Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [67]
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