She lowered her eyes again, her voice continuing soft and low, just above a threatening hysteria.
“Oh yes,” she said to me, “I know. I thought I was losing my mind at times. I built Mayfair Medical not to be the Mad Scientist. The Mad Scientist is capable of the unspeakable. Dr. Rowan Mayfair has to be good. I created this immense Medical Center to commit Dr. Rowan Mayfair to good. Once this plan was under way, I couldn’t afford to go down into madness—dreaming of the Taltos and where they’d gone, dreaming of strange creatures I’d seen and lost without a trace. Mona’s daughter. We tried everything we could to find her. But I couldn’t live in a shadow world. I had to be there for all the ordinary people, signing contracts, rolling out blueprints, calling doctors all over the country, flying to Switzerland and Vienna to interview physicians who wanted to work in the ideal medical center, the medical center that surpassed every other in its equipment, its laboratories, its staff, its comforts, its protocols and projects.
“It was to rivet me to the sane world, it was to push my own medical visions to the very limits—.”
“Rowan, it’s a magnificent thing that you did,” Quinn said. “You speak as though you don’t believe in it when you’re not there. Everyone else believes in it.”
She went on in the same soft rush of words as though she hadn’t heard him. “All kinds of people come to it,” she said, her words flowing as if she couldn’t stop them, “people who have never given birth to Taltos, people who have never seen ghosts, people who have never buried bodies in a Savage Garden, people who have never seen Blood Children, people who have never even hoped for the extraordinary in any form, it helps all manner of human beings, it embraces them, it’s real to them, real, that’s what was important. I couldn’t let it go, I couldn’t ever retreat into nightmares or scribblings in my room, I couldn’t ever fail my interns and residents, my laboratory assistants, my research teams, and you know, with my background, the neurosurgeon, the scientist at heart, I brought to every aspect of this giant organism a personal approach; I couldn’t run away, I couldn’t fail, I can’t fail now, I can’t be absent, I can’t. . . .”
She broke down, her eyes closed, her right hand forming a fist on the table.
Michael looked at her with quiet sadness.
“Go on, Rowan,” I said. “I’m listening to you.”
“You’re making me angry,” said Mona in a low sharp voice. “I think I hate you.”
I was appalled.
“Oh, yes, you always did,” Rowan said, raising her voice but not her wandering eyes. “Because I couldn’t make you well. And I couldn’t find Morrigan.”
“I don’t believe you!” Mona said.
“She’s not lying to you,” said Quinn in a chastising voice. “Remember what you just said. For years you’ve been sick, confused.”
“Mona, honey, we don’t know where Morrigan is,” said Michael.
Mona leaned against Quinn and he put his arm around her shoulder.
“Tell us, Rowan, tell us what you have to say,” I said. “I want to hear it.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said Mona, “go on with the Saga of Rowan.”
“Mona,” I whispered, leaning to clasp her head and draw her to me, my lips at her ear: “these are mortals and with mortals we have a certain eternal patience. Nothing is as it was. Curb your strength. Curb your old mortal envy and spite. They have no place here. Don’t you realize the power you have now to search for Morrigan? What’s at stake here is the rest of your family.”
Reluctantly she nodded. She didn’t understand. Her mortal sickness had divided her from these people. I was only now realizing the extent of it. Though they’d come into her hospital room probably every day and all day, she’d been drugged, full of pain, alone.
A soft rustling sound broke my concentration. The person in the servants’ quarters had awakened, and was rushing down the wooden steps. The screen door banged shut, and there came the skittering feet through the rattling foliage.
It might have been a tiny gnome, this creature that emerged from the elephant ears and the ferns, but it was simply a very old woman—a tiny bit of a thing with a small completely wrinkled face, black eyes and white hair in two long neat braids tied at the ends with pink ribbon. She was dressed in a stiff flowered robe, and clumsy padded fuzzy pink slippers.
Mona rushed to greet her, crying out: “Dolly Jean!” and picked up the bit of a creature in her arms and spun around with her.
“Lord, God in Heaven,” cried out Dolly Jean, “but it’s true, it’s Mona Mayfair. Child of Grace, you set me down right now and tell me what’s gotten into you. Look at those shoes. Rowan Mayfair, why didn’t you tell me this child was here, and you, Michael Curry, giving me that rum, you think your mother in Heaven doesn’t know the things you do, you thought you had me down for the count, I know, don’t think I don’t, and look at Mona Mayfair, what did you pump into her?”
