CHAPTER 17 #4
He turns me to the vanity mirror. I look at the right side of my throat. The puncture line is sealed; there is a faint bruise the size of a thumbprint at the carotid; the bruise is the color of an old rose. He stands behind me. He puts his hand at the unmarked side of my throat.
"It is closed."
"Yes."
"It will be visible for four days. Then it will be gone."
"Good."
He kisses the bruise once — light, dry. He turns me back to face him. "Eat now."
---
At twenty-three thirty Helene knocks at the bedroom door.
He has carried me back from the bath — I have let him — and set me on the four-poster with the wool blanket across my hips; I am in one of his shirts and nothing else; the cotton is the cold-stone cold of his skin still in the threads. He calls her in.
She comes with the steel kit. She comes with the stethoscope. She does not pretend she has not been here a hundred times for a hundred lesser things and is not, tonight, here for the most important thing she has been present for since 1862.
"Buonasera, signorina. " She takes my right index finger. The lancet bites. The drop goes onto the strip. "Allora. " She reads. "Trentanove punto due. Thirty-nine point two. Down two point three from your six o'clock baseline. " She looks up. "Bene. Within safe. He has done his work."
She listens to my heart with the stethoscope. She listens to my pulse at the unmarked side of my throat. She listens to my breathing. She nods once at Julian.
"Mio re. " She is the only person who calls him that, and only in private, and only after a thing has been done well.
"She has done well also. The bite has closed.
The bruise is the color it should be. Soup is on its way.
Eat, signorina. The plasma will not rebuild itself.
Beef broth tonight. Steak in the morning. "
"Capito."
"Brava. " She closes the kit. She nods at Julian. She leaves.
Henrik knocks at the door at twenty-three forty-five.
He has the bowl on a tray; a thick beef broth in a Royal Crown Derby cup, a piece of dark rye bread on the saucer beside it, a teaspoon of butter.
He sets it on the bedside next to the brass alarm clock.
He says, "Ma'am. " He says, "Vance. " He leaves.
I eat. Julian sits on the edge of the bed beside me.
He watches me eat. He does not make a thing of watching me eat; he just watches, the way a man watches a thing he has been waiting to see for nine weeks.
I finish the broth. I finish the bread. I drink a small glass of water.
He takes the bowl and the cup and sets them on the chair.
He gets into the bed beside me. He turns out the lamp.
The room is dark except for the fire — the gas fire in the great room he has banked from upstairs through the controls beside the bed; the small flicker visible through the door; the wood fire across the bedroom dark and cold.
The cedar smoke is faint in the air; the copper of his breath at my throat is fainter; the second of the three uses of the scent has closed its accounting tonight, and the third belongs to a chapter I will not reach until grief sends me to him for a different reason.
He turns onto his right side. He pulls me back against his chest. He sets his right palm flat against my sternum, over the place where his palm was earlier — over the place where the third thing settled in my body like a stone in a well. His left arm crosses under my pillow.
He reaches for the bedside table with his right hand. The 1925 brass alarm clock — the clock that does not need winding, the clock he has wound every night since 1547 because the sound is the sound of a small cell where a man with a heated coin once put a wheel into his arm — sits on the bedside.
He brings it to the bed.
He sets it on the wool blanket over my hip. He puts my right hand on it; his right hand over mine.
It is oh-one-fifteen. The bedside clock at the wall says oh-one-fifteen exactly.
I see the digital pulse at the edge of my vision.
The brass clock is cold in my palm. He turns the winding key under my hand — slow, half a turn, then another, then a third.
The small interior spring catches; the ticking begins.
The ticking is small and even in the dark; small enough that it does not fill the room; just enough that I will hear it when I wake at any point in the night.
His mouth at my hair. He says, low: "Quinn."
He does not say I love you again. He has said it twice tonight; once in the threshold speech and once at full depth.
He has told me he will keep saying it. He will keep saying it.
He will say it tomorrow, in a different way, with his eyes when he tells me about Konstantin and nine years; he will say it on the stair to the greenhouse on Sunday when he rolls his sleeve and shows me what he has carried since before my country was a country; he will say it without saying it, in the cup of his right palm over my sternum tonight, in the slow even turn of his hand under mine on the clock, in the small ticking that begins now.
He does not say it again. I do not say it back.
I have heard the third thing. I have not yet said it back. I will say it back. I do not yet know when.
I sleep.