Well, they got caught.

"Damien castrated and stabbed Wynken in front of the women and put them to rout.

He kept the remains! Then, after days of interrogation, the frightened women were bullied into confessing to their love for Wynken and how he had communicated through the books; and the brother took all those books, all twelve of the books of Wynken de Wilde, everything this artist had ever created, you understand—"

"His immortality," I whispered, "Exactly, his progeny! His books! And Damien had them buried with Wynken's body in the castle garden by the fountain that appears in all the little pictures in the books! Blanche could look out on it every day from her window, the place in the ground where Wynken had been laid to rest. No trial, no heresy, no execution, nothing like that. He just murdered his brother, it was as simple as that. He probably paid the monastery huge amounts of money. Who knows if it was even necessary? Did the monastery love Wynken? The monastery is a ruin now where tourists come to snap pictures. As for the castle, it was obliterated in the bombing of the First World War."

"Ah. But what happened after that, how did the books get out of the coffin? Do you have copies? Are you speaking of...."

"No, I have the originals of every one. I have come across copies, crude copies, made at the behest of Eleanor, Blanche's cousin and confidante, but as far as I know they stopped this practice of copies. There were only twelve books. And I don't know how they surfaced. I can only guess."

"And what is your guess?"

"I think Blanche went out in the night with the other women, dug up the body, and took the books out of the coffin, or whatever poor Wynken's remains had been placed in, and put everything back right the way it was."

"You think they'd do that?"

"Yes, I think they did it. I can see them doing it, by candlelight in the garden, see them digging, the five women together. Can't you?"

"Yes."

"I think they did it because they felt the way I do! They loved the beauty and the perfection of those books. Lestat, they knew they were treasures, and such is the power of obsession arid such is the power of love. And who knows, maybe they wanted the bones of Wynken. It's conceivable. Maybe one woman took a thigh bone and another the bones of his fingers and, ah, I don't know."

It seemed a ghastly picture suddenly, arid it put me in mind, without a second's hesitation, of Roger's hands, which I had chopped off sloppily with a kitchen knife and dumped, wrapped in a plastic sack. I stared at the image of these hands before me, busy, fretting with the edge of the glass, tapping the bar in anxiety.

"How far back can you trace the journey of the books?" I asked.