Mona had no awareness that with her vampiric strength she was holding the woman in the air, and how perfectly abnormal it looked.
The spectators were speechless.
“Oh, Dolly Jean, it’s been so long, so terribly long,” Mona sobbed. “I can’t even remember the last time I saw you. I was all locked up and taped up and dreaming. And when they told me Mary Jane Mayfair had run away again I think I just went into a stupor.”
“I know, my baby,” said Dolly Jean, “but they wouldn’t let me in the room, they had their rules, but don’t you think for a moment I wasn’t saying the rosary every day for you. And one of these bright days Mary Jane’ll run out of money and come home, or turn up dead in the morgue with a tag on her toe, we’ll find her.”
By this time we had all risen, except for Rowan, who remained sunk in her thoughts as if none of this was taking place, and Michael quickly took the apparently weightless Dolly Jean from Mona and set her in a chair between himself and Rowan.
“Dolly Jean, Dolly Jean!” Mona sobbed as Quinn led her back to her place at the table.
Rowan had never once even looked at either Mona or Dolly Jean. She was murmuring, her narrative moving along in her head, unbroken, and her eyes probing the dark for nothing.
“All right, settle down Dolly Jean, and you too Mona, and let Rowan talk,” said Michael.
“Who in the world are you!” Dolly Jean demanded of me. “Holy Mother of God, where did you come from?”
Rowan turned suddenly and stared at Dolly Jean with apparent wonder. Then she turned back into her solitude and crowded reminiscence.
The old woman went quiet and still. Then muttered: “Oh me, poor Rowan, she’s off again.” Then, staring at me again, she let out a huge gasp and cried: “I know who you are!”
I smiled at her. I couldn’t help it.
“Please, Dolly Jean,” said Michael, “there are issues we have to settle here.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” cried Dolly Jean, staring this time at Mona, who was hastily wiping away her latest tears. “My baby, Mona Mayfair, is a Blood Child!” Then her eyes discovered Quinn, and there came another huge gasp, and she cried out, “It’s the black-haired one!”
“No, it’s not!” Rowan declared in a furious rasping whisper, turning to the old woman again. “It’s Quinn Blackwood. You know he’s always loved Mona.” She said it as if it was the answer to every question in the universe.
Dolly Jean made a jerky little turn in her chair, and with two dips or bobs of her head made a thorough examination of Rowan, who was looking at her with gleaming eyes as if she hadn’t even seen her before.
“Oh, my girl, my poor girl,” Dolly Jean said to Rowan. She put her tiny hands on Rowan and smoothed her hair. “My darling girl, don’t you be so sad, always so sad on account of everybody. That’s my girl.”
Rowan stared at her for a long moment as though she didn’t understand a word Dolly Jean spoke, and then she looked away again at nobody, half dreaming, half thinking.
“At four o’clock this very afternoon,” Dolly Jean said, still stroking Rowan’s hair, “this poor little soul was digging her own grave in this very yard. I noticed how well you covered it up, Michael Curry, you think you can cover everything up, and when I came down here to ask her what she was doing standing in a hole of wet mud she asked me to pick up the shovel and bury her while she was still breathing.”
“Be quiet, be still,” whispered Rowan, looking far off as if at the night sounds. “It’s time now for a larger vision. The Initiates have multiplied, and this is the inner circle. Be worthy of it, Dolly Jean. Be quiet.”
“All right, my girl,” said Dolly Jean, “then you just talk on as you were, and you, my sparkling Mona, I’ll say my rosary all day long for you, and you too Quinn Blackwood. And you, the blond one, you gorgeous creature! You think I don’t know you, but I do!”
“Thank you, Madam,” I said quietly.
Quinn spoke up: “So all of you will keep our secret? This grows more dangerous for us by the moment. What can come of this?”
“The secret can be kept,” said Stirling. “Let us talk this out. There’s no going back now, anyway.”
“Why, you think we’re going to try to make the whole Mayfair clan believe in Blood Children!” Dolly Jean laughed and slapped the table with both her hands. “That’s just hilarious! We can’t even get them to believe in the Taltos! This brilliant doctor, here, she can’t make them believe in the giant helix, she can’t get them to behave themselves on account of the risk of having another Walking Baby! And you think they’d listen to us if we told them all about the Blood Children? Honey, they just take the phone off the hook when we call.”
