I stretched out a little, every muscle stiff, and put my hands over my tear streamed face. Something caught the corner of my eye. I raised my hand and looked.
On the third finger of my left hand, too heavy but not too large, I was wearing Vespasian’s ring. For as long as I had known him, he had worn it. It was solid gold, stamped with the six pointed star of fire and water, within which nested a ruby, size of a pearl. It should have been too big for my finger but it was not. It should still be on Vespasian’s hand, but it was not. It should have perished eight hundred years ago, but it had not. I held it against my cheek where it felt cold, as his body had, and cried and cried and cried again.
I could not rise from the bed for many hours and I recognised neither hunger nor curiosity at my return. I slept a little, from exhaustion and misery, but woke again to the same desolation. The day had turned dull with a dreary cloud cover but I felt none of it. Eventually, when the long afternoon had dragged into a slow twilight, I sat, drawing my legs up to my belly, and leaned back against the pillows.
Then finally I saw the other messages in my room. Beside my bed and scattered wildly across the carpet, were the tarot cards of Thoth, my own pack, randomly thrown as I had left them myself. But in a neat row on my little dressing table and in front of the mirror, were three cards, face up. They were The Moon, The Fool, and The Star. Then, on the soft velvet padded stool in front was another card, this time face down. I got up slowly and went to look. I turned the card over. It was The Aeon, Judgement, and it was the card I had taken for Vespasian. I clutched it until I had almost folded it into creases, wet with tears. I sat with it on the carpet and stared at it as if I could not let it go. Then gradually it started to fade and a pool of liquid colour trickled through my fingers and stained the carpet red until finally the card was quite blank, damp cardboard with nothing on it at all. “The Aeons have passed. He has been judged,” said the whisper in my head. “It is done,” and I howled until I was sick.
I dreamed his eyes returned to me, deep in happiness, soft black memories, long lashed like a woman’s, penetrating and intense, until all my dream spun around his eyes and the words they called to me: Love, purity, eternity. Do not cry for me, they said. Solve et coagula; dissolve the body and impress the spirit. It seems that death is the opus magnum after all. Do not cry for me, for I am always with you, if you look for me. And you wear my ring, which is my eternal oath.
But I cried anyway, for I couldn’t help it. For three days I ate nothing and became dizzy and ill, drifting in a state of unreality. No one came to me and I did not leave my own property. I sat often in the hammock under the chestnut tree and closed my eyes against the green shadows, singing softly to myself the lilting medieval tunes Vespasian had taught me, and had sung to me sometimes, my head in his lap, beside the stream in the woods.
Once I felt Sammie was close, but she passed on then, a warm smiling rustle like breath before sleep, now beyond my grasp. But each night Vespasian filled my dreams.
On the fourth day when weakness had me verging on delirium, my front door opened and I heard it close and the footsteps go into the kitchen. I ran downstairs. Absurdly, I expected Vespasian. There was no one else in my world, and no one else who could come to me but him.
It was Bertie. He carried a small suitcase and looked thin. I stopped mid stair and tried to remember who he was.
“Good God, Mol,” he said. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost. I’ve been waiting for you. I thought you were going to come and pick me up. I had to get the train.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “Did I do something wrong? I don’t know. I’m confused.”
“Oh lord, Mol,” he sighed. “Have you gone all vague again? Isn’t it enough, me going crazy, without you losing your marbles too?”
I stared at the man I ought to know and searched in my head for his name. Now I had even lost my own. “Am I Molly? I thought I was Tilda.” I frowned. “Have you come to stay? I’ll tell the girl to light the candles and cook can get the turnspit to roast a swan.”
He put me to bed. Poor Bertie had just been released from hospital, but perhaps it did him good to have to cope with a mad woman instead of being treated for madness himself. “Molly, sweetie, don’t you remember a thing?” he begged me, sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed. The rest of the tarot cards, except for number twenty of the major arcana, were still scattered across the floor and he eyed them with some mistrust. He had brought me tea and a sandwich, which he made me eat. “You came to visit me plenty of times over the months, for goodness sake. You’ve been a real brick, stood by me and everything. Very good of you, seeing we’re divorced.”
