CHAPTER 16
Megan was surprised, the next morning, to find that her interview with the duchess was neither as long nor as difficult as she had expected. The duchess was an imposing woman, but she listened to Megan’s explanation with a quiet attentiveness and an astonishing lack of rancor that led Megan to suspect that this was not the first time Theo’s mother had heard the story.
She knew she should resent the fact that Theo had obviously stolen a march on her and told the duchess all about her deception, but, frankly, Megan was glad that she was not having to face the older woman’s first reaction. She suspected that the duchess’s cool blue eyes could light with a temper to match her red hair, particularly if danger threatened one of her beloved children.
When Megan at last finished her statement, pleased that her voice had trembled only slightly, and added a final, heartfelt apology, the Duchess of Broughton regarded her for a moment, then sighed.
“I am sure you are aware, Miss Mulcahey, that I abhor lying,” she told her calmly, rising from her chair and beginning to pace. “However, in this instance, I suppose there was a certain amount of reason to your charade. Not knowing my son, you could not have realized before you came here that any tale of his murdering someone was bound to be nonsensical. And I cannot disdain the sort of love and loyalty for your brother that impelled you to try to bring down his murderer.”
“Thank you, your grace,” Megan said, making a point of getting the troublesome form of address correct. “You are very generous.”
“I am merely truthful,” the duchess responded. There was a twinkle in her eye as she went on, “I must confess that I was not entirely convinced of your qualifications, as Rafe had cabled the school where you received your training and received the less-than-reassuring news that it had closed down. Also, Anna experienced some…troubling feelings regarding you. Not, let me hasten to assure you, that she did not dislike you. She does like you, which made her doubts all the more upsetting to her. However, I trusted my instincts and those of the twins enough to let you continue for the moment. I was rather pleased, quite frankly, when Theo told me this morning what you were really doing here. It is so much more pleasant than thinking you were perhaps a thief.”
Megan struggled to keep from looking as astonished as she felt. “I—I don’t know what to say.” She smiled a little ruefully. “Obviously I must not have been as clever as I thought.”
The duchess smiled back at her. “Oh, you were clever enough, Miss Mulcahey. However, it is a mistake sometimes to confuse an easygoing manner with carelessness.”
“I can see that. I want you to know, ma’am, that I have been much torn, knowing the pain that what I believed was the truth would have caused you and your family. I am extremely fond of Alexander and Constantine.”
“As they are of you, my dear. Of course, I will begin to look for another tutor for the twins.” The duchess looked somewhat downcast at the thought. “In the meantime, I do hope that you will continue to stay with us as our guest.”
Megan stared, completely caught off guard by the request. “You want me to stay here? After what I have done?”
“Why, yes. We are all quite fond of you, not just the twins. And Theo tells me that you and he are going to look into the matter of this Mr. Barchester’s lies about Theo. It would seem the easiest thing for you to remain here. I do hope that your father and sister will come to meet us. Theo has told me how close he was to your brother.”
“Of—of course,” Megan agreed, her mind boggling a little at the thought of suggesting to her father that he call on the Duchess of Broughton.
“And if it would not be too much trouble…the twins seem to be doing so well under your tutelage. They are much more willing to work on their studies and stay out of mischief when you are overseeing them. If you could simply check on their work, keep them going in the right direction—only a few minutes a day, really—while I look for another tutor?” The duchess paused, looking hopeful and a little worried.
“Of course,” Megan agreed readily. “I will be more than happy to work with them.”
She started to take her leave, only to have the duchess hold up a hand and say, “By the way, my dear, if you are not a teacher, I confess I am rather curious. All those things that we talked about—the experimental teaching, the problems in the slums. What exactly is it you do, then?”
Megan smiled. “I work for a newspaper.”
“A newspaper? Really? How fascinating. Then the things we discussed—”
“I have written stories about them.”
The duchess brightened considerably. “I would so love to hear about them. Come here, my dear. Sit down and tell me about what you’ve written.”
Megan left the study a good thirty minutes later, feeling somewhat dazed. Things never went as one expected with the Morelands, she reflected.
