“How did you find me?” I said. “So blessed quick. Less than a day. And with so little fuss. You must have paid that damn Jew plenty.”
“Of course we paid him,” the R— said. “But it didn’t come too dear, if that’s your worry. And as for fuss, there was none at all. Virgil had explained things in advance.”
“Virgil — had — explained,” I said. This was a lie, of course. But I could hear from the sound of my voice that I believed it. My face and neck went hot, as they do each time I apprehend a truth. I stumbled in that instant over all manner of ideas, and by the time I found it in me to answer I’d already taken his lie for gospel. He’d convinced me with his child’s mouth, wet and round and graceful. I believed what he said before I’d even understood it.
It was always that way with the R—.
So Virgil left me with Tesla as a token to the R—, I thought. A token he’d return. Like the silver hoops he passes out to his niggers. It made no sense, of course—; not then or after. But I believed it.
“The old man, his Jewy uncle,” Kennedy said. “He sent word where you were hid.”
“And that you were ill,” the R— added.
“Ill?” I said. My head was running over with voices. The echo of the R—’s voice was loudest and behind it was Virgil’s voice and behind Virgil’s was my own, fear run through it like stitching through a hem. Ill? I thought. Is that how Virgil thinks of it?
The R— and his monkey-butler of an Irishman said nothing. The R— stood with his head cocked to one side. Exactly like a spaniel, I thought. But the thought didn’t help me much.
I believed that Virgil had given me to them but I didn’t understand it. Not yet.
“I’m confident you’ll recover, Clementine,” the R— said. He gave me half a wink. “In a matter of six or seven months. N’est-ce pas?”
“I’m sure Virgil didn’t ask you to keep me locked up in this room,” I said.
The R— nodded.
“What?”
“You’ve never visited Island 37 before, Mademoiselle—”
“I never was invited.”
He nodded again. “That’s right. And with good reason. This island may offer refuge, of sorts, from the United States government—”
“Governments,” Kennedy interrupted. “There’s two guh! — guh! — governments now. The Union and the other.”
“Quite,” the R— said. The honey went out of his voice, talking to Kennedy. But he recovered it for me. “For that very reason, however, this refuge of ours holds an attraction for persons you’d not much care to come across unaccompanied. You might be mistaken for—”
“What I am, Mr. Morelle?” I said.
“What you are, Clementine, is a vision,” he said. “And you know it all too well.”
The look on his face put me on my guard. Later I’d come to despise Virgil Ball with all my might, but just then I imagined he was dear to me. So I studied the R— long and hard. I’d never have believed that Virgil would give his family to such a man. I never would have credited it. I sat quiet on my bench and looked at the R—, trying to make out what Virgil adored in him.
His voice, I decided. His voice and the way he moved through the world, sure and full of spite for earthly things. The child Jesus might have moved that way, or John the Baptist. The end of the world in the body of a boy.
That afternoon they brought Parson for a visit. I hadn’t caught sight of him since we’d got off ship but I’d known that he was still about. You could see it in their faces when he was.
Parson came into the room and sat Indian-legged on the floor. He sat himself down in a dainty way, spreading his skirts like an old madame. He was so long in the body that his flat gray eyes were on a level with my own. My face began to chill at the sight of him.
“Afternoon, Parson,” I said in a careless voice. The R— and Kennedy stood watching from the hall. From time to time an old woman doddered past with a slop-bucket in her hands.
“Afternoon, Miss Gilchrist,” Parson said, taking a fat-bellied mouse out of his pocket.
I kept my face slack, watching the mouse wriggling in Parson’s palm, working its wet gray nose into the gaps between his fingers.
“It looks to be in the way of having children,” I said.
“I found it on my way to see you,” Parson said. His voice was high and matronly. “It was building a nest under the stairs.”
I smiled at him. “What do you want with it?”
“For you to see it, miss. That’s all.”
“I’ve seen enough of mice, thank you.” I made a face. “I’ve no interest in her, Parson.”
“Do tell,” Parson said. Without another word he set the mouse on the floor and slipped a cork-soled slipper off his foot. He pursed his shriveled lips and brought the heel down on the mouse’s skull.
“Don’t! Oh! OH!” I hollered, feeling a knot of sickness loosening in my belly. The mouse’s head burst and a grayish jelly shot from its mouth onto the floor. I twisted my body to the left and vomited.
“She is with child,” Parson announced, sliding the slipper back onto his foot. “Five weeks gone.”
I looked up to find the R— at my side. He took a yellow damask kerchief from his vest and gave it to me. Then he turned on Parson with a face gone gray with anger. “You disgust me,” he said. “I asked you to discover if the girl was sick.”
Parson heaved a sigh. “I have.”
“Abomination!” the R— shrieked. “Out of my sight!”
“As you like,” Parson said. In another instant he’d gone, pulling the door shut behind him.
The R— sat down beside me and folded his hands as if we were in a church. I hadn’t been fooled by his charade but it had pleased me just the same. “Please accept my apologies, Clem,” he said. “Parson has a prejudice toward your profession.”
I gave him a crooked smile. “If he’d brought a possum to step on, or a suckling pig, you might have found out the name of the father.”
“I know his name well enough,” the R— said. He leaned across and kissed me on the nose.
“No!” I said, elbowing him away. “You’re wrong. It’s Virgil’s.”
All he did was cluck. “You’re sure?”
“I haven’t let any other gentleman spend,” I said. “Not without precautions.”
This didn’t put him out a bit. “Virgil Ball is not a gentleman,” he said, nuzzling my ear.
That was the beginning of it.
We sat together for a while and I began to feel better. He asked if I felt well enough to go for a walk. A constitutional, he said. A brief excursion. I reminded him that he had cautioned me the island was a dangerous place.
“It is, Miss Gilchrist,” he said, helping me to my feet. “It is, to the unescorted.”
We went downstairs and I stopped to admire the leaded-glass window above the bar. A scene was depicted on it, in leaves of lazuli and green, and I asked him what it was. He blew out the lantern sitting on the bar-top that I might see the picture better. This is what I saw—:
Two men sat on hour-glass-shaped stools under a low dark sky. The one on the right looked something like a young Simon of the desert, with long matted hair in curls. The one on the left I took for a likeness of Parson. Behind him, in the shadow of a little bush, a lapiscolored man was climbing out of the mouth of a sparrow.
The R— took my hand and said—:
“That is Nachiketa being interviewed by the Prince of Death.”
“It’s been some time since I read my scripture,” I said. I felt small and mildewish in front of that panorama. The red of the clouds, the high green grass, the blue of the figures on their chairs brought tears to my face and I felt myself to be looking through a paper screen onto a finer world than our own. The colors began to lap together along the edges of my sight and this made the picture more beautiful even than before.