"We've got to have a proper conversation, Mitch, and we've got to have it sooner rather than later."

"A conversation about what?"

"About us. About what we do. We can't go on like this."

There was a long, long silence. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said finally.

ii While Rachel and Mitch.e.l.l played out their melancholy domestic drama, there were other events occurring, none of them so superficially noteworthy as the separation of lovers, which would in the long term prove to have far more tragic consequences.

You'll remember, perhaps, that I made mention in pa.s.sing of Loretta's astrologer? I don't know whether the fellow was a fake or not (though I have to think that any man who sells his services as a prophet to rich women is not driven by any visionary ambition). I do know, however, that his predictions proved-after a labyrinthine fashion that will become apparent over the course of the next several chapters-to become true. Would they have done so had he kept them to himself? Or was his very speaking of them part of the great plot fate was laying against the Gearys? Again, I cannot say. All I can do is tell you what happened, and leave the rest to your good judgment.Let me begin with Cadmus. The week Rachel returned from Dansky was good for the old man.

He managed a short car trip out to Long Island, and had spent a couple of hours sitting on the beach there, looking out at the ocean. Two days later one of his old enemies, a congressman by the name of Ashfield who had attempted to start an investigation into the Gearys' business practices in the forties, had died of pneumonia, which had quite brightened Cadmus's day. The illness had been painful, sources reported, and Ashfield's final hours excruciating. Hearing this, Cadmus had laughed out loud. The next day he announced to Loretta that he intended to make a list of all the people who'd attempted to get in his way over the years whom he'd now outlived.

Then he wanted her to send it into The Times, for the obituary column: a collective in memoriam for those who would never cross his path again. The conceit had gone out of his head an hour later, but his lively mood remained. He stayed up well past his usual bedtime of ten, and demanded a vodka martini as a nightcap. It was as he sipped it, sitting in his wheelchair looking out on the city, that he said: "I heard a rumor..."

"What about?" Loretta said.

"You saw that astrologer of yours."

"Yes."

"What did he have to say?"

"Are you sure you should finish that martini, Cadmus? You're not supposed to drink on your medications."

"Actually, it's rather a pleasant feeling," he said, his voice a little slurred. "You were telling me about the astrologer. He told you something grim, I gather."

"You don't believe any of that stuff anyway," Loretta said. "So why the h.e.l.l does it matter?"

"Was it that terrible?" Cadmus inquired. He studied his wife's face woozOy. "What in G.o.d's name did he say, Loretta?"

She sighed. "I don't think-"

"Tell me!" he roared.

Loretta stared at him, amazed that a sound so solid could emanate from a body so frail.

"He said something was about to change all our lives," Loretta replied. "And that I should be ready for the worst."

"The worst being what exactly?""I suppose death."

"Mine?"

"He didn't say."

"Because if it's mine..." he reached out and took her hand "... that's not the end of the world. I feel quite ready to be off somewhere restful." His hand went up to her face. "My only concern is you. I know how you hate to be alone."

"I won't be long following you," Loretta said softly.

"Oh now hush. I won't hear that. You've got a good long life ahead of you."

"Not without you I don't."

"There's nothing to be afraid of. I've made very good financial arrangements for you. You'll never want for anything."

"It's not money I'm worried about."

"What then?"

She reached for her cigarettes, fumbling with the packet a moment. "Is there something about this family you've never told me?" she said.

"Oh I'm sure there's a thousand things," Cadmus remarked blithely.

"I'm not talking about a thousand things, Cadmus," Loretta said. "I'm talking about something important. Something you've kept from me. And don't lie to me, Cadmus. It's too late for lies."

"I'm not lying to you," he said. "I meant what I said: there are a thousand things I haven't told you about this family, but none of them, sweet, I swear, none of them is very terrible." Loretta looked somewhat placated. Smiling and stroking her hand, Cadmus quickly capitalized on his success.

"Every family has a few unfortunates in its midst. We've got those. My own mother died miserably. But you know that. There was some business done in the Depression that doesn't reflect well on me, but-" he shrugged "-the Good Lord seems to have forgiven me. He granted me beautiful children and grandchildren, and a longer, healthier life than I ever dared hope I'd have.

And most of all, He gave me you." He tenderly kissed Loretta's hand. "And believe me, darling, when I tell you there's not a day goes by without my thanking Him for His generosity."

That was more or less the end of the conversation. But it was only the beginning of the consequences of the astrologer's prediction.