Eager to atone for her deception with the duchess, she put in a full morning tutoring the twins. A good portion of it was spent going over the same territory she had covered with the duchess that morning. The twins, however, were far more interested in her brother’s death in the jungles of South America and her own plan to unmask his killer than in any of the social ills she had uncovered as a reporter.
She did not ask how they had so quickly found out about the matter. The twins were never far behind any news in the family. Megan suspected that it had much to do with their habit of hanging about in the kitchen, cadging snacks from the cook and listening to the servants’ gossip.
Their suspicion, they were quick to tell her, fell on Andrew Barchester.
“Sounds like a wrong ’un,” Alex confided. “I bet that it’s him who really killed Dennis.”
“But how? He was back at the base camp,” Megan pointed out.
Con shrugged. “Why else would he lie about Theo that way? He must be covering something up.”
“Maybe he followed them,” Alex suggested. “Maybe he didn’t like being left behind while the others went off on the adventure.”
“I wouldn’t,” Con agreed.
“Yeah, and so he sneaked out after them. Spied on them.”
“And dressed up like a priest and killed Dennis?” Megan asked skeptically. “Why would he do that?”
Con shrugged. “Don’t know. That’s what you and Theo’ll have to figure out. My guess is he was stealing stuff, and your brother caught him.”
“Maybe he dressed up like that so they wouldn’t know it was him,” Alex supplied triumphantly. “You know, when he was stealing the stuff.”
“And that’s why they figured it was a priest.”
“He doesn’t really seem like a killer,” Megan opined.
“Well, they don’t, do they?” Alex answered unarguably. “Like that chap that tried to kill Kyria. Seemed regular enough.”
“Someone tried to kill Kyria?” Megan asked, astonished.
“Oh, yes,” Con answered, as if it were quite an ordinary event. “Before she married Rafe.”
“I never knew life in England was so risky,” Megan commented.
“It’s not, usually,” Con assured her.
“It’s something about our family,” Alex added. “We have a bit more fun, I think, than most of the peerage.”
They spent another good portion of their study time regaling Megan with stories of the adventures that various members of their family had embarked upon. It was some time before she was able to pull them back to the subject of medieval history.
After lunch, Theo arrived in the schoolroom. His gaze slid over Megan, and heat began to spark along her veins even though he said nothing. She moved a cautious step back from him as he turned to the twins. Megan had spent far too much of the largely sleepless night before contemplating her relationship with Theo, and none of the answers she had come up with had given her any optimism.
She was far too attracted to him. Even though she no longer believed that he was responsible for her brother’s death, there were too many obstacles between them. A future duke, even in a family as unconventional as the Morelands, did not go about marrying an American nobody. There had been marriages between English blue bloods and American heiresses, where the American money made up for the woman’s lack of appropriate ancestors. But Megan was no heiress, and Broughton had both too much fortune and integrity for the title to be up for sale in that manner.
The truth of the matter, she knew, was that Theo Moreland could not, would not, marry a New York newspaper reporter. And she was not the sort of woman who would settle for anything else. The passion that all too often flared between them, therefore, was destined to go no further.
Megan was too honest not to admit that Theo had an effect on her that no other man had ever had. It took only the sight of him to arouse a heavy ache deep in her loins and a tingling all over her skin. She wanted him. She might even be skating perilously close to falling in love with him. But she was not foolish enough to let that happen.
After all, she was not a starry-eyed dreamer like her sister. She was a woman who knew how the world worked. And she had no intention of getting into a situation she could not handle. She had kept her heart—and her virtue—intact this long, and she intended to continue that way.
Therefore, when at last Theo got the twins shuffled off to their class with Thisbe, Megan turned to him with a businesslike air, ignoring the smile he aimed at her.
“I am ready to talk to Mr. Barchester,” she said briskly.
He raised an eyebrow at her abrupt manner, but said only, “Yes. I’ve sent for the carriage.”
Megan got her hat and gloves and busied herself with putting them on as they went down the stairs, thus neatly avoiding the arm Theo offered her. He looked at her a trifle warily, but again said nothing.
But when she stepped up into the carriage without putting her hand in the one he offered, he swung in quickly after her and asked, “Have you changed your mind about me? Have I become the villain again?”
