“Louise Brooks.”
“Yes. The exquisite Louise. That was in Kitty’s time, of course. I didn’t have to endure his mooning over the woman. Though she was lovely. I will say that. She was lovely.” She poured herself a cup of tea as she spoke. “Do you want some tea?”
“No. Thank you.”
“He’s going to die in the next twenty-four hours,” Loretta went on, matter-of-factly. “And when he’s gone, I intend to take charge of this family and its assets. That’s what’s in his will.”
“You’ve seen the will?”
“No. But he’s promised me. If the will says what he swears it says then I’ll be in a position to make some kind of deal with Garrison and Mitchell.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“If it doesn’t?” Loretta sipped her tea before replying. “Then maybe we’ll need Galilee after all,” she said quietly. “Both of us.”
VII
In his bedroom on the floor above, Cadmus woke. He was cold, and there was an emptiness at the pit of his stomach which was not hunger. He turned his face toward the dimmed lamp on the bedside table, hoping its light would drive from his head the shadowy forms that had accompanied him from sleep. He didn’t want them with him in the real world. They’d have him soon enough.
The door opened. He raised his head from the pillow.
“Loretta?”
“No, sir. It’s Jocelyn.”
“Where’s Loretta? She said she was going to stay with me.”
“She’s just downstairs, sir. Mitchell’s wife came by to see her. Do you want something to eat, sir? Maybe some soup?”
“Send Rachel up.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Send Rachel up. And have her bring me a snifter of brandy. Go on, woman.”
Jocelyn went on her way, and Cadmus let his head sink back into the pillow. Lord, he was so, so cold! But the thought that Rachel was downstairs, and that he’d be laying eyes on her in a few moments, made him a little happier with his lot. She was a sweet girl; he’d always liked her. No doubt some of her innocence had been sullied by Mitchell; she’d lost some of her faith in the goodness of things. But she was a strong creature; she’d survive. He reached out, opened the drawer of the bedside cabinet, and reached around for a roll of peppermints. He could no longer chew gum—his jaws didn’t have the power—and his mouth was so filled with cankers that brushing his teeth was an ordeal, but he wanted to be sure his breath was reasonably sweet when Rachel came to sit with him. With palsied fingers he fumbled a peppermint onto his dry tongue, and began, as best he could, to suck.
Somebody was shouting in the street outside, and he longed to be there; out from this cold bed, where he could see the sky. Just once more; was that too much to ask?
In finer times he’d liked to walk. He didn’t care if it was fair weather or foul; he’d just get out of his limo wherever and whenever the urge struck him and walk. Arctic winter mornings, he remembered, and blistering August afternoons; days in spring when he’d felt like a happy truant, meandering his way home; evenings in midsummer, with half a dozen martinis in him, high as a king, singing as he went.
Never again. Never the street, never the sky, never a song. Only silence soon; and judgment. Much as he’d tried to ready himself, he was prepared for neither.
The window rattled. There was quite a wind getting up. The rattling came again, and this time the heavy drapes shook. No wonder he was cold! That silly bitch of a nurse had left one of the windows open. Another gust, and the drapes filled like sails. This time he felt the wind across the room; it was strong enough to shake the lampshade.
He felt a fluttering in his empty belly, and pushed himself up against the headboard to get a better look at the billowing drapes. What the hell was going on?
He needed his spectacles; but as he reached to pluck them up from amid the bottles of pills he heard somebody say his name.
A woman. There was a woman in the room with him.
“Loretta?”
The woman’s voice plunged into a deeper register, and this time there were no words, just a sound, like a kind of roar, that shook the bed.
He fumbled to get his spectacles on, but before he could do so the lamp was thrown off the cabinet, and smashed, leaving him and the trespasser together in the darknes.
“What in God’s name was that?” Loretta said. She got up from the table, yelling for Jocelyn, but Rachel was ahead of her, out into the hallway.
