Tawny began to stir from the deep, trauma-induced sleep that had left him at the mercy of elements, men and death. By now, the rot which had taken his ear and much of one arm had spread to parts of his brain. In decay, his mind began to open doors which Tawny had closed and forgotten. Light spilled in upon a memory all but lost...
He stood in the open door of the barn on the outermost edge of his father's property. He was dressed in simple clothes, bearing no adornment. The clothes of a traveler. He stood there, half in and out of shadow. The day was very clear, but Tawny could see the clouds that promised afternoon rains. The light on the unkempt fields made everything burn in a vivid color unlike any day that he had ever known and he smiled to think of what would be.
Brianna saw him there as she approached, her heart all but breaking with the hope that he would prove as genuine as his letter. She had it clutched in one hand, fearful to let go of it. The words within had been the sweetest she had ever known. They promised a love he had never expressed verbally and they belied a life of joy and comfort she had begun to suspect would never come. Brianna had tried not to love him. More than once she had even tried to hate him, but she could not escape the perilous company of him. He had changed so much in the year she had known him that she feared he had found another and that she would come to the barn one day to find him gone forever. Now, with the letter held so tightly to her breast, she walked toward him, begging in her heart of hearts for it to be true, reading the letter again in her mind, having memorized it completely.
My dream, my dear, my only love, Brianna,
Please know what a fool I have been to have loved you so much in silence. Until this moment I was mute, healed to words by your constant and perfect love. How can I ever be silent again, having found the voice of my adoration? Please, take what you will in raiment, in purse and in joy and come away with me to life as it should be forever. Come away in secret and we will quit this place, this nativity of our affection, and discover the world hand in hand.
Yours. Ever and always, Yours.
Her heart burst a little in joy when she neared enough to see his face. There was a sweetness to it and a smile so perfect, that had she not loved him before, she would have in that moment. It was so simple and perfect that it made his face as beautiful as it always should have been. Only in the throes which followed their passion had she seen any smile like unto it, but here it was in its prosperity and she couldn't decide if the sun made it more beautiful, or if it the sun, but she thought to die with joy some day with that smile to send here from this life to heaven.
He held his hand out to her, nothing more. It was only time he had ever done so. Tears had already brimmed in her eyes and she went to him, hand outstretched. They entwined in a kiss that killed her sweetly. She would have gladly died in that moment to preserve it and he too was touched in ways he could not express. They went this way, hand in hand for the first time ever to the straw he had strewn upon the ground, not with the chilling shadows of the barn, but in the open sun just beyond it.
"One last time he said, before departing."
The sweetness of these words caused her to weep as they played the parts they had rehearsed so many times before, but now as the lovers they were, not the ones they had portrayed. She laid aside her clothing in a slow, deliberate way like a ceremony. She set aside the heavy purse, brimming with the coin he had given her. "I saved almost all." she admitted in a way that made her seem very vulnerable. "Almost all." she repeated, and while she had kept most of it against the day that she might become pregnant and be cast out, she was glad of it now, for if they meant to travel far it would be that much more for them to share together.
She loved him then, in the face of his smiles and lies, never knowing that she had succumbed to an incubus. She never loved more than she did then and he let her. He was the demon absolute in that moment, for her love, as sweet and true as it was should have turned him from his course, but he would not turn aside from the impending path of murder he had chosen. He had made up his mind, and this is where he truly became the monster. Here, in the fertile soil of pure devotion, he smiled to think of her murder with no more thought than how it would destroy Christopher and all else with him.
It was in this moment when Brianna saw the smile on the face of the boy a year before. That tremulous and unsettling smile that she had not understood. It crossed his face again as they lay naked and entwined. It was almost the same as the smile that had broken her heart, but uneven and made of stuff not forged in heaven. Some true and perfect instinct woke up inside her then and killed her before the knife fell. Indeed, she closed her eyes in that moment and prayed in despair.
"Come, death...if it be not love."
If only she had died as peacefully as that perfect wish in her heart then. If only Tawny would have allowed it. The time of peace was past. Tawny had taken up the knife and his damnation at the same time.
August 5, 1704 - St. Pierre at Martinique
"Noooo..." Tawny groaned in that half waking world between perfect remembering in sleep and the dream of dust we wake to. It was perhaps the last piece of himself crying out to be heard. Some sliver of his former soul, lodged in the twisted metal of the monster he had fashioned for himself. In the epiphany of that waking second he regretted and prayed in despair as Brianna had done, and like her prayer, his proved too gossimir a thing. It was as fleeting as his sanity and it disappeared beneath his self-perpetuated evil. He woke in the pain and anguish befitting his crimes stinking of rot and vinegar. He could feel a hundred injuries burning. The near fatal shot, the severed ear, the scalded skin, the tomahawk wound, the ravages of rot and the dog's violent tearings. It seemed to him that he woke in Hell, fearing for the first time in a lifetime the death and judgment which comes to all, his many injuries to others finally revisited upon his head. Genuine and mortal fear crept into the cold goosebumps which sprung up everywhere on his flesh, even as it burned from fever. The bandages about him, he took for restraints and those heavy threads which lead men carefully down to Hell.
"Mon dieu. Pas complètement, monsieur ?" Someone said from what he took to be his left.
"The French..." he thought. "...the French...in Hell..." he wondered in confusion, and it might have been funny had he not been so certain then that he was damned. Still the words woke him, raised him to some hope.
The voice came again and it hurt his mind to hear words at all. "Parlez-vous français ?"
"Noo...noooo..." was all that Tawny could manage again, though he had intended to scream a little. The regret which had surfaced, that sliver in his skin pushed out by the puss of three dozen plus murders, made him want to cry out, but only one word could find its way. "...nooo..."
