Mortal Love (17 page)

“Nicky,” he said. “Nicky, don't.”

“Nick,” said Juda. “
Nick
. Stop.”

He looked from her to Daniel; a grin spread across his face. He held up his pocketknife. With one sure stroke, he drew the blade across the back of his wrist, took the knife into his left hand and scored the other wrist, then raised both hands so Daniel saw the blood welling, then running in thin black lines down his arms.

“She wrote on me,” said Nick. “Like that.”

Juda grabbed the knife from him, snapped the blade back into place, and tossed it on the floor. “Don't make it worse,” she hissed.

Nick picked up the knife, got his anorak and pulled it back on. Drops of blood stained the rug at his feet as he began to laugh. “Worse? It can get worse?”

“It's not him. It will never be him,” said Juda, and her voice rose with desperation. “Not ever, and the time is leaving us, and there's nothing else I can do—
nothing, “
she cried, her hand slashing at the air. “Fancy!”

The dog scrambled to its feet. Juda stalked to the wall, pulled the pocket doors open, and hurried downstairs, the dog at her heels. Daniel stared after her, stunned. When Nick began to laugh, Daniel turned to him, his face white. “You think this is a fucking joke, Hayward? What, did you drug me?”

“A drug, Danny? When's the last time a drug did that for you? Open your eyes, Daniel! You're in it now with all the rest of us—in for a penny, in for a pound.”

Daniel fought to keep his voice steady “Look, Nick, if this really is about her—if Larkin really does have a problem—”

“Larkin doesn't
have
a problem—Larkin
is
a problem. Come on, Danny—a girl like that. Why would she bother with you? Why would she bother with
either
of us? Even me, Danny—even me! Think about this. You met her, when? Six, seven o'clock yesterday evening? What've the last twenty-four hours been like for you, Danny?”

“Pretty weird.”

“Yeah? Well, it's going to get worse. Do you remember what you saw a few minutes ago?”

“You cutting your wrists with a Swiss army knife?”

“I mean, what you saw when Juda told you to
see.”

Daniel frowned. Of course he did—that shattering moment when he'd seen . . .
something . . .

. . .
but whatever it was already had started to fade, one of those luminous dreams you're certain you'll never forget, that disappear within minutes of waking.

“Sort of,” he said. “Something about a fish?”

Nick moved forward and pressed a finger to his lower lip. Daniel's mouth filled with the taste of scorched fish and burned honey.

Not just his mouth. His entire sensorium was flooded—burning leaves, green sap, wormwood, a blinding aureole of emerald light, the taste of anisette and salt and—

“Stop!” he cried. “God,
stop
it!”

Daniel clutched at his head as Nick stepped back. “What
is
it?” Daniel looked at him desperately. “How are you doing that?”

“I'm not. She is. Larkin.”

“But . . . how?”

“I don't know.” Nick's entire body sagged. He thrust his hands into his pockets; suddenly he looked small and old. “Or . . . well, everything I think might explain it is just too crazy.”

“What about Juda? How do you know her?”

“She found me. Tracked me down, years ago. After Larkin left me.” He lifted his face and gazed at Daniel, his eyes wild and desolate. “She said the same thing about me, Juda did.
It's not him.
What she did to you, Danny—she did that to me, too. Twenty years ago.

“And now that's what the world is like for me, Dan. Every waking hour. Every fucking moment.”

Before Daniel could reply, a voice called from the stairs. “Daniel? Daniel, you up there?”

Daniel's face brightened. “Larkin!”

Nick pulled up the hood of his anorak. “I can't stay,” he said in a low voice. “Can't bear it. Her.”

One last moment he hesitated, staring at his friend. “Don't let Learmont near her,” he said. “She's mad, coming here. You, too, Danny.”

Head lowered, he darted out the door, passing a tall, slender figure in midnight blue. “Daniel! I thought I heard you—”

“Larkin,” said Daniel. And knew at that moment Nick was right:

Why would she bother with either of us?

