Sacrament

CHAPTER XIV

Three hours later, with the gloomy day dawned, and a second blizzard moving in, Jacob and Rosa found each other on the Skipton road, a few miles north of the valley. They'd not made an explicit arrangement to meet, yet they came to the place (from different directions: Jacob from the valley itself, Rosa from her rock in the hills) within five minutes of each other, as though the rendezvous had been planned.

Rosa was in a bit of a haze as to what she'd actually done to her pursuers, but it had turned into quite a chase, she knew.

'One of them ran and ran,' she said. 'And I was so mad when I caught up with him, I ... I ...' she stopped, frowning '... I knew it was terrible, because he was like a baby, you know? The way they get.' She laughed. 'Men,' she said, 'they're all babies. Well, not all. Not you, Jacob.'

A gust of snow-flecked wind carried the sound of sirens in their direction.

'We should be on our way,' Jacob said, looking up the road and down. 'Which way do you want to go?'

'Whichever you're taking,' she replied.

'You want to go together?'

'Don't you?'

Jacob wiped his nose, which was running, with the back of his glove. 'I suppose so,' he said. 'Until they've given up looking for us, at least.'

'Oh, let them come,' Rosa said, with a sour smile. 'I'd like to tear out their throats, every one of them.'

'You can't kill them all,' Jacob said.

Her smile sweetened. 'Can't we?' she said, for all the world like a child wheedling for some indulgence. It amused Jacob, despite himself. She always had some little performance to entertain him: Rosa the schoolgirl, Rosa the fishwife, Rosa the poetess. Now Rosa the slaughterer, so busy with her murders she couldn't remember what she'd done to whom. If he wasn't to travel alone, then who better to go with than this woman who knew him so well?

It was not until the next day, reading The Daily Telegraph in a cafe in Aberdeen, that they got some sense of what Rosa had actually done, and

even then the newspaper uncharacteristically chose discretion as to the details. Two of the four bodies found on the hill had been dismembered and some portions of one remained unaccounted for. Jacob didn't enquire as to whether she had eaten them, buried them, or scattered them along her route of retreat, for the delectation of local wildlife. He simply read the account, then passed it over to Rosa.

'They've got good descriptions of us both,' he remarked.

'From the kids,' she said.

'Yes.'

'I should go back and kill them,' Rosa drawled. Then, with a spurt of venom, 'In their beds.'

'We brought it on ourselves,' Jacob said. 'It's not the end of the world.' He grinned into his Guinness. 'Or maybe it is.'

'I vote we head south.'

'I've no objection.'

'Sicily.'

'Any particular reason?'

She shrugged. 'Widows. Dust. I don't know. It just struck me as a place to lie low, if that's what you want to do.'

'It won't be for long,' Jacob said, setting down his empty glass.

'You've got a feeling?'

'I've got a feeling.'

She laughed. 'I love it when you have feelings,' she said, lightly cupping his hand in hers. 'I know we've said some hard things to one another in the last little while-'

'Rosa

'No, no, hear me out. We've said some hard things and we meant them, let's be honest, we meant them. But ... I do love you.'

'I know.'

'I wonder if you know how much I love you?' she said, leaning a little closer to him. 'Because I don't.' He looked puzzled. 'What I feel for you is so deep in me -it goes so far down into my soul, Jacob - into the very heart of who I am. There's no seeing the end of it.' She was gazing deep in his eyes and he returning her gaze, unblinking. 'Do you understand what I'm telling you?'

'It's true for me-'

'Don't say it if it's not.'

'I swear it's true,' Jacob replied. 'I don't understand it any more than you do, but we belong together; I concede it.' He leaned a little further and kissed her unpainted lips. She tasted of gin; but beyond the alcohol was that other taste, the like of which no mouth but this, his Rosa's mouth, had in it. If any man had told him at that moment she was less than perfection, he would have killed the bastard on the spot. She was a wonderment, when he saw her like this, with unclouded eyes. And he

the luckiest man alive to be walking the earth with her. So what if it took another century to complete his work? He had Rosa at his side, an ever-present sign of what lay at the end of his endeavour.

He kissed her harder, and she replied with kisses of her own; deep, deep kisses, which inspired him to return them in kind, until they were so wrapped about each other that nobody in the place dared so much as glance their way, for fear of blushing.

Later, they adjourned to a piece of wasteground adjacent to a railway track. There, with dusk upon the isle, and another snow, they finished the lovemaking they'd left off in the Courthouse. There was no paucity of passion this time: they were so elaborately intertwined that a passenger in one of the many trains that flew by while they coupled, glimpsing them there in the dirt, might have thought they were seeing not two beings but one: a single nameless animal, squatting beside the tracks, waiting to cross to the other side.

CHAPTER XV

i

Will knew he wasn't awake. Though he was lying in his own bed in what appeared to be his own room - though he could hear his mother's voice from somewhere below - he was dreaming it all. The certain proof? His mother wasn't speaking, she was singing, in French, her voice reedy but sweet. This was absurd. His mother hated the sound of her own singing voice. She'd mouthed the words when they'd sung hymns in church. And there was other evidence, more persuasive still. The light that came in through the cracks between the curtains was a colour he'd never seen light before: a gilded mauve that made everything it fell upon vibrate, as though it were singing some song of its own, in the language of light. And where it failed to fall, there was a profound stillness, and shadows that had their own uncanny hue.

'These are the strangest dreams,' somebody said.

He sat up in bed. 'Who's there?'

'Aren't they, though? Dreams within dreams. They're always the strangest.'

Will studied the darkness at the foot of his bed from which this voice was emanating; squinting to get a clearer picture of the speaker. The man was wearing red, Will thought; a fur coat, perhaps? A peaked hat?

'But I suppose it's like those Russian dolls, isn't it?' the man in the coat went on. 'You know the ones I mean? They have a doll inside a doll inside - of course you know. A man of the world like you. You've seen so much. Me, I've seen a patch of moorland five miles square.' He halted for a moment to chew on something. 'Excuse my noise,' he said, 'But I am so damn hungry ... What was I saying?'

'Dolls.'

'Oh yes. The dolls. You do understand the metaphor? These dreams are like the Russian dolls; they fit inside one another.' He paused to chew a little more. 'But here's the twist,' he said. 'It works in either direction-'

'Who are you?' Will said.

'Don't interrupt me. I suppose it's a bit of a stretch, but imagine we're in some parallel universe in which I've rewritten all the laws of physics-'