by Rice, Anne
17
“This secret has to be kept by you from anyone else,” Mona said. Her voice was quaking. She had a firm hold on Quinn’s hand. “If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Quinn knows everybody at Blackwood Farm. I can have some time for my leave-taking. What did you mean when you called me Blood Child?”
Rowan looked at her across the round table. Then with sudden impersonal impatience, Rowan tore off the thick purple robe and stepped out of it, as if from a broken shell, a tense figure in a sleeveless white cotton nightgown.
“Let’s go out there,” she said, her soft deep voice more sure of itself, her head slightly bowed. “Let’s go where the other ones were buried. Stirling’s out there. I’ve always loved that place. Let’s talk in the garden.” She started walking, and only then did I notice she was barefoot. Her hem just skirted the floor.
Michael rose from the table and followed her. It seemed his eyes avoided ours. He caught up with Rowan and put his arm around her.
Immediately Mona led the way after them.
We passed through a classic butler’s pantry of high glass cabinets crammed full of vivid china, and then on through a modern kitchen, out French doors and down painted wooden steps onto a sprawling flagstone patio.
There ahead lay the huge octagonal swimming pool, shimmering with a wealth of submerged light and beyond that, a tall dignified cabana.
Long limestone balustrades enclosed the garden patches, which were bursting with tropical plants, and very suddenly the air was filled with the strong scent of the night jasmine.
Great arching branches of the rain tree poured over us from the left. And the cicadas sang loudly from the many crowding trees. There were no traffic sounds from the world beyond. The very air itself was blessed.
Mona gasped, and smiled and shook out her hair and turned for Quinn’s reassuring embrace, murmuring fast like a hummingbird beating its wings. “It’s all the same, so lovely, more lovely even than I remembered it. Nothing’s changed.”
Rowan stopped and looked up at the moving clouds as though allowing time for Mona to absorb it all. For one second she glared at me. Blood Child. File folder of facts. Then at Mona. Then at the clouds again. “Who would change such a place?” she asked gently in her low melodic voice, responding to Mona.
“We’re only the custodians,” said Michael. “Someday other Mayfairs will live here, long after we’re gone.”
We waited, clustered together. Quinn very anxious. Mona in bliss.
I scanned for the ghost of Julien. Nowhere around. Too risky with Michael able to see him.
From a black iron gateway to the left, Stirling came to meet us, ever the gentleman in crisp tailored linen, and strangely silent, and Rowan walked on, fearless in her bare feet, and pointed toward the garden from which Stirling had just come.
Stirling’s eyes locked on Mona for one quick intake of information, and then he went after Rowan and Michael back the way he had come.
We all followed into a different world, beyond the measurements of Italian balustrade and perfectly square flagstone.
It was all rampant elephant ear and banana trees back here, and a broad lawn beneath a huge old oak, and an iron table there and modern iron chairs, more comfortable I suspected than the relics of my courtyard. A high brick wall bounded the place opposite the gateway and a row of yews concealed it from the carport to the left, and an old two-story wooden servants’ quarters shut it off from the world to the right, the building itself mostly hidden from us by high thick ligustrum.
There was someone out there in the servants’ quarters. Sleeping. Dreaming. An elderly soul. Forget about it.
Wet earth, random flowers, mingling, rattling leaves in the wet summer air, all the night songs, scent of the river only eight blocks from here over the the Irish Channel, where a train whistle cut the night, leading the distant soft roar of box cars.
The cicadas died down suddenly, but the song of the tree frogs was strong, and there were the night birds, which only a vampire could hear.
Low lights along the cement path provided a very feeble illumination. And there were other such beacons scattered in the farthest reaches of the garden. Two floodlights fixed high in the oak spilled a soft luminescence over the scene. As for the moon, it was full but veiled behind the pink panoply of clouds, and so we were in a thin rosy and penetrable darkness, and all around us the garden was alive and balmy and seeking to feed upon us with countless tiny mouths.
