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"I was positively groggy as I made my way to Aunt Queen's bedroom, and she looked up at me from her chaise lounge, where she was already under one of her white satin quilts with her feathered negligee stirring hither and thither with the motio
n of the overhead fan, and said:
" 'Darling boy, go to sleep. You're white as a sheet. I slept on the plane, but you didn't. You're staggering. ¡¯
" 'Are you drinking champagne?' I exclaimed. 'You must, for we have something to celebrate. ¡¯
" 'You come here to me!' Jasmine called out as she chased after me. But I wouldn't be deterred.
" 'Champagne it is!' I said, discovering the chilled bottle in the ice, and an extra glass, and that Aunt Queen was already happily swilling.
"What time was it? Who cared? I drank and then I told her all about Jerome, even as Jasmine dug her finely buffed fingernails into my arm and whispered curses into my ears to which I responded not one syllable.
"Aunt Queen was overcome with happiness! 'Why, splendid!' she declared. 'And all this time, Tarquin, I thought you were a virgin! Bring this child to me. And Jasmine, you amaze me. Why on earth didn't you write to us and tell us! This calls for child support among other things. ¡¯
"And so the handsome little infant was brought into the presence of the Queen, and groggily and happily I drank two more glasses of champagne before becoming totally incoherent. By then my son had been told that I was his father. And Tommy had received the news too, being advised by Aunt Queen that in this house we kept no secrets, a fact which would work to the betterment of all of us.
"I remember staggering to Aunt Queen's bed, and someone, some very blessed individual, sweeping away her many fancy quilts and boudoir dolls so that I could fall facedown into the immaculate pillows, and that same someone, no doubt, pulled off my shoes, and I was soon under the heavenly weight of the quilts and in the chill of the air conditioner, fast asleep.
"I dreamed a dream of Goblin. It was an awful dream that he was suffering and couldn't come to me. I saw him incomplete, a gaseous and hideous being, struggling to be solid, but without my will he was indistinct and loose and miserable. I knew myself in the dream as cold and cruel to him.
"I danced with Rebecca. She said, 'I would not take you for my vengeance. You have been too good. ' 'Who then would you have?' I asked, and she answered me only with laughter. She went away and the music went with her. I opened my eyes.
"Aunt Queen lay beside me. She wore her silver-rimmed glasses. She was reading her paperback The Old Curiosity Shop, which I had given her on the plane, and she said to me:
" 'Quinn, Dickens is a madman. ¡¯
" 'Oh to be sure,' I said. 'It becomes wilder and wilder, all the darkness surrounding Little Nell; just keep going. ¡¯
" 'Oh, I will,' she said.
" 'She snuggled up to me. The feathers of her negligee tickled my nose but I loved it. I loved her frail arm so close to mine. I could read the book in her hands if I wanted to. I smelled her sweet perfume. She could buy anything in the world and she wore drugstore Chantilly, and a sweeter scent in all the world there is not.
"I remember seeing the violet sky through the windows.
" 'Lord, it's almost dark,' I said. 'I have to go to the Hermitage! I have to see my Petrine masterpiece. ¡¯
" 'Tarquin Blackwood, you will not go out in that swamp at this hour. ¡¯
" 'Nonsense, I have to,' I said, kissing her forehead and then her soft powdered cheek. 'Both Mona and Goblin are denied to me, and of Goblin's loss I have nothing to lament, I confess it, but I must go out there and claim what I've done. ¡¯
"I remember further protest, but I was deaf to it.
"I hurried up the stairs and into my room and into my closet, and I knew myself to be light-headed still as I pulled on a new pair of jeans and a new shirt and new boots (all purchased for my new size by Big Ramona as soon as she knew we were coming home) and then I took my thirty-eight pistol from the nightstand and headed down and out of the house. From the kitchen I took a bottle of water and a big knife, and from the shed a flashlight, and then I went down towards the swamp.
"Of course I was disregarding the terms of my bold and savage partner, but I had never agreed to them, had I? It was for myself that I had done the refurbishment and the renovation of the Hermitage. It was for me the fine furnishings that I would soon see. I had no fear of him, and if anything I felt a brooding curiosity to see him again and contend with him -- perhaps to have a decent conversation with him. Perhaps to discuss 'our' little house and to discover whether we did indeed have a bargain, since I had achieved all of the splendid renovations, not he.
"That Goblin was not with me to help me did not matter to me. I would handle it. The Hermitage was mine.
"As I passed the little cemetery going down to the landing I stopped for a moment near Rebecca's grave. I shone the flashlight on her tombstone. A frisson of the dream came back to me, and I heard her voice again in my memory as though she was near to me. 'Not your life,' she said. 'Whose life then?' I asked. And I felt a sense of foreboding, a dreadful sense of it -- as though life itself were full of nothing but misery.
"Wasn't Mona sick unto death, nauseated and miserable, and here I was going out to the Hermitage with no thought of her? Mona wanted so badly to see the Hermitage. But what could I do but pray for Mona?
"The sky was darkening. I had to go.
"When I returned I'd go to Mayfair Medical. I'd search the wards. What hospital room doesn't have a window for nurses to peep inside? I'd get as close to Mona as I could. Nobody would stop me, but for now it was the Hermitage that beckoned. I had to go.
"Into the pirogue I piled my gear, and, double-checking my gun for bullets, I set out. There was just enough light from the reddening sky to see the trees clearly and I knew the way now, and it soon became evident that the many pirogues of the renovation had plainly marked a trail. They had worn the way, one might put it. And I was soon speeding along.
