Home Repairs

Chapter Eleven:  A Face Still Forming

by L. Inman

 

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God.

…I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

 

Willow did not need to be told that Elisabeth had gone.  The atmosphere in the house changed when Giles returned alone, and later she saw him striding calmly out to the pasture, with the air of one intending to walk a long time.  She asked him no questions, even when it became apparent that he was going to contain himself about whatever had gone wrong.  The level of scotch in the decanter did not descend; his chair at the table at mealtimes was not empty; when she returned from the times she spent with the coven he looked no different—his face merely read the same weary acquiescence as ever.

            Still, there was something powerful there, so powerful that it was outside any attempts Giles might have made to shield it from her; powerful enough that she could not read it.  This was confirmed one day when she came in from a walk to find Giles sitting quietly at the kitchen table, radiating grief, or anger which is the lion’s share of grief.  He looked briefly at her, then away.

            “Why did she go?” Willow asked at last.

            “She was having dreams,” he answered.

            “Prophetic dreams?”

            “No one can tell,” he said.  “She didn’t describe them to me.”

            Willow watched him for a moment.  Then:  “Will she come back?”

            He stared into the distance, as if doing a calculation in his head.  “I think not,” he said finally.

            There was more to it than that, Willow could tell; but she said nothing, and a moment later Giles got up and went away.  On the table he left behind him an opened envelope and a single sheet of blue paper, lightly refolded.  It was the first time he had left any bit of communication vulnerable to Willow’s scrutiny; Willow looked up briefly at the doorway where he’d gone, then slowly went to unfold the paper: slowly and gently, so that Giles could come back and stop her if he wanted to.

            There was no letter, only a poem written out in Elisabeth’s handwriting, over the initials E.B.B.:

 

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore—
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

 

It explained a lot; it explained nothing.  Willow refolded the paper and left it.  She went out into the light, broad summer air, feeling as if she ought to be collecting small stones to visit a grave that didn’t exist.

 

Elisabeth could not have explained, even to herself, why she sent the poem.  Was it an urge toward cruelty?  Was it a veiled invitation to Rupert to come to her?  The very tranquillity of Oxford, of the days in libraries and nights in her flat, seemed to confirm the existence of the brooding horror that bided its time.  There was no evidence that anything was about to happen, and no way to know it was happening once it had started.  No proof that the ache in her heart and the emptiness of her arms had been worth the self-infliction.  If it doesn’t happen, she thought, he may find it hard to forgive me.  And then:  he may find it even harder if it does.

            This didn’t bear thinking about.

            Quietly, Elisabeth arranged her books in piles to be dealt with, amassed quotations, wrote peripheral essays, endured the comments that she was looking pale and preoccupied.  Always she was listening for the knock on her door, the knock that meant Rupert had come, that meant that it had begun.

            The day it came, she was nesting in papers, reading with a pen in her hand, and had nearly forgotten everything else.  She dropped the book to her desk, heart beating; then got up slowly and crossed to the door.

            But it wasn’t Rupert.

            It was Robson, with a frightened young girl behind him.

            Which was harbinger enough.

 

*

 

Brian steered his car into the tracks he had left earlier in the day picking Anne up.  “All right?”

            Anne gathered the gift bags she had taken away from Pyke’s Lea and shifted in her seat to reach for the door handle.  “Yes, this is fine.  Thank you very much for the ride.”

            “No trouble,” Brian said easily.

            She had opened the door and was preparing to place her first foot in the snow when he said suddenly, “Are you all right?”

            She looked up to blink at him.  “Eh?”

            Brian was looking at her thoughtfully.  “You seem a little….”  He let the sentence tail off into an uncertain gesture with his head.

            She had grown accustomed to thinking of Brian as not particularly perceptive, but Anne realized afresh that she had underestimated him.  “I’m quite all right,” she said, “though very tired.  Thank you.”

            He accepted this with a small nod, which was the other thing about Brian—he had a natural solicitude for people’s private feelings…except where his passions were concerned.  Anne was aware that this had caused problems between him and Elisabeth, and she wanted no such dynamic for herself; but his courteous detachment only served to further provoke the feeling that was currently rebelling against her usual calm control.

            The trouble was, she was dear to no one in any way that would make those problems a possibility.

            Anne offered Brian a small dry smile.  “Happy Christmas,” she told him.

            “And to you.  Good night.”

            Brian waited till she had unlocked and entered the vicarage before putting his car back in gear, which was smart; but Anne moved quickly to turn on lights, the faster to show him she was safe in her home so that he would go away.

            At last she heard the sound of Brian’s engine reversing, followed by the sweep of his headlamps across the front window, and she was alone.

            Correction: she was revealed to be alone.

            With an impatient gesture she turned from her uncertain stance in the front parlor and went to put the kettle on for some tea.  When it was in the cup, and she was sitting at her kitchen table, she quaffed gently and waited for the rebellion to subside; but it didn’t.

            This was usually the moment when the phone rang, heralding the need of someone for a priest: a deathbed, a sickness, a family row.  But no such catastrophe announced itself; the silence continued and Anne wondered whether she felt grateful or furious for it.

            Bloody hell, she thought impatiently: this always happened at Christmas, so why hadn’t she put the necessary nourishments in place—called her own spiritual director, sent a card to the one cousin who spoke to her, prepared herself to focus on the joys of liturgy on her own behalf?

            Because every so often one gets tired of the faute-de-mieux, her psyche answered at once.

            Anne got up and went into the dark chapel, where the only light was the candle she had lit before the creche that morning.  The flame was licking valiantly at life despite the shortness of the wick and the dwindling shine of wax.  To dismiss the temptation to view the candle as a sort of liturgical pathetic fallacy, Anne got a fresh candle out of the cabinet and replaced the old one.  Then she went to her prie-dieu and dropped slowly to kneel before the new flame.

            With her hands and eyes closed, she found images coming unbidden to mind: the joy in the face of her friend Elisabeth at the head of the table, irrepressible despite the shadows under her eyes, the remnants of laborious grief.  And then, the same face six months ago, the bright intelligent eyes stricken clean of meaning, wandering, frightened, in the sanctuary of this house.  Anne had never found the vicarage to be much of a sanctuary for herself, but it was a better hiding place, she thought now, than Pyke’s Lea.  It wasn’t just Rupert’s and Elisabeth’s difficulties that gave their house such shadows of last stands and morbid silences.  A place to live in it certainly could be, and would be, if today was any indication—but it had niggled at Anne’s vulnerabilities and magnified her own shadows all day.

            None of this passed through Anne’s mind with any coherency, nor did she pause to straighten the confluence of her feelings about the house with what she knew of her friends.  Her friends were fine.  They had passed through the weight of darkness and found refreshment in one another, which of course was what she had hoped would happen.  Her labors of prayer had paid off.

            Only such good news could undo her self-possession.  Anne lowered her forehead to rest on the aged wood, and, degree by degree, dropped her resistance against tears.  It was safe to cry in such solitude, though the solitude was the occasion for the crying in the first place; and soon she gave in altogether and wept disconsolately.  She wept because the year had been so hard and dark, because the shadows had taken them all and spit them back out again, like Jonah—like Jonah—Yes, I am angry, Jonah had said.  I am angry enough to die—the sign of Jonah, which was all they were going to get—and the signification of that is what?—Anne railed in her mind—that it’s wrong to ask?

            “You asked,” she said suddenly, lifting her head to direct a tearful accusing stare at the swaddled baby in the manger.  “You asked and you weren’t answered.  So why am I still wrong?”

            As she stared down at the creche, she answered herself.  Not wrong; just not finished.

            In a sort of clean despair Anne laid her head down again; but she was done crying.  The chapel, the vicarage, now curled round her, a dark covert, hollow like the palm of a hand; empty, because free.  Or the other way round—free, because empty.

            After ten quieter breaths, she got up from the prie-dieu, took a tissue out of her cardigan pocket and blew her nose, made her customary brief bow to the cross behind the little altar, and left the chapel to go to bed.

 

*

 

By the end of Boxing Day the Bing Crosby mystique had faded from Pyke’s Lea somewhat.  The breast of snow on the front and back gardens was heavily tracked over with Rupert’s, Buffy’s, and Elisabeth’s footprints, and the snow-heaped, tarped-over pile of lumber had been raided for materials to make a scaffold.  The cold had not abated, which was all the more reason to step up their working pace on the front parlor room to make it into an acceptable lounge.  Buffy had visions of curling up in front of the fire on a couch much softer, she said, than the one Giles had lugged to Sunnydale and back.  Rupert listened to her indulgently and rejoiced to himself; there was little need for him to dream while holding the scaffold steady for Buffy to scrape the upper reaches of the ceiling free of wallpaper, for this was precisely what he had wanted.

            Elisabeth, meanwhile, was dreaming about the study.  When she wasn’t muttering and flipping through books in front of her laptop, she was wracketing tape measures across the bookshelves, mapping future shelving schemes, and reading the labels on woodstains and cleaners.  Rupert let her get on with it.  The study was his by logistical necessity, but it was hers by conquest.

            For two days they worked unremittingly and ate leftovers cold or hot according to their mood.  The second night they stood in the center of their new lounge, looking round appreciatively at the freshly-painted walls—Buffy had made the final decision on the color, a warm Devonshire cream—and poured themselves some brandy to drink to it.

            Warm with brandy and aching in every fiber, they dragged themselves up the stairs to bed, and were all of them asleep within a quarter of an hour.

            But in the small hours Rupert woke to find Elisabeth shuddering beside him in the bed.  Holding his breath, he went very still and waited to see if she would subside and return to quiet sleep; but of course she did not:  she began to stir and make small noises in her throat.

            He had promised her that he would hold her as before.  But he had hoped that he wouldn’t need to.  He could feel paralysis creeping over his will; any moment now she would cry in her sleep and speak his name in fear, and he would not be able to move to save her.