There was a shout now: a shrill shout. Ignoring Loretta’s instructions to wait, girl, wait! Rachel headed for the stairs. She had a momentary flash of déjà vu: ascending the flight two or three steps at a time, hearing the din of panic above, and the howling of wind. This was a scene she’d played out before, and for some reason she had kept the memory in her soul.
At the landing, she glanced back down the flight. Loretta was coming after her, clinging to the banister for support, Jocelyn at the bottom of the stairs, asking to know what the noise was.
“It’s Cadmus, you damn fool!” Loretta yelled back at her. “I thought I told you to look in on him!”
“I did!” Jocelyn said. “He asked for brandy. And for Rachel.” Loretta didn’t respond to this. It was Rachel she called after. “Stay away from that door!”
“Why?” Rachel demanded.
“It’s not your business! Just go back downstairs.”
The door was rattling, violently, and there was no small part of Rachel that wanted to do exactly as Loretta had instructed. Perhaps after all this wasn’t her business—it was Geary lunacy, Geary grief. But how could she ignore the sobs of panic that were coming from the bedroom? Somebody was terrorizing the old man, and it had to be stopped, right now. She turned the handle of the door—which rattled in her palm—and pushed. There was a force pressing on the door from the other side; she had to lay her whole body against the door to get it to open. When it did, it flew wide, and she pitched forward, so that appropriately enough she didn’t step but stumbled into the midst of the tragedy waiting for her on the other side.
VIII
Cadmus’s room was chaos. The enormous bed was empty, the covers thrown off, the pillows scattered around. All but one of the lights had gone out, the exception being his bedside lamp, which lay on the floor, flickering nervously. The cabinet it had stood upon had been overturned, as had the chairs and the small dressing table. All the appurtenances of the sickroom—the pill bottles and their contents, the medicines and the measuring spoons, the IV stand, the vomit bowl and the oxygen machine—were littered about, smashed, pounded, rendered useless.
Rachel looked for Cadmus, but she couldn’t see him. Nor could she see any sign of whoever had caused this mess. She advanced into the room a little way. The drapes fluttered. The window, she saw, was open wide. Oh Lord! Had he tried to escape and fallen? Or been thrown out?
As she started across the room, pills and glass crunching under her feet, she heard a soft sobbing. She looked in the direction of the sound, and there, crouched in the deep shadows in the corner of the room, she saw Cadmus. He was naked, his hands cupping his genitals, his face like that of a terrified monkey: lips curled back from his teeth, brow deeply furrowed. His eyes were upon her, but he made no sign of recognition. He simply stared, and shook.
“You’re going to be all right,” she said to him.
He said nothing. Just kept staring at her as she approached. The closer she got to him, the more she saw the harm that had been visited upon him. There were raised welts on his shoulders and chest, fiercely red against his sallow skin; and there was blood coming between his fingers, and pooling between his legs. She was appalled. Who would come into a dying man’s room and cause such suffering? It was inhuman.
He had begun to sob loudly now. She hushed him gently, as a mother might hush a frightened child, but his eyes grew more panicky the closer to him she came.
“Don’t . . .” he said, “Don’t touch me . . .”
“I have to get you ou
t of here,” she told him.
He shook his head, drawing his limbs still closer to his body. The motion caused him pain, she saw; he closed his eyes for a moment, and a little cry escaped him.
From the landing now, the sound of Loretta yelling at Jocelyn, telling her to go back downstairs. Rachel glanced up at the door. She had time to catch a glimpse of Loretta, then the door slammed hard, locking Loretta out. The noise started Cadmus wailing, the frail knot of his body shaking violently.
She didn’t attempt to soothe him. He was too traumatized to be comforted; she’d be wasting her breath. Besides, she had another concern. Whatever force had slammed the door in Loretta’s face, and was holding it closed, it was here in the room with her. She could feel its power, grazing the back of her neck.
Very slowly, she turned round. She wanted to be face to face with it if it decided to move against her: to see it plainly, if it was the last thing she did.