The following day, when Loretta was out at her monthly lunch with several philanthropic widows of Manhattan, the old man wheeled himself into the library, locked the door, and took from acertain hiding place behind the rows of leather-bound tomes, all undisturbed by any curious reader, a small metal box, bound with a thin leather thong. His fingers were too weak to untie the knot, so he took a pair of scissors to it, and then lifted the lid. If anyone had witnessed him doing this they would have a.s.sumed the box contained some priceless treasure, his manner was so reverential. They would have been disappointed. There was nothing glorious in the box. Just a small book that smelled brown with age, its cover stained, its pages stained, the handwritten lines upon those stained pages faded with the years. And between the pages, here and there, loose sheets of paper, a small fragment of blue cloth, a skeletal leaf that went to motes of grey dust when he tried to pick it up.

He roved back and forth through the book perhaps half a dozen times, pausing for a moment to study the contents of a page, then moving on.

Only when he'd examined it this way did he return to one of the pieces of loose paper and remove it, unfolding it with such delicacy it might have been a living thing-a b.u.t.terfly perhaps, whose wings he wanted to admire without doing the creature harm.

It was a letter. The hand it was written in was elegant, but the mind shaping the words more eloquent still, the thoughts so compressed it read less like prose than poetry.

My dearest brother, it said. The great griefs of the day have pa.s.sed, and through the twilight, all pink and gold, I hear the tender music of sleep.

The philosophers are misled, I have come to believe, when they teach us that sleep is death's similitude. It is rather a nightward journey back into our mother's arms, where we may be blessed to hear the lovely rhythm of a slumber song.

I hear it now, even as I write these words to you. And though our mother has been dead a decade, I am returned to her, and she to me, and the world is good again.

Tomorrow, we do battle at Bentonville, and are so greatly outnumbered there is no hope of victory. So forgive me if I do not tell you 1 long to embrace you, for I entertain no such hope, at least in this world.

Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. And if your prayers are answered, perhaps also the best.

I have ever loved thee.

The letter was signed Charles.

Cadmus studied it for more than a little time; especially the penultimate paragraph. The words made him shake. Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. There was nothing in this library, in all the great, grim masterworks of the world, that had the power to distress him that these words possessed. He'd not known the letter-writer personally, of course-the battle of Bentonville had been fought in 1865-but he felt a powerful empathy with him nonetheless. Whenhe read the page it was as though he was sitting beside the man as he sat in his tent before that calamitous battle, listening to the rain beating on the canvas, and the forlorn songs of the infantrymen as they huddled about their smoky fires, knowing that the following day a vastly superior force would be upon them.

Earlier in his life, when he'd first become familiar with the journal, and particularly with this letter, Cadmus had made it his business to discover as best he could the circ.u.mstances in which it had been written. What he discovered was this: that in March of 1865 the depleted forces of the Rebel States, led by Generals Johnston and Bragg, had been driven across North Carolina, and at a place called Bentonville, exhausted, hungry and despairing, they had dug in to face the might of the North. Sherman had the scent of victory; he knew his opponents would not last much longer.

The previous November, he had overseen the burning of Atlanta, and Charleston-brave, besieged Charleston-would very soon fall beneath his a.s.sault. There was no hope of victory for the South, and surely every man who made up the forces at Bentonville knew it.

The battle would last three days; and by the standards of that war there was not a great loss of life. A thousand and some soldiers of the Union perished, two thousand and some Confederates.

But such numbers mean nothing to a soldier in battle, for he need only die one death.

Cadmus had often thought about going to visit the battleground, which had been left, he'd been told, relatively untouched by time. The Harper house, a modest domicile that stood close by the field, and had been turned into a makeshift surgery during the conflict, still stood; the trenches where the Confederate soldiers had waited for the army of the North could still be lain in. With a little research he could probably have discovered where the officers' tents had been pitched; and sat himself down dose to the place where the letter he held in his hand had been penned.

Why had he never gone? Had he simply been afraid that the threads binding his destiny to that of the melancholy Captain Charles Holt would have been strengthened by such a visit? If so, then he'd denied himself in vain: those threads were getting stronger by the moment. He could feel them wrapped around him now-tightening, tightening-as if to draw his fate and that of the captain into some final embrace. He might not have been so troubled had it only been his life which was affected, but of course that wasn't the case. Loretta's d.a.m.ned astrologer knew more than he realized, with his insinuations of Geary family secrets and predictions of apocalypse. The intervention of almost a hundred and forty years could not provide asylum from what was in the wind; its message carried like a contagion from that distant battlefield.

Pray for me, brother, the captain had written, for the worst is yet to come.

No doubt those words had been true enough when they were written, Cadmus thought, but the pa.s.sage of time had made them truer still. Crime had mounted upon crime over the generations, sin mounted on sin, and G.o.d help them all-every Geary, and child of a Geary, and wife and mistress and servant of a Geary-it was time for the sinners to come to judgment.

VI.

