Once again taking up the electric torch, she left her set of rooms and — gaining the central corridor — began walking in the opposite direction, until she reached a chamber devoted to stuffed animals. She quickly located the Norfolk kaka, set on a stand behind a rippled-glass case of mahogany.
The feather fit perfectly into a bare spot on the throat.
Back in her library, Constance glanced at the open book. The feather had been marking Poem 50.
She mentally translated the lines.
Yesterday, Licinius, a day of leisure,
We played many games in my little notebooks…
Then she noticed that — at the very bottom of the page — a small notation had been made with an elegant hand, in violet ink. The ink looked remarkably fresh:
Beloved one, I offer this poem for you.
She recognized it as a loose translation of the poem’s line 16: hoc, iucunde, tibi poema feci.
She turned the book over in her hands, amazed and perturbed. Where could this have come from? Could Proctor have brought it to her? But no — he would never presume to do any such thing, even if he thought it would ease her suffering. Besides, she was sure Proctor had never read a word of poetry in his life, Latin or otherwise. And in any case, he did not know of these secret rooms in which she’d taken residence.
With Pendergast dead, nobody knew of them.
She shook her head. Somebody had left her this book. Or was she starting to lose her mind? Maybe that was it; at times her grief was proving overpowering.
She opened the bottle of wine, poured out a glass, took a sip. Even to her, hardly a connoisseur, it was remarkably complex and interesting. She took another sip and sat down to her meal. But before commencing, she turned once again to the poem. She had read it before, of course, but not for years, and now — as she again translated the lines in her head — the poem seemed far more beautiful, more provocative, than she had remembered… and despite all, she read it through from beginning to end, slowly, with absorption and pleasure.
13
Constance woke to the sound of music. She sat up in bed and pushed the sheets to one side. She had been dreaming of music. But which piece? It had seemed full of longing, pathos, and unrequited passion.
She rose and passed out of the bedroom into her small library. These late-afternoon naps, she decided, would need to be curtailed. It was not at all her way, and she did not want them to become habitual. Such behavior — excessive or uncharacteristic sleeping — was, she suspected, a manifestation of her grief.
And yet grief was not, at the moment, what she felt — not precisely. She could not say exactly what mixture of emotions filled her, save that they were subtle and contradictory.
She had intended to spend the morning writing in her journal. Instead, she found herself translating and transcribing some of the poems of Catullus, and then — for some reason she could not quite fathom — several poems from Mallarmé’s collection, Poésies. Mallarmé’s style was notoriously difficult to translate effectively into English, and at last, growing fatigued, she turned her attention to music instead.
Since “going underground”—as she referred to it in her own mind — she had been listening to the string quartets of Shostakovich, in particular the third. The final movements always reminded her of Madeline Usher and the strange, cataleptic death-in-life fit that sealed her doom in Poe’s story. In some ways Constance, too, had been feeling buried alive, like Madeline: living in self-enforced exile beneath the Manhattan streets. The restless, anxious dissonances of Shostakovich suited her mood; their grief mirrored her own.
But this afternoon, she had reached for Brahms instead of Shostakovich: the Piano Trios, to be precise. While they, too, were complex and philosophical, they were also lush, beautiful, and without the deep sadness of Shostakovich.
As she listened, a strange somnolence settled over her, and she had gone into her bedroom, intending just to lay her head on the pillow for ten minutes or so. But instead, three hours had passed: it was eight o’clock; and Mrs. Trask would have her daily meal waiting in the library elevator. Over the course of the day, rather than deciding to upbraid Mrs. Trask for the luxuriousness of the recent dinners, she had found herself wondering what the evening’s tray would contain.
She gathered up the dishes from the previous night’s meal, along with an electric torch and the half-empty bottle of wine, and went down the corridor to the secret entrance to her rooms. She pressed the unlocking trigger; the improvised stone door opened into the chamber full of Japanese woodblock prints — and then she froze in shock.
There — on the floor directly in front of her concealed doorway — sat a single flower in a cut-glass vase.
Constance released her grip, letting the silver tray, plates, and bottle drop to the floor with a crash. But it was not a reflexive movement of surprise — it was to free her hands in order to draw out the antique Italian stiletto she kept on her person at all times. Springing the blade, she shifted the beam of her torch from left to right, knife at the ready, as she peered around.
Empty. She stood there, the sense of shock giving way to a flood of anxious speculation. Somebody had been there — someone had penetrated her sanctum sanctorum.
Who was responsible for this intrusion? Who knew enough to access this most private, hidden, inaccessible of places… and what possible meaning could be ascribed to the flower?
She considered running to the stairs and ascending them as quickly as she could — leaving behind this dark sub-basement with its endless black chambers, grotesque collections, and innumerable places of concealment — to rush back to the library and the fire, back to Mrs. Trask and Proctor and the land of the living. But this impulse died quickly. Constance had never run from anything in her life. She sensed, furthermore, that she was in no immediate danger: the book of poems, the feather, the flower, were not the work of a villain. Somebody who wanted her dead could easily have killed her while she slept. Or poisoned her food. Or stabbed her as she traversed the galleries on her way to and from the elevator.
Her mind went back to the feather, marking the love poem; the fresh notation in the margin of the unfamiliar book. This was no caprice of her imagination: clearly, the person had already penetrated her secret rooms. The book, the feather, the flower — all this, it seemed to her, was a message. An eccentric message, no doubt — but a message that, though she did not understand it, had nothing of threat about it.
Constance stood quite still for about ten minutes. The shock had faded, followed by the sense of fear; but it took much longer for the uncomfortable sense that her privacy had been violated to ebb.
It did not ebb entirely.
Finally — leaving the broken plates and wine bottle on the floor, and securing a spare torch — she exited the room of Japanese prints and began a painstaking search of the sub-basement, collection by collection, room by room. She conducted her search in perfect silence, alert at all times for the faintest sound, the least glimmer of light.
She found nothing. The floor was either stone or hard-packed earth; no shoe or boot would leave an impression. Areas of dust did not seem recently disturbed. Nothing else was out of order that she could recall. The vast, shadowed-haunted galleries appeared as they always had.