As I stepped on the lawn I caught the faint scent of the alien species, the scent that Quinn had caught when he came here as a boy led by the ghost of Oncle Julien. I saw the scent hit Mona with her heightened gifts. She drew herself up as though revolted, and then took a deep breath. Quinn dipped down to kiss her.
Stirling played host with the gathering of the chairs about the table. He tried to disguise his amazement at the vision of Mona. The miracle of Quinn as vampire he’d seen in frightening circumstances, and then again, later, the night we went to tell him that Merrick Mayfair was no more. But Mona … he couldn’t quite keep it to himself.
Rowan’s snow white gown dragged in the mud. She didn’t care. She was murmuring or singing, I couldn’t tell which or catch any words or meaning to it. Michael stared at the oak as though talking to it. Then he took off his wrinkled white jacket. He put it over the back of a chair. But he stood staring at the tree as though finishing a soliloquy. He was a big chunk of a man, gorgeously made.
Stirling helped Mona to her chair, and bid Quinn to sit beside her. I waited for Rowan and Michael.
Suddenly Rowan turned and threw her arms around me. She fastened to me about as tight as a mortal woman could do it, so much divine silk and softness to me, whispering feverish words I couldn’t catch, eyes racing over me, while I stood stark still, my heart beating frantically. And then she began to touch me all over, open hands on my face, on my hair, then grabbing up my hands and slipping her fingers through my fingers. At last she thrust my hand between her legs and then drew back shuddering, letting me go and staring into my eyes.
I came quite close to losing my mind. Did anyone have a clue as to the crash and thunder inside me? I locked the casket of my heart. I punished it. I endured.
All this while, Michael never looked at us. He had sat down at some point, his back to the oak, facing Mona and Quinn, and he was talking to Mona, singing the fatherly chant again in a soothing voice as to how sweet and pretty she was, and that she was his darling daughter. I could see all that out of the corner of my eye, and then in sheer weakness, the lock inside me broke, and all was released. I gathered up Rowan’s supple limbs and I kissed her forehead, the hard sweet skin of her forehead, and then her soft unresisting lips, and let her loose arms go, watching her slip into the chair beside Michael. Silent. Done.
I went to the other side of the table and sat beside Mona. I was bitterly full of desire. It was unspeakable to need someone in this way. I closed my eyes and listened to the night. Ravenous, repulsive creatures singing magnificently. And working the soft fertile earth, creatures of such loathsomeness I couldn’t dwell on it. And the clatter of the riverfront train unendingly. And then the absurd song of the calliope on the riverboat that took the tourists up and down the waterway as they feasted and laughed and danced and sang.
“The Savage Garden,” I whispered. I turned away as if I hated them all.
“What did you say?” Rowan said. Her eyes broke from their feverish movement just for one moment.
Everyone went quiet, except the singing monsters. Monsters with wings and six or eight legs, or no legs at all.
“It’s just a phrase I used to use for the Earth,” I said, “in the old times when I didn’t believe in anything, when I believed the only laws were aesthetic laws. But I was young then and new to the Blood and stupid, expecting further miracles. Before I knew we knew more of nothing, and nothing more. Sometimes I think o
f the phrase again when the night is like this, so accidentally beautiful.”
“And now you do believe in something?” Michael asked.
“You surprise me,” I said. “I thought you’d expect me to know everything. Mortals usually do.”
He shook his head. “I suppose I have a sense,” he said, “that you’re figuring it all out step by step, like the rest of us.” He let his eyes wander over the banana trees behind me. He seemed preoccupied by the night, and deeply hurt by things I couldn’t hope to learn from him. He didn’t mean to show it off, this hurt. It simply became too great for him to conceal, and so his mind drifted, almost out of courtesy.
Mona was struggling not to cry. This place, this secret backyard, so well hidden from the world of the Garden District streets with its crowded houses, was obviously sacred to her. She slipped her right hand into my left. Her left hand was in Quinn’s hand, and I knew she held him as tight as she held me, pressing for reassurance over and over again.
