WHEN THEY RETURNED TO THE PIER, ALEX ENFOLDED LUCY—NOW enveloped in his gilt-edged rococo jacket—in a protective arm, and then ushered her quickly to his car. He was disgusted with himself for risking her apparently too soon after the operation. She hadn’t shown the least sign of any illness since going home from the hospital, was a model patient in every sense recovering in copybook fashion; but she had gone unnervingly quiet, and something had plainly exhausted her tonight. He was more anxious that perhaps she had taken a chill, as she felt cold to the touch—which would be catastrophic if he wasn’t onto it quickly. So the doctor immediately took possession of the man as he chauffeured her along the streets toward the Brompton Hospital. He reached across from the wheel and quickly crushed, then chafed, her cold hand in a gesture that was concern, examination, and affection. It would have been romantic, she thought, had he not seemed quite so alarmed.
As they came through a side entrance to the hospital, she took comfort in the fact that he walked her into the elevator and ignored the possibility of a wheelchair. He settled her smoothly into a private room and attached her to the cardiograph. Then Alex seemed to regain a perfect sense of calm as he spoke quiet commands of instruction around him. A pair of bemused junior doctors were surprised to see him shed his accustomed immunologist’s role and resume that of a knowing specialist registrar. He would relinquish care of her to no one else.
“Am I really at Death’s door?” Lucy was secretly aghast at the drama she was causing, and tried to dismiss the fuss. “I thought he’d released me into your custody tonight—at the pier.” Striving for a little levity, she wasn’t as worried as he was, clearly, but her instincts watched the hopes of any chance for closeness between them fade away, just as the good humor had from his face when he’d become aware how cold she felt, and how drained of color.
“I’m undoubtedly overplaying the tragedic elements of the comedy,” he tried to laugh, aware of her embarrassment. “But you’ll have to indulge my cautious nature this one time.”
“I’ll try to be flattered.” Lucy attempted to tease, but Alex was single-minded, concentrating solely on the task at hand, oblivious to her ironic tones, which would have passed for flirtation to an observer.
Amel—trailed by peals of laughter from the skeleton staff at his appearance—soon followed them in, despite Alex’s pleas for him not to disturb the rest of his evening. “Are we going to lure you back from your beloved immunology, Alex?” Amel was amused to see that he was checking Lucy’s blood pressure and assuming full responsibility for her. “I think you’re overreacting, but I will just come and ascertain that an informed assessment and my instincts are not at odds. My dinner reservation will keep for half an hour.”
Lucy looked apologetic: this was just what she didn’t want. But as the monitor clicked with the readout, Amel made contented noises. He agreed with Alex, looking at his patient, that she was a little ghostly and unnaturally cold. “However, nothing to worry about, I am sure of it. Don’t even mention an angiogram. The heart is very strong, beating beautifully. The nerves are not even beginning to take, of course, but the heart itself is sound. Nevertheless, your face is pale, Lucy, and I can see in your eyes that something has given you a fright tonight. So I think my colleague here is right.” He threw an amused glance over his shoulder at Alex. “We should probably keep you in for observation just for one night. A formality on my behalf, Dr. Stafford,” he added, with a smile dedicated to the patient.
Alex was grateful to have Amel take charge personally; but when he left them for a moment to call Grace and explain her flatmate wouldn’t be home tonight, she communicated her disappointment to her surgeon with the look of a child whose hopes had been crushed on her birthday.
“It is his way of telling you how important you are.” He tried to offer her some consolation, more aware than she, perhaps, of the growing strength of her feelings. “I think he is erring on the side of caution, and that you simply took a slight chill on the boat. A warm bath and an early night might have done instead; but it never hurts to do things in the proper way. It’s only six or seven weeks since your surgery.”
Lucy nodded with resignation. “It’s typical of me to make an awkward exit. You could say it’s a habit I’ve cultivated all my life.” She looked at him despondently.
Amel leaned forward and peeked over the rim of his glasses at her. “You needn’t be in such a hurry, though. Get used to the idea that you have time on your side now. In fact, on the positive side, your pulse and blood pressure are fine, and I think you’re far too well to be in here. I am very pleased with your progress, and we have a biopsy and echo due very shortly, and a mini MOT around Christmastime, so this is an excellent sign. This little episode has nothing to do with rejection, in my opinion. And no one knows that better than Alex. He has a sharp instinct for these things.”
The owner of the sharp instinct returned, and Amel thought it appropriate to remind them both that he had a dinner reservation and two delightful companions to rejoin. “I’m happy with the EKG, but an echo isn’t necessary, Alex. Perhaps just an antibiotic, and we can let her out in the morning. She’ll need some better food by then.” He smiled at them whimsically. “Interesting evening, don’t you agree?” He started to leave, and then to Alex he directed the words: “‘And having writ, moves on.’”
