Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [93]
Willie hardly knew what to say, and while he was struggling for words,Maud leaned forward and for the first time in their long association kissed him on the mouth. She left him then, and as he walked back to his hotel he imagined that finally she would be his.
And then we will win over you at last, he said in thought to the Lady in Grey.
But when morning came, and Willie went to Maud, he found her cast in as deep a gloom as he had ever seen.
“I should not have spoken to you that way last night,”Maud said, not looking away from the leaping flames of the fire, “for I can never be your wife.”
“Is there someone else?”h e asked, thinking of rumors he had heard.
“There was,”sh e replied, “and there is still, in a way. Sit with me.
There is much I should have told you long ago.”
Willie took the chair she indicated, and found himself unable to look at her. Instead, he gazed into the flames as Maud told him the truth behind things he had heard rumored and refused to believe. She told him of her French lover, of the son who had died, of the daughter who still lived.
As he listened, his heart twisted in him, and his world shifted around him, for her tone left no doubt that she spoke the truth.Willie had always accepted that others would love his Maud. How could they not? It was harder to accept that she had loved another, and how badly that other had used her.
Without a pause, Maud went from these recent sins to tell him about her belief that she had been responsible for her father’s death. At last she ended, facing him for the first time in all that long narration.
“Having done what I have done, having been what I have been, how could you marry me? You would never forget. Better, perhaps, that I should have left you to your grand romance and the poetry you make of it, but I thought I owed you truth instead.”
Her gaze dropped, and Willie realized that somehow she knew of the curse put on him by the Lady in Grey, and that she hoped that her honesty would free him—as he realized that her dishonesty had bound him, for the idealized image of herself was what linked them both to the Lady in Grey.
Yet Willie felt no stirring in his loins, though Maud’s lovely eyes were upon him. He knew that at this moment Maud would lie with him, even though she would not marry him. He felt no desire, only wrung out and weary—not from the truth Maud had offered him, but because he finally realized that though he might ask a hundred times more,Maud would never accept him.
She fears you, came the voice of the Lady in Grey, for you offer her a contentment that would rob her of her desire to act—and without action how can she redeem herself?
“I leave her then,”W illie said, and he hardly knew whether he spoke aloud or not, “to you and redemption.”
And without another word, he rose and walked out the door.
He knew, however, that Maud had only to speak and he would return, over and over again, until at last death did them part.
A Drop of
Something Special
in the Blood
BY FRED SABERHAGEN
M onday, 16 J uly, 1888—
The dream again, last night. I shall continue to call these visitations dreams, as the London specialist very firmly insisted upon doing, and it is at his urging that I begin this private record of events. As to the “dream”itself, I can only hope and pray that in setting it down on paper I may be able to exorcise at least a portion of the horror.
I awoke—or so I thought—in an unmanly state of fear, at the darkest hour of the night.
As before, the impression (whether true or not) that I had come wide-awake, was very firm. There was no confusion as to where I was; I immediately recognized, by the faint glow of streetlights coming in round the edges of the window curtain, the room in which I had lain down to sleep, in this case a somewhat overdecorated bedchamber in an overpriced Parisian hotel.
For a moment