Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [131]
“Don’t try to decide these things now,” I said. I felt so sorry for her. And in my heart I felt a burning concern for the tasks that lay ahead of Rowan.
“Maharet’s words are clear.” She went on in the same torn voice, her eyes never turning to me or to Quinn. “It was nature taking its course. It was inevitable.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” said Quinn. “But it is finished.”
I turned, and looked at the distant villa with all its lighted windows. I looked at the broad mass of rocky jungle rising behind the brashly illuminated beach. I scanned. I caught the small beasts of the wild place, the tamarinds, the birds, perhaps a wild boar deep in there. I couldn’t tell.
Yet I was reluctant to leave. I wasn’t sure why.
I wanted to move through the jungles. The jungles I had not searched, and they were thick. Only this was not the time.
We bid the island good-bye. Quinn took Mona in his arms, and they made for the clouds.
I went back for the statue of my beloved saint, and was soon on my way to the safe refuge of Blackwood Farm.
27
I STOPPED at the flat, stripped off the leather clothes, put on a lavender dress shirt, purple tie, black linen three-piece suit, new boots, cut out for Blackwood Farm, dived into Aunt Queen’s bed and went sound asleep.
(Saint Juan Diego was on the bedside table right beside me.)
Vague memory of Mona coming in before sunrise and telling me she’d E-mailed to “the mysterious Maharet” an account of the entire event. I said: “Bravo. I love you. Get out of here.”
At sunset, when I awoke, I went out into the house to discover Stirling Oliver had come. He’d had an early supper with Tommy and Nash, who had gone into New Orleans for the evening, and was now waiting for me on the “wicker terrace” on the east side of the house.
I was so comforted by every aspect of Blackwood Farm and its unsuspecting humans that I could have wept, but I didn’t. I made a little circuit of the big rooms. No sign of Julien’s ghost. Why was he letting me off the hook? I rejoiced, whatever his reasons. Here at Blackwood Farm, the island of St. Ponticus seemed remote, the horrors of last night imagined.
The Dazzling Duo had not risen yet.
I took the statue of Saint Juan Diego and I headed outdoors.
The wicker terrace had been created by Quinn out of all the antique wicker furniture he’d found in the attic of Blackwood Farm when he was still a teenager, and he’d had it all restored and put out here, and it was quite atmospheric and charming.
The floodlights weren’t on. There were just a couple of hurricane lamps flickering away, and Stirling, in a light tweed Norfolk jacket, was smoking a cigarette. His neatly trimmed gray hair was ruffled a bit by the breeze. But otherwise he was the picture of dignity. And the picture of a mortal with whom I could be at ease and talk as if I wasn’t a monster.
I sat down in the chair opposite him, with Saint Juan Diego out of sight at my side.
There was that Fall bite in the air. I resigned myself to it, and breathed in the pure freshness of the breeze, and let my eyes linger on the pearly clouds and the frightening and inevitable little stars that soon shone through them.
“So hit me with it, baby,” I said.
“Well,” he said, his youthful eyes at once alert. “A plane of our people descended on the island as swiftly as could be managed, and collected the laptops and every other computer they could find in the mezzanine library that Oberon described to us, remnants of the Secret People that Oberon wanted saved, and they were about to take their leave when a boatload of the unsavory