The Rose of Blacksword (65 page)

But there was no hesitancy in the man’s stride as he walked through the shadowed quiet of the hall. He had crossed this floor uncounted times since he had taken his first faltering steps here twenty-seven years ago, when his mother had released his baby fingers and watched in laughing excitement as he toddled into his father’s outstretched arms. Gone was that laughing mother with the gentle hands and the whispered fragrance of gardenia. Gone was the father with the moustache that made his kisses tickle.

Walking in the cavernous gloom, alone except for the tiny burden under his pullover that he supported with both hands, the man felt no unease. His nature was at times a whimsical one, but even as a child he had never been fearful. And he was not completely devoid of company.

“I’m home, Chaucer,” he called softly in the darkness. Hampered by the limitations of human hearing, he missed the owl’s silent flight, though he could feel the slight draft from its wings brush his wind-stung skin, and the light weight of padded feet coming to rest expertly on his shoulder with a subtle shift in balance. There was a musical trill of greeting. The man resettled the burden under his pullover and withdrew one hand, dragging off a suede glove with his teeth. He reached up and gently scratched the owl’s silky breast with a friendly finger.

“We have company, old son,” he said, the very attractive voice husky from the heavy cold outdoors. “Orphans. Orphans of the storm. How are your parental instincts functioning?”

A wing, lifted indignantly, touched the back of his head as the owl hissed, and that drew a slight laugh from the man.

Together they passed under the high cool ceilings, going by the small dry fountain and ceramic pool. In the vast dining room, a huge chandelier dense with dusty prisms sparkled above them in the dimness, and answered the man’s footsteps with a faint chime. Beyond, he passed the summer dining room and the butler’s pantry. At last he came gratefully into the kitchen, where the antiquated central heating had been puffing a steady, pillowy warmth. His hand hit the upper button of the old-fashioned light switch, flooding the warm wide expanse of the room with cheerful yellow light, and his eyes, night-adjusted, stung. He registered the fact briefly, instinctively, by its biology: the rapid decomposition of rhodopsin in the eye.

Crossing the parquet floor, he knelt by a low cupboard, withdrawing a cardboard shoe box. Working one-handed, he lined the box with a clean dishtowel, and then set it on the rosewood work table. With utmost care, he reached under his pullover and brought out his two tiny orphans, supporting them carefully in his cupped hands. He brought them level with his face and looked at them closely.

“Well,” he said softly. “Welcome to my nest.”

The two little owlets blinking sleepily at him from his palms were balls of gray down, all beak and brilliant lemon-yellow eyes that were beginning to focus on him with alert annoyance at having been roused from their sleeping place next to his warm, dry skin and his soothing heartbeat. They seemed suddenly to remember that they were hungry and began to chatter loudly.

The adult screech owl on the man’s shoulder shot off like a catapulted weight and swept up to perch on the high cupboard, hunching his wings and watching the noisy duo with evident disgust, clacking his beak before turning his head pointedly away.

“What’s the matter, you old bachelor?” the man asked with amusement. “Aren’t you cut out for fatherhood? Anyone would think I haven’t told you time and again that birds of a feather flock together.” The screech owl raised his ear-tufts and turned his head back enough to give the man a sardonic half-lidded look. Smiling back, the man said, “So. Let’s get on with seeing what we can do about ensuring the survival of the species.”

He deposited the owlets gently in the box before shrugging out of his jacket. They kept him busy for the next hour, their voices rising in penetrating squeals while he chopped raw beef for them, keeping it in the oven just long enough to take off the chill, then mixing it with the downy roughage he gathered by slitting open a panel of his down jacket, leaving that panel a little leaner than it had been that afternoon.

The tiny owls ate like Roman senators at an orgy. Chaucer seemed to be so amazed that he sailed down again to watch the proceedings from the man’s shoulder, and then walked up to the top of the man’s head for a better view.