            Elisabeth whimpered, and before the paralysis could solidify, he broke it and reached for her.

            “Elisabeth…wake up now.”  His voice gravelled and caught in his throat, and he cleared it.  “Elisabeth!”

            He heard her catch a sharp breath; she shook harder, and woke.  He tried to speak her name again, but his voice failed him; instead, he chafed her arm gently under the covers and breathed into her hair.

            Elisabeth turned over to face him, which she had never willingly done before; then she burrowed against him and clung until her breathing evened.  Rupert held her, cradling her close until he could clear his throat again.

            “Was it—” he swallowed and continued in a whisper— “the same?”

            Elisabeth shook her head.  “No,” she said thickly, her breath warm against his shirt.  “Not that…not that dream.”  And then, almost indistinctly:  “The older one.”

            He knew she could feel the instant release in his muscles, but the relief bypassed shame and reached his heart, unbinding his sympathy for her.  “Damn,” he said.  “I’m sorry.”

            “Hold me awhile?” she mumbled.

            “Of course.”

            In the darkness she curled close to him; he closed his eyes and bent his head, to let his lips brush her hair.  Their combined warmth radiated through their nest of covers; presently Elisabeth sighed back into sleep, and he released her gently so that she could return to her usual sleeping position.

            The moon came out and pearled the darkness, reflecting on the snow outside; and Rupert lay awake.

 

*

 

On Monday they had Brian to dinner—real dinner, not leftovers—for which he brought a cheesecake for dessert.  Inviting him had been Buffy’s idea; Giles leveled a thoughtful look her way when she brought it up, but he said nothing.  It was Elisabeth they both watched: she looked quite joyful at the suggestion, but also—and Buffy was pretty sure Giles didn’t miss it either—pensive.  Which meant that she was right, and Elisabeth and Brian needed to talk.

            Brian brought cheer into the house as well as cheesecake.  He teased Buffy about a snow-fight rematch and let Elisabeth tease him about his new Gibbon; and even he and Giles were gentle to one another.  Over dinner he drew Elisabeth into a discussion of fairytale that brushed the topic of her thesis lightly enough that she looked more cheerful about her task than she had in weeks.  Buffy didn’t miss the little dent between Giles’s brows that appeared when he saw Elisabeth gesturing happily over her plate, off and running about Dante at the end of the Purgatorio; but if he was jealous of Brian’s ability to set Elisabeth at ease academically, he—being Giles—let it go, and melted quietly away after the dishes were cleared, saying something about catching up on his files in the study.

            The conversation lasted until Elisabeth had got nearly to the bottom of the sinkful of dishes; Buffy busied herself with clearing the table of leftovers and putting them away, while Brian dried the dishes Elisabeth handed him.  Then, casually, Brian said:  “So.  Is it time for you to tell me what happened?”

            Buffy ducked back out of the room with a damp rag to wipe down the table, but she could still hear Elisabeth’s reply.

            “I’ve been having nightmares,” she said on a sigh.  “Some of them were about Rupert.  Most of them, actually.  I…couldn’t bear to tell him what I was dreaming about.  But then he figured it out.  Shit, meet fan.”

            Brian made a small sympathetic noise.  Buffy scrubbed harder at the dining table.

            “But it made us talk about it, which we never had really done.  I think we’re okay now.”  Her voice was cautious but steady.

            “And did you stop dreaming about it?”

            “About Rupert?” Elisabeth answered, distantly.  “Yes.”

            Brian didn’t ask what else Elisabeth might have to dream about.  Perhaps he, too, was thinking about the First, because he said:  “Did you tell anyone?  Because…well—”

            “—Because that’s what got me in trouble the first time?” Elisabeth finished, bitterly.  “I did tell Anne about the dreams.  She advised me to tell Rupert, of course.  But I couldn’t bear the thought of it; and I had this…vague sense that—that since I had to keep silence about stuff I had no business knowing, I might as well keep silence about what it cost me.”

            At this, Buffy put down the rag and went back into the kitchen, just as Brian replied.

            “Idiot,” he said.

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, “what he said.”

            Elisabeth cast her eyes down on a faint rueful smile.  Then she reached and turned off the tap.  A small silence fell.  Buffy watched Brian: he was looking at Elisabeth with a tenderness sharpened by—analysis, perhaps; she remembered what it had been like in the last Sunnydale war, how just thinking about the situation hardened one’s attitude.  And here was another thing she hadn’t realized fully: Brian had been there.  He had gone through all that, with Elisabeth.  It said something about him that he was still here.

            Finally Brian said:  “So you…talked about It.  With Rupert.”

            Elisabeth sighed deeply and nodded, bracing her hands on the counter behind her.

            “And…?”  Brian stopped, uncertainly.

            Elisabeth was staring thoughtfully into the distance.  “The thorn’s out,” she said, after a moment.  “There’s still my….”  Buffy saw her eyes suddenly focus, and she turned to see that Giles had reappeared in the doorway, and was looking her way.

            “Buffy,” he said quietly, “can I speak with you a moment?”

            Buffy felt herself blushing hot.  Brian’s color had also risen; Elisabeth alone looked calm.

            “Sure,” Buffy said.

            She followed him back to the study, heart beating quickly.

            “I’ve had an interesting email from Xander,” Giles said, returning to his computer desk and sitting down to mouse up the window.  “Have a look.”

            It took Buffy a moment, bending down to look at the monitor, to switch her thoughts from the track of getting-in-trouble-for-gossiping to the track of being-asked-advice-about-Slayer-business.  She stopped and reread Xander’s first paragraph.  That there was more than one paragraph said something in itself: Xander’s reports were usually short and to the point.  Even with a lot to say, however, he hadn’t exactly beat around the bush.

            I wouldn’t have recognized the guy if he hadn’t given me that second look when the flames went up, she read.  I know the village dust-up wasn’t an accident, but now I wonder what my stalker might have to do with it.  Then, laconically:  I hope I don’t have to kill him.

            “Shit,” Buffy said.  “Somebody’s following Xander around.  Have you talked to Willow about this?”

            “Not yet.”  Giles leaned back slowly in his desk chair.  “I wanted your input first.  What do you think this means?”

            He was looking at her very levelly: he knew exactly what she was thinking, and knew she knew it.

            Buffy chose her words slowly.  “Do you think the Council is trying to pick up info?  And if that’s true, how would they know where Xander was?”

            “That they know who he is is a clue, I think,” Giles said.

            “A clue that they really are Watchers?  Or a clue that they’ve found a source of information?”

            Damn, that sounded like an accusation.  She waited for Giles to go ballistic.

            He didn’t.

            “Both,” he said.

            After a moment— “Shit,” Buffy said again.  Now she was worried; and that in itself was weird—she rarely worried about Xander in foreign lands with possible demons on the loose, but spied on by morally ambiguous men who resented her power?  “Can’t we up his protection somehow?”

            “We’ll want Willow for that.  Perhaps you should call her,” Giles said.

            “Perhaps you should call her,” Buffy retorted.  “You’ve owed her a phone call longer than I have.”

            Giles gave a small sigh and linked his hands over his stomach.  “I suppose.  Has Elisabeth put on water for tea?”

            “Dunno,” Buffy said.  “Nobody said anything about tea.”

            “Perhaps you’d go and ask?  And you can see if they’ve finished talking about me, as well.”

            Buffy gave him a look, which he returned with mild humor over his glass-rims.  The cat, who had lurked unnoticed under the desk, leapt into his lap and began to settle in a tight curl across his thighs.  The thorn’s out, Elisabeth had said.

            “Shall I report back?” Buffy said dryly.

            “That won’t be necessary,” he answered.  “I’ll be along in a minute.”

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, “if the cat decides you can get up.  Make him call Willow,” she told the cat, and went.

 

*

 

Elisabeth saw Brian out; his footsteps crunched on the lingering bits of snow clinging to the walk as he made his way through the dark to his car.  When his headlights came up, she smiled into the night and closed the door.

            Buffy had already gone upstairs to claim the shower, so Elisabeth went into the kitchen instead and gathered together the teacups to wash.  Rupert’s cup was still with him in the study, so she ventured back there.  He was still on the phone, the cat curled and purring on his corduroy lap; he looked up from his conversation—which on his end mostly consisted of nods and grunts—to give Elisabeth a faint wry smile as she retrieved his empty cup.  She returned the smile and quietly retreated.

            She felt an oil-and-water mix of safety and discomfort.  She had accepted a prolonged hug from Brian before he left, which she did not remember doing since the days after her return from Bath, weakened and grieved, six months ago.  Brian’s understanding had grown—the longing and impatience had gone out of the look he gave her—which she suspected was largely Buffy’s doing.  Elisabeth had an idea that Buffy and Brian had bonded in a way that Rupert would dislike intensely if he knew.  There was plenty to justify suspicion, but it seemed Rupert was doing his best to ignore it.

            All should have been well.  But the old dream had come back—no, strictly speaking, the old waking nightmare had repackaged itself as a dream.  Elisabeth thought it was distinctly unfair that she should have got rid of Rupert’s dream with a pitchfork only to have the other one come in the barn door with—  She shook her head and sighed.  The solution to the one problem had been to talk with Rupert.  Who was there to talk to about this?  The First?

            “Not bloody likely,” she said to the kitchen in a savage murmur.

            She decided, instead of waiting for Rupert to get off the phone or Buffy to get out of the shower, to go to bed.

            She was still thumbing over her paperback of the Purgatorio, however, when Rupert came quietly up the stairs and into the room.  “Ah,” he said softly.  “You’re still awake.”

            “Yeah,” she answered.  After a moment she bookmarked Dante and set the book on the far side of the nightstand, to watch Rupert undress.  His movements were calm but thoughtful: he folded both jumper and trousers neatly over the chair in the corner.  He didn’t change into pajamas but climbed into bed next to her in T-shirt and boxers—which could have betokened any number of things, including the nothing that was habit.