She stepped into the room, smiling. She no longer looked pale but flushed; her hair had slipped from its chignon to fall in a dark haze upon her shoulders. “I couldn't find you,” she said.

“Here I am.”

She stepped over and took his arm, and together they went into the hallway, walking slowly past paintings and a series of shadowboxes. Downstairs the party roiled on, waves of laughter and bits of music, raised voices, the tinkle of broken glass. But here on the second floor, all was silent, the hall empty.

“Look at that.” Larkin stopped, tipped her head toward a pasteltinted watercolor of a child with butterfly wings perched upon a lightning bolt. The child's face was sly, its long eyes upturned so that they showed neither iris nor pupil. “Isn't that amazing? How could someone know to paint that?”

Daniel shook his head. “I don't know.” He stepped closer, looking in vain for the artist's signature.

“I never get tired of them.” Larkin gazed at the painting, and Daniel was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “No matter how often I see them ... I can never keep away. They draw me.”

Daniel started to reply, then stopped. A few feet from where they stood, a door opened. A man stepped into the corridor. Slight, dressed in dark trousers and a cable-knit sweater, with black, gray-salted hair falling to his shoulders and a ruddy face, his features saved from boyishness by heavy black brows above deep-set sea-blue eyes. As the door closed behind him, he looked up, startled, at Daniel and Larkin.

“Hello,” he said.

Daniel stared at him: was this Learmont? He draped an arm protectively around Larkin, but she barely glanced at the newcomer. The man continued to gaze at them; no, not at them: at Larkin. His expression grew intent, almost disbelieving, until of a sudden he seemed to notice Daniel watching him.

“Remarkable stuff he has, isn't it?” He looked at Daniel and smiled. “Our host.”

Daniel's hand tightened around Larkin; he could feel her tense. She pulled away, turning to stare at him in alarm.

“I'll meet you at the car,” he said quietly. He smiled for the newcomer's benefit, then gently pushed Larkin toward the step. “Five minutes.”

Nodding, she turned and hurried away. The two men watched her go. Daniel straightened, slipping his hand into his pocket. His fingers found the acorn, and he clutched it as he turned to the newcomer.

“I'm Balthazar Warnick,” the man said, and held out his hand.

“Daniel Rowlands.” Daniel let the acorn slide free. “You're American, too.”

“I am. Are you the same Daniel Rowlands who writes for the
Washington Horizon?”

Daniel smiled stiffly. “Guilty as charged.”

“Very happy to meet you.” Warnick shook his hand warmly. “I live in the District, too. I enjoy your column. That was a very nice piece you did on Akhenaton last spring.”

“Thanks. So you're from D.C.?” He gestured at the wall of paintings. “Are you with the National Gallery? Or the Corcoran?”

“No, nothing like that. I'm an instructor at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine.”

“Art history?”

“Classical archaeology. My work occasionally intersects with Russell's. Do you know him?”

Daniel hesitated. “No.”

“Are you covering this for the
Horizon
?”

“No. I'm here on sabbatical for several months. Working on a book.”

“Doesn't your family miss you?”

“I'm not married.”

“Ah.” Warnick gave him a melancholy smile. “Then you are free to give yourself to research. And it's all research, isn't it? Any bit of knowledge we can obtain, no matter its source, no matter how we go about retrieving it—all fuel for the fire, isn't it?
Fas est et ab hoste doceri.”

Daniel stiffened. Balthazar Warnick stared at him with an expectant, almost teasing expression on his ruddy face. Daniel stared back. Finally he said, “I think I'd better go.”

“Wait.” Warnick laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Before you do—let me introduce you to our host. Just so you'll know who you're dealing with. Always a good idea, I think.”

He began to steer Daniel toward the door.

“I'm sorry, but I told my friend—”

“Oh, she'll wait.” Warnick paused, staring up at Daniel with his sea-blue eyes. His expression grew wistful. “They nearly always do. Come—”

And opening the door, he drew Daniel inside.

CHAPTER SIX

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel

T
he train departed Paddington Station promptly
at nine-thirty. Radborne's third-class ticket gave him a coach that was his alone, save for an elderly man who blew his nose all the way to Exeter.