As the man fed the owlets, he clucked to them and talked to them, first apologizing for the lack of mouse meat, and then telling them all sorts of interesting facts about their eyesight and hearing, their population density in the region. He started to go into their mating cycle, but stopped, laughing, and promised them they could hear about that when they were a little older. At long last, they’d had enough—first one, then the other, began nodding sleepily and ignoring the proffered bits of feather-wrapped meat.

The man tucked the tired infant owls back under his pullover and sat down. The tingling of relief to his legs and back reminded him that he’d been on his feet since two o’clock in the afternoon. He said to Chaucer, who’d returned to perch on his shoulder, “Why don’t you make me a sandwich, you old feather duster?”

Chaucer walked down his arm, the razor-sharp talons daintily applied, and stepped off to stand on the table, blinking first one intense saucerlike eye, then the other.

The man stretched one graceful, supple-fingered hand and scratched the owl behind the ears, chuckling softly, and then yawned and closed his eyes for a moment … man and wild creature in a still tableau.…

The silence was broken when he opened his eyes again and looked at his watch, giving a soft curse. He was due soon at work.

The nestlings didn’t like much being taken from next to his skin and put back into the box, even though he made them as comfortable as he could. He carried the box up the great staircase to his bedroom and left it there with the door closed. There was no point in testing Chaucer’s patience. Then he collected fresh clothes from the drying room near the kitchen, stripping off his hiking clothes and pulled on clean wheat-colored jeans, leather boots, and a V-necked white sweatshirt.

To Chaucer, sitting on the edge of the laundry basket examining a clothespin in one claw, the man remarked, “You probably wonder, don’t you, old son, why I never talk about what I do to support us all?” The owl began chewing thoughtfully on the clothespin, giving him a wise look. “The truth is, there’s no intelligible way to explain it. Humans have particularly odd forms of entertainment. But it pays what we need to support this rockpile, and now we have two new mouths to feed.”

The man pulled on his jacket again and strode out through the new snow to an old station wagon, whistling resignedly.

Jennifer Hamilton, the woman who had faked flu in high school for the entire two weeks her class had studied reproductive biology, the woman who had almost expired with embarrassment in a college art history class when asked to speak on the merits of Michelangelo’s David—Jennifer Hamilton, who’d spent a lifetime of twenty-three years misplaced in an era of sexual liberation, was about to attend a club where men took off their clothes to music.

From the outside, the Cougar Club had a deceptive coziness, like a family restaurant that serves fish fries on Friday nights. Inside was another story. Inside it wasn’t frying fish that sizzled. It was the stage act.

In fact, Jennifer hadn’t realized until she was actually within the friendly white clapboard walls that the place was anything more than the popular nightclub which her four companions, in a spirit of gleeful mischief, had represented it to be. Light had begun to dawn for her when she saw the gift shop just within the front door which merchandised Cougar Club nightshirts and bumper stickers decorated with a provocative male silhouette. There were even more provocative items such as calendars featuring Cougar Club dancers in throat-tightening stages of undress, and a mysterious piece of equipment called a “go-naked pen.”

Turning to her companions, trying to look like a woman who thought this was all a good joke instead of one who was likely to require being removed from the place on a stretcher, Jennifer had said, “I can see that I’ve been grossly misled!”

Her words brought laughter because none of the four women with her had known her long enough to realize that after one glance at the club’s logo, an undraped male silhouette, Jennifer’s stomach felt as though it had begun to solidify. And because she didn’t want to look like a poor sport, it was the last thing she wanted them to discover. She had been in Emerald Lake only two weeks working at her new job as children’s librarian at the public library. New job, new town, new people.

She knew it was partly her own fault, but in her home town where she’d lived from birth through college, her acquaintances and neighbors had recognized only her stiff, rather formal exterior. But another wider and more playful soul had grown beneath that exterior … and it had such a difficult time showing itself.

Jennifer had come at Annette’s invitation tonight. Annette, a tall friendly woman, was adult services librarian. Somehow she accomplished a remarkable amount in spite of the impression she gave of always being on the way to the back room to have a cigarette. Annette’s younger sister Diane had come also, and her friend Susan. They were leaning over the merchandise counter, wearing straight-leg jeans, blouson jackets and boots with heels, looking like a page from the Spiegel catalogue. Lydia beside them was the library aide. She had just picked up a logoed G-string and was giving it the twice over.

