Revenant

by Kat Richardson

  After a time, he pressed his cheek against the top of my head. “I love you so much,” he said, “and ever since I saw you again in the doll hospital, I can only view the world in the context of you. Every step I take without you beside me or in front of me seems like wasted motion. I feel you in my heart like a separate but indivisible part of me. Not just the magic thing; the everything. If you died, I wouldn’t know how to live. I would be like an old-fashioned watch that had lost its spring. I never want to be far from you again.”

  An electric wariness tingled over my nerves. “What if I didn’t die, but I couldn’t be with you? What if we had to be apart for a while through no desire of our own?”

  “Like this past year? Are you hinting at something I should know . . . ?”

  “No,” I replied too quickly. “Just hypothesizing. But what if . . . ? Would you wind down and die?”

  “No. Because I would know you were still in the world, still spinning the little gears of my existence, if from afar. I wouldn’t like it much, though.”

  “I wouldn’t, either. I didn’t like this past year much at all.”

  “Maybe we should do something about it.”

  I made a small interrogative sound, confused and apprehensive about where he seemed to be leading the conversation. . . .

  “This isn’t how I pictured this moment. . . .”

  “What moment? What’s wrong with it?” I asked, startled, and twisting out of his lap to get a better look into his face.

  He let me back away, but kept his gaze on me, his expression so soft and full of longing that tears pricked in my eyes. “Will you marry me? Harper? I want . . . us to be . . . together.”

  “But we are.”

  “Legally.”

  I blinked at him. “You think you’re going to die.”

  He stared and then broke out in startled, uncomfortable laughter. “No! If I thought that, I wouldn’t be asking. I know I’m supposed to do this differently—I’m supposed to get on one knee and have a ring and all that, but I suck at that kind of thing.”

  “But . . . you’d be stuck with me. You’d be out in the open. Everyone would know how to find you and you’d never be able to hide again.”

  “I don’t want to hide anymore. I think I’m too old for hide-and-seek.”

  “What about your father?”

  “What about him? When this is over—one way or another—he’s not going to matter anymore. It’s not about him—except what dealing with him has taught me about myself. About what I want and what I don’t want. Back at the agency—the other one—the field guys were all single because they were wild cards, mobile, replaceable . . . expendable. When a guy moved up, he got a desk job, got a house, got married, because now he was a real person with a real place in the world—not what we used to call a ‘wild dog’ with no permanence, born to roam, born to die. I want to be permanent. With you. Out in the open.”

  I was panting and sweating, couldn’t answer him while I wrestled with a fear I hadn’t faced in years. I thought I wasn’t afraid of anything so paltry, but the impulse to flee that captivity and everything that I associated with it hadn’t quite let go of me, as regressive and stupid as it was.

  Quinton frowned and leaned forward, reaching to brush my cheek and then pulling back, his eyes widening a little. “You’re panicking. Which I sort of understand. But you don’t have to. What I’m offering is not a prison and a wedding ring is not a shackle. You wouldn’t be my property. The only thing that would change between us would be the light.”

  “Light?” I repeated, confused and disoriented.

  “It’s that condition that isn’t shadows, secrets, and darkness. And we could live there.” He looked down at my injured hand, biting his lip.

  “It’s OK to touch me. I won’t shatter into pieces,” I said.

  He took my hand into his and studied it, then turned it upward to press a kiss into my palm. A warm tear fell onto my upturned wrist.

  I felt as if something cold and hard were breaking inside me and I started crying. Quinton pulled me gently toward him and I threw myself back into his arms, flooding tears and sobbing. I wished I could blame my display on exhaustion, injury, and low blood sugar, but none of those was the cause. I was still sorting out if what I felt was relief, joy, or terror. Or all three.

  So, of course, the door opened and Nelia bustled in with an armload of boxes.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Nelia was more flustered than either of us. She put the pile of boxes on the nearest table and started back out.

  “No, no,” Quinton called out. “It’s OK.” He swiped at his eyes and cast me a questioning glance as I sniffled and wiped my face with the back of my right hand. “It is all right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We’ll finish this later. I can’t think—”

  He shook his head and gave me a small smile. “It’s OK. I’m not going very far away.”

  I nodded and moved aside so he could stand up. He paused to give me another kiss—a soft, slow brush of his lips over mine—and helped me to my feet as he got up. “I love you more than Roger loved Jessica,” he whispered.

  I snorted a laugh as he left the room. Nelia watched me with a sideways glance of curiosity. “Are you all right, Mrs. Smith?”

  I laughed again, thinking that I wasn’t even sure which last name I’d have if I were to accept Quinton’s proposal. I had no desire to adopt “Purlis” or any of his various working aliases. “Smith” might work just as well. Maybe I should get used to it. “Yes. Well, mostly.” I moved to lean against the sofa on which I’d been sitting with Quinton, and my injured hand brushed over the upholstery, sending a sharp pang up my arm. “Ow,” I gasped.

  “Oh, your injury. Cousin Carlos said you needed a bandage. Let me see.” I held out my hand and she peered at it. “Nasty. What happened to your finger?”

  “Accident.”

