sure she’d never receive again, ever. And then he winked and he said, his voice breaking:
“You really do still love me, baby.”
“Yes,” she said. “I learned how once, apparently, and it will have to be forever. Come with me, come outside, come out under the oak. I want to be near them for a while. I don’t know why. You and I, we are the only ones who know that they’re there together.”
They slipped down the back stairs, through the kitchen. The guard by the pool merely nodded to them. The yard was dark as they found the iron table. She flung herself at him, and he steadied her. Yes, for this little while and then you’ll hate me again, she thought.
Yes, you’ll despise me. She kissed his hair, his cheek, she rubbed her forehead back and forth across his sharp beard. She felt his soft responsive sighs, thick and heavy and from the chest.
You’ll despise me, she thought. But who else can go after the men who killed Aaron?
Five
THE PLANE LANDED in Edinburgh’s airport at 11:00 p.m. Ash was dozing with his face against the window. He saw the headlamps of the cars moving steadily towards him, both black, both German—sedans that would take him and his little entourage over the narrow roads to Donnelaith. It was no longer a trek one had to make on horseback. Ash was glad of it, not because he had not loved those journeys through the dangerous mountains, but because he wanted to reach the glen itself with no delay.
Modern life has made all impatient, he thought quietly. How many times in his long life had he set out for Donnelaith, determined to visit the place of his most tragic losses and reexamine his destiny again? Sometimes it had taken him years to make his way to England and then north to the Highlands. Other times it had been a matter of months.
Now it was something accomplished in a matter of hours. And he was glad of it. For the going there had never been the difficult or the cathartic part. Rather it was the visit itself.
He stood up now as this tentative young girl, Leslie, who had flown with him from America, brought his coat and a folded blanket and a pillow as well.
“Sleepy, my dearest?” he asked her, with gentle reproach. Servants in America baffled him. They did the strangest things. He would not have been surprised if she had changed into a nightgown.
“For you, Mr. Ash. The drive is almost two hours. I thought you might want it.”
He smiled as he walked past her. What must it be like for her, he wondered. The nocturnal trips to far-flung places? Scotland must seem like any other place to which he had at times dragged her or his other attendants. No one could guess what this meant to him.
As he stepped out onto the metal stairway, the wind caught him by surprise. It was colder here even than it had been in London. Indeed, his journey had taken him from one circle of frost to another and then another. And with childish eagerness and shallow regret, he longed for the warmth of the London hotel. He thought of the gypsy sleeping so beautifully against the pillow, lean and dark-skinned, with a cruel mouth and jet black eyebrows and lashes that curled upwards like those of a child.
He covered his eyes with the back of his hand and hurried down the metal steps and into the car.
Why did children have such big eyelashes? Why did they lose them later on? Did they need this extra protection? And how was it with the Taltos? He could not remember anything that he had ever known, per se, to be childhood. Surely for the Taltos there was such a period.
“Lost knowledge …” Those words had been given to him so often; he could not remember a time when he didn’t know them.
This was an agony, really, this return, this refusal to move forward without a bitter consultation with his full soul.
Soul. You have no soul, or so they’ve told you.
Through the dim glass he watched young Leslie slip into the passenger seat in front of him. He was relieved that he had the rear compartment entirely to himself—that two cars had been found to carry him and his little entourage northward. It would have been unendurable now to sit close to a human, to hear human chatter, to smell a robust female human, so sweet and