The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,180

candle, she kindled the very fire that burnt her to death.”

“Do not make the same error, Deborah!” I whispered, even as I kissed her face. “No one instructs a daimon, for that is what this is.”

“Oh, no, it is more than that,” she whispered, “and you are most mistaken. But don’t fear for me, Petyr. I am not my mother. There is no cause.”

We sat then in quiet by the little fire, though I could not think that she would want to be near it, and as she leaned her forehead on the stones above it, I kissed her again on her soft cheek, and brushed back the long vagrant strands of her moist black hair.

“Petyr,” she said, “I shall never live in hunger and filth as she lived. I shall never be at the mercy of foolish men.”

“Don’t marry, Deborah. Don’t go! Come with me. Come into the Talamasca and we shall discover the nature of this creature together … ”

“No, Petyr. You know I will not.” And here she smiled sadly. “It is you who must come with me, and we shall go away. Speak to me now with your secret voice, the voice in you that can command clocks to stop or spirits to come, and be with me, and be my bridegroom, and this shall be the witches’ wedding night.”

I went to answer her with a thousand protests, but she covered my mouth with her hand, and then with her mouth, and she went to kissing me with such heat and charm that I knew nothing anymore, but that I had to tear from her the garments that bound her, and have her there in the bed with the green curtains drawn around us, this tender childlike body with its woman’s breasts and woman’s secrets which I had bathed and clothed.

Why do I torture myself to write this? I am confessing my old sin, Stefan. I am telling you all that I did, for I cannot write of this woman without this confession and so I go on.

Never have I celebrated the rites with such abandon. Never have I known such voluptuousness and sweetness as I knew in her.

For she believed herself to be a witch, Stefan, and therefore to be evil, and these were the devil’s rites to her that she celebrated with such willfulness. Yet hers was a tender and loving heart, I swear it, and so the mixture was a rare and powerful witch’s brew indeed.

I did not leave her bed till morning. I slept against her perfumed breast. I wept now and then like a boy. With a temptress’s skill, she had wakened all of my flesh to her. She had discovered my most secret hungers and had toyed with them, and fed them. I was her slave. But she knew that I would not stay with her, that I had to go back to the Talamasca, and for hours finally she lay quiet and sad staring at the wooden ceiling of the bed, as the light came through the seams of the curtains and the bed began to grow warm from the sun.

I dressed wearily and without desire for anything in the whole of Christendom but her soul and her flesh. Yet I was leaving her. I was going home to tell Roemer what I had done. I was going back to the Motherhouse, which was indeed my mother and my father, and I knew no other choice.

I thought now she will send me off with curses. But it was not to be. One last time, I begged her to remain in Amsterdam, to come with me.

Good-bye, my little priest, she said to me. Fare thee well, and may the Talamasca reward you for what you have given up in me. Tears she shed, and I kissed her open hands hungrily before I left her, and put my face once more into her hair. “Go now, Petyr,” she said finally. “Remember me.”

Perhaps a day or two passed before I was told that she had gone. I was disconsolate and lay weeping and trying to listen to Roemer and to Geertruid, but I could not hear what they had to say. They were not angry with me as I had thought they would be, that much I knew.

And it was Roemer who went to Judith de Wilde and purchased from her the portrait of Deborah by Rembrandt van Rijn which hangs in our house to this day.

It was a full year perhaps