As for my beloved Quinn, he was severely discomforted and unsure of everything. He studied Rowan and Michael uneasily. Never had he been with this many mortals who knew what he was. In fact, he had never been with more than one, and that was Stirling. He, too, sensed the presence of the old one in the back house. He didn’t like it.
And Stirling, who had correctly surmised that the disclosure had been made, that Rowan was now subdued and deep in thought, seemed frightened in a dignified way also. He was to my far left, and his eyes were on Rowan.
“What do you believe in now?” Mona asked me, her voice unsteady but insistent. “I mean, if the old resignation of the Savage Garden was wrong, what has replaced it?”
“Belief in The Maker,” I replied, “who put it all together with love and purpose. What else?”
“Amen,” said Michael with a sigh, “someone better than us, has to be—somebody better than every creature who walks the Earth, somebody who shows compassion.…”
“Will you show compassion to us?” Quinn asked. It was sharp. He looked directly at Michael. “I want my secret kept as well as Mona’s.”
“Trouble with you is you think you’re still human,” Michael replied. “Your secret’s utterly safe. It will be exactly the way you want it. Wait a safe period of time. Then Mona can return to the family. It’s not a difficult thing at all.”
“This seems amazingly easy for you,” Quinn replied suspiciously. “Why is that so?”
Michael gave a short bitter laugh. “You have to understand what the Taltos was, and what they did to us.”
Rowan said in a low voice, “And what I did to one of them too quickly, too foolishly.” Her eyes moved away into memory.
“I don’t know or understand,” said Quinn. “I think what Lestat had in mind was an exchange of secrets. There are things Mona simply can’t explain. They hurt her too much. They involve you. She becomes caught up in a web of loyalty, and she can’t be free. But one thing is clear. She wants to find her daughter, Morrigan.”
“I don’t know if we can help,” said Michael.
“I can look for Morrigan now myself,” Mona protested. “I’m strong again.” Her hand tightened on mine. “But you have to tell me all you know. For two years I lay in that bed confused and crazy. I’m still mixed-up. I don’t know why you haven’t found my daughter.”
“We’ll take you all through it again,” said Michael soothingly.
Rowan murmured under her breath, then came to the surface, eyes remote, uncertain, moving rapidly again over the table as over nothing.
“I knew about you,” she said. Her words were hushed and ran on smoothly, “I mean, what you are—Blood Children, Blood Hunters, Vampires. I knew. It wasn’t a simple matter. Michael knew. The knowledge came in stages.” She looked directly at me for the first time as she continued:
“I had seen one of your kind one time, walking, in the Quarter. It was a male with black hair, very handsome, and set apart from everything around him. He appeared to be searching for someone. I’d felt a paralytic conflict, an attraction to him, and a fear of him also. You know my powers. They’re not developed as they ought to be. I’m a witch who won’t be a witch, a Mad Scientist who won’t be Mad. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to follow him. It was a long time ago. I never forgot about it—knowing he wasn’t human, and that he wasn’t a ghost. I don’t think I told anyone about him.
“But then this woman disappeared from the Talamasca. Her name was Merrick Mayfair. I hadn’t known her, but I’d known of her—that she was a colored Mayfair, descended from a downtown branch of the family. I can’t remember. I think it was Lily Mayfair, yes, or was it Lauren—I despise Lauren, Lauren has an evil mind—Lauren who told me there were lots of colored Mayfairs, but this Merrick wasn’t very close to any of them. This Merrick, she had tremendous psychic powers. She knew about us, the First Street gang, but she really didn’t want contact. She’d spent most of her life in the Talamasca and we’d never even known of her. Mayfairs hate it when they don’t know about Mayfairs.
“Lauren said that she’d come once, this Merrick Mayfair, when the house was opened for a Holiday Tour, you know, a benefit for the Preservationists, after Michael had restored everything, after all the bad times were over, and before Mona was really sick. This person, Merrick, she’d gone through First Street with the tourists, imagine, just to see the nucleus. And we hadn’t been here. We hadn’t known.”
