The episode was repeated. It was the third or fourth time before she realized they were being observed, that all of it was being observed, from the first touch to the last, all of it was being noted by avid eyes, hungry for sensation, people hiding in the underbrush whom she could not quite see. She thought they were people. Perhaps they weren’t people. She was too heated to care who watched. Besides, she had a sense that all of it was meant, planned, a part of some larger whole to which she was dedicated. Sometimes, during her couplings with Ashes, she would murmur Morrigan’s name.
But then, in a tenday or two, Rooly found herself sick, really sick, vomiting and gasping like a fish, and any taste of the drug made her worse. Ashes took her by her ear and whispered deep into it, “That’s my child you carry, lady. That’s my daughter you bear. And I’ll be back for her.”
Then he went away.
Rooly had been pregnant several times, or thought she had, but each time she had miscarried. This time she did not miscarry, or at least she had not a short time later when the Mantelbys’ men of business descended on her to tell her that her parents and her eldest sister were dead.
The Mantelby men extricated Rooly from among her fellows as they might an oyster from its shell, efficiently, quickly, not caring who got hurt in the process. Her parents and eldest sister, she was told, had gone for a picnic, though such entertainments were totally foreign to them. They had gone together, though Margon and Stella had gone nowhere together since the Hunk had come. They had gone to a high place, though Stella was afraid of heights, and then, somehow, all three of them had fallen from that height to their deaths. Everyone was surprised and shocked and disbelieving, except Rooly, who remained indifferent.
Margon Mantelby Sr. was dead, Margon Mantelby Jr. had no living brothers. Since Marool’s eldest sister was now dead and her other sisters had been dowered into other families, Marool was the only Mantelby remaining. She inherited the name and the fortune, swollen as it was by the prices paid for six brides. Several of her sisters served notice they would contest this ruling on the grounds of moral incompetence. Marool was promiscuous; Marool was even then pregnant by the Hagions-knew-whom, and was therefore guilty of mismothering; she had done the Hagions-knew-what while among the Wasters and she was unfit to manage House Mantelby under the Mantelby name.
Marool—awakened by greed and a few days abstinence to an appreciation of the life she had long despised—denied it all. She went to the Temple, where she knelt before the same effigy as before. D’Jevier, fascinated despite herself, hovered near the curtained arch, observing. Marool was no longer a pudgy girl, but a woman lean as a snake, every plane of her face tight drawn around huge eyes that were dark and full of fire, casting the terrible allure that D’Jevier had noted before.
Once again the marble robe filled with fire and once again the fiery hand reached out to touch Marool, as though in blessing. When Marool came calmly from the Sanctuary, she told D’Jevier that she had vowed a religious pilgrimage to the Daughter House of the Hagions at the new city of Nehbe, along the coast to the east, a pilgrimage made in memory of her parents. Could D’Jevier assist her by appointing someone in Temple Service to look after the Mantelby estate in Marool’s absence? At the usual rates, of course. Marool would, she said, be generous.
D’Jevier nodded, though she had to struggle to keep her face and voice calm. She agreed to send a factotum from the Temple plus an efficient Man of Business to keep everything running while Marool was away.
It was almost a year later when Marool returned in the company of several Haggers she had picked up somewhere. She came openly to the Temple and to the theater. She was clean, decently dressed, and certainly not pregnant. When her sisters sought witnesses to her alleged immorality or promiscuity or any of the rest of it, none could be found. The Wasters had disappeared. Marool’s closest associates, or at least those who had known most about her, were simply gone, no one knew where. No one knew anything about a child, there was no evidence of the rumored child itself and Marool could not be convicted of mismothering.