Iron Chamber of Memory (12 page)

“But I won’t remember it is I who gave it to you.”

“Why not? You bought it! You should be able to remember that. Put all the images of me you can into your new memory halls. Adorn the walls with them! Study me like a painter would a model. You will forget, but your lips and eyes will remember the necklace! When you see it, the impulse will break through, and you’ll have to kiss me!”

“And then what? I kiss my best friend’s wife-to-be? How will that change anything?”

She bit her lip. Still kneeling, she wrapped her white arms around his upper thighs. “Think of Sleeping Beauty! The kiss will break the spell!”

When he bent down, his mouth half an inch from hers, she put her slim fingers on his lips, and whispered. “No more tonight! Only if you are burning, aching, longing, will you remember. Your body and blood might remember, even if your mind does not.”

He did step away from her again. This time, however, he had to put his whole head in the ice bucket to cool the rebellion in his flesh.

Laureline looked at him through heavily lidded eyes, her lips pursed. “You are going to have the locals start telling their old stories about ghosts and sea-witches, if they hear you howl like that.”

Henry shook the ice water out of his eyes. “You slept in here that night. Why did you say you slept on the cot? Because that is what I remembered, too.”

Her smile vanished.

She said sharply, “This means someone is coordinating the false memories. Do you think it is Manfred? You know he has all those books on hypnotism and the occult for his dissertation. He went to Rome last year, and got permission to study the books in the black library under the Vatican, where copies of the most blasphemous grimoires and manuals captured from warlocks and heretics are stored. Maybe including that Italian fellow you read, Giordano Bruno. Didn’t you tell me he was burned at the stake in the Sixteenth Century?”

“It cannot be Manfred,” said Henry curtly.

But his mind returned, against its will, to the suspicion that had touched his mind when he first entered the house. He and Laureline were bewitched by some manner of hypnotism that plagued them when they left this room. In all the world, he only knew one man who was studying mesmerism. And by some unlikely chance, it happened to be the very same man who owned this house.

Even he was forced to admit this seemed like a rather unexpected coincidence.

She looked up at him, and her eyes seemed deeper than he had ever seen them, like two emerald oceans, fathomless, bottomless. “He is descended from Arviragus and Anna, the Virgin’s cousin, from Avallach and Eudelen, from whose heirs Helen of the Cross was born, who married Constantine the Great. From him King Athrwys son of Uthyr sprung.”

Henry started. Some scholars thought Athrwys to be King Arthur, or, rather, the real name of the figure about whom the legends had gathered. He was struck by a sudden notion. Were not such gathered legends very much like the false memories that robbed him and Laureline of their true selves whenever they stepped into the air of the outer world?

He wondered uneasily what, if anything, Manfred might remember were he to enter this chamber? Would his friend remember the real version of events, where he had called Laureline a harpy and had not wished to wed her? Or had he changed his mind? And, if so, what lengths had he been willing to go to in order to win this emerald-eyed beauty?

Henry shivered and rejected this line of thought as absurd. Still, it was strange that Manfred, who had aided him in his studies, had never told him of any blood connection to the legendary King Arthur.

She said, “Owen Glendower the Magician comes from the same bloodline. Donne and De Vere families, who are the earls of Oxford, descend from the Magician, as does the Cavendish family—and the Hathaways. You know that what is happening to the two of us has no natural explanation. Who has the better motive, the stronger desire, to take me away from you? Why is this chamber, in his house, his very house, the only place where we are immune?”

Because were there any truth to it, the temptation to claim the willing girl as his own, to take her and have her before Manfred did, to consummate his passion not in love but as an act of preemptive retaliation, was simply too strong.

And because the accusation seemed so reasonable now that it came from her lips, so inevitable, Henry ran from the chamber, seeking the oblivion that would wash into forgetfulness the horrible thought that his best friend might be his betrayer.

There was no other way to forget it.

Hal found himself in dark halls with his shirt buttons missing, dripping with icy water, and wondering for the life of him where Laurel and her candle had gone. Perhaps she went to change into something more decent, he hoped. He had bumped into a ladder in the dark, where a careless workman had left a bucket of water that had turned icy in the winter cold. Had she been doused as well? Oddly, he could not remember. She would have had no choice but to go change if she, too, had been caught in the icy drench. His imagination of what would have happened to her silky nightgown under such circumstances made him feel less chilled.