            “So what’s the story?” Elisabeth asked, watching him shift about and move pillows to his liking.

            At first she thought he didn’t want to tell her.  But then he turned onto his side facing her, folded a pillow under his ear, and said:  “Someone’s following Xander around.”

            Silence caught her breath; then she let out a sigh.  “Damn.  Is he all right?”

            Rupert shrugged.  “For now.  I called Willow to discuss ways of protecting him.”

            “What did she say?”

            He gave a long sigh and an eyeroll.  “Well, she spent most of the time quizzing me about my state of mind, so the subject wasn’t covered as thoroughly as it might have been.”

            Elisabeth half-snorted into a chuckle.  “I can sympathize.”

            His eyes found hers.  “Did you confess to Brian’s satisfaction?”

            “I think so.”  A small knot relaxed itself inside her.  This was what she had asked him for—undemanding honesty resting between them.

            Rupert gave her a small smile.

            “Who’s following Xander?  Do you know?”

            “Buffy and I suspect Council.”

            “Oh dear,” Elisabeth said.  “It’s inevitable, I guess—but not more welcome for that….How did they find him?”

            “That’s what we need to find out.”  He gave her the substance of Xander’s email, and of Buffy’s response to it.  “Amazingly,” he said, “she didn’t…freak out.”

            “You were expecting her to?”  Elisabeth said, amused.

            “Well….”

            “Who’s been doing most of the freaking out about Council interference?” she added, boldly.

            “Me,” he admitted on a groan.  “But I’ve…I don’t know.  I expect Buffy to react sooner than think.  I’m probably not doing her justice.”

            “Well, we’re probably not used to not being deep in an apocalypse by Christmastime.”

            He let his gaze bury itself in the middle distance; she watched lovingly, head on her pillow.  “No,” he agreed, at length.  “Bit unsubtle for me to give Buffy the pocket watch, wasn’t it.”

            “I think she took it in the best possible light.”  Elisabeth reached to stroke his shoulder. 

            “Yes, well,” he said, “what we’re going to do about this I don’t know.”

            Instead of offering what could only be an inane answer, Elisabeth snuggled down into the nest of covers and sighed.  Their bed was very comfortable; but there was an unsafety that lurked in the darkness of her mind.  Rupert glanced at her, then turned over to turn out the lamp on his side.  But when he reached over her shoulder to get hers, she said suddenly— “Can I have the light on tonight?”

            He drew back his hand and bent his gaze to her face.  “Are you all right?” he said, after a moment.

            Xander wasn’t safe, and probably not comfortable either.  “I’m fine,” she said.  “I just like to know where I am, tonight.”

            He did not withdraw his gaze, so she turned over and tried to settle into her usual position, as if there were no reason to be concerned.  She felt him lay his head down close to her, from behind.  “It won’t bother you?” she said.

            “Can I do anything?”

            It was not the words so much as the tone that made her turn to look at him.  “You’re already doing it,” she told him softly.

            He gave her a small smile; she turned again to lay her head down and close her eyes; and after a while they both fell asleep.

 

*

 

The next day, Buffy and Elisabeth started on the arduous task of scraping the walls of the study clean to receive fresh paint.  “On the bright side,” Buffy said, rocking the ladder with her strokes, “there are all these bookcases.  And on the not-so-bright side—”

            “—there are all these bookcases,” Elisabeth said, grunting as she picked at the grimy beads of old paint clinging between the edge of one case and the wall.

            Rupert had gone to the hardware store, with a list of DIY provisions in hand; as soon as he had gone Buffy got out the boombox, which hadn’t seen any use since before the exorcism, and put on a CD of lively tunes.

            Singing along, sometimes half-dancing, they worked their way toward one another at the center, where the fireplace was.

            “What are we doing for tomorrow night?” Buffy asked, stripping off her gloves to rebind her hair in its messy ponytail.

            “Well, Andrew’s plane gets in tomorrow afternoon; after we pick him up, I imagine we’ll all have dinner—I’ve invited Anne and Brian to see the New Year in.”

            “Full house, then,” Buffy said.  “House is always a bit fuller when Andrew’s here.”

            “Damn, that reminds me,” Elisabeth said.  “I need to bring up the air mattress from the flat.”

            “Can I help?”

            Elisabeth turned, thoughtful.  “You know, there is something I might ask you to do.  I was thinking of asking Brian if he’d go and pick up Andrew from the airport.  We have a lot to do tomorrow, and I want Rupert sane.”

            Buffy snorted into a laugh.

            “Do you think you could go with him?”

            Buffy finished laughing and thought about it.  “Sure.  I could go.”

            “I’m sure he will mind the errand less if you’re going along.”  Elisabeth pursed her lips on a dry smile.

            She was not surprised to see Buffy blush and reach quickly for her gloves.

            “So,” Elisabeth said, “did you have a fling with him?”

            “I—”  Buffy blushed harder, then set her shoulders straight.  “I kissed him.”

            She was looking sideways at Elisabeth, to gauge her reaction; Elisabeth grinned.  “Good for you,” she said.  Then added, with a facial shrug, “He’s a good kisser.”

            Buffy opened her mouth, then shut it again; then said:  “So—you guys—”

            “We didn’t get much further than kissing,” Elisabeth said.  “But yeah.”

            “Is that why Giles doesn’t like him?”

            Elisabeth thought Buffy knew perfectly well why Brian and Rupert disliked each other, but she said, “One of the reasons, I guess.  Brian has a knack for winning people’s confidence—he clicked with Xander straight off, when he was here.”

            “That would make Giles jealous.”

            “Yeah.”  Elisabeth took up her scraper again.  “I think you probably have the right idea not telling him how you clicked with Brian.  That would make him even more jealous.”

            Buffy stopped: Elisabeth could feel her gaze, but steadfastly kept scraping.

            “Not,” Buffy said finally, “jealous in the same way he is of you.”

            “No,” Elisabeth said; “but it’s not as dissimilar a thing as you may think.”

            She waited for Buffy to deny it, or to dissemble.  But— “Yeah,” she said.

            “‘Course,” Elisabeth said, “there’s some of that going with Rupert and Brian too, though you’d never get either one of them to admit it.”

            “You mean sexual tension that runs on premium hate-octane?  No kidding.  I mean, it’s no wonder he never asked what was up with me and Spike in the first place—I mean, he should talk, and then there was that whole Ethan thing, and that was a world of ugh.”

            “Xander said—”  Elisabeth broke off.  That would be too mean, and she felt suddenly cheap.

            But it was too late.  “What,” Buffy said, with a familiar edge to her voice.

            Elisabeth blushed hard.  “He—said—that sometimes listening to you and Rupert go on, he found himself wishing you would just—you know—”

            “Yes?”

            A lame periphrasis was not going to cut it.  Elisabeth took a deep breath and got it over with.  “‘Just fuck already,’ is what he said.”

            Buffy was silent.  It took Elisabeth a moment to get up the courage to look over at her; when she did, she found that Buffy was staring into the middle distance with her lips pushed out thoughtfully.

            “Typical Xander,” she said finally, though her color was high.

            “He’d be so embarrassed if he knew I told you that,” Elisabeth said, cringing afresh.  “Fact, he’d probably kill me.”

            “Not if I killed him first,” Buffy retorted.  Then:  “Did Giles tell you about what happened?”

            “Yeah,” Elisabeth said.  “Doesn’t bode well, does it.”

            Buffy shook her head.  “I talked to Will a little bit last night, and there’s not a whole lot she can do other than send extra energy to the amulet she gave him.”  She got down from her ladder and moved it to the side of the fireplace near Elisabeth, with an air that suggested she was glad to be well launched on the new subject.  “I was afraid Giles was going to freak out if I mentioned the Council,” she added, clattering up with her scraper.  “But he didn’t.”

            “No,” Elisabeth agreed.  Then added after a moment, “Poor Rupert.”

            Buffy answered only with a sigh, and set to work.  For a few minutes the only sound was the grumble of their scrapers and the creak of their ladders above the music.  Then Buffy said, “Did we put caulk on Giles’s list?”

            “I don’t think so,” Elisabeth said, wiping the blade of her scraper with gloved fingers.  “We still have some spackle, though.  Is there a crack?”

            “Yeah.  It’s—” she grunted, digging along the top of the shelf— “running along between the shelf and the wall.”

            Elisabeth looked up.  “Weird.  All the shelves I’ve been doing are sealed to the wall.”

            “Mine too.”  Buffy stopped struggling with the scraper and put it down to lean back and survey the whole case.  “Hey, look.”  She pointed at the division between her rank and the one next to it.  “The boards are doubled up here.”

            Elisabeth had noticed that when making her measurements, but had assumed that it indicated where new shelves had been added to the ones either side of the fireplace.  But now she realized that there was no doubled divider on the other side.  “Weird,” she said again.

            With sudden energy Buffy picked up the scraper, and instead of trying to spare the crack along the top, began attacking it from end to end of the case.  “Careful!” Elisabeth uttered, but Buffy, unheeding, drew the corner of the scraper along in one last flourish, then backed in half a jump off the ladder and dragged it back.  “There’s something behind it,” she said, stepping back.  “Yeah! look, there’s a space let in next to the fireplace so you can—”

            Elisabeth got off her ladder at top speed, almost falling, and backed up to watch as Buffy searched for a handhold at the doubled divider.  She found one and began to haul with feet braced.

            At first nothing happened; not even Buffy’s strength had any effect at all on the sturdy bookcase.  But then there was a long groan, and a rattle of dust, and the bookcase came free an inch.  “It’s coming away!” Elisabeth cried, elation and terror rising in her chest at once.