For a moment, I thought that Rowan was going to start raving. She glared at Dolly Jean. She was trembling violently. Her face had gone white, and her lips were moving but she was not forming words.
Then the strangest laugh came out of Rowan. A soft free laugh. Her face became girlish and full of delight.
Dolly Jean went into ecstasy.
“Don’t you know it,” she cried to Rowan. “You can’t get them to believe in pneumonia! You can’t get them to believe in the flu!”
Rowan nodded and the laugh slowly but sweetly died in a smile. I had never seen such expressions in Rowan, obviously, and they were glorious to behold.
Mona was crying and trying to talk at the same time.
“Dolly Jean, please simmer down,” said Mona. “We’ve got to get some things settled here.”
“Then get me a drink of rum,” said Dolly Jean, “for Heaven’s sakes, go on your young legs, you know where it is, no, tell you what, bring me the Amaretto, go get it with a shot glass. That’ll make me real happy.”
Mona went off at once, darting across the lawn and towards the pool, high heels clicking when they hit the flagstones, and off around the bend on her errand.
Michael sat there musing and shaking his head. “You drink that on top of all that rum and you’re going be sick,” he murmured.
“I was born sick,” said the old woman.
Stirling stared at Dolly Jean as though she was something perfectly horrible. I almost burst out laughing.
Rowan continued to smile at Dolly Jean. It was sweet and secretive and honest.
“I’m going to pour that bottle of Amaretto down your throat,” Rowan said gently in her husky confidential voice. “I’m going to drown you with it.”
Dolly Jean bobbed up and down in the chair with squeals of laughter. She grabbed Rowan’s face and held her tight.
“Now, I made you laugh, I did, you’re all right, my genius girl, my doctor, my boss lady, my mistress of the house, I love you, girl, I’m the only one in the entire Mayfair clan that’s not afraid of you.” She kissed Rowan on the mouth and then let her go. “You just keep on taking care of everybody, that’s what God put you here to do, you understand, you take care of everybody.”
“And I fail and fail again,” said Rowan.
“No, you don’t, darlin’,” said Dolly Jean. “Put another wing on that hospital. And don’t you fret anything, you sweet girl.”
Rowan sank back in her chair. She looked dazed. Her eyes closed.
Across the lawn, Mona came flying, silver tray in hand, with several bottles of liqueurs and bright shiny glasses. She set this down on the iron table.
“Now, let me see,” she said. “We have three human beings.” She put the glasses in front of Stirling, Michael, Dolly Jean, and Rowan. “Oh, no, four human beings. Okay, now here you are, all human beings have glasses.”
I thought Quinn would perish from mortification on the spot. I merely cringed.
Michael picked up the bottle of Irish Mist and poured himself a small amount. Dolly Jean took the bottle of Amaretto for herself and swallowed a good mouthful. Stirling poured a shiny nugget of cognac and sipped it. Rowan ignored the proceedings.
A silence ensued in which Mona took her old place.
“Rowan,” I said, “you were trying to explain how you knew about us. You were talking about Merrick Mayfair, about when she disappeared from the Talamasca.”
“Oh, that’s a good one,” said Dolly Jean. She drank more of the Amaretto. “I can’t wait for this. Go on, Rowan, if you’ve a mind to talk for once, I want to hear it. Carry on as if I wasn’t here to cheer you along.”
“You have to understand what the Talamasca meant to us,” Rowan said. She paused. Then went on in a low voice, filling the quiet completely. “The Talamasca has known the Mayfair family through all its thirteen generations. Mona understands. Quinn, I don’t know that you ever understood, but we could tell them anything. They knew all about the Taltos. They knew. It was like going to Confession to go to them. They have the solidity and the eternal self-confidence of the Roman Church. And Stirling was so patient. Mona loved him.”
“Don’t talk about us as if we’re not here,” said Mona.
“Patience, Mona,” I said.
Rowan continued as if she hadn’t even heard:
“Then it was Dolly Jean, our precious Dolly Jean Mayfair from Fontevrault Plantation, who said that Merrick Mayfair had become a Blood Child: ‘Sure enough! That’s what happened to that one!’ Dolly Jean knew it. She’d called Tante Oscar. Tante Oscar had told her.”
Rowan smiled at Dolly Jean, who nodded and took another huge mouthful of Amaretto. Rowan leaned over and so did Dolly Jean and their foreheads touched, and then they kissed tenderly on the mouth. It was as if these two women were lovers.