“What?” She looked at him, but her eyes dropped before his penetrating gaze. “No, of course not. Don’t be absurd.”
“Then why are you acting as if I have the plague?”
“I am not. That’s nonsense.”
“Then why can you not look at me?”
Megan lifted her head in response and looked directly into his face. She didn’t like the way her insides quivered when she looked at him, but she ignored the sensation.
“We are going to interview Mr. Barchester together,” she said firmly. “That doesn’t mean…”
She faltered as he turned a politely inquiring gaze upon her. It occurred to her that there was no way to express her thoughts on the matter of their relationship without revealing how foolishly attracted to him she was.
“Yes?” he urged her. “It doesn’t mean what?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she finished lamely and turned to look out the window. She continued after a moment, “You are still Lord Raine, and I am still Megan Mulcahey from New York.”
An annoying twinkle started in his eyes. “I cannot argue with that.”
Megan grimaced, refusing to share his amusement. “It isn’t as if we are friends.”
“Are we not?” The amusement grew, now tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I had hoped that we were. Then what you feel for me is solely animal attraction?”
Pink stained her cheekbones, and Megan shot him a fierce look. “That is not what I meant, and you know it.”
“I am afraid that I don’t know. You are being unaccustomedly unclear,” he responded mildly, still with that irritating amusement in his eyes that told her he knew exactly how she felt about him and was rather smugly pleased with it.
Megan narrowed her eyes, but Theo was spared her hot retort by the fact that the carriage pulled to a halt in front of Andrew Barchester’s redbrick townhome.
With a flash of a grin at her, Theo exited the carriage and held up his hand to help her down. She could not avoid taking his hand without obvious rudeness, so she put her hand in his and stepped down. Even through her glove, his hand was warm and she was more aware of it than she was of the ground beneath her feet. His fingers closed around hers with just the briefest of pressures and then were gone. Megan could not resist looking up into his face, and the warmth she saw there in his eyes left her a little breathless.
Foolish, she reminded herself. Dangerous.
Neither warning seemed to weigh much against the flutter of her heart.
Theo knocked at the door, and it was opened promptly by a haughty-faced manservant, whose expression changed subtly at the sound of Theo’s name. He whisked them into the same elegant drawing room where Megan and Deirdre had visited Barchester, then bowed out of the room and went in search of his employer.
Megan’s thoughts turned to her sister as they waited for Barchester to appear. She feared that Deirdre had become attached to Mr. Barchester, and that whatever they found out in the next few minutes would hurt Deirdre. Mr. Barchester had been, at best, careless—and at worst, villainous—in what he had told her family about Dennis’s death. For Deirdre’s sake, Megan hoped that they would find out that Barchester was innocent of any ill intent.
A few minutes later, Barchester strode into the drawing room, whatever surprise he felt at their visit carefully concealed behind an expression of polite welcome. Only his eyes as they went to Megan betrayed his curiosity.
“Miss, umm…” Barchester fumbled for the false name under which she had been introduced to him at the museum party.
“Mulcahey,” Megan told him, returning his gaze with a cool, steady examination.
“Uh, yes, of course,” he replied, though his face looked more bewildered than ever. “And Lord Raine. How do you do?”
“I am quite well,” Theo replied, his voice as hard and flat as his eyes. “And my memory, it seems, must be quite a bit better than yours.”
Barchester’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?” He glanced from Theo to Megan, then back.
“Lord Raine and I have been discussing the expedition you and he took up the Amazon,” Megan said. “And I find his version is significantly different from yours.”
He looked at her, faintly puzzled. “Yes, well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”
“What I am wondering is why?” Megan went on.
“Miss Mulcahey…” He frowned at her a little and cast a glance toward Theo. “I, um…”
“He knows what you told me,” Megan explained. “There is no need for any of us to dance around the matter.”
Barchester looked shocked. “He has gotten around you? He has made you believe him?”
“I didn’t ‘get around’ Miss Mulcahey,” Theo retorted. “And if you knew her better, you would realize that no one could make her believe anything. But she knew the truth when she heard it. What we are here to find out is why you lied to Megan and her family.” Theo’s face was dark with anger, and he took a step closer to Barchester.
