Around him whips the deadly hush of winter, the wind in its silent rising. Around the two of them, the sweep of wind flattening the dead grasses of the moors and the dales, the blown hills, the unmowed swale of cemeteries, of houses returning inexorably to the earth. Their two thousand days—the roar of springs, of summers, of autumns. Now, winter’s silence. He hears nothing, but he feels it. They both feel it: the chill.

Sylvia stands at the threshold to the room, shocked witness to the gravity of her success. She sees it with her own eyes. Ted bows his head; he reads on. She takes it in, her pupils imperceptibly wide, her expression from the distance of the doorway as inscrutable as it was when she refused answer to his questions and turned her back to climb the stairs. But she sees. She’s gotten what she wanted. They will see it on the page as she sees it in his eyes, the mark of her triumph, this, her Cadmean victory.

23. “Nick and the Candlestick”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Nick and the Candlestick”

DECEMBER 20, 1962

LONDON

She bites the thread from a topstitched hem. Wrapped in layers, her fingers numb, she sews curtains and doll clothes at her desk in the frigid midnight flat. The electric iron seethes, steaming the windows blue. An ice age of black corridors, creaking floorboards, primitive fear. Paring knives glint menace from the bottom of the sink in the kitchen downstairs. Copper oozes green, dripping acid. Dripping grottoes, echoing caverns, subterranean penetralia lie undisturbed for centuries. The gills of her manuscript ripple in the wall heater’s faint eddy.

She too has mastered it, the meaningless dark, etching her own magic gallery on shadowy walls. Wrapped in reindeer hide, forehead streaked with soot, under shuddering light the artist performs acts expedient, sacred, essential as meat. Charcoal, manganese, ocher, iron oxide: rubbed with tallow into stone, blown into patterns through reeds. Handprints that will sustain their unique whorls and scars for the next forty thousand years. Real wolves, real lions stir at the flare of firelight.

Sylvia’s left hand feeds cloth to her Singer; her right turns the crank on the wheel. At her sewing machine, she lifts the presser foot and cranks the needle high, releasing the velveteen for the parlor curtains. Bits of pattern tissue curl like fortune-telling fish beneath her toes. She plucks pins from the seams, tugs basting thread free. The iron tears and sizzles.