  She gave me a sideways look but didn’t ask again. “It needs washing.”

  She led me out of the room and down a corridor to a small powder room near the back door. It was obviously more of a family space than one for guests, situated as it was near the kitchen and work areas, but it had a large cabinet filled with useful supplies such as bandage tape, gauze, and medicines. “There’s always an injury this time of year,” Nelia said. “Someone is always cutting their hand instead of a vine, falling off a ladder, or out of a tree. . . . It makes me glad I only work here.”

  “I thought you were one of the family.”

  “I am,” she said, pulling me up to the sink where she started water running to warm and fussed with various packages of gauze, tape, and disinfectant. “But . . . I have a gypsy heart. I married an Englishman once and thought I could settle down if I were just rich enough. But I couldn’t. I prefer the caravan to a house. I come to visit and help out when the harvest is on because this is my blood family. But I always think my real family is the wind and the sun and the campfire at night. It’s hard to be indoors so much when the weather is so fine, but even a gypsy has a duty to family. Up to a point.”

  I scrubbed my hands carefully—the hot water stung the skin of my injured hand and I had to go around the finger with care, not sure if I was supposed to keep the stitches dry or not. I did my best not to wet the sutures, but they looked a little damp anyhow when I was done. Nelia handed me a towel and waited while I dried my hands; then she made me hold out the cut hand again and began bandaging my finger very neatly.

  “Is Carlos actually a cousin of yours?” I asked.

  “Probably not. He knew all the family history up to Carlos and Amélia, but he doesn’t fit. I know everyone living who’s part of our family and there are very few Ataídes left in our direct line. The first of Amélia’s children was a girl, but the second was a boy and so the only direct descendants of Carlos and Amélia who bear the family name are the male children and grandchild
ren of Damiao-Maria Ataíde.” Nelia looked up at my face. “Why are you frowning?”

  “Two children? I . . . thought there was only one.”

  “Carlos said the same. The rumor was always that Amélia’s daughter, Beatriz, was the child of her lover, but I was never sure.”

  “Why not?”

  Nelia shrugged. “I can’t say—I just think so. When did she have time to become pregnant by anyone but her husband? She was too young to conceive when he left for college and too proud to present him with a bastard before she’d given birth to a legitimate heir. She may have had lovers, but she wasn’t fool enough to let one of them compromise her position. Damiao’s birth killed her—her maid said it was ‘childbed fever.’ They thought the child was dead, too, at first, and didn’t tell Carlos about it—he had a famous temper. He went into mourning and somehow no one ever told him about the boy, who had already been brought here to be raised by one of Beatriz’s nurses. That was how they did it then—children raised in the countryside far from their parents. Carlos became a recluse for years—they said he was a sorcerer and he was even interrogated by the Inquisition once, but he was released. The stories say that the lights from his room cast doleful shadows on the night and let demons out to roam the streets of Lisbon. And some of them say he consorted with the Devil and that his enemies dropped dead in the street when he passed—which I never believed. Then he disappeared in the earthquake and no one ever knew what had become of him. His body was never discovered, as many weren’t, and he never knew he had a son. Or that’s the family legend.”

  “That is a lot of legend.”

  Nelia shrugged. “You know how stories go. I think he just didn’t care that he had children.”

  “What about the sorcerer part?”

  She cocked her head in thought. “Hmm . . . That I might believe”—she held up her thumb and index fingers less than an inch apart—“a little. All of the diaries say he was a very strange man.”

  “Whose diaries are these?”

  “Oh, Amélia and her maid left some. They aren’t very complete. The maid hated Carlos, so I don’t take anything she wrote about him seriously. When she wasn’t complaining about Carlos, Amélia was mostly whining about household things, social gatherings she couldn’t attend without her husband, and being bored, or being ill. She was a dissatisfied woman who became obsessed with providing an heir. I think she may have been a little crazy. She was of two minds about her daughter, too—some days she loved her with all her heart and others she was angry that Beatriz wasn’t a boy.”

  “How much older was Beatriz than Damiao?”

  “Twelve years. She was more like a mother than a sister to him, I suspect.”

  “And which child are you descended from?”

  “Beatriz.” She finished off the bandage and patted my hand with a smile. “Good enough, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, still trying to work it out. . . .

  “How do you know Carlos?” she asked as I started to turn away.

  “We work together.”

  “He seems very . . . fond of you.” She said it as if unsure she’d used the right word.

  I laughed. “In an odd sort of way, I suppose he is.”

  “Why would he say he was my cousin when it just isn’t possible?”

  “I don’t know. Are you sure he’s not related?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “He can’t be, but he is an Ataíde—he looks just like the first Carlos.”

  That drew me up short. “How does anyone know what he looked like?”

  “There’s a portrait, of course,” she said, tilting her head toward the front of the house.

  “May I see it?” I asked.

  “If you like, but it will be there later, if you would prefer to see your room now, instead.”

  “No. I can rest in a few minutes. I’d really like to see that painting.”

  Nelia shrugged. “I’ll show you where it is. I have to take the wine crate out of the salon anyhow.”

