liar—”
“I had no choice.”
“You’re all the same.”
“He was going to kill me.”
“It wouldn’t have been any great loss,” she said sourly. “One liar more or less. Just go away!”
“Hear me out—”
“I’ve heard all I want to hear,” she said, starting to turn from him.
Without thinking, he moved toward her, intending another appeal. She caught the motion from the corner of her eye and, thinking perhaps that he meant her some harm, she reeled around. In that instant the fragments of brightness on her hands found purpose. They grew frenetic, and in a heartbeat fused, flying from her body in a bright thread. It came at Will too fast for him to avoid it, grazing his shoulder as it snaked toward the ceiling. A fleeting contact, but enough to throw him off balance. He reeled for a moment, his legs so weak they refused to bear him up. Then he sank down to his knees while a kind of euphoria ran through him, its source the place where the thread had grazed his flesh. He felt, or imagined he felt, its energy spreading through his body, sinew, nerve, and marrow illuminated by its passage, blood brightening, senses shining—
He saw the thread on the ceiling now, dividing again, like a string of tiny pearls dropped in defiance of gravity and snapping.
They rolled away in every direction, the weaker ones going out on the instant, the stronger striking the walls before they ran out of light.
Will watched them as he might have watched a meteor shower, head back, mouth wide. Only when every one had been extinguished did he look back at their source. Rosa had retreated to her corner, but Will’s eyes had been lent an uncanny strength by the luminescence and in the moments before it died in him, he saw her as he had never seen before. There was a creature of burnished shadow in her, dark and sleek and protean. A creature held in check by all that she’d become over the years, like a painting so degraded by accruals of grime and varnish and the hands of inept restorers that its glory was now no longer visible. And just as surely as his revelatory gaze saw through to the core of her, so she in her turn saw something miraculous in him.
“So tell me,” she said, her voice low, “when did you become a fox?”
“Me?” he said.
“It moves in you,” she replied, staring at him, “I can see it there, plainly.”
He looked down at his body, half expecting the power that had emanated from her to have worked some physical change in him. Absurd, of course, it was still pale, sweaty flesh he was looking down at. More disappointing still, the last of the light was going out in him. He could feel its gift passing away and was already mourning it.
“Steep was right about you,” she said. “You’re quite a creature. To have a spirit move in you that way and not be driven crazy.”
“Who says I haven’t been driven crazy?” he said, thinking of the troubled path that had brought him to his possession.
“You know that I see something in you, don’t you?”
“If you do then look away,” she said.
“I don’t want to. It’s beautiful.” The burnished creature was still visible, but only just, its alien elegance receding into Rosa’s wounded substance. “Oh Lord,” he murmured. “I’ve just realized, I’ve seen this before. This body inside you.” She didn’t speak for a moment, as though she couldn’t make up her mind whether to be drawn into this inquiry or not. But she could not resist. “Where?” she said.
“In a painting,” he said. “By Thomas Simeon. He called it the Nilotic.”
She shuddered at the syllables. “Nilotic?” she said. “What is that?”
“Somebody who lives on the Nile.”
“I was never,” she shook her head; began again, “I remember an island,” she said, “but not a river. Not that river, at least.
The Amazon, yes. I went with Steep to the Amazon to kill butterflies. But never the Nile . . .” Her voice was fading as she spoke, and the last of her other self disappeared from sight. “Yet . . . there’s truth in what you say. Something moves in me as the fox moves in you.”
“And you want to know what it is.”
“Only Rukenau knows that,” she said. “Will you take me to Rukenau? You’re a fox. You can sniff him out.”
“And you think he’ll explain it.”
“I think if he can’t, then nobody can.” He found Frannie sitting at the bottom of the stairs, reading a yellow and well-trodden newspaper she’d found in one of the rooms. “How’s she doing?” she asked.
He clung to the door frame, his limbs still weak “She wants to find Rukenau. That’s about the only thing in her mind right now.”
“And where’s he?”
“If he’s anywhere, he’s up in the Hebrides, where the book said he went. She doesn’t know what island.”
“Do you want us to take her?”
“Not us. Me. If you can bandage her up, I’ll take over from there.”
Frannie closed the newspaper and tossed it to the dusty boards. “And what do you think’s on this island?”
“Worst case scenario, a lot of birds. Best case? Rukenau, and the Domus Mundi, whatever the hell that is.”
“So you’re suggesting I should stay here while you go off and see?” Frannie said with a tight little smile. “No, Will. This is my moment too. I was there at the beginning. And I’m going to be there at the end.”
Before Will could respond the front door was pushed open, and Sherwood came in, nursing a bag of medications. “I’ve brought every bandage I could find,” he said, dumping the bag in Frannie’s arms.
“All right,” said Will. “Here’s the plan. I’m going to go back to my Dad’s house and tell Adele I’ve got to leave—”
“Where are you going?” Sherwood wanted to know.
“Frannie’ll explain,” Will said, coaxing his still nervous limbs into motion. He lurched past Sherwood to the front door.
“Please be quick,” Frannie said, “I don’t want to be here when—”
“Don’t even say it,” Will told her. “I’ll be quick as I can, I promise.”
Then he was out of the door at a stumble, down the path, and out into the street. He wanted to run barefoot, or naked, the way he’d once imagined himself walking to Jacob in the Courthouse, the fire in him turning snow to steam. But he kept the desires of boy and fox hidden as he made his way home.
They’d have their moment. But not yet.
XIV
i
Adele wasn’t alone. There was a meticulously polished car parked outside the house and inside, its owner, a sprightly, even gleeful fellow by the name of Maurice Shilling, the undertaker.
Will took Adele aside and explai
ned that he was going to have to leave for a day or two. She of course wanted to know where he was going. He lied as little as possible. A woman friend of his was sick, he told her, and he was going to drive up to Scotland to do what he could to comfort her.
“You will be back for the funeral?” she said.
He promised he would. “I feel bad leaving you on your own right now.”
“If it’s a mission of mercy,” Adele said, “then you should go. I’ve got everything under control.”
He let her return to Mr. Shilling and went upstairs to fetch some more robust attire. Sitting on the bed lacing up his boots he chanced to glance out of the window just as the sun broke the clouds and lay a patch of gold on the hillside. The laces went untied as he watched, his spirit suspended in a moment of grace.
This isn’t a dream of life, he thought, nor a theory, nor a photograph. This is life itself. And whatever happens now we’ve had our moment, the sun and me. Then the clouds closed again, and the gold vanished, and heading back to the business of threading and tying he found his eyes wet with gratitude for the epiphanies he’d been granted. The visions in Berkeley, the visitations of the fox, the touch of Rosa’s thread: Each had been a kind of awakening, as though he’d stirred from his coma with a hunger for sentience that would not be sated by a single transformation.
How many times would he have to waken, until he was as conscious as a man could be? A dozen? A hundred? Or did it go on forever, this rousing of the spirit, the skins of his slumbers stripped away only to uncover another dream, and another?
Downstairs, Mr. Shilling was still talking about flowers, coffins, and prices. Will didn’t interrupt the negotiations—Adele was perfectly capable of driving a hard bargain on her own—but slipped quietly into his father’s study to look for an atlas. All the oversized books were collected on one shelf, so he didn’t have to search far. It was the same battered edition he remembered from his childhood, furnished whenever he had geography homework.
Much of it was out of date by now, of course. Borders had shifted, cities been renamed or destroyed. But the Western Isles were constants, surely. If wars had ever been fought over them, the peace treaties had been signed centuries ago. They were inconsequential, a scattering of colored dots on a paper sea.