            Buffy tore off her gloves and redoubled her efforts.  Elisabeth snatched off hers, then dashed to grab the edge of the rug behind Buffy’s heels and peel it back.  With a terrible rending noise, the bookcase came fully free of the plaster and began to swing, horribly shuddering and grating, toward the fireplace.

            The terror overcame Elisabeth’s elation.  She dropped the edge of the rug and backed away.  Buffy hauled and tugged, and there was revealed behind the bookcase, not blank wall, or even a door, but a smaller square black maw, into which Buffy’s scraper fell with a hollow clatter from the top of the bookcase.  They heard it rattle far down, and the dust fell, and then it was still.  Dry cold crept from the maw toward them.

            Buffy let go of the bookcase and straightened, panting and pink-faced.  “Hey!” she said.  “Looks like you got a secret passageway.  Wonder where it goes?”

            “Don’t go down there!” Elisabeth said sharply.

            Buffy turned to Elisabeth where she stood a safe twelve paces back, and gave her a look.  “Are you kidding?  Giles would never forgive me if I explored his secret passageway without him.  We’ll have to wait till he comes back.”

            Elisabeth did not like this idea any better, but she got hold of herself.  “It’s got to be the priesthole,” she said, controlling a shiver with an effort.  “They must have rebuilt it.”

            “What’s a priesthole?” Buffy asked.

            Elisabeth explained, hugging herself to stop the shuddering of her gut muscles as she spoke.  She didn’t dare to go nearer, but she could see from where she stood that the passage, however it was built, went down to the right.  Straight in ahead was the other wall: behind that—Elisabeth’s thoughts raced—must be the back of the staircase, where the little downstairs bathroom was.  Now that it had been revealed, it was hard to imagine the priesthole’s entrance being anywhere but the study; but it was possible that another door had once reached it from that space.  And why would they have rebuilt the priesthole after its discovery and ruin?  And how would they have replaced all the books that camouflaged it?  Elisabeth was beginning to realize that she had not thought very deeply about the Bartholomaes and their house at all.

            Buffy was not far behind.  “It seems weird they’d rebuild this hiding place, if everybody already knew about it.  Why would you cover over something people already knew was there?”

            The words struck past the surface of Elisabeth’s consciousness and pricked her heart.  Why indeed cover it over—why curl round the little heart of darkness and shield it so persistently?  What are you protecting?

            “I suppose,” Elisabeth answered slowly, “because the hole hasn’t gone away.  You’d have to do something with it, if it’s still there.”

            And you’d know that you would eventually have to go back in.

            Buffy, studying Elisabeth’s face as she stared at the little maw, opened her mouth to speak; but before she could ask her question, the front door rattled and opened.  “I’m home!” Rupert called amid the flyaway sounds of plastic shopping bags.  “And I’ve got lunch.”

            They waited; it didn’t take long before Rupert’s steps tracked their silence back to the study:  Elisabeth realized all at once that the CD Buffy had put on had finished minutes ago.

            “I thought the ‘lunch’ bit would bring you both running,” he said as he came in the door; and then he stopped dead at the sight of their little tableau—Elisabeth in recoil, Buffy coated in centuries-old dust, and the black doorway where a bookcase had been.

            There was a silence; then, “Good Lord,” Rupert said.  “You found it.”

            “Don’t think anyone but a Slayer could have got it open,” Elisabeth said, hardily.  To her dismay, Rupert went immediately forward and began to examine the bookcase and the opening.  “I see,” he murmured.  “It’s set a bit back from the mantelpiece—I did think that was odd—wonder why I didn’t consider—yes, looks like there’s the mechanism, rusted away, of course, though the air coming up is remarkably dry….Buffy, would you get my torch from the toolbox in the conservatory?”  Buffy was off like a shot, and back, before Elisabeth could even formulate a protest.

            Now they were both peering down the dark shaft, Rupert playing the torch up and down.  “Yes, that’s where the steps become stone; no telling how sturdy the wooden part is.  You’d probably better go first, Buffy.”

            Elisabeth forced her voice to work.  “I don’t think anyone should be going down there!”

            They both turned to look at her, blinking.  Finally Rupert said gently, “I think the danger’s gone from it, Elisabeth.  It was a pretty thorough exorcism.”

            “I know that,” Elisabeth said, shaking and ashamed of it.  “But you don’t know if it’s stable.  It’s—” she held back the word dark— “closed off underground.  Ready to fall down for all we know.”

            “Well,” he said, even more gently, “we should find out now that we can.”

            They were going down.  Elisabeth said nothing more to stop them; and Rupert turned to hand Buffy the torch.  “Careful,” he said, as she edged her foot down to the first riser.  When the stair did not so much as creak, she went down more easily, and Rupert followed her.  Involuntarily Elisabeth drew toward the opening, to watch them disappear, conflicting emotions churning in her stomach.  “What’s her deal?” she heard Buffy say, in a voice of indistinct concern.

            “She can’t bear the dark,” Rupert murmured back, briefly, and Elisabeth’s hands clenched, nails sharp against the palms.  She felt a sudden furious urge to go down there and show them she could explore dark places with the best of them—and it was her house too, dammit—but she had already done herself out of the opportunity.  Someone had to stay up here and be ready for an emergency, and she had nominated herself for that post by default.

            Below, she could see the shifting beam of the flashlight as they played it over the passage; they had disappeared, but she could hear their voices, and she didn’t need to be able to make out the words to hear the boyish excitement in Rupert’s.  She leaned a hand on the rough lintel of the priesthole and heard herself give a long sigh.  If they were going to talk about jealousy, it might as well be admitted: she had things to be jealous of too. 

            She waited for them to come back up; but it took forever, and since she could hear Rupert’s voice faintly the whole time, an irrational anger took up all the space of relief.  When at last she caught sight of Rupert’s grinning, dirt-smeared face at the bottom of the stone steps, she was seized with an urge to brain him with his torch.  She crossed her arms to resist the temptation.

            “There’s a passage,” he said to her, even before he got all the way up the stairs.  Elisabeth moved back, glaring at him stonily with arms crossed, so that he could come up into the room.  “Goes out into the wood.  Remember that grate amongst those rocks?  The sewer behind it’s fallen in, of course, but I bet that’s where the passage was meant to go.  It won’t be hard to excavate it.  There’s a room too, of course, but it’s empty as far as I can tell.  Not that we won’t be going thoroughly over it, of course—”  He broke off, noticing at last that she was looking like she wanted to go thoroughly over him, and not in the good way.

            “It’s quite safe,” he said, with an appeasing note in his voice that touched fire to her anger.

            “And I guess I’m just supposed to take your word for it,” Elisabeth snapped.  “As if I were a—a deficient child who—”

            “You didn’t want to go down there,” he protested, quite reasonably.  “I only—”

            “I conquered this house, in case you’ve forgotten!”  Elisabeth uncrossed her arms, hands in hard fists.

            Rupert’s answer was quiet.  “I haven’t forgotten.”

            “Then give me my—”  But Buffy was stamping up the steps, and Elisabeth snatched away the end of her own sentence, her face going hot.

            “Boy,” Buffy said, dusting off hands dark with dirt, and shaking cobwebs out of her hair, “nothing like exploring secret passages to give a girl an appetite.  What’s for lunch?”

            “Indian takeaway,” Rupert answered.  His eyes were still on Elisabeth.  “Let’s go eat it while it’s still warm.”

            “That’s okay.”  Elisabeth hated the thin strained sound of her own voice.  “I’m not hungry.”  Before either could reply, she strode from the room and took the stairs at a quick pace.  When she got up to her bedroom, she shut the door against them firmly: just short of a slam.

            At least she hadn’t been lying; she wasn’t hungry, she was tied in knots inside.  And she knew she’d just behaved like an idiot, which only made it ten times worse.  It just proved, conclusively, that she was an albatross.

            Elisabeth curled up on the bed with her legs drawn up, half sitting against the pillows and the headboard.  She peeled off her sneakers to keep the duvet clean, but made no other concessions to either neatness or comfort.

            She heard Rupert’s footsteps coming up the stairs.  She cleared her throat, prepared to refuse him entry if—when—he knocked.

            But he didn’t knock.  He just opened the door and came in, bearing a bowl of mulligatawny on a plate with a piece of nan bread next to it.  He set it down on her nightstand: a curl of steam rose from the surface of the soup as if to beckon her.  Elisabeth’s tongue began to ache hard at the root.

            “Don’t be nice to me,” she said.  “I don’t deserve it.”

            She glanced up at him briefly, and saw a sudden hardness come into his concerned face.

            “Don’t be so stupid,” he said, sharply.  “And I’ll be nice to you if I please.”  He must have caught the petulant note in that last, because his lips twitched afterward, as if to add, So there.  But Elisabeth wasn’t ready to laugh, not even at him.

            “It’s embarrassing,” she said miserably.  “I’m embarrassed.”

            “Eat your soup,” Rupert said.

            “Is that an order?”  She gave him a sullen glare from under her brows, and he smiled grimly.

            “It’s a reinforced suggestion,” he said, and turned to go.

            To her chagrin, Elisabeth’s eyes began to brim.  “I’m sorry,” she said, bleakly.

            Rupert stopped, and turned to look her directly in the eyes.  “I know.  Tell me what I am to do,” he said, “when the time comes.”

            She frowned, and the urge to tears subsided.  “Time comes for what?”

            “I think you’ll know before I do,” he said gently.  “Eat your soup.”

            He went away.

            After a minute of the silence he left behind him, Elisabeth decided that for the moment it would be difficult to worsen her feeling of shame; so she reached out slowly for the bowl of soup, and began to spoon it up and eat it.

 

*

 

It turned out to be less difficult to face Buffy than she feared; that evening, just before dinner, she ventured downstairs, and all Buffy did when she saw her was give a sympathetic grimace and ask, “You okay?”  Elisabeth gave her a self-deprecating eyeroll, and Buffy patted her shoulder with a hand that was competently gentle despite being marked for slaying.