Taking it from her with a twinkle in her eyes, Annette said, “What do you think? Should I buy one of these for the hubby?”

Susan laughed. “C’mon. Bill would never put on one of those things.”

“Little do you know Bill’s private side,” Annette said. “He’d have it on in two minutes.”

With a grin and a teasing push on the arm, Diane said, “And you’d have it off again in one!”

Annette picked out a calendar and paid a woman who happened to be pregnant and was wearing a Cougar Club T-shirt; as was the girl behind the counter at the coat-check stand; as was the female maître d’. Jennifer found herself wondering in an unnerved way if any of this was in some way connected with the nature of the entertainment provided inside. She was further unnerved by the press of women who were departing, flushed and ecstatic, from the previous show. One clapped her on the back and said,

“Whew! En-
joy
!”

As they walked into the packed cavern of the nightclub, Jennifer looked through the candles flickering on many tables to the ominous, empty stage dominating the room. She turned to Annette.

“I see a free table in the back corner—”

“Oh, no,” Annette said with a wolfish smile. “I should think we’d want to sit fairly close.”

“
Very
close,” put in Diane.

They ended up directly in front of the stage, which was raised just enough to put anyone on it at thigh level with Jennifer’s nose. Generously, her friends insisted she take the closest seat. When she protested in a suffocated voice that it might kill her, they thought she was being witty.

Admission was for women only. It was an attractive crowd that ran the gamut of ages, though the concentration seemed to be of women in their twenties and thirties. And not one of them would have looked out of place in a meeting of the local PTA or at church choir practice. They were letting down their hair with the weekend-away-from-home exuberance of farm implement salesmen at a convention. The young male waiters—who seemed to hail from that class of folks know as “hunks”—were receiving some pretty risque answers when they came to the tables collecting orders for drinks, asking, “What would you like?”

The waiters responded to the ribald answers with quick, accustomed smiles, and brought them drinks instead. Their waiter, who introduced himself as Rick, couldn’t quite repress a gleam of interest, though, when Diane leaned her elbows on the table. Her long blond hair trailing forward over her red ribbed sweater, she asked, “For the fifteen dollar cover charge, do I get to take you home too?”

Mounting the stage wearing a clinging knit dress, the Mistress of Ceremonies had geranium-red lips and looked like she’d have become someone’s mistress without too much ceremony. There was a slight, intriguing hard edge to the lean, beautiful woman. Her hair, long and black, caught the smoky light from the spots like vintage Cher Bono as she welcomed the audience.

“Ladies who come here are usually celebrating something,” she observed, and looked around the room, randomly choosing tables, asking for the occasion. There was a doe party for a young girl who was getting married in a week; a group of student nurses who’d gotten their caps; a woman leaving for the Air Force. One divorce. (A burst of sympathetic cheers. The M.C. sent over a certificate for free drinks on the house.) There was also a busload of bank employees from Chicago. They were toasting the night with margaritas, in a way that would probably have started a stampede of investors withdrawing their money if any of them had been there to see it.

“Illinois girls know how to party
hard
!” The M.C. grinned. “And that’s good. Let’s take a poll, ladies. How many of you have never seen any man besides your husband or your boyfriend in the altogether? Let’s see your hands!”

Many hands rose. But not Jennifer’s. Jennifer’s hands had welded themselves to the sides of her chair.

“Enlightenment awaits!” promised the M.C. in high good humor. “Tonight you’re going to see
everything
of three gorgeous guys and find out how the men in your lives”—she winked—“measure up!”

Amid the howling approval around her, Jennifer tried to sink as low as possible in her chair without disappearing under the table; she spared a thought for her poor mother, receiving the news that her only child had suffered a fatal heart attack in a nightclub featuring male strippers.

She made it halfway through the first act. But when the macho hunk onstage five feet from her dropped his hands to the waistband of his skintight glitzy slacks, and made teasing motions that indicated he was going to divest himself of them, she vanished into the restroom.