‘That’s a value judgement. Sit down.’
Elizabeth slumped into the chair next to her own unlit fire. She saw Hunter drop the taser on the rug next to where he knelt. ‘You’re supposed to be vulnerable to electricity.’
Mrs Mallory sat back down herself. She adjusted her torn dress to cover her bare chest. She lit a cigarette. But her eyes stayed locked on Hunter’s. ‘I sometimes speculate on how many hours poor, fat, talentless, self-taught Rachel Hall spent toiling over her spell books to inflict that particular vulnerability. I’d have to concede she did the work craftily and well. It surprised me. And it almost succeeded. But it did not. And after Magdalena I had to take the necessary steps to eradicate the weakness she had imposed upon me. You do not live as long as I have by being idle.’
‘And you have your tilt to put upon the world,’ Elizabeth said, ‘like you did before, in 1933.’
Mrs Mallory smiled. But her eyes stayed locked on Hunter’s. ‘Only about ten good years,’ she said, ‘the blink
of an eye. This time it will last much longer. Not that you will live to experience it.’
‘Brooke puzzles me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I would have thought Yeats much more your thing.’
‘Slouching towards Bethlehem? You think in clichés, Doctor. Brooke was cute. Berlin was pretty. I was bored. And your efforts to divert me are pathetic.’
‘Do you really intend to kill the boy?’
‘No. I intend to have his father do that. And I require that you watch.’
Adam slept. The sleep was not free of dreams. But it was free of Mrs Mallory’s dreams. He felt restful and secure. He did not mind dreaming. He honestly preferred it when the dreams were his own and this one was not, was it, entirely? But at least it was not a dream imposed upon him by the witch. There was kindness and warmth in this imagined landscape. There was urgency, but it was a calm and deliberate sort of urgency. The orchestrator of his dream was patient and good. He did not trouble himself in his slumber with their identity. He took what rest and refuge he could simply in being asleep.
Elizabeth watched, unable not to, as the point of Hunter’s sword scraped at the stone flags of her cottage floor and he brought it out of his belt and raised it high. It descended slowly. Adam’s head and chest were visible to her to Hunter’s left, the rest of him concealed by his father’s kneeling shape. Mrs Mallory stared and smoked. The sword touched Adam’s throat. Beads of blood gathered on the keen blade at the point of contact.
‘Cut,’ Mrs Mallory said.
Elizabeth heard Hunter groan. She heard the tendons strain and crack in his arm and shoulder with the force of his will and defiance. He was far stronger than Cawdor. Perhaps he was stronger than Rodriguez too. Certainly he was, she
realised. She heard muscle tear and something snap that sounded like his wrist and then a loud crack as his shoulder blade broke with the stubbornness of him and he cried out in raw agony.
‘Transfer the sword to your other hand,’ Mrs Mallory said. Her cigarette was smoked almost down to the touch of her skin. Her voice was growing impatient. The sword skittered between Hunter’s trembling fingers on the rug. He clenched its hilt in his left hand. His body was convulsing with resistance and his right arm hung as hopelessly as Elizabeth considered their cause to be by his side. She slipped the cup and its cargo of ivory dice from her pocket and spilled the dice on to the floor in front of the cold hearth where they chinked and shivered and stopped still. Mrs Mallory glanced towards the sound and her eyes switched back to Hunter. ‘Rest,’ she said. Hunter turned the hilt of the sword in his hand so that the flat of the blade lay on Adam’s throat. He shivered and groaned.
Mrs Mallory flicked her cigarette stub into the fireplace. She looked at the dice. Elizabeth thought that her pupils had grown larger in the snowy light. She was someone who liked to gamble. There had been a card table at the centre of the canvas cathedral. Adam had dreamed of her windowless games room at the house in Cleaver Square. ‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘Surely you would not wish to play against me?’
‘The curse on the boy,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s entirely of your making?’
‘What concern is that of yours?’
‘You serve someone. Or you serve something, don’t you, Mrs Mallory?’
