Eleven years later, in the city of Oxford, he met her again for the first time...
In 1870, Jack Cade is admitted to the new-breed stronghold of Pandemonium, a colony of people just like him: descendants of the vanished demon race, all of them extrao...
They went down to the docks, still clinging onto each other with a kind of panicky need—always looking over their shoulders, and jumping at small noises, and then laughing at themselves for doing so.
Whenever they passed an open doorway, or a group of night revellers, they kept telling themselves to stop smiling and act normal. But they had forgotten what normal was. It seemed hilarious to them that there were still people in the world going about their daily business—closing their shutters, brushing their teeth, arguing with their wives—as though nothing had happened.
Jack tried to imagine what he must look like to them, with his shirt torn and bloodied, yet totally unable to stop grinning.
He and Ellini were both staggering, but both supporting each other, in a way that was based purely on emotion, and therefore defied the ordinary laws of physics. They were hysterical with happiness and terror—and it wasn't just the terror of Robin's pursuit.
She seemed to be scared of getting physically close to him and scared of letting him go. All the way down to the docks, she had her hand very firmly clasped in his, but occasionally, she would extend her arm, as though she was trying to pull away from him without really wanting to succeed.
For his part, Jack was terrified of disappointing her. It would have really helped to want her a bit less—because the way he felt right now, Ellini's first sexual experience in years was in danger of being over in a few seconds.
He was also terrified about what would happen afterwards—even though 'afterwards' seemed like a state of bliss too perfect to be hoped for—because he had never been in a relationship that had lasted longer than a few nights, and he knew his company could get irksome at the best of times.
Now, though, all the separate terrors had fused together into a kind of drunken happiness. They talked at random and laughed at nothing all the way down to the docks.
The only ship scheduled for departure that night was a steamer bound for India. Ellini handled the negotiations, because she spoke the best French. When Jack found out that she had only booked one cabin for them, he was sorely tempted to jump up in front of the little French quartermaster and click his heels.
He persuaded her to speak French all night—even though he only understood a fraction of what she said—because it sounded so beautiful. And it was magic. It was just like the letters. If Ellini thought she couldn't be heard or understood, she became unbelievably talkative. She said far more than she ever would have if she'd thought he could understand her.
It made her a lot less nervous, babbling away in French, interspersing her words with absent-minded little kisses to his neck, his jaw, or his eyebrow. And, because it was Ellini doing the kissing, Jack's neck, jaw, and eyebrows became heart-poundingly sensitive, until he was sure that the whole thing would be over before she'd even taken her clothes off.
But, somehow, he managed to hang on. The best way to handle it was to grab hold of the headboard, try not to look at her full, firm breasts, and pray that you satisfied her before you exploded. Of course, satisfying her was so intensely joyous that you did, inevitably, explode. But that was OK, because at least you'd satisfied her once, and could try again in ten minutes or so.
He hadn't forgotten about the French phrases, though. Jack had an amazing memory for anything associated with Ellini. He waited until she'd fallen asleep and then wrote down the things he hadn't understood—phonetically, for the most part, because words you didn't understand were hard to spell and separate. He worked on translating them in the following weeks, with the help of the French sailors and a rudimentary French dictionary.
He acquired quite a good working knowledge of the language this way, although his progress was not aided by the fact that, by then, he was learning to associate the sound of French with the most intense pleasure he'd ever felt in his life. It was slow progress, but he wouldn't have changed it for anything in the world.
He remembered strange things about that first night. Despite telling himself to commit every curve and contour of her body to memory, it wasn't the things he'd been avidly staring at that he could most easily recall. It had all been a blur of skin and gunpowder and glorious, babbling French. And ecstasy was not conducive to accurate recall. It tended to obliterate every thought in your head.
But he remembered the moments immediately afterwards—lying back in the darkness of the cabin, trying to catch his breath. Ellini was too shy to look at him, so she had curled up by his side, pressing her face against his chest. She was soothing the shock of all that pleasure by tiptoeing her fingers over his ribs. Just like incy-wincy spider.
Remembering the way she used to walk her fingers up his chest four years ago—and how he'd ached for her from dusk till dawn because of it—made him grin in the darkness.
The window was open, he remembered that. The faintest breath of wind was stirring the hangings around the bed. And, out on the docks, the American sailors—and their French compatriots, who would celebrate any battle in which the British had been defeated—were playing the Star-Spangled Banner for Independence Day.
Jack remembered thinking that there was too much emphasis on endings in the narratives of the world. Everyone thought the point of life was to achieve happiness, but they secretly meant at the end—or until the end—as though you could set things in stone by dying in the throes of them. If you achieved happiness halfway through your life, and then had it wrenched away from you, that would be seen as a tragedy, because no one cared how happy you'd been—just how happy you ended up.
Jack wasn't sure how happy he would end up. He wasn't sure he could keep her. But it seemed to him as he lay there in the darkness, still breathless and shaking with joy, that the point of life was that he'd been here, and lived this moment, and, whatever happened next—whether Ellini found him unbearable to live with, or some superior fighter came along and carried her away—he'd been here now, and it had been amazing.
Nobody could take that away from him, ever. If he died and went to hell then it wouldn't be hell, because he'd have this memory. And if there was no life after death—if consciousness just stopped as soon as your heart did—then he and this memory would expire at precisely the same moment. He would never be parted from it.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
