Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

"It's so strange," said Lily. "This is like being from a family of great musicians, yet not knowing how to read music, not even knowing how to carry a tune."

Only Paige Mayfair seemed unembarrassed, the one from away, the one who hadn't grown up in the shadow of First Street, hearing people answer each other's thoughts as easily as each other's words.

Paige laid her small leather pocketbook on the floor, and came to the bed. "Turn out the lights, except for the candles."

"That's nonsense," said Fielding.

"I prefer it that way," said Paige. "I prefer that there will be no distractions." Then she looked down at Rowan, studying her slowly from her smooth forehead down to the feet poking straight up beneath the sheet. Paige's face looked sad, deliberately sad and thoughtful.

"This is useless," said Fielding. He was obviously finding it difficult to remain standing.

Mona tugged him over closer to the bed. "Here, lean on the mattress," she said, trying not to be impatient. "I've got your arm. Lay your hand on her. One hand will do it."

"No, both hands, please," said Paige.

"Absolute idiocy!" said Fielding.

The others closed in around the bed. Michael stepped back but then Lily gestured that he must join them too. They all laid their hands on Rowan, Fielding tilting forward at a precarious angle, his labored breathing audible, a little cough collecting in his wattled throat.

Mona felt Rowan's soft pale arm. She had laid her fingers right on the bruises. What had caused them? Had he grabbed Rowan and shaken her? You could almost see the marks of the fingers. Mona laid her own fingers on top of the marks.

Rowan, heal! She hadn't waited for the others, and now she saw that all had made the same silent unceremonious decision. She heard the communal prayer rising; she saw that Paige and Lily had closed their eyes. "Heal," whispered Paige. "Heal," whispered Mona.

"Heal, Rowan," said Randall in a deep decisive voice.

Finally the disgruntled murmur came from Fielding. "Heal, child, if the power is within you. Heal. Heal. Heal."

When Mona opened her eyes again she saw that, Michael was crying. He was holding Rowan's right hand tight in both of his. He was whispering the word along with all of them. Mona closed her eyes and said it again.

"Come on, Rowan! Heal!"

Moments passed as they remained there. Moments passed in which this or that one whispered, or stirred, or clasped the flesh more tightly or patted it. Lily laid her hand on Rowan's forehead. Michael bent to kiss Rowan's head.

It was Paige finally who said that they had done what they could do.

"Has she had the Last Sacraments?" asked Fielding.

"Yes, at the hospital, before the surgery," said Lauren. "But she is not going to die. She is holding steady. She is in a deep coma. And she could go on like that for days."

Michael had turned his back on the assembly. Silently, they slipped out of the room.

In the living room, Lauren and Lily poured the coffee. Mona set out the sugar and the cream. It was still pitch-dark outside, wintry, still.

The great clock chimed five. Paige looked at it, as if startled. And then dropped her eyes.

"What do you think?" asked Randall. "She's not dying," said Paige. "But there is absolutely no response. At least none that I could feel."

"None," said Lily.

"Well, we tried it," said Mona. "That's the important thing. We tried."

She went out of the double parlor into the hallway. For a moment she thought she saw Michael at the top of the stairs. But it was just the nurse passing. The house creaked and rustled as it always did. She hurried up, deliberately on tiptoe, trying not to play the stairs like musical keys.

The bedside lamp had been lighted again. The candle flames were lost in the brash yellow illumination.

Mona wiped her eyes and took Rowan's hand. Her own hand was snaking. "Heal, Rowan!" she said. "Heal, Rowan! Heal! You're not dying, Rowan! Heal!"

Michael put his arms around her, kissed her cheek.

She didn't turn away. "Heal, Rowan," she said. I'm sorry I did it with him. I'm sorry. "Heal, please," she whispered, "what good is it all...the heritage, the money, any of it...if we can't...if we can't heal?"

It must have been six-thirty when Mona made the resolve. There would be a Mayfair Medical. It would happen just as Rowan had planned.

Mona had taken a wool blanket with her out under the oak tree, before the guest house, and she was sitting there on the dry blanket, watching the morning shimmer in the wetness around her, the fresh light green leaves of the bananas, the crinkled elephant ears, the ginger lilies, the green moss on the bricks. The sky was violet now just as it might be at sunset, something she witnessed far more often than dawn.

A guard slept in a straight-backed chair at the garden gate. Another walked back and forth on the other side of the picket gates along the flagstones beside the pool.

