“Whatever you may be, little witch, you have me in your power and I am transformed. I did not know how strange and cold an existence I had before you touched me. I was dead and I did not know it. How strange to discover myself perhaps only moments away from my own death—for, beloved, my brother does not give up a hunt. It’s possible, Electra, that he is more determined to capture me than you. Henri Le Cherche has long sought a reason to destroy me and now I have given him one. I have taken his property, his amusement—you, in other words—and provided him with the reason to kill me that he has always wanted.”
“How could such a creature be your brother? How could such a monster as he be connected to you by blood!”
“Oh, my love, we are deeply connected. Why do you think there is such enmity between us? Only creatures who see themselves in each other could feel the kind of hatred we feel.”
“That cannot be true.”
His fists clenched and he took her face roughly in his hands, his voice suddenly gone wild, free of any restraint. “You do not know what was in my heart when I was a younger man! Why do you think I withdrew into a shell of myself, a creature who conducted his affairs with the world as if he had no feeling? In my youth I saw the danger I was in. I knew what I could become—I watched my brother become it, and it disgusted me. I withdrew into an icy numbness to keep myself safe from those feelings—all feelings—while my brother did the opposite and refined those feelings into elegant perversions. You have not seen his machines, his leathern toys. You have not been forced to play any of his particular games with him or his … clients. My brother has no experience of women as people—they are things to subjugate, humiliate. He fears them, and he has made fortunes by selling them to other, similar men and providing them with the perversities that satisfy their urgent compulsions.”
She saw the depth of his horror and despair and cried out, flung the whole of her spirit and will between him and what so terrified him. “Basil. My love. That is not you!”
“You do not know what has been in my heart … my mind! My brother and I share more than blood. I have struggled all my life to make my nature the opposite of his! I have closed it off and now it is opened. You have opened it, and I fear as well as welcome what has happened to me now. I have only the love I feel for you as a beacon to guide me! Electra Gates, until you I had never met a woman I regarded as an equal. I controlled them, and so they had no power to move me. But now I have met my match, my savior! I am not talking to you now as one bound by custom or convention, Electra Gates. I speak to you as if we had passed together through the grave and into the next world, shorn of everything but the truth. And in that next world we would stand before God as equals. As we are.”
“As we are!” Electra repeated. “I am not afraid of your past, Basil Le Cherche, or of what you have felt. I know who you are—be only that and I will be satisfied completely. Be the man I see before me now and I will move any mountain to remain by that man’s side.”
He swept her into his embrace, pressing her body against the length of his own, drowning them both in a kiss as sweeping and deep as the currents flowing beneath and around them, and they were carried.
NEAVE
You Should Be Married
The day after I refused Max’s advice to sleep aboard the Rubber Duck, Jane called me to say that Lilly hadn’t come to pick Annie up when she’d said she would. I looked at the clock: 7:07 p.m. What time did she say she’d be there? I’d asked. “Right after she left the office,” Jane said. “She said she expected to be here at six. Neavie, when did she leave work?”
Lilly hadn’t left the office, because she’d never come in at all. This wasn’t that unusual, especially in the weeks before a conference. Lilly’s work took her far and wide, to manufacturers and speakers and meeting planners and cosmetics events. She had a cavalier attitude about telling us her movements, and more than once we’d seen her disappear from the office for a couple days and return, triumphant, with a contract to rent five boats and an entire island for a scavenger hunt and an invoice for some kind of glittering prize to use at the end of the game. Isn’t that brilliant! she’d say when she surfaced back at the office. Won’t we have fun! I said all this to my sister Jane.
“Neave, you know she can be late for some things, but she’s never, never been late to pick up Annie. And she didn’t come.”
I remember looking at a grease stain on a crumpled brown paper bag in my trash can and knowing this was all wrong, that everything was changed in an instant and my life might never be all right again.
“She’ll call,” I said.
Lilly did not return that night. We told Annie that her mom was on business and Aunt Jane was going to keep taking care of her for a little while. We told the girls in the office that Lilly had a migraine.
Four days later there was still no sign of Lilly, and migraines don’t go on forever. Five days in, we admitted to Annie that we didn’t know where her mom was. I looked at Annie sitting on Jane’s living-room sofa, a quiet, pale face under a mop of black curls. Her eyes got greener when she was unhappy and bluer when she was pleased. They were very green now. “Don’t be frightened,” I said to her. “It’ll be fine.”
All my life I’d made a habit of not lying in general, but in particular not lying to children. I’d been especially careful not to lie to Annie, because I wanted her trust. But at that moment I wanted her to love me more than I wanted her to trust me, so I lied. I stood there and felt every muscle in my face arguing with me and I said, “It’ll be fine.” She didn’t believe me, of course. Her little body was braced—she could feel something evil even if she didn’t know what it looked like or where it came from. Or maybe that was me, bracing, feeling everything around me braced.
“It’s all right, Aunt Neave,” she whispered, and I turned my head to get a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Sure enough, I was wearing the kind of face that would leave poor Annie offering me comfort, offering me the very first lie I had ever heard her tell. I shouldn’t even be in the same room with Annie if I wanted her protected. I was terrifying. “Maybe,” Annie whispered, to no one in particular, “maybe he’ll give her back.”
At work I kept acting like there was an annual sales conference coming up and there was work to be done. The trapeze troupe that Lilly had hired called, looking for a final signed contract. “Lessons,” their manager insisted. “Miss Terhune added a budget line for us to give volunteers from the audience a flying-trapeze lesson. She asked us if we could get a couple salesgirls up on the swings safely, do something easy but flashy and we discussed pricing. We need the amended agreement…”