            She glanced into the study, but didn’t go in: the bookcase had been left open for the time being, and the blackness of the door hole was worse in lamplight than daylight.  Elisabeth tried not to think about it while they ate dinner, and even managed to forget about the maw for a space of time while they played several hands of spades at the dining room table afterward.  Rupert volunteered, unobtrusively, to shut up the house for the night; and she went upstairs to shower and dress for bed.

            When he came upstairs, he found her already in bed, wearing her new blue pajamas.  “I closed up the priesthole for the night, too,” he said, going to the closet to undress.

            Elisabeth nodded.  She had heard the noise downstairs, and known what it meant.  And what Rupert meant by it.  And apparently she wasn’t finished being proud.  When Rupert was buttoning up his own pajama shirt, she reached for her lamp, the only light in the room.  As she knew he would, Rupert looked up.  “D’you not want the light tonight?” he asked, tentatively.

            “No,” was all she said; and she knew he’d caught the look on her face when the light clicked off.  He got into bed without protest, and settled down close to her but not quite touching.  She knew what this meant too: it meant that he had chosen patience—Giles patience, which like Giles pissitude was inimitable and unmistakable.  A part of her rejoiced at Rupert being so like himself, another part of her was furious at him for not taking her bait, and a third and larger part of her was wishing she had swallowed her pride and left the light on.

            Going determinedly to sleep would be a good way to flip off her own fear; but staying awake would at least forestall the dreams she knew were biding their moment to attack.  I will make your darkness rise up and consume you, the First had promised her; and I will make him watch.  Was it foolish of her to believe that the First would not, could not fulfill that promise even after defeat?  Like a time bomb; like the gestation of a plague.  The black door hole down in the study could have opened the door to her own contagion, unzipped the secure seal between reality and the Nothing.

            Fear and pain; pain and fear.  She had known pain during her vigil in Rupert’s apartment in Bath, had offered it as the only thing she had to sacrifice on behalf of the world.  Sacrifice; Anne had said something about sacrifice.  And—Nothing was the womb of creation, Anne had said.  But she could be wrong.  Hope was usually wrong.

            The night deepened, and Elisabeth shuddered, fighting both sleep and panic at once.  But it wasn’t till Rupert stirred and sat up behind her that she realized that her cocoon of pain and fear was not opaque.  He might have been getting up to visit the bathroom; but she knew he wasn’t.  He got out of bed; came round to her side and drew the covers gently away from her; found her hand and pulled steadily till she sat up.  Obediently she got out of bed, into the dark chill, and let Rupert drape her own robe over her shoulders and lead her downstairs.

            The kitchen light lanced hard across her vision, and she winced.  He put her in a chair at the table and filled the electric kettle, his hands the steadiest thing in the room.  There was a thick glut of nausea in her gorge, but when he put before her a steaming cup of chamomile tea, she wrapped both her hands round its warmth and prepared herself to swallow sips of it.  Rupert sat down across from her and rested his lips against his clasped hands.  She studied his face for a moment: there were weary shadows and lines under his eyes, but the expression in them was calm.  She owed him an explanation; and she lowered her own gaze to the shining amber liquid in her cup, to form the words.

            Rupert cleared his throat softly.  “You don’t need to say anything,” he said.  “Just drink your tea.”

            Elisabeth’s throat ached again; but she put the cup to her lips and sipped, and the hot tea smoothed the ache away a little with every swallow.

            When the tea was gone, he took her cup and washed it, then led her back upstairs, where he put her to bed and tucked her up.  She heard him open the nightstand drawer and rummage among the few paperbacks, pens, index cards (for nighttime inspirations), and sex-related accoutrements; a box of matches rattled, and he struck one to light a fresh tea-light, which he then placed in the candle stand he had given her.  The light flickered brightly, jewel-like among the mosaic pieces of glass; he turned it so that she could see it fully, and went to crawl into bed beside her.

            As the bed re-warmed with their presence, she reached under the covers to find his hand and give it a small squeeze.  He returned the gesture, then turned over to burrow in his pillow and sigh down to sleep.  With the candle burning before her face, Elisabeth closed her eyes.  She fell asleep, and did not dream at all.

            Elisabeth woke in the pale dawn to find the candle burned out and dark; and she knew what she had to do.

 

*

 

Rupert was afraid.  The fact that the opening of the little black door in the study brought him no threat only compounded the incipient anxiety underlying his breath.  He felt no threat from the open priesthole; but the shadow it raised in Elisabeth’s eyes brought back everything he had ever feared for her and for himself.  But it was useless to panic.  She needed him to be steady; and he found that he could.

            In the morning, he rose and began the task of tidying the house for their guests that would come in the evening to help them see in the new year.  Elisabeth came down, grim and calm, and turned a hand to help without a word.

            Brian was to come later in the morning, to pick up Buffy and go to the airport to get Andrew.  Elisabeth had made this arrangement yesterday evening, and though he approved of it, Rupert also didn’t know that he entirely wanted Buffy to leave him and Elisabeth alone.

            When they heard Brian’s car picking its way up the gravel of the lane, Rupert, in the dining room, saw Buffy turn to Elisabeth where they stood in the kitchen and say in a low voice, “Are you sure you want me to go?  Do you need me here?”

            Elisabeth’s chin went down, and she didn’t answer for a moment.  Then she said:  “I think I need you to go with Brian more.”

            Far more than the words, the note in her voice set him atremble with fear, and he didn’t wait to hear Buffy’s reply but fled to the lounge to watch from the front window as she and Brian went out the front door and down the path to his car.  Brian’s laugh reached him from outside; the doors slammed; and he watched the taillights of his car disappear down the lane.

            And behind him he felt as much as heard Elisabeth come into the room.

            “Rupert,” she said, in half a whisper.

            He turned.  She was pale—paler than pale, white; her face set and resolute.

            “Yes?”  His voice came out faint and strained, and he knew his fear was visible on his face.

            “I need to ask something of you,” she said, now trembling.  He waited.

            She swallowed and went on.  “Do you…do you remember when we tried to do that meditation…back in Sunnydale?”

            Did he remember?  It seemed to him now that each day he’d lived with her had been a remembering, and he already knew what she was going to say next, as if it all had been decided long ago.  He nodded.

            “I need to go back there,” she said, her voice flat.  “I need you to take me back there.”

            She had said it: and he knew that his only hope lay in choosing to do what she asked.  He opened his mouth, shakily, but his throat was silent.

            But she saw what was in his face, and said abruptly:  “I can’t go on if I don’t make peace with the darkness.  I don’t want to, but I have to.  Please; can you help me?”

            Rupert could not make her plead with him.  He cleared his throat forcibly.  “Let’s see what we can do,” he said.  He went to her and took her hand; and she followed him, inevitably, to the study.

            Rupert opened the doors of his armoire in the corner.  He must not think, he must just do it.  “I’m afraid,” he said softly, “that my crystal set didn’t survive the Hellmouth.  We’ll have to find other things to use instead.”  There was, in fact, not much in his armoire; he had neglected to replenish the basic supplies he usually kept for workings.  There were a few small jars of herbs, his bottle of scotch, two ancient Tarot decks in drawstring pouches, some well-thumbed books of tables and spells, and two unpacked cardboard cartons of odds and ends that he’d salvaged from the various wreckages he’d left behind.  With a sudden alacrity he grabbed one of them and began to rummage in it.  Incense—no; bell—no; statue of Kali—definitely not.  “Ah!” he uttered, and dug deeper in the box till he had unearthed the drawstring bag he’d caught sight of: a small quartz crystal sphere, if he was not mistaken.  He put down the box and shook the globe into his palm; then he looked up.

            Elisabeth, at his side, was absorbed in looking at one of his Tarot decks, with an expression on her face that he recognized; he had learned to trust that look of thoughtful intuition, and he said:  “Find something that interests you?”

            She looked up at him, then edged out one of the cards and turned it to show him.

            The Fool.

            A knot in his spirit suddenly untied itself, and he remembered with a rush how he had fallen in love with her, how despite her terror she had taken that step over the cliff, over and over when it was required of her.  He nodded; then he held out the crystal sphere for her inspection.  She took it in her hand and cupped it.  “Yeah,” she said softly.

            “Right then.”  He took the deck from her and sorted through it till he found all four aces; they needed all the grounding that was going.

            Without discussing it, they moved to the place under the chandelier, the scene of Elisabeth’s earlier triumph and his acknowledged heartbreak, and sat down tailor-fashion across from one another.  Elisabeth chose to sit with her back to the closed priesthole: he was not certain, but he thought he knew what that said about how she perceived that threat.  She had lost color again.

            Rupert laid the four aces in a diamond square, with deliberate precision, and set the sphere in the center.  Fire, air, earth, and water.  Then he laid the Fool next to them, at her right hand and his left, their dominant side.  He looked up: and their eyes met.  For a moment a nightmare future stretched out before Rupert’s mind’s eye: losing her, losing himself, irremediable desolation.  Then his vision cleared and he said hoarsely:  “Lay your hands open and focus on the sphere.”

            She lowered her gaze and did as he said.  He watched, drinking in what might be his last sight of her sane and reachable: he thought of what the First had said about her, and what the First had probably said to her, wearing her face.

            He began to speak the words that would draw her under, saw the focus of her eyes hone on a point so small it became invisible and her gaze opaque.  He felt her give the burden of her consciousness into his own open hands; his tears blurred her image and spilled down his face, but his voice held steady.

            He could go with her to a point, and did: for years he had nursed misgivings about other people trusting him, and he knew now that though he could not control the possibility of his own failure, he too must play the Fool.

            There came the moment when Elisabeth must leave him behind as she drew inward; her eyes closed, and he waited, breathing shallowly, for her to reach what she sought.  She began to tremble lightly, then harder; slowly the calm ebbed from her face and was replaced by the hard grief that lay on the far side of fear.  She shook as though she might tear apart, but made no sound.  Rupert watched, breathless.