‘Whether I do or not, the curse you speak of was inflicted entirely for my own entertainment.’
Elizabeth thought there was a bit more to it than
entertainment but did not want to labour the point. ‘So you can lift it without repercussion?’
‘You are beginning to irritate me,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘You can die well or you can die very badly indeed, Doctor. Irritating me is most unwise.’
‘Three throws of the dice,’ Elizabeth said, nodding at the two pale cubes of ivory on the stone of her cottage floor. ‘We play the best of three. If the total scored on the face of the dice is six or below, I win the throw. A score from seven to twelve and you win.’
Mrs Mallory chuckled, her eyes on the ivory cubes. She lit a fresh cigarette. ‘I win nothing I don’t already have,’ she said.
‘But can you resist?’ Elizabeth raised her arms, widening them at the cottage interior. They felt stiff and the gesture forced. Her stomach was cramped with fear. He voice sounded like that of a stranger to her own ears. ‘This is a dull evening in a drab little location. Surely a momentary diversion would be welcome?’
Mrs Mallory smiled. The smile broadened into a grin. Her teeth were very white against lips that looked almost black in the moonlight reflecting off the snow through the cottage windows. ‘What if I lose? You want me to lift the curse on the boy? You expect mercy from me?’
‘I expect more than that,’ Elizabeth said. ‘If you lose I want your word you will go into exile.’
Mrs Mallory laughed again. But she was still staring at the ivory cubes on the floor.
‘At the location of my choosing,’ Elizabeth said. ‘For the length of time I dictate.’
‘You are close to your mother, are you not?’
‘Yes.’
‘If I win, her life is forfeit.’
‘Done.’
‘Do you wish to know the manner of her death?’
‘No.’
‘I have decided she will burn. Start grieving for her now. You have not much time left to you.’
‘You have not yet won.’
Mrs Mallory was silent. The only audible sound in the room was Hunter’s ponderous breathing. He was spellbound. She did not need to maintain eye contact with him to keep him so, as she had at Magdalena. She was stronger than she had been then, enfeebled by Miss Hall’s craft and cunning. Elizabeth wondered how strong she was now. She thought that Hunter was probably in shock too, the refuge enforced by his brain from the pain inflicted on his body. A refuge too from thinking about the obscene crime he was in the middle of being compelled to commit.
Adam dreamed. And someone familiar appeared in the dream. He was in a house with a ticking clock and a polished sideboard and there were butter-smelling crumpets in front of him and Mrs Bancroft handed him a mug of hot chocolate but he did not know if he would be able to drink it because his throat stung, and then she smiled and leaned forward and whispered to him and said, ‘Don’t worry, Adam, you will never be obliged to call me by my first name. You are right and I am far too old for that.’
Mrs Mallory uncoiled out of her chair and shook off her coat, shrugging the sable wrap from her shoulders. She dropped and scooped the dice into the leather cup and, on her haunches on the flags before the fireplace, she rattled it. Her hair was loose and it shook blackly in the snowy paleness against the line of her jaw and tumbled glossily down her shoulders and back. Elizabeth saw that her torn clothing had repaired itself. She slid from her own chair and kneeled beside her, close enough to smell her scent, urgent with sex, sweet with the heavy perfume worn over it. Her dress was
tight and satiny against the length of her thighs and her taut belly and the blossoming push of her breasts. She was a powerful and immensely seductive presence this close to, and the effect on Elizabeth was defeating as she listened to the hollow rattle of the cup, thinking that she could not possibly succeed against such an adversary.
‘You take the first throw,’ Mrs Mallory said.
Elizabeth took the cup. Their fingers brushed. She had expected her opponent’s touch to be cold. But just now, it seemed there was much more fire in her than ice. She rattled the dice.
‘They are old,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘But I sense that you are new to this. Some players think it lucky to blow on the dice.’
‘You?’
‘I’ve no great faith in luck.’
‘You were very lucky at Magdalena.’