A sword went through me at these words. I glanced at Stirling. He too was suffering. I flashed back on Merrick climbing on the flaming altar, taking with her into the Light the spirit that had plagued Quinn all of his life. Don’t reveal. Don’t revive. Can’t help.
But Rowan was talking about a time long before the other night when Merrick disappeared forever. Rowan was talking about Merrick’s turning to us.
“Then she disappeared,” Rowan said, “and the Talamasca was thrown into confusion. Merrick gone. Whispers of evil. That’s when Stirling Oliver came South.” She looked at Stirling. He was watching her fearfully but calmly.
She lowered her eyes again, her voice continuing soft and low, just above a threatening hysteria.
“Oh yes,” she said to me, “I know. I thought I was losing my mind at times. I built Mayfair Medical not to be the Mad Scientist. The Mad Scientist is capable of the unspeakable. Dr. Rowan Mayfair has to be good. I created this immense Medical Center to commit Dr. Rowan Mayfair to good. Once this plan was under way, I couldn’t afford to go down into madness—dreaming of the Taltos and where they’d gone, dreaming of strange creatures I’d seen and lost without a trace. Mona’s daughter. We tried everything we could to find her. But I couldn’t live in a shadow world. I had to be there for all the ordinary people, signing contracts, rolling out blueprints, calling doctors all over the country, flying to Switzerland and Vienna to interview physicians who wanted to work in the ideal medical center, the medical center that surpassed every other in its equipment, its laboratories, its staff, its comforts, its protocols and projects.
“It was to rivet me to the sane world, it was to push my own medical visions to the very limits—.”
“Rowan, it’s a magnificent thing that you did,” Quinn said. “You speak as though you don’t believe in it when you’re not there. Everyone else believes in it.”
She went on in the same soft rush of words as though she hadn’t heard him. “All kinds of people come to it,” she said, her words flowing as if she couldn’t stop them, “people who have never given birth to Taltos, people who have never seen ghosts, people who have never buried bodies in a Savage Garden, people who have never seen Blood Children, people who have never even hoped for the extraordinary in any form, it helps all manner of human beings, it embraces them, it’s real to them, real, that’s what was important. I couldn’t let it go, I couldn’t ever retreat into nightmares or scribblings in my room, I couldn’t ever fail my interns and residents, my laboratory assistants, my research teams, and you know, with my background, the neurosurgeon, the s
cientist at heart, I brought to every aspect of this giant organism a personal approach; I couldn’t run away, I couldn’t fail, I can’t fail now, I can’t be absent, I can’t.…”
She broke down, her eyes closed, her right hand forming a fist on the table.
Michael looked at her with quiet sadness.
“Go on, Rowan,” I said. “I’m listening to you.”
“You’re making me angry,” said Mona in a low sharp voice. “I think I hate you.”
I was appalled.
“Oh, yes, you always did,” Rowan said, raising her voice but not her wandering eyes. “Because I couldn’t make you well. And I couldn’t find Morrigan.”
“I don’t believe you!” Mona said.
“She’s not lying to you,” said Quinn in a chastising voice. “Remember what you just said. For years you’ve been sick, confused.”
“Mona, honey, we don’t know where Morrigan is,” said Michael.
Mona leaned against Quinn and he put his arm around her shoulder.
“Tell us, Rowan, tell us what you have to say,” I said. “I want to hear it.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said Mona, “go on with the Saga of Rowan.”
“Mona,” I whispered, leaning to clasp her head and draw her to me, my lips at her ear: “these are mortals and with mortals we have a certain eternal patience. Nothing is as it was. Curb your strength. Curb your old mortal envy and spite. They have no place here. Don’t you realize the power you have now to search for Morrigan? What’s at stake here is the rest of your family.”
Reluctantly she nodded. She didn’t understand. Her mortal sickness had divided her from these people. I was only now realizing the extent of it. Though they’d come into her hospital room probably every day and all day, she’d been drugged, full of pain, alone.