The journey took most of the day. The lemony sunlight that touched the grimy coach windows in London disappeared by the time they reached Devizes. The rest of the trip passed in a nickel-colored blur, rain and smoke smirching the glass, the smell of burning coal making Radborne feel queasy and light-headed. He had not slept well the previous night: there had been words with Mrs. Beale when he told her he was leaving to take a position.

“A lunatic asylum?” She dropped her tatting as though it might soil her. “Broadmoor?”

“No, I told you, it's in Cornwall. Sarsinmoor, it's called—”

“Sarsinmoor? Well, I have never heard of it. And I have made it a practice never to let rooms to temperamental individuals—”

“I am taking a position there, Mrs. Beale. I am not a patient.”

“—and so I must ask you to vacate your room immediately, Mr. Comstock. And there is to be no question of repayment of your rent or—”

“That will not be necessary,” Radborne said hotly. “You are welcome to it. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to pack.”

In the third-class coach, he dozed fitfully on a wooden bench, his head pillowed on his velvet jacket and his bags at his feet. By the time they departed Redruth in midafternoon, he gave up hope of getting any sleep. Outside the station he saw women and children waiting for the London-bound train, their barrows full of the late-autumn harvest—broccoli and sprouts and carrots—and tinners with blackened faces and white pits for eyes. The names painted on worm-bitten signposts were incomprehensible: Bowda, Trespettigue, Hendra, Cassacawn, Menkee, Kernick. When he did glimpse a name that he could understand—Death Corner, Catshole Downs—he found no reassurance in it.

The green downs and fields of Somerset had long since given way to a landscape unlike anything he had ever seen, that part of England where warm red sandstone and the granite uplands of Dartmoor surrender to black Devonian slate. Scoured hills bristling with gorse, their peaks etched with strange mounds and ragged lines of upright stones, deep-cleft valleys where black streams trickled through poison-green bog.

There were few trees, fewer buildings. Now and then a narrow road wound between hedges so tall he could have stood on a man's shoulders without seeing over them. He pressed his face against the train's filthy window, fascinated and repelled by the way distant snow-topped mountains metamorphosed into slag heaps so close he might have touched them, then disappeared behind the ruins of ancient settlements. There were gaps like the tinners' empty eyes within crumbling walls of stacked slate and reddish stone. When, after an hour, a conductor passed through the empty coach, Radborne fairly lunged from his seat to stop him.

“Sir! Can you tell me, how long until we reach Sarsinmoor?”

The conductor stared at him blankly. “Where you going, then?”

“Sarsinmoor.”

The man shook his head. “Sarsin Moor? Are you sure? No moor here named that.”

“It's a place. A ... a hospital. I was told that the nearest station is Padwithiel.”

The conductor brightened. “Ah, Padwithiel—that would be Penrechdroc, we call it. I would say two hours more, if there's no trouble with the track. Two hours,” he repeated, pleased, and made his way to the next coach.

Radborne slumped against the wooden seat. He saw nothing but desolation: crags and moorland, granite slabs, a hawk pecking at a sheep's carcass. After a few minutes, he groaned. He picked up his color box and cradled it in his lap. A woman's face moved just within the limits of his vision, hair like smoke, shining flecks of green, a white mouth.

“Go away,” he whispered. He shut his eyes, felt a thicket of needles stabbing at his eyelids. “Go away, go away.”

For the remainder of the journey, he sat with head bowed and shoulders hunched, his color box on his knees as he tried to shut out the shadows rustling around him.

When he got
off the train, the sign at the station read
PADWITHIEL.
But the conductor had called for Penrechdroc, and the name painted on the side of the tiny station house was Penrechdroc as well. It was dusk now. Radborne stood alone on the platform, staring through the mist in search of Dr. Learmont or a carriage.

There was not another soul to be seen. The village consisted of four ancient cottages with walls of cream-colored stone and gray granite sills, tiny square windows hung with dingy lace. A narrow path wound past the cottages and up a steep black hill, disappearing at its crown into moor and fog.

