The Taker (22 page)

S
he’s dying. She won’t make it through the day.”

It was Alejandro’s voice, his words not meant for my ears. My eyelids fluttered. He stood next to Adair at my bedside. Both had their arms crossed over their chests in resignation, grave looks on their faces.

Here it was, the absolute end, and I still had no idea what they meant to do with me, why Adair had bothered to mislead me with a declaration of affection, or ply me with homeopathic potions but refuse me a doctor’s care. At that point, his strange behavior made no difference: I was about to die. If it was my body they were after—for medical dissection or experimentation, to use in a satanic ritual—there would be no one to stop them. After all, what was I but a penniless and friendless vagrant? I wasn’t even their servant; I was less than that, a woman who let strangers do what they pleased with her in exchange for shelter and a meal. I would have cried for what I’d become but the fever had dried me up, leaving me without tears.

I couldn’t help agreeing with Alejandro’s conclusion: I had to be
dying. A body could not feel this bad and live. Inside I was on fire, every muscle burning. I ached. With each breath, my rib cage creaked like a rusty bellows. If I weren’t sorry to be taking Jonathan’s baby with me and so afraid of the heavy weight of the sins for which I would be judged, I would have prayed for God to show me mercy by letting me die.

I had only one regret, which was that I’d never see Jonathan again. I’d believed so strongly we were destined to be together that it seemed inconceivable we could be separated, that I would die without being able to reach out and touch his face, that he would not be holding my hand as the last breath escaped me. The gravity of my situation became real to me at that moment: my end was here, there was nothing I could do, no entreaty to God that would change that. And the thing I wanted above all else was to see Jonathan.

“It’s your decision,” Alejandro said to Adair, who hadn’t spoken a word. “If she pleases you. Dona and Tilde have made their positions clear—”

“It’s not up for a vote,” he growled. “None of you has a say in who joins our household. You all continue to exist at my pleasure”—did I hear him correctly? I thought not; his words slurred and boomed in my head—“you continue to serve me at my pleasure.”

Adair stepped beside me and ran a hand over my sweaty brow. “See the look on her face, Alejandro? She knows she is dying and yet she fights. I saw that look on your face, on Tilde’s … it is always the same.” He cupped my cheek. “Listen to me, Lanore. I am about to give you a rare gift. Do you understand? If I do not intervene, you will die. So this is to be our bargain … I am ready to catch you as you die and bring your soul back to this world. But that means you will belong to me entirely, more than just your body. To own your body, that is an easy thing, I can do that now. I want more from you; I want your fiery soul. Do you agree to this?” he asked, searching my eyes for a reaction. “Prepare yourself,” he said to me. I had no idea what he was talking about.

He leaned close, like a priest about to hear my confession. He held a silver vial as slender as a hummingbird’s beak and pulled a stopper
out—more like a needle than a stopper. “Open your mouth,” he commanded, but I was frozen with fright. “Open your damn mouth,” he repeated, “or I will crack your jaw in two.”

In my confusion I thought he might be offering last rites—I was from a Catholic family, for all intents and purposes—and I wanted absolution for my sins. So I opened my mouth and closed my eyes, waiting.

He smeared the stopper against my tongue. I didn’t even feel it—the instrument was minute—but my tongue immediately went numb and was seized with the most vile taste. My mouth watered and I began to convulse; he pushed my mouth shut and held it, pinning me to the bed as I was racked with seizures. Blood welled in my mouth, made bitter and sour by the potion he had put on my tongue. Had he poisoned me to hasten my dying? I was lost in my own blood and could feel nothing else. In the back of my mind, I heard Adair mumble, words that made no sense. But panic had replaced all else, especially logic. I didn’t care what he was saying or why he was doing this, I was completely in shock.

My chest squeezed, the pain and panic excruciating. My lungs no longer worked—pump rusted bellows, for God’s sake. I couldn’t breathe. I know now that my heart was stopping and was unable to make my lungs work. My brain flailed. I was dying, but I wouldn’t die alone. My hands went instinctively to my belly, cupping the small mound that had just begun making itself undeniably evident.