The conversation between Rachel and Mitch was surprisingly civilized. There were no raisedvoices; no tears on either side; no accusations. They simply exchanged disappointments in hushed voices, and agreed, after an hour or so, that they were failing to give one another joy, and that it would be best to part. Their only difference of opinion lay in this: Rachel had come to believe that there was no chance of reviving the marriage, and it would be best to start divorce proceedings immediately, while Mitch begged that they give one another a grace period of a few weeks to turn the decision over and be certain they were doing the right thing. After a little discussion, she said she'd go along with this. What was a few weeks? In the meantime they agreed to keep any discussion of the matter to a very small circle, and not consult lawyers. The moment a lawyer was brought into the picture, Mitch argued, any hope of reconciliation would be at an end. As to living arrangements, they would keep it very simple. Rachel would stay in the Central Park apartment; Mitch would either go back to the mansion or take a suite at a hotel.

They parted with a tentative embrace, like two people made of gla.s.s.

The following day, Rachel got a call from Margie. How about lunch, she said; somewhere grotesquely expensive, where they could linger so long over dessert that they could go straight on to c.o.c.ktails?

"Just as long as we don't talk about Mitch," Rachel said.

"Oh no," Margie said, with a faint air of mystery in her voice, "I've got something much more interesting than him to talk about."

The restaurant Margie had chosen had been open only a few months, but it had already won a spate of four-star reviews, so it was packed, with a line of people all vainly hoping they'd get themselves a table. Inevitably, Margie knew the maitre d' (in a much earlier incarnation, she later explained, he'd been a barman at a little dive she'd frequented in Soho). He treated them both royally, taking them to a table which offered a full view of the room.

"Plenty of people to gossip about," Margie said, surveying the faces before them. Rachel knew a few of them by sight; a couple by name.

"Something for you to drink?" the waiter wanted to know.

"How many martinis do you have?"

"We have sixteen on our list," the waiter replied, proffering the doc.u.ment, "but if you have some particular request..."

"Bring us two very dry martinis to start. Straight up. No olives. And we'll look at the list while you're bringing them."

"I didn't know you could mix so many martinis," Rachel said.

"Well I'm quite sure after the third or fourth you can't tell the difference," Margie said. "Oh look... the table by the window... isn't that Cecil?""Yes it is."

The Gearys' lawyer, who was a man in his early sixties, was leaning across the table gazing at a blonde, decorative woman a third his age.

"That's not his wife, I presume?" Rachel said.

"Absolutely not. His wife-what's her name? Phyllis, I believe-looks like our maitre d' in bad drag.

No, that's one of his mistresses."

"He has more than one?"

Margie rolled her eyes. "When Cedl shuffles off to heaven, there will be more women at the graveside than are walking Fifth Avenue right now."

"Why?" said Rachel. "I mean, he's so unattractive."

Margie c.o.c.ked her head a little. "Is he?" she said. "I think he's quite well preserved for his age.

And he's fabulously wealthy, which is all a woman like that cares about. She's going to get a little sparkly something before lunch is over. You just watch. She's counting the minutes. Every time his hand gets near his pocket she salivates."

"If he's so rich, why does he go on working? Couldn't he just retire?"

"He only has the family as clients now. And I think he does that out of loyalty to the old man.

Garrison says he's very smart. Could have been the best of the best, Garrison says."

"So what happened?"

"The same thing that happened to you and me. He got dragged into the Geary family. And once you're in there's really no way out."

"You promised, Margie. No talking about Mitch.e.l.l."

"I'm not going to talk about Mitch.e.l.l. You asked me what happened to Cecil. I'm telling you."

The waiter was back at the table with the martinis. Margie was intrigued to know what a Cajun Martini-number thirteen on the list-was like. The waiter began to describe the recipe, but she stopped him after half a florid phrase.

"Just bring us two," she said.

"You'll have me drunk," Rachel said.

"I need you a little tipsy," Margie said, "for what I'm going to tell you about.""Oh my Lord."

"What?"

"You were right," Rachel said, nodding across the room in the direction of Cecil's table. Just as Margie had pre- dieted the lawyer had taken out a slim box from his pocket, and was opening it to let the blonde see her reward.

"Didn't I say?" Margie murmured. "Sparkly."

"It used to happen all the time in Boston," Rachel said.

"Oh that's right, you worked in a jewelry store."

"These men would come in and they'd ask me to choose something for their wives. At least they'd say wives, but I got the picture after a few weeks. These were older men, you know-forties, fifties-and they'd always want something for a younger woman. That's why they'd ask me. It was like they were saying: if you were my mistress, what would you like? That's how I met Mitch.e.l.l."

"Now who's talking about Mitch.e.l.l? I thought he was verboten."

Rachel drained her martini. "I don't mind. In a way I'd sort of like to talk about him."

"You would?"