“And now,” the voice went on. “Now the memory of that disturbs her, and she puts it all onto me. Her own desires are off the hook and I become the villain of the piece. And that’s … distorted. It isn’t the truth. It not only deprives me of the right to defend myself—but it deprives you too. It deprives you of that part of yourself that is just like me. Because you are like me, Bernard. And that makes you afraid. You suppress it. It becomes anathema to you. You indulge in petty, humiliating perversions to—how can I put it?—to stave off the real urges, the real impetus of your nature. She’s made you like that. She taught you to despise yourself, that part of yourself that’s like me. And why? Because she’s peddling a worldview in which she has no responsibility, in which I work like some sort of … grand puppeteer on the world stage and she just dances. All I’m asking you to accept, Bernard, is the possibility—just the possibility—that there’s another worldview. A worldview in which you can live freely as what you really are.”

Bernard covered his face with his bleeding hands. Felt the damp, sticky surface of his flesh beneath his fingers. He was experiencing a remarkable floating sensation now, as if he were detaching from his own body. As if some part of him were being drawn up out though his pores and into the smoke, becoming part and parcel of the smoke. He could feel himself striving to float with it, float on, float up through the coffin’s stone, float up into the freedom of the presence above him.

“I’m sorry, Bernard,” the voice said calmly. “But there comes a time—it comes for all of us—when you have to consider the possibility that everything you’ve been taught is a lie; when you have to entertain the idea that the people you love best have in fact deceived you.”

Bernard floated in the smoke. The smoke caressed him.

“I am who you want to be, Bernard. And you contain me within you,” said the voice. “We are, both of us, Saint Iago.”

7

The sky above Belham Grange churned with black rain-clouds. The wind that carried them in from the south rattled the naked branches of the trees overhanging the front drive. It made mysterious trails in the grass, swift, swirling strips of lighter green as the blades bent over before it. These swaths appeared in front of Storm and curled around him and vanished. They appeared again as the wind picked up, moving off into the hills like ghostly footprints.

Sophia was marching quickly into the darkening day, charging angrily away from the house, away from the drive and off into the field. Storm had to take long strides to keep up with her, hurriedly belting his trench coat against the cold.