He stumbled around the lightless mansion for a time, barking his shins on unexpected crates the workmen had left behind, wondering where the dinner could be that she had promised him. Finally he found his way into a part of the mansion he recognized, despite the gloom, and found the cot in the spare attic room. It was equipped with a sleeping bag and an inflatable pillow. The hunting rifles were gone, and the pyramid of cans had been placed in a footlocker next to a cooler, and several car batteries were wired to a hotplate. There was also an electric teapot half-full of water and a propane lantern as well. His dinner consisted of a beer bottle from the cooler and a Styrofoam cup of instant noodles. He ate less than half, surprised to find himself not hungry at all.

In Hampshire, Barton-on-Sea was between Highcliffe and Milford-on-Sea. The clubhouse was an imposing glass-walled structure with a peaked roof of brown slate like a tortoise shell. It was situated on a green hill commanding a splendid view across the Solent to the Needles on the Isle of Wight, along to Old Harry Rocks at Swanage. The golf course here dated back to 1879.

The day was blustery and unseasonably cold, with snarls of cloud promising rain that never came scudding swiftly against a deceptively bright blue-white sky. The lawn was as green and neat as only two centuries of maintenance could produce, surrounded by thickets of darker green rough and water traps like shining rugs.

Hal resisted the impulse to swat his golfball over the cliff into the sea. He could not remember why he had agreed to take Laurel golfing on Wednesday. A month ago, he would have thought nothing of it, but ever since the day that they broke into the High House of Wrongerwood, he had found himself entertaining distinctly unbestmanly thoughts. A private outing with her seemed a foolish move, especially with Manfred’s doubts troubling him.

But agreed he had, and now he must make the best of it.

She was dressed smartly, obeying the strict dress code of the club, while managing to subvert it. Laurel wore white knee socks and very short shorts, her crisp white blouse tucked neatly into her wide black belt, buttons of her short-sleeved blouse straining wherever her bosom heaved in a laugh or indrawn breath. How she could breathe with her belt cinched so tightly was a mystery to him. She looked like a pouter pigeon.

She was dressed like someone set to walk a sandy summer beach. The other women golfing were wearing sweaters.

For some reason, she was wearing the expensive diamond pendant Hal had bought her as sort of a pre-wedding gift, and, against his will, his eyes were magnetized to it. The little silver dolphins nestled in the dell of her breasts, and seemed to mock him with their knowing smiles.

She was fairly good at the game, perhaps better than he was, at least at first. By the sixth hole, he was suspicious that she was deliberately missing shots to let him win, a habit he found very girlish and very annoying. Her normal gaiety was bubbling over, and she giggled at everything, funny or not.

The wind was coming from the cliffs, and the balls in flight during drives tended to hook north. Laurel wore her hair piled high atop her head in a Gibson, adorned by an absurd pin shaped like a golf ball, but even so the long unruly strands tended to escape the coiffeur, and fly and leap in the wind.

As they played, his eyes were repeatedly drawn to the back of her neck, naked with her hair pinned up as it was, with a few little stray wisps showing. The clasp of the chain rested there. He kept feeling this tingling in his lips and this unexpected urge to nuzzle her there, or to nip her ear right where her dangling earring swung: earrings which annoyed him because such jewelry was utterly inappropriate for a golf course!

It was clear she was flirting with her poor caddy as well, a freckled teenager with a thick Scottish brogue and thicker acne. She kept calling him “sweetie” and “dearie,” no doubt because she had forgotten his name, and she touched his hand whenever he handed her a club, bathing him in lingering, warm looks from beneath her half-lidded lashes.

Why the devil was the woman wearing so much jewelry during a golf game? And why must she always contrive to be walking in front of him as they strolled from tee to tee? Between her parading herself before him and her incessant flirtations with the caddy, Hal found himself tempted to swat her across the backside with a fairway wood.

