He drew in his breath. "You've seen the Door to Heaven?" he asked calmly.
"As surely as you've seen a ghost appear to you," I said.
"So have I," he said. "I've seen the Door to Heaven. And I've seen Heaven here on earth. Stay with me, stay with me, and I swear to you when the door opens, I'll take you with me. You'll be deserving of it."
The voices came loudly from the hall. But I looked at him, trying to answer what he said. He seemed as resolute, as without conflict, as determined and courageous as he had been before our fight.
The voices were too loud to be ignored. The woman was angry. Others talked to her as if she were a fool. It was all far away. Beyond the windows lay the black night with the lights of New York so bright that the sky itself was reddened like the dawn coming when there was no dawn. The breeze sang.
I looked down at the box. I could have wept. He had me and the world had me. At least for now, for as long as I would allow it.
He drew close to me. And I turned, letting him come close, and between us there was a tenderness and a sudden quiet. I looked into his eyes, and I saw the round black circle within his eyes, and I wondered if he saw in my eyes only blackness.
"You want the body you have now," he said. "You want the body and the power. You were meant to have it. You were meant to be mine, but as of this moment and forever, I respect you. You're no servant to me. You are Azriel."
He clasped my arm. He raised his hand and clasped the side of my face. I felt his kiss, hot and sweet on my skin. I turned and locked my mouth on his for one instant, and then let him go and his face blazed with love for me. Did I feel the same heat for him?
There was a loud noise from beyond the doors.
He made a gesture to me, as if to say, be patient, and then I suppose he would have gone to the door, but it opened, and the woman appeared there, the mother with the black-and-silver hair who before had been wrapped in red silk.
She was sick, but she had groomed and clothed herself in a proper stiff way, and she marched forward. Wet and pale, and trembling, she carried a bundle, a purse, a portmanteau that was too heavy for her.
"Help me!" she cried. She said this to me! And she looked directly at me. She came up to me, turning her back on him. "You, you help me!"
She was dressed in gray wool, and the only silk on her was wrapped high around her neck, and her shoes were fancy with raised heels and beautiful straps across her arched feet, so thin, so full of blue veins beneath the skin. She gave off a deep and rich perfume, and the smell of chemicals unknown to me, and of decay and death, very advanced, death all through her, struggling to wrap its tendrils around her heart and brain and make them go to sleep forever.
"Help me now get out of here!" She grabbed my hand, wet and warm and as seductive as he was.
"Rachel," said Gregory, biting his tongue. "This is the medicine talking." His voice grew hard. "Go back to your bed."
Female attendants in white had come into the room, also gawky boys, in stiff servile little coats, but this entire assemblage stood about idle and frightened of her, nurses and lackeys, and waiting upon his every gesture.
She wrapped her arm around me. She implored me. "You help me, please, just to get out of here, help me to the elevator, to the street." She tried to make her words careful and persuasive, and they sounded soft, drunken, and full of misery. "Help me, and I'll pay you, you know that! I want to leave my own house! I am not a prisoner. I don't want to die here! Don't I have the right to die in a place of my own choosing?"
"Take her back," said Gregory furiously to the others. "Go on, get her out of here and don't hurt her."
"Mrs. Belkin," cried one of the women. The gawky youths closed in on her like a flock that had to move as one or be scattered.
"No!" she cried out. Her voice took on youthful strength.
As the four of them set upon her, all with anxious and tentative hands, she cried out to me:
"You have to help me. I don't care who you are. He is killing me. He's poisoning me. He's hastening my death by his clock! Stop him! Help me!"
The women's murmuring, lying voices rose to drown her out. "She's sick," said one woman in full and true distress. And other voices came like tiresome echoes of every word. "She's so drugged, she doesn't know what she's doing. Doing. Doing."
There came a babble as the boys and Gregory spoke, and then Rachel Belkin shouted over all, and the nurse tried to make her own voice even louder.
I rushed forward and pulled one of the women loose from her, and accidentally pushed this woman to the floor. The others were all paralyzed, except for Rachel herself who reached out to me, and grabbed my very head with her right hand, as if she would make me look at her.
She was sickly and raging with fever. She was no older than Gregory-fifty-five at most. A powerful and elegant woman, in spite of it all.
Gregory cursed at her. "Damn it, Rachel. Azriel, back away." He waved his arms at the others. "Get Mrs. Belkin back to her bed." "No," I said.
I pushed two of the others away from her effortlessly and they stumbled and drew back, clinging to one another. "No," I said. "I'll help you."
"Azriel," she said. "Azriel!" She recognized the name but couldn't place it.
"Goodbye, Gregory," I said. "We shall see if I have to come back to you and your bones," I said. "She wants to die under a different roof. That's her right. I agree with her. And for Esther, I must, you see. Farewell until I come back to you."
Gregory was aghast.
The servants were helpless.
Rachel Belkin threw her arm around me and I held her firmly in the circle of my right arm.
She seemed about to collapse and one of her ankles turned on the shiny floor. She cried out in pain. I held her. Her hair was loosed and hanging all around her, brushed, lustrous, the silver as beautiful as the black. She was thin and delicate in her years, and had the stubborn beauty of a willow tree, or torn and shining leaves left on a beach by the waves, ruined yet gleaming.
We moved swiftly towards the door together.
"You can't do this," said Gregory. He was purple with rage, I turned to see him sputtering and staring and making his hands into fists, all grace lost. "Stop him," he said to the others.
"Don't make me hurt you, Gregory," I said. "It would be too much of a pleasure."
He ran at me. I swung around so that I could hold her and strike him with my left hand.
And I dealt him one fine blow with my left fist that knocked him on his back, so that his head struck the hearth.