To Barchester’s credit, he did not back up, but faced Theo squarely. “I did not lie, my lord.”
“You told them I killed Dennis.” Theo’s eyes flashed, and his fists knotted.
Barchester swallowed, but continued to stand his ground. “I did not lie,” he repeated.
“Bloody hell! How do you have the nerve to stand there and tell me to my face that that is not a lie? You were not even there!”
“No. I was not. But anyone could have seen that you were lying. You could scarcely get the words out. Every time I asked you about the details, you were vague and obviously uneasy. You avoided conversation. Hell, you avoided me. It was clear that you were lying.”
“You are a terrible liar,” Megan conceded, turning to Theo. “I knew last night that what you said about Dennis having an accident was pure poppycock.”
Theo’s mouth twitched in irritation. “All right, yes, I am not adept at lying. I admit it. Dennis did not die the way that we said. But why the devil would you make the leap from that to saying that I killed him?”
“Because Julian saw you!”
Theo’s jaw dropped.
“Ah, you didn’t realize that, did you?” Barchester went on triumphantly. “While you were struggling with Dennis, you did not see Julian come into the cave. He saw you stab Dennis, and he hid, afraid of what you would do to him if you knew that he had witnessed the whole thing.”
“Coffey told you I killed Dennis?” Theo asked carefully. “He told you that he saw me murder him?”
“Yes. I questioned him about the story you had told me, because it didn’t ring true. At first he tried to back up your version, but when I told him that I knew you were lying, he admitted what really happened. He thought you must have been delirious from a fever, that you mistook Dennis for an enemy or something.”
“I see.” Theo contemplated the other man for a moment, then said, “Interesting that neither of you did anything about this murder you think I committed.”
Barchester shot him a scornful look. “As if our word would have meant anything against that of a marquess!”
“You didn’t even confront me about it.”
“What good would it have done?” Barchester asked him, bitterness tainting his voice. “I asked you what happened, and you lied to me. Why would that have changed if I told you I knew the truth? You would tell any official I might go to the same lie. And we had no proof to back it up.”
“You could have given me the chance, instead of believing I was guilty!” Theo shot back.
Barchester’s mouth twisted. “I had thought you were different, that you weren’t the kind of aristocrat’s son that I had gone to school with. But then you lied, and I realized that whatever egalitarian facade you put up, it was only skin deep. Scratch, and the aristocrat came out soon enough.”
“I had thought you were different, too,” Theo retorted coldly. “I thought you judged a man on who he was, how he acted with you, not on the arbitrary matter of his birth. Scratch you, and your prejudices come out clearly enough.”
“You expect me to believe that Julian lied about it? Why would he do that?”
“You tell me. I will point out one thing, though, that you might think about with your intellect instead of your prejudice. You saw me when Coffey and I came back into camp. You saw how weak my illness had left me. I wasn’t even completely over my fever. How the devil do you think I was able to overcome a fellow like Dennis in my condition? Eh? And why did Coffey hide and watch instead of coming to Dennis’s aid? Two men against one feverish one? I would think they could have brought me down.”
Barchester’s eyes shifted away from Theo. “Madness can give people inhuman strength. Delirium would be the same.”
“No doubt you would like to believe that,” Theo responded tightly. He turned toward Megan. “I think it is time for us to leave.”
Megan nodded. She gave Barchester one last long look, then swept from the room, Theo right behind her. They said nothing until they were out of the house.
Megan looked up at Theo. “Do you think he’s telling the truth? That Coffey is the one who lied about you?”
Theo shrugged. “It’s anybody’s guess. He seems convinced of what he says.”
“Yes, he does.” Megan frowned. “But why did he tell us without reservation that you did it? As if he had actually witnessed Dennis’s death? Why did he not say that he heard it from another?”
Theo shook his head. “I don’t know.” He handed her up into the carriage. Then he spoke quietly to the coachman and swung up onto the seat across from her.
The carriage pulled out into the street, went smartly down the road and turned left, then left again, coming up on the other side of the small park that lay across from Barchester’s house. The carriage pulled to a stop.
Megan, who was still ruminating on Barchester’s words, looked over at Theo questioningly. “Why are we stopping?”