            She went rigid, and drew in a sharp sob of a breath; her eyes watered from under her lashes as if from some great effort.  Suddenly, she shuddered upright and her eyes opened, blank and unseeing.  Caught on the brink of anguish, he watched; and then she blinked, and her eyes were meeting his, and she made a small sound, like a child waking from a nightmare.

            For only a second Rupert’s breath remained suspended; then he swept aside the cards and the sphere and held his arms open to her.  She came to him and burrowed her face hard against his chest, and he bore her up, both of them shaking together.

            Almost at once she relaxed into a limpness of relief, and sagged in his arms.  He unfolded his legs and let her sink down with her head in his lap, her face nested on his thighs.  Within the space of a breath she was profoundly asleep.

            He stroked her mussed hair back from her temple, combing it with his trembling fingers.  At the hairline he could see the faint line of white scar left from the night she had died in the doorway to her old home.  One of his tears dropped upon the soft round of her cheek and rolled; he wiped it away.

            He wanted to say to her, I see what you have done.  I see that you did it for me, too.  He wanted to say:  I don’t think you’re deficient, or a child, or a coward.  He wanted to say:  Thank you.

            Rupert sat while the light changed and dimmed to late afternoon, and Elisabeth lay still across his lap in a stunned sleep.  From time to time he combed her hair with his fingers, and meditated on the new and free space his breath had found.  When he heard what must be the sound of the car returning down the lane, he reached at last to move her.  “Let’s get you upstairs,” he said, hoisting her awkwardly upward; as he’d hoped, she woke just enough for him to maneuver them both to their feet so he could walk her upstairs.  She submitted to his guidance, putting one numb foot above the other on the stairs, and collapsed again on their bed, where he took off her shoes and spread an afghan over her.  The print of his jeans was pink on her skin.  He kissed her marked cheek, turned on her lamp for when she woke, and went downstairs, just as the front door opened to admit all the noise and life of his guests.

 

*

 

She must have been ready to wake, because she came easily up from the depths of sleep when Rupert sat at her side on the bed.  The bedside lamp shone in the way it could only do at night; in its thick yellow light she saw a plate with a thick sandwich on it and a cup of milky tea sitting waiting for her.

            “You don’t have to keep feeding me like this, you know,” she said in a soft croak.

            “I know,” he said, humor in his voice.  His hand stroked her shoulder.

            She drew in a long breath and wriggled to sit up.  He picked up the tea and held it ready for her.  When she could, she accepted the cup and took a long pull at its hot sweetness.  “Here’s a sandwich for you,” Rupert said.

            “I’ll spoil my dinner,” she protested faintly.

            “Dinner’s long past, dear heart.”

            She blinked and looked around: the sky through the windows was indeed black.  “How long did I sleep?”  Before he could answer that, she followed that question with another:  “Did all our guests go home?”

            “Oh, no,” he smiled.  “They’re all downstairs making exceeding merry.”

            “Some hostess I am,” Elisabeth said.

            “Eat your sandwich,” Rupert said.

            She snorted a laugh, but he didn’t have to tell her twice: she was ravenous.  He held her tea for her while she put the plate on her lap and ate the sandwich in large hungry bites: beef and two kinds of cheese, and soft bread.  “So everyone’s here?” she asked him with her mouth full.

            He nodded.  “Andrew got in fine, and they picked up Anne on the way back.”

            “I’ll be glad to see them,” she said fervently, and took another bite, following it with a drink of tea.

            When she had come to the end of the sandwich, and sat back replete with the rest of the tea, she let Rupert catch her eye.

            “What can you tell me?” he asked softly.

            There was much she could tell him; there was nothing she could tell him.  Elisabeth chose her words slowly.  “I can tell you that Anne was right,” she began.

            “She usually is,” Rupert said dryly.

            “She was right; the First had more to fear from my darkness than I did.  The womb of creation, she called it.  Still—” Elisabeth shuddered— “if I never go back there again it’ll be too soon.”

            He made no answer, but sat with his eyes resting in hers.  A new sensation had begun to make itself felt to her, and she sat patiently, teasing out what it meant—this new buoyancy, this fluidity and liberty.  She was…free.  What she and Rupert had done had made them free of one another.  The disaster in Sunnydale had sealed them together in horror, and they had compounded the seal with love.  The love remained, but the seal had gone.  All this she grasped, inarticulately, and felt both exhilarated and frightened.

            “D’you feel ready to go down?” he asked her.

            She thought about it.  “Shower first, I think,” she said.

            “All right,” Rupert said, gathering her plate and cup.  “I’ll go down and make sure nobody’s bagged the last of the eggnog.”

            “Ha!” Elisabeth said.  “Better hurry then.”

            Before he got up, he leaned forward and kissed her mouth: a soft, sweet, chaste kiss.  “Thank you,” he whispered before he pulled away and rose to his feet.

            And that was how she knew he felt it too.

 

*

 

If Anne wanted to be honest with herself, she knew she wanted to see the priesthole; so she was content when Brian demanded to be shown it as soon as they got to Pyke’s Lea.  Andrew, the young man, was no less enthusiastic; and so Buffy volunteered to pull the bookcase open again and shine the large torch down the staircase for all their benefits.  Rupert vetoed any suggestion of their taking anyone down for a tour till the place had been more thoroughly examined, much to Andrew’s disappointment.

            They unloaded Andrew’s luggage from the boot of Brian’s car, but Rupert asked them to leave it in the hall and not take it upstairs to the room they’d fixed for him till Elisabeth was awake.  She was taking a well-earned nap, Rupert explained.  Buffy looked worried, Anne noticed; but Rupert’s face was calm.

            Elisabeth slept through dinner.  Brian began to look worried as well; but Rupert looked, if anything, even more satisfied than he had at first.

            After dinner Buffy ushered them into the newly-finished lounge and brought in a tray of desserts; Rupert tempted them all with aged scotch, brandy, and eggnog with Lord only knew what alcohol in it.  Anne took a brandy and subsided into the new armchair.  She still felt fragile, though less unnerved in this house than before the priesthole’s discovery.  Fortunately for her dignity, Brian and Buffy were very entertaining, and no one looked askance at her.

            Rupert excused himself after a little, and went upstairs; and a little while after that he came back down with an empty plate and a teacup and looked in to tell them to save Elisabeth some eggnog.  “Oh, damn!” Brian teased him, “it’s all gone.”  “It better not be!” Rupert said, and went away with the dishes.

            “It’s very good eggnog,” Andrew said, looking somewhat blank and dizzy.

            “How much of that have you had?” Buffy demanded, grabbing the punch bowl.

            “Only three cups,” Andrew said, looking toward her with a gesture like an infant’s, as if his head were too heavy to move accurately.

            “Three cups!” Buffy yelped.  “Of Giles’s eggnog?”

            “God Almighty,” Brian said.  “Two’s a skinful.”

            “Quick, Brian! Make him some coffee.”

            Anne watched them dart to Andrew’s rescue—they’d had their own share of alcohol—and fought a smile with difficulty.

            “I can hold my liquor,” Andrew said, with dignity.  And it was true that although he looked very dizzy indeed, his voice was quite measured and clear.

            They were dosing a very reluctant Andrew with coffee when Elisabeth came in, her hair wet and bound up in a neat bun.  She looked pale and tired, as if she had just given birth to a very difficult bit of good news.  Buffy was not too distracted to study her narrowly, and Anne received confirmation in Buffy’s sudden expression of relief.

            Elisabeth greeted them all with handshakes and smiles, helped herself to eggnog, and talked quite pleasantly of the approaching midnight.  Rupert came in with a box of crackers, and she teased him about the potency of his eggnog.  Rupert offered an apology, but he looked rather complacent as he sat down in one of the armchairs; Elisabeth got up amused, and announced an intention to serve out more coffee before midnight came.  On her way out she paused to bend over Rupert and kiss his temple.  Anne saw the expression on Rupert’s face when she touched him; and saw, too, Buffy’s expression across the room, watching them.  It occurred to her suddenly that this young woman, so formidable in her strength and resolve, must know a loneliness like that of Anne’s own calling.  Buffy also must feel a small sword at the happiness of her friends; must know the pain of being shut out of a consummation she had chosen not to pursue.

            Good heavens, Anne thought suddenly, I must not be any too sober myself.  She was glad when Elisabeth came in with the coffee pot and a tray of cups.

            It was getting close to midnight, and their hilarity had not flagged.  “More coffee?” Elisabeth asked Andrew, gesturing with the pot as Brian handed out crackers.

            “I don’t need any more,” Andrew said, a little petulantly.  “I can hold my liquor just fine.  Mr. Robson says—”  He broke off.  There was a sudden silence.

            “What about Robson?” Buffy said slowly.

            “Crap,” Andrew said, shooting a hunted glance at Rupert, who had caught both Buffy’s and Elisabeth’s eye in turn.  “I wasn’t supposed to say anything about—”

            “Oh my God,” Elisabeth said, sitting up straight and putting down the coffee pot.  “Has he been pulling a Palpatine on you?”

            “No!” Andrew cried.  “He’s not evil, he’s good—he’s been teaching me—”  He stopped again at the grim looks gathering around him, and a new expression came over his face as he realized he’d said exactly what they would have expected.

            “Looks like we’ve found our leak,” Buffy said quietly.

            “I don’t get it,” Brian said.  “Who’s Robson?”

            Elisabeth looked over at him, but it was Anne who answered.  “He’s a Watcher,” Anne said.

            Brian’s face darkened, as it always did at the mention of Watchers.

            Anne ignored Rupert’s thoughtful look.  Elisabeth said gently:  “Andrew, have you been telling Mr. Robson things about your work?”

