A maid entered the room and started clearing away the remains of a plate of marrons glacés and Turkish delight the men had been consuming. A nearby ottoman was dusted with icing sugar and spilled snuff. Lavinia picked up James’s silver snuffbox. It was half-empty, even though it must have contained a good ounce. She stared at it, the ghost of an image forming in the smoky atmosphere.
The maid, an irrepressibly cheerful eighteen year old, who had been born into service and was already betrothed to one of the valets, dampened the embers in the fireplace.
‘Dolly, I must replace the master’s cognac,’ Lavinia announced. ‘I see he has finished it tonight.’ She spoke clearly, wanting the maid to remember her words.
‘Don’t concern yourself, madam. I can do that.’
‘No, I shall do it. My husband is particular about his cognac.’
Lavinia found small things to busy herself with until the maid had left the room. Then she picked up the snuffbox again, turning it thoughtfully in her hand. Walking over to the desk, she emptied its contents onto a sheet of paper. Then she lifted the Mimosa hostilis root bark from the stand she had placed it on earlier for study, and using a laboratory knife, shaved off a quantity. She ground it to a fine brown powder using a pestle and mortar, then turned to James’s locked cabinet where she knew she would find a vial of peyote fluid.
Staring down at the dampened rust-coloured powder, it seemed to her that she was looking back over the last three years of her life: the sands they had walked along when James first courted her; the oak of her husband’s locked bedroom door; the dried blood on her face after James had struck her; and, finally, the relentless sensation of suffocation and increasing fear. He has stolen my soul.
The sentence reverberated over and over in her head as she meticulously tipped the ground mixture into the silver box, then added a layer of the Colonel’s own snuff. Closing the lid tightly, she shook the box vigorously. When she opened it again, the poison was undetectable.
‘Is it wise, James?’
‘Is what wise?’
The two men lay in each other’s arms on the large divan the Colonel had purchased for the Westminster apartment Hamish now resided in. A velvet throw half covered them, and a fire sank low in the grate across the lavishly furnished drawing room. Its high ceiling, dating from the previous century, was covered with a plaster relief of gods and angels. Hamish sat up, his smooth white back facing the Colonel. He reached for a cigarette and placed the slim stick into an ivory holder, his fingers trembling from an excess of drink and opiate.
‘To have your wife assist at the ritual when I could so easily do it.’
‘I have made a promise. I cannot take everything away from the poor child. Also, remember, she could destroy us with one word.’
Hamish knew James was right: the need for discretion was essential. But it disturbed him to know that the young wife had so much power—he did not think her rational. He ran his fingers lightly across his lover’s naked shoulders. The Colonel’s body, half reclining, was a series of undulating curves—chest, belly, thighs; the scale of him gave his corpulence a grandiose quality. He looked, Hamish decided lovingly, like a well-fed Zeus.
‘In that case, why not let her have her own paramour?’
Closing his eyes, the Colonel sighed heavily.
‘I have found that I am still possessive. Whether this is a kind of love, I cannot say, but I still regard her as my wife. Other than that, I cannot—we cannot, that is to say, you and I—afford the scandal. Lavinia is still my wife, and the mother of my son.’
‘James, there is great anger in her. It would not be intelligent to rely upon her during such a risky venture.’
‘Then you do not truly understand me. It is this very danger that is so alluring.’
66
Los Angeles, 2002
THE QUAKE SHOOK JULIA OUT of sleep, a subterranean rumble that threaded itself through her sleeping and rattled the bed. She sat up as the brass frame trembled in unison with every piece of glass, every door and hanging picture in the house.
Her dream still lingered about her: she had been running in a labyrinth, a series of corridors whose earth-like walls sprang up like trees behind her as she ran. There had been a creature, a man, chasing her—she remembered the heavy thud of his feet, his bellowing breath that echoed down the long halls. Terrified, she had stumbled. Lying on the ground, she had looked back to find the huge eyes of a bull staring down at her, his man’s chest heaving as he stood over her—the Minotaur. It was then that the earthquake woke her.
Julia waited to die. She wanted to die. There was a curious symmetry to this, she thought: here she was, childless, without husband, alone in a rattling house waiting to die; while on the other side of town, Carla, heavily pregnant, lay wrapped around Klaus, probably terrified she was about to lose everything. I have already lost, Julia concluded, strangely invincible in her indifference. The usual panic she felt during earthquakes—diving under the bed, or running to stand in a doorframe—seemed to have left her entirely.
The shaking stopped. Julia reached across and opened the bedside cupboard drawer. The gun Tom Donohue had given her lay there, on top of some old letters; somehow, the sight of it was comforting.
She was interrupted by the phone ringing. ‘Julia, are you okay?’ Gabriel, disembodied, sounded even younger.
‘I’m intact, although I think the fridge might have taken a walk.’
She reached for the remote and switched on the TV at the foot of the bed. Immediately a news item came on about the earthquake: 7.5 on the Richter scale, the epicentre being somewhere out in the Mojave Desert, one casualty at a military base…The words raced like ticker tape across the bottom of the screen, while above a smiling nubile blonde, who looked too airbrushed to have an anus, advertised haemorrhoid cream.
‘I love you.’ Gabriel’s voice was drowsy, as if he were stoned or drunk.
‘No, you don’t. You’re in the grip of hormonally driven lust. It might feel like love, but trust me, it’s not. Besides, I don’t want you to be in love with me. I’m far too dangerous and irresponsible.’