“I think a little walk in the park would be of benefit to me right now.” He nodded toward the strip of greenery and trees that separated them from the street in front of Barchester’s house.
“We are going to spy on him?” Megan asked eagerly.
“I would suggest that I do it myself and send you back safely to the house, but I have a good idea what you would say to that.”
Megan grinned. “You are a smart man.”
She scrambled out of the carriage after him and took his arm to stroll into the park as if they were simply out enjoying the afternoon. They walked across the width of the park until they could see the front door of Barchester’s house.
“Let us hope that he has not left the house yet,” Theo said as he turned and began to walk parallel to the iron fence that separated the trees of the park from the street.
“Are you sure he is going to leave it?” Megan asked.
“No. But I think it is a strong possibility,” he replied. “If he was telling the truth—that Coffey is the one who lied about my having killed Dennis—then I would think he would go to question Coffey about it. It is certainly what I would do.”
“And if he doesn’t leave, then you think he was lying to us again? That the lie is his alone?”
“It seems more likely.”
“Unless, of course, they are in it together,” Megan pointed out. “Then he would go running off to see his partner in the lie.”
“True.”
They had reached the end of the park and stopped. Sheltered by the trees, they were able to look at a slant across the street and down to Barchester’s door without being seen themselves from his house.
“But what exactly is this ‘it’ they are in together?” Theo mused as he gazed through the fence railings. “What is the purpose of the lies?”
“I don’t know why they would be in it together,” Megan replied. “Or, indeed, why Mr. Barchester would be the one who made up the lie. While it is possible, I suppose, that Barchester could have done as Alex and Con surmised and followed your group, then killed Dennis, it seems an unlikely scenario. It makes more sense to me that Barchester simply accepted Mr. Coffey’s lie.”
“I agree. Which leaves us with only the question of why Coffey would have made up the lie.”
“It makes little sense for him to lie to Barchester if a villager killed my brother, as he told you. I would think that means Coffey lied because he killed Dennis himself.” Tears glittered in Megan’s eyes, and Theo put his hand over hers on his arm.
“I am sorry.”
Megan offered him a weak smile. “It is foolish, I suppose, for all this to make the wound fresher. But somehow it does. It seems so much more horrible that a man Dennis knew and trusted killed him.”
“I know. It is hard for me, too, to believe that Julian killed him.”
“The twins’ rationale makes more sense with Mr. Coffey,” Megan reasoned. “He came upon all that treasure with you. It wouldn’t have been strange for him to want some of it—many men would have. But Dennis opposed that. Perhaps Mr. Coffey tried to sneak some of it out and Dennis caught him.”
“He was stealing the treasure while dressed up in a priest’s garb?”
“Perhaps Dennis caught him in the garb and realized what he was doing—I don’t know.”
“Or perhaps I confused the scene with one of my dreams,” Theo admitted. “Aside from the delirium I suffered, I think that the healing tea they gave me to drink may have induced hallucinations. I read more about the Incas after I returned, and I learned that the priests often ingested plants that gave them visions. So I’m not entirely sure that what I saw was accurate. Dreams and reality could have blurred. It was all so vague and strange….”
“Mr. Coffey could have taken treasure out of the cave. You wouldn’t have known if he loaded some of the objects on your pack animals. You were too ill. But Dennis might have caught him. They fought, and he killed him. Then he lied to you about what happened. And when Barchester didn’t buy the accident story, he made up a different lie for him.”
“But why make up that second lie? Why not just stick to what he and I had agreed upon?” Theo pointed out.
“Well…” Megan thought for a minute. “Barchester, feeling that the story you two told was a lie, might very well have kept on questioning you, and after a while, you might have explained the truth to him. And in talking about it, one or both of you might have begun to see holes in Coffey’s story. The best thing to do was to keep the two of you from thinking about the story, from talking about what happened. If Barchester believed that you killed Dennis, he would not keep on questioning you.”
“That’s true. I wanted to put it out of my mind, but if Barchester had continued to plague me about it, I would soon have admitted what I thought was the truth. As it was, I closed it off. I avoided Barchester because of the painful reminders, and he avoided me just as assiduously. Moreover, he wrote to your father and repeated the lies, so your father never contacted me about it.” Theo grimaced. “And I fell right into the plan—not writing to your father again, being relieved when Barchester told me that he had done so.”
