The Cloisters(34)
“I was on a tour once and heard that you grow poisons? Is that true?” a woman interrupted.
Leo nodded. “But you need to remember that many things we consider poisons today had medicinal properties in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Take belladonna, for example,” he said. “It’s called the beautiful woman because women used to take small amounts of it to enlarge their pupils.”
His eyes found mine, his face dimpling through the stubble he hadn’t bothered to trim for several days.
“What were some of the other uses?” asked a voice from the back.
“Well, mandrake was used as a sleep aid. Although we now know that taking too much can easily result in death—”
“We can discuss all of this when we’re out in the garden,” Rachel interrupted. “I’m sure Leo needs to go.”
Leo raised the mug in thanks, and as he slid his body past the group filling the hallway, he brushed up against me as he went, a single, calloused hand grabbing my wrist. That was all it took for the blood in my body to rush and burn. But by the time I looked over my shoulder he was already walking down the hall; he didn’t look back.
“Okay,” Rachel said, clapping. “Who wants to see the statue of Saint Margaret of Antioch?” And we shuffled on.
After we left the docents to their free coffee and pastries in the kitchen, where Moira clucked over them attentively, Rachel and I stopped in the chapel. I loved the way voices sounded in there—a collection of quiet whispers that came together into something else entirely, a monastic hum or meditative chant. Footsteps in the stone hallway outside gave a welcome percussive structure to the space. It was how I imagined the churches and cathedrals of Europe must feel, as visitors shuffled around the stations of the cross painted by Italian, Flemish, or French masters, while a real Mass was prepared nearby.
Rachel sat on a bench and leaned back on her arms, her fingers curved around the edge, her face cast toward the ceiling, where light came through the stained glass and spread pools of red, blue, and green on the blond stone walls.
“So. You’re going to do this, aren’t you.”
She didn’t pose it as a question, but a statement of fact.
“What do you mean?”
“You and Leo.”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Oh, but you have.” She let her head loll in my direction until our eyes met. “You look hungry around him.”
“I don’t even know him.” I could feel a heat spreading not just across my cheeks but throughout my whole body.
“Do you need to?”
I didn’t know. The majority of my experience with men had either been men I barely knew—the stray one-night stands of my sophomore and junior years, a customer I met waiting tables who was in town for the weekend, a senior about to go to law school—or men I had known my entire life. There was no in-between, and already, Leo was somewhere in between.
We walked back through the galleries, stopping in the early Gothic hall where the walls were lined with brilliant examples of stained glass from the cathedrals of Canterbury, Rouen, and Soissons. One showed a woman in a golden dress clutching two bottles; the title read: Woman Dispensing Poisons from the Legend of Saint Germain of Paris, 1245–47.
* * *
I stayed late that night, but looking back, I don’t know why. An afternoon rainstorm had come through and broken the heat, if not the humidity, leaving the gardens heavy with moisture. When five o’clock came and went, Patrick and Rachel left, asking only in passing how long I planned to stay. Just another hour, I had said, but I knew I wanted to wait until it was dark. I wanted to feel myself fully alone in the space, to hear nothing but the slight echo of my own breathing or the shush of paper under the pad of my finger.
Once the sun was down, I closed my books and went to sit at the edge of the Bonnefont Cloister, where I watched the moon rise above the tops of the trees. And while I watched, time slipped away from me, and the day eased deeper into the night. My face tilted up at the sky, I couldn’t help but believe the night sky in New York was different from the one I had seen back in Washington. I imagined that here the constellations hung differently, the moon waned more slowly, the earth spun more quickly on its axis. Even though I knew no such thing was possible.
When the moon crested directly overhead, I decided to make my way back to the library. Two hours, perhaps, had elapsed, and when I leaned on the door, the interior was dark. Supposing that security had simply turned the lights off when they found the room empty, I reached instinctively for the switch. But as the door closed, I realized the space was not entirely unlit, but rather illuminated at the end, by two large candelabras that dripped with wax and liquid yellow light.
At first I didn’t see the bodies, cast as they were in shadow. But I did see the cards laid out on the table, their gold leaf flickering and catching the candlelight. It was only when Patrick moved that their silhouettes became clear, the flex of his arm, the fall of her hair, familiar specters.
“Ann—” he said, and I could see, as my eyes adjusted to the dim light, that he had crossed the space toward me, had closed the distance so that his hand could reach out and touch my arm, steady me.
Rachel remained rooted on the other side of the table, and none of us seemed capable of finding the right words. All the questions I wanted to ask seemed unnecessarily redundant—it was clear what was going on. There was no doubt they thought they were alone; my books, after all, were closed. The experiment, the reading, whatever they were about to call this, was not supposed to involve me. It struck me that my presence was a mistake, an error, and that we all had secrets to keep from each other—I from Rachel and Patrick, Leo from us all—and some part of me liked that, as it meant every ounce of information and intimate knowledge was hard-won.