“Are we?” The sandwich tasted disgusting, soggy white slices of bread substitute and tasteless slimy artificial ham. The tea was hot tannin and stuck to my tongue. I longed for the rich tang of the bacon hanging from the rafters, smoked in the rising musky blue from the fire, for the mellow glory of the wine from our own estate, for the hot baked unbleached bread, crusty from our ovens. “Did I marry you? I can’t imagine why. I used to be married to someone else. Someone terribly, wonderfully special.”
Bertie looked after me until I remembered who he was, and who I was, and that I loved tea, and ham sandwiches, and modern food, and could turn on electric lights and gas cookers and use a toilet that flushed. From the day Lilith had left him sprawled on my carpet reliving all the raging memories of the murders she had committed using his body, Bertie had been in a psychiatric hospital. The police had never arrested him. They did not believe he was capable of murder and torture and black magic and assumed his nightmare confessions were the result of a nervous breakdown, both understandable, and curable. No one had ever been accused of the murders, and no others had occurred. For six months Bertie had slowly recovered and Molly had visited him and taken him chocolates and promised him her spare room indefinitely once he was pronounced fit to return home. And now he was.
I cried at night and called for Jasper and woke with my pillow soaked each morning, but during the days I sank back into a reluctant reality. Bertie was a sweet nurse. He was not the healer Vespasian had been, but then, I was no longer suffering from terrible physical wounds, the scars of torture or the pain of battle. My injuries were purely emotional. A few pale scars still threaded across my body but most had faded to invisibility. Except the dragon of the sacred fire. That still stared back at me from the mirror, tucked into my cleavage, with a tiny black spot on the snout where Lilith’s claw had broken off in my breast and nearly killed me. But I avoided looking in mirrors.
Although we no longer lived by the medieval calendar and it was hundreds of years since the Gregorian had replaced the Julien, I found our dates had once again coincided. I had fallen back into Molly during the terrible night of Beltain, the first day of May. It was the eighteenth of May when I remembered that I had to visit my mother. But I had no energy and my mind remained so utterly bleak; it was another five days before I did so.
“I don’t know why you bother,” said Bertie when I told him. “You haven’t seen her for years, why go now, when you’re still so bloody insecure yourself? She won’t even recognise you, you know she won’t.”
“She might, this time,” I said. “Besides, I think she’s dying.”
“Well, the asylum will phone up and tell you when that happens,” said Bertie. “Frankly, I just don’t think you’re up to the journey. You’re still not with it, girl. Only last night you asked if there was any spiced wine in the vat, and you’d take some up to Jasper. I mean, what the devil am I supposed to do with you Mol?”
“Just ignore me,” I said. “I’ll get over it I suppose. It’s just – dreams. I’m depressed. Don’t worry.”
My mother was kept in a great white place just outside London. I travelled down by coach, which allowed me a more gentle arrival and a cosy, jogging trip with sunshine through the windows and all the pretty Cotswold countryside. Tilda enjoyed travelling in unaccustomed comfort. She was still with
me. We would never be parted now.
The taxi from the coach station sped through industrial grey and introduced Tilda to more startling changes. I had phoned ahead and I was expected. The ward sister clacked through long pale corridors to the private room on the third floor, which I had been paying for out of my royalties for many years. “Oh, there’s been no change,” she told me, all brisk and efficient and bored. “We’d have contacted you if there’d been anything. I’m afraid she’s still basically catatonic, though in excellent physical health of course.”
“I had this feeling,” I said, “that she was dying.”
“Oh dear, how wretched for you,” said the nurse without the slightest sympathy. “But I really don’t think that’s likely. Like I said, there’s been no change.”