She scanned the room again. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the light from the flickering lamp, but they were still unable to find the cause of the maelstrom. She decided to simply call it forth.
“Where are you?” she said. Behind her, the old man’s wails abruptly died away. He seemed to hold his breath, as if anticipating the worst. “My name’s Rachel,” she went on, “and he—” she pointed back toward Cadmus “—is my father-in-law. I’d like you to let me take him out of this room and get him some help. He’s bleeding.”
There was a silence. Then, a voice, across the room: a place between the windows which her gaze had twice passed over and found empty. Now she saw her error. There was somebody sitting there, formally, like a statue, every drape of her dress, every hair on her head, immaculate.
I didn’t touch him, the woman said.
Even now, though Rachel’s eyes had found her, the woman was hard to keep in focus. Her black, silken skin seemed to deflect Rachel’s gaze. But she persevered. When her eyes slid left or right, she returned them to the woman, back and back and back again, refusing to be put off.
He tried to unman himself the woman was explaining, thinking it’d placate me.
Rachel didn’t know whether to believe what she was being told or not. The idea that Cadmus had done the damage between his legs to himself was grotesque.
“May I take him then?” Rachel said.
No you may not, the woman replied. I came here to watch him die, and that’s what I’m going to do.
Rachel glanced back over her shoulders. Cadmus was watching his tormentor, the terror on his face replaced with a blank look, as though he was too used up by what he’d endured to even weep.
You may stay with him if you wish, the woman went on. You won’t have to wait very long. He’s only got a few more breaths left in him.
“I don’t want to watch him die,” Rachel protested.
Where’s your sense of history? the woman replied. She rose as she spoke, and dropped the last defenses she’d put up against Rachel’s gaze. She was perhaps the most beautiful woman Rachel had ever seen; her glorious face had about it the same nakedness that Rachel had seen in Galilee’s face, that first night .Skin and nerve and muscle and bone all extolling one another.
Now she understood what the woman meant when she talked about a sense of history. She was a Barbarossa, attending the death of a Geary.
“Are you his sister?” Rachel said.
Sister?
“Galilee’s sister?”
The woman made a tiny smile. No. I’m his mother: Cesaria Yaos Barbarossa. And you . . . who were you before you were a Geary?
“My name was Pallenberg.”
Rachel Pallenberg.
“Right.”
Tell me . . . do you regret it? Marrying into this wretched family?
Rachel contemplated the question before replying. Perhaps it would be politic to tell the woman that she regretted it heart and soul, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. It wasn’t true. There were losses and gains, as in everything.
“I thought I loved my husband, and I thought he loved me,” Rachel said. “But I was in love with a lie.”
And what was that?
“That I’d be happy once I had everything—”
—even though you lost yourself?
“Almost,” Rachel said. “Almost lost.”
Tell me: is your husband here in the house?
“No.”
Just the women out there? Cesaria said, glancing toward the door.
“Don’t hurt them,” Rachel said. “They’re good people.”
I told you, I didn’t come here to hurt anybody. I came to bear witness.
Rachel glanced at the destruction on all sides. “So why do this?”
He annoyed me, Cesaria said, trying to bargain with me. “Leave me alone and I’ll give you whatever I’ve got.” Her eyes flickered in Cadmus’s direction. You’ve got nothing I want, old man, she said. Besides, this house needs to be cleansed from top to bottom. He knows why. He understands. It’s time to strip away all the pretense. All the comforting things he collected to make him feel like a king. It all has to go. She began to walk back in Cadmus’s direction. In the end, it’ll be easier for him to move on, when there’s nothing to keep him here.
“If you want to wreck the house,” Rachel said, “that’s one thing. But he’s just a sick old man, and sitting here watching him bleed to death is cruel.” Cesaria stared at her. “You don’t think it’s cruel?”
I didn’t ask myself, Cesaria said. But yes, probably. And let me tell you, he deserves a lot worse, for the things he’s done.
“To you?”
No, to my son. To Atva. Or as he prefers it: Galilee.
