"There’s nothing to tell. I’ve said so before," replied Mo, and Farid bowed his head and looked at his sooty hands as if Mo had snatched hope itself from his fingers.
He stood up. He still went barefoot, even though there was sometimes frost at night now. "Good luck, Meggie," he murmured, giving her a quick kiss. Then he turned without another word. Meggie was already missing him as he swung himself up onto his donkey.
Yes. Perhaps they really ought to go back. . . .
She jumped when Mo put his hand on her shoulder.
"Keep the book wrapped in a cloth when you’re not looking at it," he said. "The nights are damp." Then he made his way past her mother and went over to the robbers, who were sitting around the embers of their dying fire as silently as if they were waiting for him.
But Resa stood there, staring at the book in her hands as if it were another book, the one that had swallowed her up entirely over ten years ago. Then she looked at Meggie.
"What about you?" she asked. "Do you want to stay here, like your father? Don’t you miss your friends, and Elinor and Darius? And your warm bed without any lice in it, the café down by the lake, the peaceful roads?"
Meggie wished so much she could give the answer that Resa Wanted to hear, but she couldn’t.
"I don’t know," she said quietly.
And that was the truth.
CHAPTER 11
SICK WITH LONGING
Eljnor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad.
Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.
Elinor had wallowed in misery on the printed page, but she’d never thought that in real life, gray and uneventful as hers had been for many years, such pain could enter her own heart. You’re paying the price now, Elinor, she often told herself these days.
Paying the price for the happiness of those last months. Didn’t books say that, too: that there’s always a price to pay for happiness? How could she ever have thought she would simply find it and be allowed to keep it? Stupid. Stupid Elinor.
When she didn’t feel like getting up in the morning, when her heart faltered more and more frequently for no apparent reason, as if it were too tired to beat steadily, when she had no appetite even at breakfast time (although she had always preached that breakfast was the most important meal of the day), when Darius, with that anxious, owlish expression on his face, kept asking how she was, she began wondering whether becoming ill with longing was more than just a literary invention after all.
Didn’t she feel, deep down inside, that her longing was sapping her strength and her appetite, even her pleasure in her books? Longing.
Darius suggested going away to auctions of rare books, or famous bookshops that she hadn’t visited for a long time. He drew up lists of volumes not yet in her library, lists that would have filled Elinor with delighted excitement only a year ago. But now her eyes passed over the titles with as little interest as if she were reading a shopping list for cleaning products. What had become of her love for printed pages and precious bindings, words on parchment and paper? She missed the tug at her heart that she used to feel at the sight of her books, the need to stroke their Spines tenderly, open them, lose herself in them. But it seemed as if all of a sudden her heart couldn’t enjoy or feel anything, as if the pain had numbed it to everything but her longing for Meggie and her parents. Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn’t kiss her like Meggie, they couldn’t hug her like Resa, they couldn’t laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.
She began spending days on end in bed. She ate too little and then too much. Her stomach hurt, her head ached, her heart fluttered inside her. She was cross and absentminded and began crying like a crocodile over the most sentimental stories because of course she went on reading. What else was there for her to do? She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy. And Orpheus’s ugly dog lay beside her bed, slobbering on her carpet and staring at her with his sad eyes as if he were the only creature in the world who understood her sorrows.
Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite fair. Presumably Darius, too, knew just how wretched she was feeling. "Elinor, won’t you go for a little walk?" he would ask when he had brought her breakfast in bed yet again, and she still hadn’t appeared in the kitchen by twelve noon. "Elinor, I found this wonderful edition of Ivanhoe in one of your catalogs. Why don’t we go and take a look at it? The place isn’t far away." Or, as he had said only a few days ago, "Please, Elinor, go and see the doctor! This can’t go on!"
"The doctor?" she snapped at the poor man. "And what do you expect me to say to him? ‘Well, doctor, it seems to be my heart. It feels this ridiculous yearning for three people who disappeared into a book. Do you have any pills for that kind of thing?’"
Of course Darius had had no answer. Without a word, he had just put down her tea—
tea with honey and lemon, her favorite — beside the bed among the mountains of books piled on her bedside table, and gone downstairs again looking so sad that Elinor had a shockingly guilty conscience. All the same, she didn’t get up.
She stayed in bed for three more days, and when she dragged herself into her library on the fourth day, still in her nightdress and dressing gown, to get something else to read, she found Darius holding the sheet of paper. The one that had taken Orpheus to the place where Elinor supposed Resa, Meggie, and Mortimer still were.
"What on earth are you doing?" she asked, horrified. "No one touches that piece of paper, understand? No one!"
Darius put the sheet back in its place and wiped a speck off the glass case with his sleeve. "I was only looking at it," he said in his gentle voice. "Orpheus really doesn’t write badly, does he? Although it sounds very much like Fenoglio."
"Which is why it can hardly be described as Orpheus’s writing," said Elinor scornfully. "He’s a parasite. A louse preying on other writers — except that he feeds on their words, not their blood. Even his name is stolen from another poet! Orpheus!"
"Yes, I expect you’re right," said Darius as he carefully closed the glass case again.
"But perhaps you should call him a forger instead. He copies Fenoglio’s style so perfectly that at first glance you can’t tell the difference. It would be interesting to see how he writes when he has to work without a model. Can he paint pictures of his own? Pictures that don’t look like someone else’s?" Darius looked at the words under the glass lid as if they could answer his question.