“ ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound that way,’ she said. ‘I meant to say that during this time she’s been deeply and totally in love with you. She’s been writing to you, or talking to you by phone, instead of fighting us. She asks about you all the time.’

“I felt the chills come over me. My darling Mona. What had I done in leaving her? Had I fallen so in love with the letters and phone calls of Ophelia Immortal that I lost Mona herself?

“ ‘Thank you, Rowan,’ I said. ‘Thank you always.’ There were so many more questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t dare to try it. I was so afraid.

“That night the champagne flowed in Aunt Queen’s suite. Nash, who had drunk far too much of it, but with our liberal encouragement, proposed toast after toast to the lady he loved most in this world, Mrs. Lorraine McQueen; and young Tommy, now age thirteen by a matter of two whole days, stood up to read a poem he had written for the occasion, declaring himself to have become a man thanks to his guardian and inspiration, nephew Tarquin Blackwood. Only I failed to comport myself in keeping with the occasion. I could only smile and salute everyone with my glass and say how very happy I was that we were returning home at last, to take stock of all we’d learned, and to all those we had missed in our journeying.

“The fact was, a multitude of worries and apprehensions had a Byronic hold upon me. Not to see Mona was foremost among them. But I was also obsessed with Petronia, that she was occupying the Hermitage so boldly, and of course I was thinking of Goblin. Was I fool enough to believe that Goblin would not show himself to me as soon as I came within the orbit of Blackwood Manor? I was not.

“And so the three-and-a-half-year intermezzo was ended.

“The following morning we departed for Newark with a connecting flight to take us immediately to New Orleans.”

CHAPTER 36

36

“CLEM AND JASMINE BOTH GREETED us at the airport and I burst into tears embracing them, so glad was I to see them; and never before had Clem looked so handsome in his chauffeur’s black suit and official hat, and never had Jasmine looked so lovely in her tailored suit of gray wool and her signature blouse of white ruffled silk, her blond Afro full and shaped and her tears flowing freely.