VII

By the time Will opened his eyes the fire, which had been in its heyday when he arrived, was not in its embery dotage. But Jacob had laid his guest close to it, and there was still sufficient heat in its dwindling flame to drive the last of the chill from Will’s bones. He sat up, and realized he was wrapped in Jacob’s military coat and naked beneath.

“That was brave,” somebody on the other side of the fire said.

Will squinted to see the speaker better. It was Jacob, of course. He was lounging against the wall, staring through the flames at Will. He looked a little sick himself, Will thought, as though in sympathy with his own condition; but whereas Will’s illness had left him worn and weak, Steep glittered in his hurt: pale, gleaming skin, shiny curls pasted to the thick muscle of his neck. His coarse gray shirt was unbuttoned to his navel, his chest arrayed with a fan of dark hair that ran over the ridges of his belly to his belt. When he smiled, as he did now, his eyes and teeth glistened, as though made of the same implacable stuff.

“You’re sick, and yet you found your way through this blizzard. That shows courage.”

“I’m not sick,” Will insisted. “I mean . . . I was a little, but I feel fine now—”

“You look fine.”

“I am. I’m ready to go any time you want to.”

“Go where?”

“Wherever you want,” Will said. “I don’t care. I’m not afraid of the cold.”

“Oh this isn’t cold,” Jacob said. “Not like some winters we’ve endured, the bitch and me.” He glanced back toward the courtroom, and through the smoke Will thought he saw a contemptuous look cross Jacob’s face. A heartbeat later, his gaze came Will’s way once more, and there was a new intensity in it.

“I think maybe you were sent to me, Will, by some kind god or other, to be my companion. You see, I won’t be traveling with Mrs. McGee after tonight. We’ve decided to part company.”

“Have you . . . traveled with her for long?” Jacob leaned forward from his squatting position and picking up a stick, poked at the fire. There was still fuel concealed in the embers, and it caught as he raked them over. “More than I care to remember,” he said.

“So why are you stopping now?”

By the light of the spluttering flames (whatever had been cremated here, it had been fatty) Will saw Jacob grimace.

“Because I hate her,” he replied. “And she hates me. I would have killed her tonight, if I’d been quicker. And then we’d have had us a fire, wouldn’t we? We could have warmed half of Yorkshire.”

“Would you really have killed her?”

Jacob raised his left hand into the light. It was gummy with something that looked like blood, but mixed with flakes of silvery paint. “This is mine,” he said. “Shed because I failed to shed hers.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “Yes. I would have killed her. But I would have regretted it, I think. She and I are intertwined in some fashion I’ve never understood. If I’d done harm to her—”

“You’d have hurt yourself?” Will ventured.

“You understand this?” he said, almost puzzled. Then, more quietly: “Lord, what have I found?”

“I had a brother,” Will replied, by way of explanation.

“When he died I was happy about it. Well, not happy. That sounds horrible—”

“If you were happy, say so,” Jacob replied.

“Well I was,” Will said. “I was glad he was dead. But since he died I’m different. It’s the same with you and Mrs. McGee in a way, isn’t it? If she’d died you’d be different. And maybe you wouldn’t be the way you wanted to be.”

“I don’t know either,” Jacob replied softly. “How old was your brother?”

“Fifteen and a half.”

“And you didn’t love him?” Will shook his head. “Well that’s plain enough,” Jacob said.

“Do you have any brothers?” Will asked him. Now it was Jacob who shook his head. “What about sisters?”

“None,” he said. “Or if I did, I don’t remember them, which is possible.”

“Having brothers and sisters and not remembering?”

“Having a childhood. Having parents. Being born.”

“I don’t remember being born,” Will said.

“Oh you do,” Jacob said. “Deep, deep inside,” he tapped his breastbone, “—there’s memory in there somewhere, if you knew how to find it.”

“Maybe it’s in you too,” Will said.

“I’ve looked,” Jacob said. “Looked as deep as I dare.

Sometimes I think I get a taste of it. A moment of epiphany, then it’s gone.”

“What’s an epiphany?” Will asked.

Jacob smiled, happy to be a teacher. “A little piece of bliss,” he said. “A moment when for no reason you seem to understand everything or know that it’s there for the understanding.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those.”

“You wouldn’t necessarily remember if you had. They’re hard to hold on to. When you do, it’s sometimes worse than forgetting them completely.”

“Why?”

“Because they taunt you. They remind you there’s something worth listening for, watching for.”

“So tell me one,” Will said. “Tell me an epiphany.” Jacob grinned. “There’s an order.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t mean it if you did,” Jacob said.

“I did,” Will said, beginning to see a pattern in what Jacob asked of him. “I want you to tell me an epiphany.” Jacob poked the fire one last time, and then leaned back against the wall.

“Remember how I said I’d endured colder winters than this?”

Will nodded.

