The Instruction

The Instruction
Mid-morning rain had been threading itself through the trees outside the leaded glass of Jean’s library since just after breakfast, and Isabel, curled into the deep wing chair by the cold fireplace with a cup of tea gone tepid in her hands and a book she had not, technically, taken down from the shelf in her lap, had been pretending for the better part of an hour that she was not waiting for something to happen.
She was waiting.
Her body had been waiting since the moment Jean had set the cup of tea in front of her at the kitchen table and asked her, in the soft careful brogue of a woman who already knew the answer, whether she had slept well.
She had not.
She had slept fully and unbrokenly for the first time since Saturday and she had, in the small private vocabulary of the body she was learning to read, not slept enough. Whatever the man in the dream had done to her in the small dark hour after three had not closed the circuit so much as it had introduced her, formally, to the shape of the circuit, and her body, this morning, was making the small persistent demand of a body that had been allowed to taste a thing once and was not, on any reasonable accounting of itself, prepared to wait until tonight to taste it again.
The book in her lap, when she lowered her eyes to it, was open.
She had not opened it.
Not metaphor. She had walked into the library after breakfast in Jean’s borrowed cardigan, with her tea in her hand, and had crossed the rug to the wing chair without going near the shelves, and the book in her lap had arrived there by some small careful arrangement of the room she did not, on any honest reading of the rug, want to interrogate.
The cover was leather, soft and dark and worn the way books were worn when their owner had handled them often without being seen handling them. The spine had no title. The first page, when she let her thumb find the edge of it and lift, had no frontispiece. The second page, when she turned to it without thinking, had three lines of the same old script she had read on the bedside grimoire the night before last.
Her body, before her eyes had finished resolving the words, had already decided.
Heat.
Not the heat that had come up through her in the bath. Not the heat that had come up through her under last night’s robe. A different heat. Slower. The heat of a thing being told, by a force older than the room it was sitting in, that the previous week had been an introduction.
The script on the page, under the slow drag of her finger, composed itself.
Bring something back.
The line did not arrive in her ear the way Jean’s brogue arrived. It arrived in her chest, in the small specific place between her collarbones, the way certain sentences had been arriving there for the better part of a fortnight, and she registered it as the small quiet shift it was.
The library door opened.
Mora, one shoulder against the jamb, with the soft polite indifference of a woman who had not, technically, knocked, watched her for a long beat from across the rug.
“You felt that,” Mora said.
It was not a question.
Isabel turned her head, slowly, in the wing chair. The cup of tea in her lap had cooled to the precise temperature a cup of tea cooled to when its drinker had forgotten, for the better part of an hour, that she was holding it.
“Felt what.”
“The shift, milaya. The page calling.”
A small soft sound came up out of Isabel that was not quite a laugh.
Mora crossed the rug without being invited and lowered herself onto the small velvet ottoman at the foot of the wing chair the way Mora lowered herself onto anything in this cottage, which was to say with the soft polite ease of a woman who had been lowering herself onto velvet ottomans in cottages on three continents since long before any of them had been born. The Mediterranean garnet on her mouth this morning was a slightly different shade than yesterday’s, in the soft low register garnets came in when their wearer had decided, on a Thursday morning, to be thoughtful about colour.
“The book opened itself.”
“Aye.”
“Did you tell it to.”
“No, milaya. The book chose.”
A long quiet beat held the library.
Outside the leaded glass, the rain on the trees did the soft careful work rain on trees did when nothing else in a room was making any noise, and Isabel, in the wing chair, registered the soft small specific pull behind her own sternum that had not, since she had walked downstairs in last night’s robe, gone anywhere.
“What does it want.”
Mora looked at her for a long quiet beat.
When Mora finally spoke, the soft Eastern European cadence of her voice carried the precise small weight of a teacher who had been waiting, in the long careful arrangement of these things, for the right student to walk into the right room on the right morning, and was not, this morning, going to soften it.
“It wants you to bring something back, milaya. Tonight. When you dream.”
Isabel swallowed.
“Bring what back.”
“The mark, first. Then the heat. Then the smell of him. By the end of the week, perhaps a sound. By the end of next week, perhaps more.” A soft small smile under the garnet. “I am not, milaya, going to tell you what more means in this house. You will know when you do it.”
A small involuntary pull moved through Isabel’s chest, low, behind the sternum.
The pull was not, by any honest read of itself, hers.
Mora registered it. Mora did not, by any small movement of her face, comment on it.
“He felt that,” Isabel said, quietly.
“Aye.”
“From wherever he is.”
“Wherever he is, milaya, his body is currently registering the small soft fact that yours just decided to learn this. What he does with that information is, this morning, his business. Yours is to read the page.”
The page, on Isabel’s lap, had turned itself.
She had not turned it.
The new page, in the same old hand, gave her the rest of the instruction, in three lines a body was permitted to read only once.
When she lifted her eyes from it, the rain on the leaded glass had stopped.
The pull behind her sternum, far from quieting, had sharpened into a thing she could feel, now, as a presence on the other side of the curve of the world, doing the small precise work of a body that had been told something exquisite was on its way and was, by the soft careful arithmetic of these things, not in any position to stay still until evening.
Mora rose from the ottoman.
“Tonight, milaya.”
“Tonight.”
“Eat. Walk in the woods. Drink water. Do not, today, touch yourself.”
Isabel made a small involuntary sound in her throat.
“That is the instruction, milaya. For the page to do its work, the body must arrive hungry.”
The library door closed behind her.
Outside the leaded glass, the rain had not, technically, started again, but the soft small wet smell of trees that had been holding water all morning was rising into the air of the room the way it did before a body decided, in the soft slow architecture of a long day, to ache.
Isabel, in the wing chair, sat with the book open on her lap and the small definite warmth of a man on the other side of the curve of the world pressing against the soft place under her sternum, and registered, in the soft quiet way her body had been learning to register things, that the day was going to be a long one.
The book closed itself.
Her hand, on the cover, did not move.