Adair froze, realization breaking on his face. “My God, she is pregnant. Did no one know she was with child?” he roared as he spun around, flinging an arm at Alejandro behind him. My body was shutting down, piece by piece, and my soul was terrified, searching for a place to go.

And then it ceased to be.

I woke up.

Of course, the first thing I thought was that the terrible episode had been a dream or that I’d passed the peak of my illness and was
recovering. I found momentary comfort in these explanations, but I couldn’t deny that something terrible and irrevocable had happened to me. If I concentrated very hard, I remembered blurred visions, of being held against the mattress, of someone carrying away a large copper basin filled with thick, foul-smelling blood.

I woke in my pauper’s bed in the tiny room, but the room was ghastly cold, the fire long since died out. The curtains over the sole window were drawn, but there was a sliver of overcast sky visible where the panels met. The sky had that gray cast of a New England autumn to it, but even those tiny chinks of light were bright and chalky, and painful to look at.

My throat burned as though I’d been forced to drink acid. I decided to go searching for a draft of water, but when I sat up, I was thrown immediately to my back as the room circled and spun. The light, my equilibrium … I felt terribly sensitive, like an invalid altered by a prolonged illness.

Aside from my throat and my fiery head, the rest of me was cold. My muscles no longer burned with fever. Instead, I moved sluggishly, as though I’d been left to float in cold water for days. One very important thing had changed and I didn’t need anyone to tell me what it was: I no longer carried my baby with me. It was gone.

It took me about a half hour to leave the room, slowly acclimating to standing, then walking. As I inched down the hall toward the courtiers’ bedchambers, I heard the quotidian noises of the household quite precisely, with an animal’s keenness: whispered conversations between lovers in bed; the snoring of the head butler napping in the linen closet; the sound of water being drawn from the giant cauldron, perhaps for someone’s bath.

I stopped in front of Alejandro’s door, swaying on my feet, steeling myself to go in and demand that he explain what had happened to me and to my unborn child. I raised my hand to knock, but stopped. Whatever had happened to me was serious and irrevocable. I knew who had the answers and I decided to go right to the source: the one
who had placed poison on my tongue, spoken magical words in my ear, and made everything change. The one who, in all likelihood, had taken my child from me. For my lost child’s sake, I had to be strong.

I turned and strode to the end of the hall. I raised my hand to knock and again thought better of it. I wouldn’t come to Adair as a servant, asking for permission to speak with him.

The doors parted with one push. I knew the room and the habits of its occupant, and went straight to the bower of cushions where Adair slept. He lay under a sable blanket, unmoving as a corpse, his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.

“You’ve rejoined us,” he said, more a declaration than an observation. “You’re back among the living.”

I was afraid of him. I couldn’t explain the things he’d done to me, or why I hadn’t run from Tilde’s invitation at the carriage, or why I’d let any of this happen. But the time had come to confront him.

“What did you do to me? And what happened to my baby?”

His eyes shifted, settling on me, as baleful as a wolf’s. “You were dying from infection and I decided not to let you leave, not yet. And you didn’t want to die. I saw it in your eyes. As for the baby—we didn’t know you were with child. Once you’d been given the unction, there was nothing to be done for the child.”

My eyes welled with tears, that after everything—the exile from St. Andrew, surviving despite the hellish infection—my baby had been taken away from me so thoughtlessly. “What did you do … how did you keep me from dying? You said you were not a doctor …”

He rose from the bed and slipped on a silk robe. He grabbed my wrist, and before I knew what was happening, whisked me out of the room and down the stairs. “What has happened to you cannot be explained. It can only be—shown.”

He dragged me to the common rooms in the back of the house. As we passed Dona in the hall, Adair snapped his fingers at him and said, “Come with us.” He took me to the room behind the kitchen where the giant cauldrons used to cook for crowds and the other pantry
oddities were kept: fish grills, shaped to fit a fish like an iron maiden; cake tins and forms; and the half barrel of water drawn from the cistern for household use. The water glinted, black and cold, in the barrel.

