Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“So that’s your job? Drawing?”
“Mostly.”
“Drawing what?” His eyes come back to mine. They have a quality, in this light, of being slightly too aware. “Just flowers?”
“This and that.”
He doesn’t follow up. He doesn’t have to. There was a certain tone to that question. How he could possibly know I’ve drawn him I don’t know, but I suppose if I was a man with the body of a god and I walked around naked, I’d assume someone was drawing me too.
I should ask him to leave. I mean, we’re talking through the window. The sensible move at this point is well nice to meet you, thank you, goodnight, I’m going to lock my back door and go and be unsettled in private.
The other sensible move is to ask him if he wants to come in. Out of politeness. Out of the social pressure any American woman of my class and upbringing has been raised to feel, that says the man at the door has come over in the rapidly cooling air, and is being civil, and the least you could do is offer him a cup of tea. The man swam the way here, did he not?
But I don’t say that. Because the police were here today. Because Effie wrote don’t let him in, and whether or not she meant this particular man, I’m not going to ignore the woman who lived here for sixty years and warded her windows with salt. I don’t know this man from Adam, and that matters more than the fact that I want to invite him in.
Because, oh, I do. I want to invite him in.
The wanting is the thing that decides it for me. I know what I’d do if I had this man on the inside of my windows. I haven’t slept with anyone in a year—and this is not a man in any of the categories I have for men—and I’m not, at least not tonight, going to find out what happens if I let him past the salt.
“And what do you do over there, in the castle?” I ask, feeling the need to keep talking, to break the strange silence that’s befallen us.
“I could ask you the same about this cottage.”
“But I’m asking you.”
A hint of a smile. “I read. I walk. I swim, as you know.”
“That’s it?”
“Mostly, I wait.”
He says it hesitantly, like he wasn’t sure he should say it out loud. It’s enough that I don’t ask him to clarify, because part of me knows when to leave a thing alone. It’s not a big part of me, but it’s there. Sometimes.
“And what do you do for work?” I go on.
“This and that,” he repeats what I said earlier.
“Family money, then.”
A small pause. “I had a great deal of it once. I’ve learned to make it last.”
“And you’ve been here a long time, I gather?”
“Yes.” He pauses, his brows coming down. “I won’t lie to you, Iris.” He uses my name the way he used it the first time, all gruff and low and smooth all at once. “But I’m not going to tell you everything tonight.”
“Uh, okay. That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
“Aye.”
He doesn’t make excuses for it. He doesn’t say anything that might explain why his conversational skills are upside down and sideways.
I stare at him, trying to figure him out. The sun has dropped another inch behind the castle and the light through the window has gone from gold to a deeper, more burnt-honey color, and the breeze has picked up enough that I can hear it moving through the herbs in the kitchen garden behind him.
“You knew Effie then.” I think of her letter, of her words, her warning.
“I did.”
“Did you know her well?”
“Well enough.”
“What does ‘well enough’ mean?”
“It means I knew her for a long time. We weren’t friends, but we had an understanding.”
“What kind of understanding?”
A thoughtful look crosses his face. “She kept her wards up. I respected them. She was superstitious to the bone, kept to herself, kept her doors locked, kept salt at the windows. There are people in this country who still live that way. I’m from the kind of family that knew not to take offense.”
The kitchen has gone properly dim behind me. The salt line on the sill is a thin pale ridge in the failing light. He said wards without any irony or contempt for an elderly woman’s irrational behavior.
“All right then,” I say, because I’m not sure what else there is to say. I don’t dare mention the letter, I feel that’s a dangerous admission itself.
Meanwhile, Alasdair has stopped being lit by the gold of the sun, and started being lit by the bluer, colder light of dusk. The planes of his face have shifted in a way I’m finding it hard to keep looking at directly. He’s starting to look less like a man and more like something else. Something…ancient.