“What did Cadmus ever do to Galilee?”
Tell her, Cesaria said. Go on. Tell her. You’ll never have another chance, so say it! Rachel looked back at Cadmus, but there was no answer forthcoming. He’d hung his head, whether out of exhaustion or shame Rachel didn’t know. Did you think you were so secret that nobody saw? Cesaria went on. I saw. When you made my child murder your own flesh and blood. I saw. There was a barely audible sob out of Cadmus. Tell her it’s true, Cesaria said.
Don’t be such a coward.
“It’s true . . .” Cadmus murmured.
Does your wife know, by the way? Cesaria said.
Very slowly, Cadmus raised his head. If he’d looked sick before, he looked a dozen times sicker now. There was no blood left in his face; his lips were bluish, his eyes and teeth yellow. “No,” he said.
Let her in, Cesaria told Rachel. I want her to know what he hid from her. And tell the servant to leave. This is family business.
Though Rachel didn’t much like being treated like a servant herself, she didn’t argue with the instruction. She dutifully went to the door, which opened without effort. Both Loretta and Jocelyn were waiting there, Jocelyn sobbing uncontrollably.
“Why did you lock the door?” Loretta demanded.
“I didn’t,” Rachel told her. “Cesaria Barbarossa’s in there with Cadmus. She wants you to come in. And she wants Jocelyn out of the house.”
“Cesaria . . . ?” Loretta said, her strident tone dropping to a murmur. “How did she get in?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said, moving aside to allow Loretta a glimpse into the sickroom. “She says she’s come to watch Cadmus die.”
“Well she’s not going to have the pleasure,” Loretta said, and pushing past Rachel stepped through the door.
“What should I do?” Jocelyn wanted to know.
“Just leave.”
“Shall I call Garrison?”
“No. Just get out of the house. You’ve done what you can.”
It was clear from the fearful expression on Jocelyn’s face that she wanted to go; but deep-seated loyalty was preventing her from doing so.
“If you don’t go now,” Rachel warned, “you may not get another chance. You’ve got your own family to think of. Go.”
A look of relief crossed Jocelyn’s face; here were the w
ords that let her go with a clear conscience. “Thank you,” she said, and slipped away.
Rachel closed the door after her, and turned back to face the events of the room. Loretta had already decided on her method of dealing with Cesaria: head-on attack.
“You don’t have any business being here,” she was saying. “You’re trespassing in my house and I want you out.”
This isn’t your house, Cesaria said, her eyes fixed not on Loretta but on the man still squatting against the wall. And it isn’t his either. Loretta started to protest but Cesaria waved her words away. My son built this house, as he—she pointed at Cadmus—well knows. He built it with the blood he spilled to make you your fortune. And the seed he spilled.
“What are you talking about?” Loretta said. Her tone, though still assertive, was tinged with unease, as though she knew there was truth in what she was hearing.
Tell her, Cesaria said to Cadmus. The figure crouched in the shadows shook its heavy head. Cesaria took a step toward Cadmus. Old man, she said. Get yourself up off the floor.
“He can’t—” Loretta said.
Shut up, Cesaria snapped. You heard me, old man. I want you up.
As the instruction left her lips Cadmus’s head rolled backward, so that now he was looking straight up at Cesaria. Then, inch by quivering inch, he started to rise, his back pressed against the wall; but not of his own volition. His legs were too wasted to bear him up this way. This was Cesaria’s doing. She was raising him by sheer force of will.
It seemed he was not entirely unhappy to be puppeteered this way. A tight-lipped smile had crept onto his face, as though in some perverse way he was taking pleasure in being handled this way; in feeling the woman’s power upon him.
As fascinated as she was appalled, Rachel crossed the room and went to stand at Loretta’s side. “Please, don’t do this,” she said to Cesaria. “Let him die in peace.”
He doesn’t want to die in peace, Cesaria replied. Then, to Cadmus: Do you? It’s better to suffer now, because that way you think you will have paid your debts. lsn’t that what you hope?