“God help me,” said Radborne, and he shivered. Cold wind carried the smell of burning furze and the sweeter scent of peat fire. He turned and saw another building, set by itself a hundred yards off. Its windows were uncurtained and brightly lit; a painted sign hung above the wide recessed doorway. Radborne hoisted his valise and color box and headed toward it, slowing when he saw the wagons and cart horses that waited on the far side of the building.

Above him the sky had deepened to lavender and indigo. In the dimness he could just make out the inn's signboard—a vivid painting of a grotesque figure with long, slanted eyes and sharp chin, pointed fingers arranged so that it seemed to be holding the very placard it decorated.

COLEMAN GREY
, the sign read.

“Mind yerself, there. 'Tis mucky.”

Radborne turned to see a man stepping from behind a farm cart. He was compact and dark-haired, his face burned blackish red by sun and wind. He looked at Radborne and nodded, touching his battered black cap. “I'm Kervissey. Yeh'll be wanting a ride to manor?”

Radborne nodded, venturing a smile. “I certainly will be.”

“I'll want payment now. Else you can walk.”

Radborne hesitated. “All right,” he said. He dug into his pocket and counted out a few shillings. This seemed to satisfy the farmer, who strode to a wagon harnessed to a draft horse with hooves the size of casks. Radborne hurried after him. He handed Kervissey his valise, which the farmer unceremoniously tossed into the back of the cart. Radborne winced and clasped his color box tightly.

“I'll keep these up front with me.”

“Yeh're riding in back. Get in.”

Radborne stared at him in disbelief, but Kervissey only climbed in front and picked up the reins. After a moment Radborne clambered into the back. Kervissey shouted at the draft horse.

“Gas e dhe gerdhes!”

With a lurch they moved forward. Radborne settled himself as best he could on a pile of empty croker sacks, trying to avoid the crusted skin of bird droppings and filthy feathers stuck to the floor. His color box he wedged in a corner behind a wooden crate, then tugged the collar of his greatcoat up around his ears and concentrated on keeping warm.

The cart clattered uphill, leaving the four cottages behind. At the top of the rise, it hied sharply to the left, past a dour Methodist church, its stone walls bleak as a prison. There were a few more houses, which Radborne would have thought deserted were it not for skeins of smoke rising from the chimneys, and a single farmstead where starved-looking sheep cropped yellow grass.

That was all. Around them mist rose in whitish columns, and Penrechdroc disappeared as they started downhill. The horse's plod became a trot. At the bottom of the rise, the mist blew off. Radborne stared out as the moor swept suddenly around them, a vast gray counterpane unrolled from the sky.

“That's Sarsinmoor!” shouted Kervissey. He twisted his head to glare at the swell of gorse-grown hills and treacherous blanket bog, split like a skin where granite tors thrust to the sky. They were miles from the sea, yet Radborne could hear waves beating inside his skull and the skirling cry of lapwings.

“God, what a place,” he said.

From bare hills the ruins of abandoned tin mines rose like scaffolding. Ancient hedges crisscrossed fields where nothing dwelled but skylarks and foxes. It was a land that looked as though it had not been occupied but seized: on every hillside Radborne saw what appeared to be relics of strife. Fallen towers, granite beacons, collapsed stone huts, and ransacked burial mounds. All bespoke an ancient, relentless vigilance.

Yet nothing grew here but gorse and gnarled evergreens bowed and broken by the wind from the sea. What on earth could they have been keeping watch for?

Beneath him the croker sacks rustled as he tried to get comfortable. The wind was relentless. He shivered and gazed out at a half-circle of standing stones rising from the heath.

“
Ay!”

Radborne started as the driver glanced back at him.

“
Kemerough wyth na wra why gasa an vorth noweth rag an vorth goth!
You keep your eyes ahead, Mehster Comstook!”

The farmer banged on the wagon board. Radborne scowled but swiveled until he stared at the hindquarters of the dray horse.