‘That was fate.’
‘Then why play, if you don’t believe in luck?’
‘Chance and luck are not the same.’
Elizabeth threw. The dice bounced and settled. Face up, they showed two sixes. There could have been no more emphatic result in her opponent’s favour. But Elizabeth sensed that the cast dice had settled free of interference. She had lost the throw fairly. On the other side of the room, Hunter was shivering over his sleeping son, the flat steel of the sword blade matt in the ghostly light cast by the snow under a cruel November moon outside.
Mrs Mallory plucked the cup from her hand and scooped the dice into it. She smiled at Elizabeth with a glittery narrowing of eyes and the dice were flung with a snap of her wrist on to the floor. They danced and jittered, as though their facets flirted with destiny. Then they stopped. And Elizabeth saw that a two and a four were studded on their face sides in black against the white.
‘Down to the final throw,’ Mrs Mallory said, then louder, ‘Not long now, Colonel Hunter. I’ll be back to attend to you and Adam presently.’ She gathered the dice and handed Elizabeth the cup containing them. Elizabeth saw that the grey eyes had widened. Her opponent was appraising her.
‘Will you try to determine the outcome?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then what is the point of playing? If the result is predetermined, chance cannot prevail. It does not exist.’
‘I used to look like you do,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘I rather enjoyed the way I looked then. I was pretty, as you are, shared those feline features all of us who share the gift enjoy. But it seemed pragmatic to change, over time. And I have turned out rather well, I think.’ She nodded at the leather cup in Elizabeth’s fingers. ‘I will try to determine the outcome. And so will you. That is the point of playing. It amuses me to gamble. And I have not gambled, really, since my win at Magdalena. Are you ready, Miss Bancroft?’
Elizabeth rattled the cup and blew on the dice.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Mrs Mallory said. She laughed.
Elizabeth threw.
And the ivory cubes tumbled downwards as though weightless on a slow-motion descent to the cold, chisel-scarred flags of her cottage floor. The sound was like slow motion too as they collided with the floor and then rebounded and bounced again with smudged, dissonant clacks, mocking time and gravity. One of them settled and Elizabeth’s heart thudded with dread in her chest as she saw that it showed a five. She heard a peal of laughter, the sharpness of it blunted by the thickening air that seemed to suspend the second dice a few inches above the flags. It was hard to breathe. And the shape of the unsettled dice seemed unsettled
itself, subtly corrupt, its simple geometry deformed and palely repulsive, so that looking at it she winced and felt vomit sour at the back of her throat.
Elizabeth closed her eyes. She hoped that Mrs Mallory had spent too much of herself. A great deal of her must have been lavished just on sustaining the affront to nature her long life represented. But it was Mark Hunter’s resistance that might have depleted her now. She had surely not expected the obdurate stubbornness of his love for his precious son. It must have cost her something. By contrast, she herself was young and entirely unspent. She was inexperienced at this, a novice only, but her mother had said she was strong. She summoned the strength that lay in her, almost untapped and, she saw now with a blossoming sense of wonder, quite immense.
‘No,’ she heard her opponent say.
‘I think you might have underestimated me.’
‘No,’ Mrs Mallory said. Age withered through her voice like a reedy sigh. ‘You can’t!’
‘I can,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And I have.’
She opened her eyes. The second dice lay, innocently shaped again, a few inches from the first. As she had willed it to, it had fallen showing the one. She had won. Mrs Mallory stood next to where she knelt. She had put on her coat and her sable wrap. She was nothing, if not a woman of her word. She was ready for departure, dressed for exile. And she would need the comfort of the fur across her shoulders. Where she was going, it was very cold indeed. Elizabeth got off her knees. She had no need to play the supplicant in victory.
‘Where do you insist I go?’
Elizabeth told her.
‘For what length of time do you insist I stay?’
Elizabeth told her.
Mrs Mallory smiled. She was pulling on a pair of leather gloves. ‘A merciless exile,’ she said.