The room was deeply shrouded, a haven of silent shade. The curtains were pulled across the window and the lump in the bed under the white covers was completely immovable. I bent over her. My mother’s face stared back at me. Large boned, heavy features, slack mouth, no expression, it was the veleda, but empty of soul. “Hello mother,” I said. “You ordered me to come. So I’m here.”
There was no response. The eyes were open, as they had always been, but they were glazed, milky lidless stare. The drops the nurses used to keep her eyes moist still glistened in the corners and stuck like little grains of sand along the sparse white lashes. I could hear her breathing and see the slight flaring of the nostrils as they absorbed air, and then exhaled. I pulled up a chair and sat beside her and waited.
It was some time before I realised her breathing was grating in her chest and becoming laboured. “Will you speak to me?” I asked. “You told me to come. Do you know that I’ve lost him?”
I saw her blink. It was the first voluntary movement I had seen her make in years. I continued to wait. A young nurse came past the corridor with a trolley and I went out and took a cup of tea. Then I returned inside and waited some more. I had my nose in the cup and was thinking not of my mother but of Vespasian, when the voice came and startled me so much, I choked. The veleda said, “It’s interesting, this business of humanity.”
I put the cup down and stared at her. Her gaze had become focused and she was looking at me, her body all long and thin and stretched out under the covers, but her face was faintly animated and she had spoken quite clearly. “Who are you?” I whispered.
“If you don’t know, why have you come?” said the woman. “I am the veleda. I am not your mother. I owe you nothing.”
I nodded. “I only came because you told me to and because you said you had a gift for me.” I paused, then muttered, “I also came because I love you.”
“I suppose,” she said, “you think it unjust, losing everyone you love.”
“Justice?” I wondered. “No, I don’t think of it that way. But I wanted very much to die and now I find it difficult to accept life alone.”
“Life and death are less separate than you think,” she said. “You are still ignorant, in spite of what you’ve learned.”
I would have liked to hold her hand, but I didn’t dare. “Are you dying then?” I asked her.
Only her eyes and her mouth moved. They were three sparks of animation in a face that already looked long dead. “Your lover Vespasian originally summoned me from the other world,” said the veleda. “Now that he is gone, I am free to release myself.”
I felt my eyes fill with inevitable tears. “He died eight hundred years ago,” I said softly.
“Fool,” she said. “Life is an eternal instant. Have you learned nothing of alchemy?” She glared, then blinked back the pale sparkle of irritation. “But this business of love interests me. Not your feelings for him; that endless circle of reproduction and lust and avarice that spins around humanity like an ouroboros. It’s your feelings for me that I find interesting.”
I lowered my eyes and watched my fingers fidget in my lap. “I still think of you as my mother,” I said.
“Absurd,” little more than a grunt but for one amazing second, I thought she smiled. “Yet you respond to cruelty with love. I believe it to be more of a strength than a weakness. I have found it worthy. The gift? It is not in exchange for the love, which is irrelevant, but for the interest which I have enjoyed from knowing you.”
“You’re paying me for being interesting by loving you when you hated me?”
“As usual,” said my mother, “you have misunderstood. I never hated you. I do not have such ridiculous emotions. But I have no wish to talk about myself. First I have some advice. Be prepared next Samhain.”
I stuttered, knowing I was foolish and afraid I might cry. “Do you mean -?” I said. “I hoped just perhaps, being Hallowe’en and knowing what happened before – I thought it possible, if the doors opened between the worlds, then he might come back. Vespasian. I’ve been hoping so much. Just for the one night of course. I thought he might come back to me.”
My mother’s eyes narrowed but the tiny black specks of her pupils widened. “It is not your Vespasian who will return,” she said. “It is Arthur. When the witching hour seeps through and unites all worlds, then Arthur will be searching, not for lost love, but for you. Be well prepared.”
I shivered. I wiped my nose. “What can I do in this modern world with a ghost such as that?”
“You need not face him alone,” said the veleda.