“Coffey must have thought that he had gotten away with it long since,” Megan agreed. “He wouldn’t have suspected that Dennis’s family would turn up after all these years, stirring up the whole matter again.”
“Look!” Theo interrupted, nodding toward Barchester’s front door. “His carriage is pulling up in front of the house. He is leaving.”
Megan turned to Theo, excitement rising in her chest. “Shall we follow him?”
A grin was his only answer as he took her arm and started back across the park toward their own carriage.
By the time they reached the carriage and climbed in, then circled around, Barchester’s carriage was almost a block ahead of them.
But it was easy enough for the coachman to keep it in sight, and they followed at a leisurely pace. Inside, Megan kept twitching aside the curtain impatiently to look for Barchester’s carriage.
“I can’t see it at all,” she grumbled.
“Neither can I, but we are headed toward the museum,” Theo told her, satisfaction in his voice.
Their suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later when they drove slowly past the Cavendish’s entrance. Barchester’s carriage sat in the driveway. On Theo’s instructions, their coach turned into the next street and parked at the corner, where they had an excellent view of the museum’s driveway.
“I would love to hear what they are saying to each other,” Megan mused, peering out past the edge of the curtain.
“Somehow, I suspect we could not sneak close enough to hear. But at least we know now that it was not merely Barchester lying. Either Coffey lied to him, or he and Coffey are in it together. There is no reason for him to go running to Coffey otherwise.”
“What shall we do now?”
“I think we certainly need to talk to Coffey. And another visit to Barchester might be in order.” Theo’s jaw tightened, and his green eyes grew cold and hard. “If it was Coffey who killed Dennis…All these years, and I did nothing….”
“You didn’t know.”
“I did not try hard enough to find out. I was too busy trying to escape my grief and guilt.”
“You are too hard on yourself.” Megan leaned forward and closed her hand over his.
His skin was warm beneath her palm, and suddenly she was very aware of the small, confined nature of the carriage. It was an intimate setting, shut away from the world by the closed curtains, cradled by the soft, buttery leather of the seats. Megan’s heart tripped in its beat.
Theo looked at her, his eyes dark and deep in the shuttered space. He turned his palm over, his hand curling around hers. Megan drew a shaky breath, reminding herself of all the reasons why nothing could ever happen between the two of them.
“I—we should probably go back,” she said quickly. “It is growing late.”
His eyes narrowed, but he released her hand slowly and said, “No doubt you are right. I think the best thing to do would be to set Tom Quick up to watch the museum—see if Coffey goes anywhere, what he does.”
Megan nodded. “Yes. No doubt.”
It was best not to think about what might have happened just then. Or why Theo had let the moment go so easily. Most of all, it was best not to consider why his letting it go engendered such a flat feeling of disappointment in her.
They rode home, speaking little, wrapped in their own thoughts. As Theo handed Megan down from the carriage in front of Broughton House, he clasped her hand for a moment longer than necessary.
“I did not hurt your brother,” he said fiercely. “Whatever it takes, I will prove it to you.”
Startled, Megan looked at him. “I know.”
“Do you? I wonder.”
“Yes,” Megan replied calmly. “I am certain of it.”
He gazed at her for a moment longer. “And if Coffey did, I promise you, he will pay for it.”
Taking her arm, he propelled her into the house.
* * *
MEGAN DREAMED that night.
She was in a cave, a vast, cavernous place with rough walls of stone. It was lit by torches shoved into iron braces spaced regularly around the walls. Torchlight flickered on the stone, uneven and gleaming with a dampness that had an almost satiny look. The ceiling of the cave was high, and if she looked up, she could see the faint glitter of rock that seemingly dripped down from the roof, barely touched by the light from the torches.
In the center of the room was a large stone, waist high, and so flat on top that it seemed almost a table. On this slab of rock lay a man. A sheet of white cloth covered his legs and torso, extending midway up his chest, which was bare. His hair was thick and black, shaggily falling almost to his shoulders, but swept back now from his face and spread over the gray rock.