Kervissey spit and shook his head. “Stupid gawk,” he said.

The horse clopped on placidly, the farmer grumbled to himself. Somewhere overhead an owl croaked. The wagon splashed through a stream, wooden wheels straining. Radborne sat hunched in the dark and the cold and stared at the back of Kervissey's head. The wind carried the smells of rain and the sea; after a while icy drops began to patter against the dusty sacking. The horse picked its way across open moor and along ancient, deeply grooved lanes that ran between the impenetrable hedges. Within the insubstantial folds of his woolen jacket, Radborne shivered and cursed Dr. Learmont.

Hours passed. Days, maybe. That couldn't be possible, and yet he felt inside an uneasy dream, time a stream he had fallen into, buoyed along by shadows, the wreckage of half-remembered faces. Sometimes he thought he heard voices rising above the rushing of wind. He saw flickers that might have been the sun streaking, meteor-wise, across a sky that was sometimes black, sometimes like an inverted bowl streaked with gold and blue. Unexpectedly he would laugh, then fall silent, shocked by the sound and unable to recall what had torn it from him. Only when he felt the sudden weight of his color box as the wagon rounded a curve did he remember where he was, and why, and when.

Above him the clouds had broken. A half-moon shone just above the horizon, bright as an electrolier. Radborne leaned forward. “How much longer is it?”

“
Is
it?
is
it?' Kervissey replied, mocking him. “ 'Tis there, young man! See't? 'Tis the manor house, and there's Doctor waiting for you—”

Radborne stood, rocking back and forth as he tried to keep his balance. “My God,” he murmured. “Look at this.”

Before him was a vast promontory, ridged with ruined stone walls and separated from the mainland by a narrow land bridge. At its peak stood a house—not an old house, but a gracefully executed four-story manse, built at the early part of the century in the Italianate style, of soft yellow stone and black slate. There were lamps burning in the lower windows, a wedge of yellow light that might have been an open door. Beyond the promontory, and surrounding it some hundreds of feet below, was the sea. Radborne could hear waves thundering against the cliffs and feel them, too—the earth beneath the wagon shuddered with each crash of the tide. He could feel a piercing pain in his ears, as though a skewer had been thrust into his skull.

Kervissey shouted to the horse. “
Gas e dhe gerdhes! Yskynna!”
It began to race up the winding road, the wagon jouncing behind it. Radborne sank back down. The narrow tongue of land leading to the promontory was perhaps thirty feet wide. The passage of horses and carts had beaten the turf down to cracked slate and bare earth. On the far side of this, the promontory seemed an island rising from the dark sea, the manor house a beacon at its height.

Radborne's hands clutched at the pockets of his jacket. He turned to stare northeast and then southwest. In both directions were the same dramatic cliffs, thrusting out into the ocean as far as he could see. Perhaps a half mile to the south, separated by a raging channel that swirled into a whirlpool at its base, reared another spike of black stone surmounted by the ruins of a castle or keep. Radborne could just discern a broken bridge like a dangling thread, the sole remnant of where it had once been connected to the mainland.

“What is that place?” he shouted above the wind.

“Argolkelys!” Kervissey shouted back. “On next headland you'll find what they call Tintagel, though this one's the older. No Christian goes there, don't you think of it! Hold on now—”

Around them the the path fell away into soft green turf and lines of broken slates. Near the manor house, a row of stunted evergreens bent before the wind. The horse slowed its pace, and Kervissey whistled to it softly.

“There now, there now, soon we go home.
Trenos vyttyn, coascar,”
he added, glancing at Radborne.

“What?”

“It's tomorrow morning, lad. Not night anymore. Today—and here you are.”

As they drew in front the house, the massive oaken doors opened and Dr. Learmont appeared.

“Mr. Comstock!” he cried as Radborne jumped down from the cart. “How glad I am to see you—come in, come in! I see that you found Kervissey—
mur ras dheugh-why,
Kervissey!”

He nodded at the farmer, then clasped Radborne's hand warmly. “Your baggage arrived safely? And yourself?”