            “You mean he’s been using me?” Andrew put down his coffee cup with a clank and stood up unsteadily.  Which was answer enough.

            Andrew swung round to look at Rupert.  “Is that why he didn’t want me to mention him to you?”  Rupert merely looked at him ruefully: Andrew looked at Buffy, who was plaiting her fingers thoughtfully in her lap.

            “Andrew,” she said, “you knew about Xander’s shadow man, didn’t you?”

            “Someone’s shadowing Xander?”  The boy paled.  “I wouldn’t hurt Xander.  You know I wouldn’t!”

            “But you told Robson where he was,” Buffy said, inexorably.

            “But—” Andrew’s face went hard.  “I can’t believe this.  I’ve been used.  Again!”

            “You’re not the only one it’s happened to,” Rupert said, but the comfort fell flat.

            “But I’m the one he picked.  I’m the one he picked,” he repeated, louder.  “Because I’m the weak link.”

            “Nobody thinks that,” Elisabeth said, and at the same time Buffy said, “It’s our fault for leaving you without a partner,” but Andrew ignored them both.

            “I’m sick of being everybody’s dupe.”  His voice cracked.  “From the Watchers to the First Fucking Evil—and don’t you laugh at me,” he said savagely to Rupert.

            “I’m not,” Rupert replied, going serious at once.  “I was merely thinking of certain passages of my youth.”

            “I’m not your mirror image,” Andrew raged.  “And I’m not your apprentice.”

            Rupert’s gentleness was as inexorable as Buffy’s.  “Most good Watchers have expressed such a sentiment,” he said.

            “Then maybe I don’t want to be one!”  Andrew pushed his way, stumbling, round the coffee table and stormed out of the room.  A moment later the heavy front door slammed.

            Before the silence had time to settle, Rupert looked at Buffy and cut his eyes toward the door.  She nodded grimly, and got up to follow.  The door shut more quietly behind her.

            Elisabeth was still sitting upright, but she looked blank.  “Well,” she said.

            Rupert was looking thoughtful.  Brian was looking at Anne.

            “How,” Brian said, “did you know this Robson bloke is a Watcher?”

            Anne closed her eyes and sighed.

            “The Robsons are something like third cousins once removed,” she said.  “I haven’t met him, but I know who he is.”

            “Your family are Watchers?” Elisabeth said, in wonder.

            “Not my immediate family.  A branch up the tree.”  Anne decided she might as well make a complete confession.  “The Watchers nearer related to me were all exterminated, of course; but they have—had—an old heritage.  They were related, I believe, to another Catholic Watcher family called Bartholomae.”

            They stared at her.  Brian spoke finally, in a slow voice.  “You mean to say,” he demanded, “that I did all that research on this bloody house…and I could have just bloody well asked you?”

            Anne shook her head.  “I didn’t know about the house,” she hastened to say.  “I didn’t know the Bartholomaes built it till Rupert told me the details of your exorcism.  But I heard the name and the pieces, as they say, fell together.”  She kept her eyes on her coffee cup.  But in the silence that followed, she looked up at Elisabeth, too afraid of what she would see not to meet it.

            “Huh,” Elisabeth said.

            “Oh,” Rupert sighed, “dear.”

 

*

 

Buffy buttoned up Elisabeth’s coat as she followed Andrew down the lane and over the receding drifts of crunchy snow.  He had taken the lane at a run, but she could still see his shadowed figure moving down the road in a pelting walk, his breath coming out in volleys of vapor in the sharp air.  She kept him in sight and did not hurry; she wanted to think.

            It was very tempting to think of Andrew as someone more trouble than he was worth, someone who could just be written off.  But it was no longer possible, even if he hadn’t joined the Murderer’s Club, as she had spat at Angel.  Buffy felt a twist of grief.  Everybody was in that club now, it seemed:  Andrew, Giles, Willow, Angel, Faith…only Xander had not killed another human being—and judging from his email, he did not see himself as being able to dodge that bullet much longer.  Dawn had been afraid of her power as long as she’d known of it; Elisabeth, too, was afraid of what she could do.  Buffy had ceased to be afraid of her own power: that had been the First’s plan, and though it had backfired, it wasn’t like it hadn’t taken its toll.

            No, Andrew was definitely one of them now, obnoxious and naïve as he was.  Robson had messed with one of her people.  She hadn’t decided yet how he was going to pay, but as far as Buffy was concerned it was a done deal.  And if Robson was responsible for Xander’s danger, he’d have to pay twice.

            She was catching up with Andrew on the road: he had paused in the light of the lamp at the head of the next lane to clutch at his side, breathing heavily.  He hadn’t taken a coat; he was wearing only the thin sweater he’d had on when he got off the plane.  Buffy lengthened her stride.

            Andrew heard her coming and started again, though he was still winded.  Buffy kept moving till she was almost even with him, matching his pace.

            “Go—” he uttered— “away—”  There were tears on his face, and Buffy thought suddenly, this is a Moment for him.  It wasn’t for her; but she had recently had one, and under this very sky.  You didn’t mess with other people’s Moments, and if there hadn’t been so much at stake, she would have gone away as he asked.  Buffy thought of the look on Giles’s face, which Andrew had interpreted as amusement, and treaded carefully.

            “I can’t go away, Andrew,” she said finally.  “It’s dangerous to be alone out here.”

            “What do you care?”  He spat the words at her, awkward in his very fury.  “I’d be better off dead.”

            “Bullshit,” Buffy said evenly.

            Andrew stumbled on.  They had left the pale cast of light and entered the shadow between it and the next, a hundred yards down the curving road.  The snow, so soft on the night it fell, was now hard and resisted their treads.

            “It’s not bullshit,” Andrew said, when he had breath enough.  “I’m more trouble than I’m worth, aren’t I?”  He made it an accusation.  Buffy didn’t answer; it was true enough that she had thought it, and even if she had thought it only to deny it, that wouldn’t help him.

            “I’m not—” Andrew went on— “any use to people—just to—their enemies.”  His voice broke on the last word and he stumbled to a halt.  A sharp eddy of wind plucked at his sweater, and he shivered hard.  They could have been the only two people in Oxfordshire.

            “You’re all always going to hate me,” he said, in a voice that buried a wail of despair.  Buffy shook her head mutely, and he said, “And why not?  I’m a freak, a geek, and—something that rhymes with ‘geek’ and means ‘traitor’.”

            Buffy couldn’t resist it.  “Sneak?” she offered.

            Andrew barked a short laugh, but he was too angry to be undone.  So Buffy stood and waited.  Finally he spoke again, and a pleading note came into his voice.

            “I thought I was helping,” he said.  “I thought—if I could be the one who brings everyone together….He—he said that forces for good should work together, but sometimes personalities got in the way.  He said that Mr. Giles and he didn’t get along, but…. Why does he hate the Council?”

            “Giles?” Buffy asked, though Andrew could hardly mean anybody else.  “Well, you know about the Council, don’t you?  It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that they want to be the only good guys in the room.  They tried to kill me and Faith.  It’s hard for Giles.  He’s a Watcher, but he knows better than they do.  Good is complicated, Andrew.  It’s evil that’s simple.”

            Andrew was silent for a moment.  Then:  “He made me feel valuable.”

            The little pang hit Buffy again.  That was what Giles had wanted; it was what she had wanted.  Willow and Xander, her best friends, had wanted it.  Why was it such a hard thing to find, or to give?

            Her silence made Andrew burst out:  “Is it wrong?  Do I have to beat it down every time?  Do I have to treat it like it’s evil?”

            “It’s just something we want,” Buffy said helplessly, thinking that whatever she said would only make things worse.  But at the ‘we,’ Andrew went very still.

            “It’s just something we want,” Buffy said again, “and sometimes other people use it to manipulate us.”  Like Warren did to you, she thought.  Like the First did to all of us.

            “Like I did to Jonathan,” Andrew said, and began to weep quietly.

            He was turned toward her and away from the far-off light, and his face was in shadow.  But she could see his bowed head, and his trembling, and the faint heave of his shoulders as he stood grieving.  He had spoken not a single mythological word, made not a single attempt to cast this moment as part of some heroic story.  Perhaps, Buffy thought, he was realizing that there are other kinds of stories besides the heroic.  Perhaps he wasn’t thinking of stories at all; after all, these tears weren’t going to solve a Hellmouthy problem.  They were just tears, and that was significance enough.

            Presently Andrew raised his head and swiped at his nose with the back of his hand.  “What am I going to do?” he asked her.

            Buffy shrugged.  “Do what you want.”

            “I…I don’t know what that is.”  His voice was hoarse.

            She remained silent, and he said, “I don’t want to join the Council.”

            “No.”  She hadn’t expected he would.

            “I d-don’t know if I can keep Mr. Robson away from me.”

            “Why don’t you let me worry about that part,” Buffy said.  “And let’s get back to the house.  You’re going to die of hypothermia out here.”

            Andrew was indeed shivering violently, from cold or self-discovery or both.  “O-kay,” he uttered, hugging himself.  She turned to go back, and he turned with her.

            “That’s the problem with storming out dramatically,” Andrew said, with a faint return of his usual air of confidential enthusiasm.  “It’s kind of an anticlimax to come back and get your coat.”

            Buffy gave a short laugh.

 

*

 

Elisabeth helped Rupert bring the last of the cups into the kitchen, where Anne was already wrapping and sealing things to put away.  “Well, midnight came and went,” Rupert said with a glance at the clock, “and we didn’t even notice it.”

            “Not that there weren’t fireworks,” Elisabeth said.  “I’m taking Brian upstairs to get Andrew’s room finished.”  She turned, and was gone.

            Rupert hadn’t blinked at Elisabeth’s declaration; there seemed to be no question that the plans would go forward as made, as if Andrew’s gaffe were merely a social solecism and not an upheaval of their entire trust in him.  But, Anne thought, this was probably for the best.  Continuing to accept Andrew would probably make him more tractable in the long run.