The house seemed to grow brighter, more distant against the deepening violet. A deep blood-red aurora began to rise slowly to the far right. You never really knew east from west in New Orleans, until the sun came, or the sun went. Well, here it was coming, glorious and not altogether silent. It seemed the birds heard it; the birds were incited; and all the thick shaggy leaves around her were rattling and alive.

It made her happy to see it, incompletely and impatiently happy. It made her feel alone. Designee of the legacy. Lauren had said in a low whisper, "This shouldn't come as much of a surprise to you. It's a matter of lineage. You traced it yourself in your computer. We'll explain it all. I cannot talk about it while Rowan lives and breathes."

There will be a Mayfair Medical, Rowan. That will be your legacy, and we will take our secrets with us into our own private and ultimately dispensable history, but the stones of Mayfair Medical will stand firm for all to see.

She felt dizzy suddenly. Kind of sick. She really hated being awake at this time of morning. Always had. And when Mona was little, Alicia had always wanted to go to Mass. Drunk or sober the night before, didn't matter. Alicia had to get up and go to Mass. They went uptown to Holy Name on the streetcar. Mona always felt bad like this, headachy with a bad taste in her mouth. That had only stopped in the last few years when Alicia was drinking in the morning, finally, and was already with a beer in her hand, sitting on the back steps, when Mona came down.

But it wasn't so bad being awake now, seeing this deep red color rising miraculously, seeing it turn to gold. The sheer excitement of the last few days rendered things so precious, so clear. Look at this garden, never forget to look at it. The legacy. Christ, Mona, this is your garden! Or soon will he!

No wonder she couldn't sleep. She had tried. Best to use this time for thinking, for planning, for laying out in orderly fashion the thing that had begun to obsess her, the location and the structure of Mayfair Medical, where the word Heal would be written. In stone? In stained glass?

Pierce would be her strongest ally; he was of the same conservative ilk as Ryan, but the idea was dear to him; he wanted it to work. The last two months, he had kept the plan alive. With a little pushing, he could be made to formulate, imagine, envision. It would all work out, the conservatives in the firm holding them back a little, and their insistence to be bold, to think big, to dream.

Pierce lay asleep not very far away in one of the many scattered lounge chairs, his jacket over his shoulder. He had wanted the bracing air, he said. He was near the pool. He couldn't take the stuffiness of indoors. He had looked like a baby when she passed him.

We'll do it, thought Mona. It's more than a childish resolve to go around the world before I am twenty, or dig a tunnel to China, or start the most successful mutual fund in the international stock market. Designee of the legacy. All things are possible, that is the key thing to remember.

Not Alicia's view as she sat with her beer on the step. "I'm too tired to do anything anymore." Don't think about her in a freezer drawer. They don't really freeze people in the morgue, do they? Don't they just k

eep them cold?

All those books on hospitals, where had Mona seen them? In Rowan's room, when Mona had been plotting to seduce Michael. Those books were in the nightstand by the bed. Mona would read them later, study the entire project. That was important--have an advanced scheme before you bring them to the table; run the meeting like an ad for new computers, with all those shiny laser printouts of floor plans, and spreadsheets and lists.

Finally she closed her eyes. She could feel the sun now. Didn't have to see it.

She would play a little trick on herself that always made her sleep. Her mind was going a mile a second, and so she made it do something: decorate the lobbies and offices of Mayfair Medical--made it pick colors, made it hang drapes, made it choose paintings for the interior, paintings that would make waiting patients happy, paintings that would give overworked doctors and nurses a moment of illumination when they stepped into a corridor or into a stairwell, or came in the front doors.

Representations of healing, something like that beautiful painting by Rembrandt of the Anatomy Lesson. She opened her eyes with a start. No, they wouldn't want to see that, nothing that terrible. Think of other things, the passive and beautiful faces of Piero Delia Francesca, the soft sweet eyes of Botticelli's women, soothing fancies. Things that were better than real.

She was so sleepy. She was trying to remember all the people in that big Medici painting in Florence, the one with Lorenzo looking out of the corner of his eye. She'd been five when Gifford took her to Europe the first time.

"Mothers and babies!" she'd said as they went through the Palazzo Vecchio. She'd so loved to skip and twirl on the stone floors. She had never seen so many pictures of that one grand theme. Gifford had whispered sternly, "Madonna with Child."

Gifford bent down to kiss her. Go to sleep for a while.

Yes, think I will. I didn't mean to, I mean with Michael, I never meant to...