His eyes were closed; she could not see their color. But she could see the handsome features—the full lower lip and high, wide cheekbones, the firm thrust of jaw and chin, the straight nose, the thick black sweep of eyebrows and eyelashes. His skin was darkened from the sun, but she could see the flush of blood beneath the tan. His flesh, damp with sweat, gleamed in the dim light.
There was a woman standing beside him, a small woman with delicate features and velvet-brown eyes. Thick black hair fell in a sweep down her back. She wore a white gown that fell straight from her shoulders, belted at the waist with plates of gold fastened end to end. A wide band of gold encircled her head, cutting across her forehead, and above it rose more narrow plates of gold, shorter at the ends and tapering to the longest plate in the center. Fastened behind the plates was a small fan of feathers, long, bright sweeps of yellow, red, blue and green. A gold armlet banded one upper arm, one end of it the stylized head of a snake, the body zigzagging to the other end, which was its tail.
She held her arms out, palms up, over the man on the slab, and her eyes were closed, her face raised. She chanted in a strange tongue, her words nonsense to Megan. A bowl lay on the table in front of her, beside the man, and next to it lay a cloth and a golden goblet. At either end of the table sat metal bowls, and in them incense burned, its pungent smoke curling up toward the ceiling and perfuming the air.
Megan was looking down upon the scene as if she were floating above the man and his companion. She stared, fascinated, as the woman ceased her chant and picked up the cloth, dipping it into the bowl and mopping his face and chest with it. The man stirred and muttered, then coughed, a long, wracking cough that shook his large frame.
The woman put her hand behind his neck and lifted his head a little, bringing the goblet to his lips and pouring some of its contents into his mouth. He drank a little, and she laid his head back down. Picking up his hand, she slipped something into his palm and curved his fingers around it. She inclined her head, her lips moving in prayer or incantation; Megan was not sure which.
Megan moved closer, drawn to the man, floating down from the heights to stand on the rock floor. It was cool beneath her feet, and she realized in that instant that her feet were bare. She glanced down at herself. She was wearing one of her nightgowns, a simple, straight, white cotton shift with a rounded neck and one frivolous row of ruffles across the bosom. The air was chilly on her skin, but it did not bother her.
She walked closer, and the woman on the other side of the table lifted her head and looked straight into Megan’s face. She smiled slowly, with satisfaction, then turned and walked out of the cave into the darkness beyond, leaving Megan alone with the man on the rock slab.
Megan went to his side and looked down at him. The heavy incense filled her nostrils, the smoke stinging her eyes. He moved restlessly on the stone, coughing again. His face was flushed, and she could hear the rasp of his breath in his lungs. She touched his forehead, and his skin was searing with heat. He was dying. She knew it as certainly as she knew that she loved him.
“You can’t die!” she exclaimed, her voice cracking with emotion.
His eyes flew open at her words, and he stared at her. His eyes were dark in the dim torchlight, and he seemed to gaze deep inside her.
“You cannot die,” she repeated. “I won’t allow it. I am waiting for you.”
She slipped her hand in his. His palm opened to her, revealing the clear crystal that the woman had laid there. Megan curled her hand around his, the crystal trapped between them, and squeezed, holding onto him fiercely.
“Live!” she whispered. “You are mine.”
The crystal between them flared with heat, sending it shooting up Megan’s arm and into her body. She trembled with the intensity, her gaze locked with that of the man before her. For an instant they were melded together; her veins, her nerves, her flesh connected to him, humming with the same piercing vibration.
Then the moment was gone, and she went limp. She had to grab the edge of the stone table to remain standing. She looked at the man. He gazed back at her for one long moment, then placed the crystal in her palm.
Megan closed her hand around it tightly, not caring that its edges bit into her flesh. She laid her other hand upon his forehead. It was noticeably cooler, and she smiled. He would live now, she thought.
Reaching up, she took the chain she always wore out from beneath her nightgown. She slipped it off over her head and kissed the medal, warm from lying against her skin. Then she put the medallion and its chain into his palm, replacing the crystal, and curved his fingers around it. She lifted his fist to her mouth and brushed her lips against his knuckles.
“Remember me.”
“Always.” His word was a mere breath on the air, but she heard it.
He smiled.
Theo.