Peters and I dined on bread and soup at the entertainers' communal table. Emerson took to foraging in the small hours and seemed able to satisfy his needs in this fashion—I suspect with fruit and vegetable leftovers from Prospero's feasts.
And the days wore on. We spent the better part of a week exploring and creating a map of the place. As for the nobles and their consorts, the wealthy merchants and theirs, we saw a few in the distance but we did not see Von Kempelen. Nor did we see Annie. And while I felt as if I knew Griswold from my nightmare vision in the pit, I might have passed Templeton and Goodfellow without recognizing them.
And January passed into February. I had been afraid to take any chances until we'd gained familiarity with our surroundings. Now we were near that point, and I was wondering as to our best course of action.
Events, however, preceded any action on my part. A few days later, Peters and I were returning to the stables from our breakfast, intending to practice an act we were working out—involving some miming on his part, some acrobatics by Emerson, and a bit of buffoonery by myself. We were hoping this would gain us access to an area of the abbey hitherto closed to us. As we approached, we heard a series of piteous shrieks and we hastened to learn its cause.
Its source seemed to lie at the center of a fairly large crowd in the area immediately before the stables.
The shrieking continued as we pressed forward, but I could not see what was going on.
"Hoist me onto your shoulders, Eddie," Peters said.
I complied. I squatted, he leapt up, I grasped his ankles, I stood. He was heavy, but he was nimble. He was only at a height for a few seconds before he jumped down. He uttered an oath as he did so.
"What is it?" I asked.
"They're floggin' a lad," he said. "Just a boy. Back's all laid open. Usin' a cat."
He elbowed the man to his right.
"Hey, mate," he asked. "What'd he do?"
The man said something in Spanish.
"Stole some grain meant for the prince's horses," Peters translated. "Prospero ordered the floggin'. He and some of his men are up front, watchin'."
The shrieks stopped. We waited for the crowd to thin, as I wanted a look at Prospero. People began to drift off, and Peters inquired of another which one was the prince.
Prospero was pointed out to us—a tall, handsome man, standing among his ministers and courtiers, chuckling with them as the boy was untied. He said something then to the man who had administered the beating—what, I'll never know, as my gaze drifted past him.
She was standing in a doorway to the building off to my left, hand raised to her mouth, eyes wide with horror and quickly narrowing to dam tears. Annie. She turned away without having seen me and retreated within. In an instant I was after her.
This building—to the west—connected the monastic quarters to the castellated citadel where Prospero and his entourage had their residence and revels. There was a main corridor on every level, sided by rooms larger than the cells though lacking the magnificence of those to the north or even the spaciousness of those to the east.
I sought with my gaze in both directions when I reached the corridor. I caught sight of her fleeing form turning—northward, to my right—where I knew a stair to be located.
"Annie!" I called, but she was already out of sight.
I rushed after, and when I reached the stair I mounted it two steps at a time.
North again, this time to my left, not so far ahead now, still hurrying.
"Annie!"
She slowed, looked back, halted, studied me in the light from the clerestories as I approached. Her brow unknitted itself and then she was smiling.
"Eddie!"
She looked just as I remembered her from the visions—hair a light chestnut, ghost-gray eyes—and then she was in my arms and weeping.
"I'm sorry," she said, "so sorry. I didn't mean it."
After a time, I asked, "What are you talking about?"
"This. All of it," she explained, gesturing. "Poe's sufferings. Yours. Mine. I'm sorry."
I shook my head.
"I still don't understand what you're saying."
"All my life," she told me, "I've tried to bring the three of us together—in one solid, real world. Not just my kingdom, by the sea. That's why we're here. Templeton was able to take my efforts and twist them some way. I still don't know how—"
"I do," I said. "That way is closed to him now. On the other hand, he apparently could use you directly—with drugs and mesmerism—as he did in Toledo."
"Toledo?"
"The pit, the pendulum. Ligeia said he used you to warp my senses—possibly even reality itself. I still don't know how much of what happened in that prison was real, how much hallucination."
"The pit and the pendulum!" she exclaimed. "You really lived through it? I thought it just a nightmare I'd had. I—"
"It's all right. It's over. It's done with now. You were tricked."
I wondered as I held her: I had never considered that our uncanny tripartite relationship might be based on unnatural efforts on her part. In truth, I had always seen Poe and myself somewhat as rivals for her affection. It had been a long time now, though, since I had borne my poor double anything but a species of fondness; I thought of him rather as my brother, and felt a fierce wish to help him defend himself against our common enemies. But that Annie might be the source of everything—
"He is forgetting us, you know," Annie told me, drawing away, producing a handkerchief from her sleeve, drying her eyes. "Not me so much, not yet at least. But already he has more than half forgotten you. And he doubts the existence of any other world than the one he's being forced to live in. He doesn't realize that he is now condemned to live in the wrong world."
"I've already seen evidence of this," I said, "and I'm sorry for him. But there seems little I can do about it at present. Whereas now I've finally found you, I can get you out of this madhouse, take you someplace peaceful. Perhaps then we can work out a way to help him."
"Not that simple," she said. "Not that simple. But tell me, who is this Ligeia you mentioned?"
I felt my face grow warm.
"Why, she works for Seabright Ellison," I said, "the man who set me on this trail. She seems a powerful mesmerist, possibly something more. Why do you ask?"
"Ligeia was my mother's name," she replied, "and it's such an uncommon name that it startled me, hearing it."
"Was she tall, dark-haired, more than a little attractive?" I asked.
"I don't really know," she said. "I was raised an orphan, like you, like Poe. I'd been left with relatives while my parents traveled abroad. When the relatives died in an accident I was taken in and raised by friends of theirs. They moved about. My parents never came for me. My step-parents told me my mother's name, but they had no likeness of her that I might see."
"What was your father's name?"
"I'm not sure."
"Was it Valdemar?"
"I—I don't know... . It could be. Yes, it might."
I caught hold of her hand.
"Come on," I said. "We can sort these things out later. Let's get out of this place, this country, this world if we have to. I've a secret means of leaving the abbey."
She walked with me, down the stairs, back along the lower corridor, out into the courtyard, where I found Peters and introduced them. Peters was no longer alone. He had with him now a dainty, dark-eyed midget girl he had just met, another of the entertainers. He introduced her to us as Trippetta. She was a dancer, and he explained that she was a Ree Indian from a village on the upper Missouri very near where he himself had been born, and possibly even distantly related.
I was loath to discuss our business before the diminutive lady no matter what her degree of consanguinity with my friend. Fortunately she was on her way to a rehearsal and bade us adieu moments later, though not before she and Peters had arranged to meet again later in the day.
"I don't know that you should have made that date," I said, after she had left. "I'm trying to persuade Annie to leave with us today."