I waited. The silence seemed to spread into me and I was suddenly afraid that she’d died, with her eyes open and the words of my gift lost on dead lips. Then I saw she was still breathing. “Please tell me,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”
“You are still the gatekeeper,” she answered at last. Her voice was fading. “You took back your power when you banished Lilith. You still hold those keys. It is how you returned here, once the other child in you tried to die. The keys are my gift. Even once I’m gone, you will still hold the keys. They are utterly yours.”
“Without you?” I whispered.
“Call on Janus,” she said. “Call on Hermes, on Cernunnus and on Thoth. Use the alchemy you learned before. Your world is modern but magic is old. Remember the unchanging power you still have. If you want him, you can bring him back. Discover the courage to open the gates and call him through.”
My voice echoed in my head as if it came from far away. “In truth? Not just in dreams?”
“Fool,” she said again. “I’ve already told you that dreams are more real than the dull substance of reality. But if you want him solid, in the physical forms of this dreary place, then take him. Do you think I’ve given you a power so pathetic, so feeble, that you cannot summon one miserable soul from the other side? If you want him, you can have him. It was he who brought me to this incarnation, and therefore it was he who personally caused your birth, not by seed but by spirit. You are bound to him, and he to you.”
I was nursing my hand as I often did, gently cradling the finger that supported Vespasian’s ring. The gold felt always cold, the ruby warm. “I have his ring,” I said, nodding. “It came to me. I hope that somehow, it was he who sent it. In exchange, I have lost my heart.” I was staring at the ring, then looked up at my mother. “But I cannot resurrect the dead,” I shivered. “That is a blasphemy. I do not believe I can ever do such a thing.”
She did not answer me. When they found me still sitting there beside her in floods of tears, they thought it was because she had died, all white in her white bed, as I bent over with my tears on her blank face, holding her hand for the first time in twenty nine years.
I do not remember the journey home. Bertie was waiting for me with tea and dinner and gentle sympathy. I found it very hard to talk. He thought it was because my mother was finally dead. I let him think so. Perhaps, a little bit, it was.
For the rest, I was completely confused.
Chapter Sixty Two
It was a warm June, with magpies on the wing, iridescent over the fields, and a kestrel nesting at the top of the church spire. A cricket sat persistent in my garden on warm after
noons, reminding me of lost contentment.
I had buried my mother but I spoke to her often in my dreams, asking her to explain what I was supposed to do and how to bring him back. I could find no hint of power within myself. I gathered herbs at night. I made elixirs in the moonlight. I went to bed early and curled myself into a ball and sobbed. I cut the tarot pack, and always came up with the card of The Moon, or of The Star, or The Fool. I could not find Judgement, because it was no longer there.
I walked up on the hills in the sunshine and trudged through the sheep droppings and picked buttercups and Old Man’s Beard and sat on the mossy stone overlooking the village and called on Janus and Hermes, on Cernunnus and Thoth, and prayed to God, and half expected to see my lover come striding over the rise, with his fur lined cloak blowing in the breeze and his black hair flying loose all about his beautiful face. And when he did not, I cried and went home with red rimmed eyes and told Bertie it was the wind, whether there had been any or not.
I walked through the woods and sat for hours under the yew tree beside the pool. Sometimes I slept there. I dreamed, as I always did, of Vespasian, but when I woke, he was never there. At home I curled in the big chair and read, and burst into tears at regular intervals.
“Good God, Mol,” said Bertie. “I should read a different book if I were you. That one is just turning you into a dish cloth. No point reading sad books when you’re not feeling all that bright yourself.”
But it was a different book each time and they were all happy stories and that was the trouble.
Then I started vomiting, lurching in and out of nausea, and being suddenly sick in the loo after a mad dash. I wondered if one of my silly elixirs had poisoned me, though it had been days since I had bothered making one. Bertie neither held my fevered brow nor wiped my face. In fact, he kept his distance and complained about the smell. What he did do, was call the doctor.
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