Alex didn’t need the caution, having elected not to speak further of the strange incident on the water, although the words he had heard resonated with him. It had taken him at once to the extraordinary safety device Will had loaded onto his notebook—the mysterious Sator Square. There seemed to be echoes and reverberations in everything happening around him now, and he wondered about Will’s e-mail—the mention of an unbroken river of thought—in the light of their own journey down the Thames tonight. Neither Amel nor Lucy, he recognized, had believed there was an entirely rational explanation for what they’d seen.
He watched Amel go thoughtfully, then turned to Lucy. The celestial goddess’s place had been usurped by a fragile creature in a hospital gown, and he played wardrobe mistress with the wonderful silk creation and a padded hanger he’d brought back with him specifically for the purpose. She looked exhausted; yet there was a radiant clarity in her face. As wise as Athena, maybe, he thought; but as vulnerable as any Florence Dombey or Catherine Morland, too; flung into a wider world without familial protection. This was certainly not a moment to desert her.
“I have some patient notes I need to finish. Would you be comfortable if I just sat here and got on with it?” He gestured at the chair beside her bed. “I’d be happier keeping half an eye on you myself.” Lucy ventured a curious smile at him. “It’s not that I don’t trust the housemen—some of whom will have been awake for thirty hours or more. But you’ll assuage my own sense of negligence.”
Lucy’s face relaxed for the first time in an hour. She nodded, not trusting her voice. Alex read what he believed her expression said, and returned her smile. “But you must try and sleep, Lucy; don’t let me prevent you from doing that.” So she immediately closed her eyes like an obedient child and drifted fast into a sleep—so fast it came upon her—initially peopled by richly dressed men on a great barge, melting thereafter into an icy dreamscape.
A scantily dressed man kneeled opposite another who was seated, this second man dressed all in thick, splendid red robes trimmed with brocade. The man on the ground was not at all prepossessing, Lucy saw; he was rather small and dark, wearing a coarse, woolen gown that might once have been a monk’s habit. She felt he was about to receive some kind of judgment from his adversary. But the kneeling man was perversely distracted, not paying enough attention to his judge. He was squinting in pale wintry light through the narrow slits of the windowed chamber they were in, out onto a bridge. “The Ponte Sant’Angelo, Lucina,” she heard him say to her; and he looked deeply into her eyes as he had before—earlier, on this very night. She tried to smile some solace at him. It was her robed man from the barge, the monk. “This bridge is where Beatrice Cenci, just twenty-five years in this world, was beheaded for murdering her father,” he was telling Lucy quietly, “after he repeatedly raped her. Her older brother was drawn and quartered here, too—just one year ago. His Holiness wished to make an example of them to other unruly families.”
Lucy had no idea how to react to him, and then she watched him turn his head away from her, and from the window, back to the man in red. Then he spoke again, as clearly as he had spoken to her earlier tonight: “The Church is flawed, Your Grace. It has lost touch with the pure teachings of the Apostles, who converted people with preaching and the example of a good life. But now, anyone who does not wish to be a Catholic must endure pain and punishment. Force, and not love, is used to convince doubters of the ‘truth.’”
And then he turned quietly away from the man whose power held his earthly fate, and looked again at the bright spirit of Lucy, as though he were a man possessed, talking, he might have said, to angels: “The soul of man, Lucina, be very sure, is the only god there is. And how shall we honor it?”
And now the man—he must have been a cardinal, Lucy thought—was saying something Lucy could hardly hear to the man on the floor; something about him locking himself into his own prison, his own fate, and throwing away the key. His voice then rose to a volume Lucy could hear clearly as he addressed the man’s jailers. “Hand him over to the city authorities to do what they must; but see he is given a merciful death inasmuch as it is possible, without the shedding of blood.”
Lucy saw that he had been forced to kneel for some time; but now the monk rose to his modest but full height. “It is with far greater fear that you pronounce, than I receive, this sentence.” His voice was utterly calm, without anger or fear. The words silenced everyone present.
She watched these actions play out in front of her, devoid of any physical strength or bodily control of her own. She was paralyzed by the sound of boots on stones, saw the frosty breath of the figures in her mystery play, felt cold herself, thought her limbs were heavy and far away. She moved in her bed and felt the wires that were attached to her chest through her half-sleeping state, saw the shadow of an angel sitting near her with his head bowed; and then she closed her heavy lids again and slept on.
When she woke it was a sunshine morning, her body felt as light as a feather, and her heart was thrumming musically according to her own impressions. The chair was vacant but for her own familiar overnight bag, which must have come courtesy of Grace; but on the table next to her she found a tiny bouquet of miniature pink roses and a note written in pen and ink, in a bold italic hand:
For sleeping Ariadne, when she wakes. I have my son today, but tomorrow I am free. Are you brave enough to join me with some friends for lunch in Mortlake?
It was signed “Alessandro,” his alter ego from the previous evening. The doctor had exited again; and perhaps the man would reappear. And yes: she would be very interested to see Mortlake again, in the daylight.
“Shall I put them in water for you?” a cheerful voice in a nurse’s uniform asked her.
Lucy smiled serenely. “No. Thanks. I’m not staying, and they’re coming home with me.”