Adair shoved me into Dona’s arms and gestured to the barrel with a toss of his head. Dona rolled his eyes as he yanked up the sleeve on his right arm and then, as swiftly as a housewife snatching up the chicken that is to be the evening’s supper, he grabbed the back of my neck and plunged my head into the water. I had no time to prepare and swallowed a lungful of water immediately. By the strength of his grip, I could tell he didn’t mean to let me go. All I could do was thrash and struggle in the hope I might knock the barrel over or that he’d relent out of pity. Why had Adair saved me from infection and a fever if he meant to have me drowned now?

He shouted at me; I heard his voice through the splashing but couldn’t make out his words. A long stretch of time seemed to pass, but I knew this must be an illusion. The dying were said in their panic to experience each of their last seconds clearly and distinctly. But I had depleted the air in my lungs; surely death would come at any moment. I hung from Dona’s hand in the water, numb with cold and terror, waiting for my end. Wanting to join the lost child, wanting—after all that had happened to me—to give up. To be at peace.

Dona yanked my head from the barrel and water coursed from my hair, down my face, and over my shoulders, spattering all over the floor. He held me upright.

“So, what do you think?” Adair asked.

“You tried to kill me just now!”

“But you didn’t drown, did you?” He handed Dona a towel, which he used to wipe his wet arm, disdainfully. “Dona held you under for a good five minutes, and here you stand, alive. The water didn’t kill you. And why do you think that is?”

I blinked the frigid water from my eyes. “I—don’t know.”

His grin was like a skeleton’s. “That’s because you’re immortal. You can never die.”

I crouched by the fire in Adair’s bedchamber. He gave me a glass and a bottle of brandy, and lay on his bed while I stared at the flames and avoided the hospitality of his alcohol. I didn’t want to believe him and I didn’t want anything he might give me. If I couldn’t kill him for taking my baby from me, then I wanted to run away from him and out of the house. Again, however, fear kept me from thinking clearly, and the last shreds of my common sense warned me that I shouldn’t leave. I had to hear him out.

Next to the bed was a curious instrument, with tubes and chambers made of brass and glass. I now know it to be a hookah, but at the time it was only an exotic contraption that bellowed sweet smoke. Adair drew on the pipe and exhaled a long stream toward the ceiling, until his eyes grew glassy and his limbs were languid.

“Do you understand now?” he asked. “You are no longer mortal. You are beyond life and death. You cannot die.” He offered the hookah’s mouthpiece to me, then pulled it back when I didn’t take it. “It doesn’t matter how someone might try to kill you—neither bow nor rifle, knife nor poison, fire nor water. A mound of earth piled on top of you. Neither disease nor famine.”

“How can that be?”

He took another long draft on the pipe, holding in its narcotic smoke for a moment before releasing it in a thick cloud. “How this came to be, I cannot tell you. I’ve thought on it, prayed on it, tried to dream on it using all manner of drugs. No answer has come to me. I can’t explain it and have come to stop looking for answers.”

“You’re saying you cannot die?”

“I’m saying I’ve been alive for hundreds of years.”

“Who in God’s universe is immortal?” I asked of myself. “Angels are immortal.”

Adair snorted. “Always the angels, always God. Why is it that when one hears a voice speak to them, they always assume it is God talking?”

“Are you saying it’s the work of the devil?”

He scratched his flat stomach. “I’m saying I have searched for answers, and no voice has spoken to me. Neither God nor Satan has taken the trouble to explain to me how this—miracle—fits into his plans. No one has commanded me to do his bidding. From this, I can only deduce that I am no one’s minion. I have no master. We are all immortal—Alejandro, Uzra, and the rest. I have made all of you, understand?” Another long draw on the pipe, a gurgle of water, and his booming voice lowered. “You have transcended death.”