  “I didn’t see one. . . .”

  “The wooden box I brought in with the mail. It shouldn’t sit like that for long—the room gets too warm to preserve the wine. So inconvenient—the last thing this house needs is more presentation wine in fancy crates. You can’t drink the stuff or someone will have a fit, so it just takes up room and goes bad. A waste.”

  She led me back toward the room we’d left earlier and stopped at the door, pointing to a heavy frame that hung on the wall a few feet away. I couldn’t see the painting within from my angle—the frame’s thick carving obscured even an oblique view. “That’s it. Amélia painted it herself. It needs restoring, but she was so haphazard, that it’s hard to tell which bits are dirt and which are just Amélia’s poor work. She was much better at needlework and music.”

  I walked toward the painting while Nelia went into the salon to retrieve the packages she’d left. I wasn’t holding out much hope about the portrait’s quality or likeness, no matter how much Nelia seemed to think it looked like Carlos.

  I was surprised. Even in the subdued light of the west-facing room, the windows of which weren’t yet lit with direct sun, it was startling. The work was terrible, the colors muddy where they weren’t slashes of primary tones like a modern abstract. There was a lot of black, too, and not all of it was the color of paint. The uncanny darkness hung in streamers of Grey and gleamed in the thick body of the paint as if mixed into the oil and pigment. It could have been age that made the painting as a whole seem dark, but I thought it might have been the subject, because the man glowering out of the canvas was unmistakably Carlos.

  The portrait showed him in a library or study, standing beside a table covered with books. He wore a loose white shirt under a long, pale blue garment that was something like a dressing gown. He was younger than I knew him and his hair was cut close to his head, almost shaved. His beard and mustache were much smaller and softer, just framing his mouth and not extending onto his cheeks at all, leaving his jaw and neck exposed without any sign of the scars that he now had there. His left hand rested on a human skull, the long fingers curled slightly as if caught tapping the bones in impatience. In his right hand he held something that could have been a scruffy quill pen or a badly rendered knife. The hand’s position was awkward, as if Amélia couldn’t recall exactly what a hand looked like when she got to that point. She’d worked very hard on the details of the man’s face and clothes, but the arrangement of the painting was odd, the room exquisitely detailed on one corner and barely blocked in at another. Carlos’s figure was pushed off to the left, leaving the skull his hand rested on at the center of the picture, while the man simply ended at midthigh, though there was still empty canvas below into which he could have been painted full-length. In the upper-right corner, a bird descended into the picture as if it had flown in through an unseen window and been captured by accident.

  I stared at the painting and shook my head.

  Nelia came back out of the salon with the wooden box and two smaller cardboard parcels in her arms. “It’s an awful painting,” she said. “I think she may have been insane by the time she finished it. But you see why I say he must be a relative. How could this Carlos look so much like that Carlos and be anything but a descendant?”

  I felt something ruffle across the surface of the Grey, scattering a few ghosts, and I started to turn as a footstep sounded behind us.

  “It is a disturbing likeness,” Carlos said behind me.

  Nelia yelped in surprise and spun around, fumbling to keep hold of her packages. She pulled them tight to her chest and stared at him.

  Carlos offered a restrained nod and didn’t smile. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you. I came to see how you were—both of you. Mr. Smith has gone to bed. I think he was hoping one of you would be coming to join him soon.” He raised an eyebrow at Nelia.

  She blushed and exc
used herself, turning and walking away at just less than a scurry, clutching her boxes in a swirl of gold and silver energy while streamers of Carlos’s black pall followed in her wake. I frowned after her for a moment, feeling dull-witted and thinking I’d just missed something other than Carlos’s not quite flirting with her.

  “I think it’s a very bad painting,” I said, just to say something as my exhaustion caught up to me.

  “It is yet another thing I did not know about my wife.”

  “That she was a terrible painter?”

  “That she had an imagination. That room was the library in her home, where she lived when I was at Coimbra. I was rarely in it and I don’t recall ever wandering the shelves en déshabillé. I don’t remember a skull or stuffed ravens. However, I may have owned some garment like that once, though not while I was at college. It appears she created this portrait from her own mind, weaving pieces of memory together with some ideas of her own—and I had thought her rather brainless. I didn’t realize her depths. Plainly, I underestimated her.” It didn’t sound like a compliment.

  “Plainly,” I said, shaking off a surge of heavy-lidded sleepiness.

  “I may need to speak with her again.”

  “This seems like the place for it.”

  “Yes. I should unbind her and Rafa here—it would be appropriate.”

  “You’re getting sentimental in your old age.”

  “Hardly. Practical. I can’t carry them forever and they may be useful.”

  I grunted, unable to put my thoughts together fast enough to make a better reply.

  Carlos looked me over. “You need rest and your spouse-in-soul expects you.” He put his hand out. “I only want to know how you do.”

  I put my injured paw in his palm and shivered at the touch, feeling a little ill. “I do all right, I think. Very tired, though.”

  He peered at my bandaged hand. “Hmm . . . It should be well enough with time. Sleep, and I will talk with you more later.”

  “Are you sending me to bed?”

  “I am.”