            She kept her hands moving, wrapping the remainder of the cheese from dessert in its cloth and putting it with the other things to go back in the refrigerator.  But of course that would not stop Rupert from looking at her; or from speaking.

            “You didn’t tell me,” he said quietly.

            She stilled her hands and looked up at him.  “No,” she answered.

            There was no excuse to give, so she gave none, merely looked back at him.  His face was calm, his gaze gentle; it was impossible to tell if he were hurt, though she thought she could sense he was not angry.  Anne realized that this was a moment in which he indisputably had the moral high ground over her: and yet she felt that he was reluctant to claim it, as if he felt an obligation to renounce his advantage.

            “There was no chance I would ever have been a Watcher,” Anne told him.  “My side of the family were already distancing themselves from their cousins.  If I’d been born male, there would have been no objection to my taking holy orders; but I wasn’t.  When I left Rome, I lost them, Watchers and civilians and all.”

            “Did it have to be that way?” he asked her, not even pretending not to know the answer.

            “Probably not,” Anne said evenly.  “But it was.”

            He nodded, and his gaze dropped to the middle distance.

            They heard the front door open, and the clatter of feet into the house.  After a moment Andrew came into the kitchen, violently shivering, with Buffy behind him, shrugging out of Elisabeth’s wool frock coat.  She folded it over her arm and stood in the doorway.  Her face was pink from cold; Andrew’s, from cold and crying.  He went to the roll of paper towels by the sink and racketed off an awkward couple of pieces.

            Buffy was looking at Rupert.  Rupert looked back at her impassively, then at Andrew.

            “Wh-what are you going to do with me?”  Andrew’s shivering had not abated much, and he was making heavy weather of wiping his nose.

            “Nothing, tonight,” Rupert said.  “I expect you and I will need to have some conversations in the near future about what you gave away.”

            Fresh tears rose in the boy’s eyes, but he gathered himself straight to his lanky height and nodded.  Rupert regarded him with equanimity for a moment, then asked:  “What did he offer you?”

            “He was going to train me,” Andrew said.

            “As a Watcher?”

            “Sort of,” Andrew said, refolding the wad of paper towel and wiping at his nose again.  “He said Watchers are different now…in some ways.  Not in others.”

            “He’s not wrong about that,” Rupert murmured, half to himself.  Then:  “And he’s not wrong that you need proper training.”

            Andrew said bitterly, “I guess he was never going to do it.”

            “Maybe,” Rupert said, voicing Anne’s own thought.  “He has his own ideas of honor.  Still,” he went on briskly, “it’s probably best if I handle the training from here on in.”

            “You didn’t want to before,” Andrew accused.

            Rupert’s answer echoed Anne’s earlier simple admission.  “No.”

            “It’s because you feel sorry for me,” Andrew said, his voice raw.

            Rupert made no attempt to affirm or deny it, merely looked the boy in the eye; and after a moment Andrew dropped his gaze and nodded.

            “Upstairs,” Rupert said gently, “you will find Elisabeth and Brian making you a bedroom in the office.”

            With a long sniff and a final shiver, Andrew gave a last nod and went out.

            A small silence reigned; then Buffy spoke.  “I don’t know about you, but I think I’m too tired to hash all this out tonight.”

            Rupert nodded and sighed.  “Morning’s good enough for making long-term plans.”

            “Short term,” Buffy said, “I’m going to text Will so she knows who to keep an eye on.  That might help Xander some.”  A bit of worry crept into her voice.  Anne roused herself.

            “I’m tired as well,” she said.  “And I’ve got a service for the Holy Name tomorrow.”

            Buffy gave her a puzzled look, but didn’t ask the question.  Rupert said, “I’m sure Brian will be ready to leave soon.”

            Yes, Anne thought, and with any luck he’ll be too tired to interrogate me about my Watcher side of the family.

            She felt achingly tired, and a little depressed; but as they went out of the kitchen Rupert rested his hand on her shoulder from behind, for a brief moment; she reached up to touch his fingers, and was comforted.

 

*

 

The house was quiet.  Everyone had gone to bed, and the last lights put out.  Andrew shifted uncomfortably on his air mattress and tried to make himself go to sleep; but it still hurt too much.  He chewed his lower lip to stop new tears from coming.

            A shadow nosed open the door, which he had not firmly shut, and slipped into the room.  Andrew went very still and waited; and the cat leapt up onto the mattress and came toward his head, its feet making small puff-sounds on the bed as it stepped.  It hunkered down close to him; Andrew could see the faint outline of its ears in the darkness.  He thought: he’s here to make sure I don’t hurt anybody.  His eyes grew wet again, but he reached gingerly to pet the top of the soft head.  To his relief the cat’s ears lifted to accommodate his touch, and it started a very small purr.

            After a few minutes the cat nestled closer to him, warming him, and Andrew stroked the soft fur till he grew tired, and went to sleep.

 

*

 

Elisabeth’s sleep was peaceful.  For once she felt free to relax where she lay, not curled half-hedgehog and edging toward fetal.  So when she woke to Rupert’s trembling, she found herself on her back, all her muscles quiet; and it cost her nothing to reach next to her and touch him.  He drew in a sharp breath and startled; then rolled over and slipped a hand over her, to take refuge close against her.

            Elisabeth raised her arm to draw him in and settle him so that his head lay in the hollow of her shoulder, under her jaw.  She stroked his hair, lightly, but still he trembled, in bursts of shaking that she could not fully absorb against her body.

            After a long time, he spoke quietly, his voice by contrast very calm.  “Damn,” he said.  “How tiresome this is.”

            She smiled in the darkness, and combed his hair with her fingertips.

            “Don’t fash yourself,” she said.  “You had a difficult day.”

            “You should talk,” he said.

            “I know.”

            He sighed.  “I’ll be good for nothing in the morning.”

            “Maybe you won’t need to be,” Elisabeth said.  “You should rest anyway, you know.”

            “And let everyone else carry the weight of our Watcher problem, perhaps?  Though it seems there are more people with the experience to do it than I thought.”

            “I was rather shocked by Anne’s little revelation,” Elisabeth agreed; “but I wasn’t really surprised.”

            Rupert grunted softly.

            “And of course, Knowles offered me a job as a Watcher, that day I was at the Council.”

            He half-raised his head.  “You didn’t tell me that!”

            “Didn’t I?  Yes, after the scene in front of the dais, I was taken to his office, still in that damned white robe, and he gave me a very dry little look and made the offer.  He wasn’t surprised when I refused.  But I laughed.”  Elisabeth gave a little sigh.  “Poor Andrew.”

            Rupert snorted.

            “It’s funny I didn’t tell you, when we talked afterward, in my flat.  But it’s hard to remember what we said then.”

            “Yes,” Rupert said.  “I suppose you were too busy trying to get rid of me to remember to mention it.”

            “Oh, Rupert!” she said, on a sharp inbreath, and they both stiffened.

            “Sorry,” he muttered at once, “sorry—I didn’t mean—”

            “Don’t say you didn’t mean it.”

            “No,” he agreed, and after a breath tried again.  “I didn’t mean to carry my bitterness so long.  I didn’t feel that way at the time.  I didn’t, till later.”

            Elisabeth made herself relax.  She began stroking Rupert’s hair again; but the little pain hadn’t gone away, and she knew he could tell.

            “Dammit,” he said, burrowing miserably against her.  “I—”  But he stopped.

            “No, I get it,” she said slowly.  “It’s a little…a little bit like that time I said I wished I had died back in Sunnydale.”

            He sighed and nodded.

            “I didn’t say it to hurt you.  But it did.”

            “Yes,” he said.  Then:  “And I remember what I said, too.  I told you what you could do to make it up to me.”

            The unspoken invitation lay heavy in the air, as if he had raised his head to look at her, though he had not.  Elisabeth went still, with her hand in his hair.  She swallowed; and then she spoke.

            “Let me handle Robson.”

            He was silent, and she waited patiently for him to think it over.

            “Buffy will want to take a hand,” he said finally.

            “My plan involves Buffy,” Elisabeth said, calm.

            “You have a plan, then?”

            She hadn’t, until this moment.  “Yeah,” she said.

            Rupert gave a long sigh.  “I think you are right,” he said.  “I would be too tempted to…well.”

            “Kill him?” Elisabeth supplied, with equanimity.

            “Probably,” Rupert said.  His voice held a note of relief that she had said it for him, and of sadness that she had been able to guess.

            Elisabeth turned her face to him, to kiss his hair gently.  “I love you,” she said.

            She felt him breathe out and relax in her arms.  “I know.”

 

*

 

Across the kitchen table, in the early morning light, Buffy curled her hands around her coffee cup and thought about it.  Elisabeth waited.

            “Yeah,” Buffy said finally.  “I think you’re right.  I think we’ll have to start there.”

            “Okay,” Elisabeth said.

            “And I’ll work on the arrangements for moving Andrew to Rome.  In the meantime….”

            “In the meantime we can move him into my flat.  We’ve pretty much completed the move to Pyke’s Lea now; and Rupert intends to do a lot of work with him, so it will be convenient to have him close.”

            Buffy nodded.  “Do you want me to call Brian and explain his part in the plan to him?”

            “Do that,” Elisabeth said, pushing her chair back to rise.  “I’ve got to dig out my contact number.”

            “Okay.”  Buffy got up too; and Elisabeth carried her tea into the dining room, where her laptop and books and notebook lay piled in a corner.

            She flipped carefully through her notebook, looking for the number she had written on one of the unnumbered blank pages.  At last she found it, and, glancing at the clock, took it to the table and got out her phone.

            Ring.  Ring.  “Heathbend Clinic,” said a cool female voice.

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said; “I’d like to speak with Dr. Kettering-Carter, please.”

 

*

 

Chapter 12

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