By the eighth hole, she was insisting that Hal give her tips on her stance and swing. So naturally, he had to put his arms around her to show her how to grip the putter, his breath warm on her ear. The playful wind tossed strands of her tickling hair that caught in his mouth or fluttered over his eyes and nose. It was nearly unendurable.

She exclaimed with equal enthusiasm over well-placed shots and abominable flops, shanks and whiffs. Whenever she did so, however, just as she turned, she would catch her breath. This tiny motion set the diamond bouncing and flashing at her cleavage, drawing his eyes and thoughts there. It was as if he could smell and taste her, as if his tongue and lips remembered the curving shape of her from some erotic dream of the night.

He knew he should have told her no.

On the ninth fairway, she teed off with her four iron, a picture-perfect swing. Her front leg was straight, her back leg a smooth arch of thigh and calf, with only one toe touching the grass; her torso twisted and gluteal muscles clenched, showing off the perfect lines of her legs, hips and wasp-thin waist. Her white and shapely arms were overhead. The club was over her shoulder with the shaft nearly parallel to her back leg. Her breasts jutted outward, and her swan-neck turned just so, betraying that delicate line which reaches from a woman’s ear to her clavicle.

The wind gusted, plastering her blouse against her body, making her more naked than naked. Her wild hair strands snapped and soared like a dark pennant. Laurel froze in that pose for a moment—like a Greek goddess of white marble, contrived with emeralds for eyes and onyx locks—as the ball flew true in a smooth arc, over a hundred yards, bouncing and rolling to rest on the green within feet of the flag.

All at once, it was like the surface ice of a winter river broke in his mind, and the rushing thoughts flowing below were exposed. The sight of her in all her graceful beauty, her confidence, her high-hearted humor, her little stabs of sly wit, her luxurious sensuality, her film-actress glamour, everything about her shattered his heart at that moment.

She turned toward him, tossing her head in a mare-like motion to fling her hair away, her smile white and dazzling, her posture triumphant, the pendant blazing at her breast. “A stony! Well? Aren’t you going to say
nice shot
?”

Hal could not speak, could not breathe.

This was no mere admiration for his best friend’s wife-to-be. This was deep, erotic, raw passion, but, paradoxically, also tender, spiritual, and pure and selfless. He both wanted to cherish her like a saint in worship and to take her here and now on the grass in the blustery wind, and damnation to the caddy if he saw too much.

It was love.

He suddenly remembered why he had bought that necklace. He had not known why at the time. It was not in apology for some imagined wrong. No; it was a token of his love. The matter was as simple as that.

The only thing he wanted in life, the only thing that would make him truly happy, belonged to another man, a man whose friendship meant more than life to him. A man he could not betray nor even wound.

Manfred had everything. And that left him with nothing.

Simple.

In a black mood, his face dark, he drove his ball over the cliffs into the sea, threw his club into the grass, and stalked back toward the clubhouse without a word. The caddy stared in shock and silence at his retreating back, and Laurel called out to him, at first in confusion, then in wrath.

He left the keys to his sportscar with the manager, telling him to give them to Miss du Lac when she came in, and then he called a taxi.

It was later that week. Hal was sitting at a table in the dark corner of the pub occupying what had once been the stable when the Stocks Inn had been a farmhouse, back before his nation was born. He was seated facing the fire, separated from the next table by a wall of stone that might once have been part of a stall. The half-melted candle on his table was unlit.

Hal had spent his days and nights before this leafing through volumes in libraries and, when he could get permission, private collections, gathering material for his paper. It astonished him how many records were still on microfiche, not digitized, or crumbling in the poorly preserved originals. It was depressing; it was a whole world of forgotten words.

He worked in a haze of distraction, wasting hours staring at a single document without reading it, chain-smoking enough to fill his rented room with ash and smog, and then taking long walks to clear his head. The room he was renting was from an old widower named Drake who ran a tobacco shop downstairs. Not only did the landlord not mind the smell, nor Hal ever run short of cigarettes, but the rich and delicious scent from downstairs would wake the craving in him at all hours. Not that the landlord approved of cigarettes. At the landlord’s avuncular urging, Hal was developing a taste for fine cigars. One more expensive habit he could not afford.