The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,178

so tightly cinched warmed me, and the sight of her fair neck and sloping shoulders. There was not a succulent particle of her flesh for which I did not hunger. I was a rabid beast in a cage.

“Petyr,” she said looking up into my eyes, “I know that you gave the gems to your order, and that you took nothing of my thanks for yourself. So let me give you now what you wanted from me in our long journey here, and which you were too gentle to take.”

“But Deborah, why do you do this?” I asked, determined not to take the slightest advantage of her. For in deep distress she was, I could read this in her eyes.

“Because I want it, Petyr,” she said to me suddenly, and wrapping her arms around me, she covered me with kisses. “Leave the Talamasca, Petyr, and come with me,” she said. “Be my husband, and I will not marry this other man.”

“But Deborah, why do you want this of me?” I asked again.

With bitterness and sadness she laughed. “I am lonely for your understanding, Petyr. I am lonely for one from whom I need hide nothing. We are witches, Petyr, whether we belong to God or the devil, we are witches, you and I.”

Oh, how her eyes glittered as she said this, how plain was her triumph, yet how bitter. Her teeth were clenched together for an instant. Then she put her hands on me and stroked my face and neck and I was further maddened.

“You know that you desire me, Petyr, as you have always. Why do you not give in? Come with me; we will leave Amsterdam if the Talamasca will not allow you to be free; we will go away together, and there is nothing that I cannot get for you, nothing that I will not give you, only be with me, and let me be close to you and no longer afraid. I can speak to you of who I am and what befell my mother. I can speak to you of all that troubles me, Petyr, and of you I am never afraid.”

At this her face grew sad and the tears came to her eyes.

“My young husband is beautiful and all that I ever dreamed of when I sat, dirty and barefoot, at the cottage door. He is the lord who rode by on his way to the castle, and to a castle he shall take me now, though it be in another land. It is as if I have entered into the fairy tales told by my mother, and I shall be the Comtesse, and all those rhymes and songs shall be made real.

“But Petyr, I love him and do not love him. You are the first man that I loved, you who brought me here, you who saw the pyre on which my mother died, and you who bathed me and fed me and clothed me when I could not do these things for myself.”

I was past all hope of leaving this chamber without having her. I knew it. Yet so fascinated was I by the smallest fall of her lashes or the tiniest dimple of her cheek, that I let her draw me not to the bed but down upon the carpet before the little coal fire, and there in the flickering warmth she began to tell me of her woes.

“My past is like phantoms now to me,” she cried softly, her eyes growing wide at the wonder of it. “Did I ever live in such a place, Petyr? Did I watch my mother die?”

“Do not bring it back into the light, Deborah,” I said. “Let the old pictures fade away.”

“But Petyr, you remember when you first spoke to me and you told me that my mother was not evil, that men had done evil to her. Why did you believe those things?”

“You tell me if she was a witch, Deborah, and what is a witch, by God!”

“Oh, Petyr, I remember going out into the fields with her, under the moonless sky where the stones were.”

“And what happened, my dear?” I begged her. “Did the devil come with cloven hoofs?”

She shook her head, and gestured for me to listen to her and be still and be good. “Petyr,” she said, “it was a witch judge that taught her the black magic! She showed me the very book. He had come through our village when I was but a small thing, crawling still, and he