“There was one worse than any other. The winter of seventeen thirty-nine. Mrs. McGee and I were in Russia—”

“Seventeen thirty-nine?”

“No questions,” Jacob said. “Or you’ll have nothing more. It was the bitterest cold I’ve ever known. Birds froze in flight and fell out of the air like stones. People perished in their millions and lay in stacks unburied because the earth was too hard to be dug. You can’t imagine . . . well, perhaps you can.” He gave Will a curious little smile. “Can you see it in your mind’s eye?”

 Will nodded. “So far,” he said.

“Good. Well now. I was in St. Petersburg, with Mrs. McGee in tow. She had not wanted to come, as I recall, but there was a learned doctor there by the name of Khrouslov who had theorized that this lethal cold was the beginning of an age of ice, that acre by acre, soul by soul, species by species, it would grasp the earth.” Jacob closed his stained hand into a fist as he spoke, until the knuckles blazed white. “Until there was nothing left alive.” Now he opened his hand, and lightly blew the silvery dust of dried blood off his palm into the dying fire. “Plainly, I needed to hear what the man had to say. Unfortunately by the time I arrived he was dead.”

“Of the cold?”

“Of the cold,” Jacob replied, indulging the question despite his edict. “I would have left the city there and then,” he went on, “but Mrs. McGee wanted to stay. The Empress Anna, having recently executed a number of well-loved men, had commanded an ice palace to be built as a distraction for her disgruntled subjects. Now if there’s one thing Mrs. McGee loves it’s artifice. Silk flowers, wax fruit, china cats. And this palace was to be the greatest piece of fakery ice and man could create. The architect was a fellow called Eropkin. I got to know him briefly. The empress had him executed as a traitor the following summer—it wasn’t the last winter of the world, you see, except for him. But for the months his palace stood, there on the river bank between the Admiralty and the Winter Palace, he was the most admired, the most lionized, the most adored man in St. Petersburg.”

“Why?” Will said.

“Because he’d made a masterpiece, Will. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen an ice palace? No. But you understand the principle. Blocks of ice were cut from the river, which was solid enough to march an army over, then carved, and assembled, just the way you’d build an ordinary palace.

“Except . . . Eropkin had genius in him that winter. It was as though his whole career had been leading up to this triumph.

He’d only let the masons use the finest, clearest ice, blue and white. He had ice trees carved for the gardens around the palaces, with ice birds in their branches and ice wolves lurking between. There were ice dolphins, flanking the front doors that seemed to be leaping from spumy waves, and dogs playing on the step. There was a bitch, I remember, lying casually at threshold, suckling her pups. And inside—”

“You could go inside?” Will said, astonished.

“Oh certainly. There was a ballroom, with chandeliers.

There was a receiving room with a vast fireplace and an ice fire burning in the grate. There was a bedroom, with a stupendous four-poster bed. And of course people came in there tens of thousands to see the place. It was better by night than by day I think, because at night they lit thousands of lanterns and bonfires around it, and the walls were translucent, so it was possible to see layer upon layer of the place—”

“Like you had X-ray eyes.”

“Exactly so.”

“Is that when you had your moment of . . . of—”

“Epiphany? No. That comes later.”

“So what happened to the palace?”

“What do you think?”

“It just melted.”

Jacob nodded. “I went back to St. Petersburg in the late spring, because I’d heard the papers of the learned Dr. Khrouslov had been discovered. They had, but his wife had burned them, mistaking them for love letters to his mistress. Anyway, it was by then early May and every trace of the palace had gone.

“And I went down to the Neva—to smoke a cigarette or take a piss, something inconsequential—and while I was looking down into the river something seized hold of my—I want to say my soul, if I have one—and I thought of all those wonders, the wolves and dolphins and spires and chandeliers and birds and trees, there, somehow waiting in the water. Being in the water already, if I just knew how to see them—” He wasn’t looking at Will any longer, but staring into what remained of the fire, his eyes huge. “Ready to spring into life. And I thought, if I throw myself in, and drown in the river, and dissolve in the river, then next year when the river freezes and the Empress Anna commands another palace to be built I’ll be in every part of it. Jacob in the bird. Jacob in the tree. Jacob in the wolf.”

“But none of it’d be alive.”

Jacob smiled. “That was the glory of it, Will. Not to be alive. That was the perfection. I stood there on the riverbank and joy in me, oh, Will, the sheer . . . sheer . . . brimming bliss of it. I mean God could not have been happier at that moment. And that, to answer your question, was my Russian epiphany.” His voice trailed away, in deference to the memory, leaving only the soft popping of the dying fire. Will was content with the hush; he needed time to mull over all he’d just been told. Jacob’s story had put so many images into his head. Of carved ice birds sitting on carved ice perches, more alive than the frozen flocks that had dropped out of the sky. Of the people—Empress Anna’s complaining subjects—so astonished by the spires and the lights that they forgot the deaths of great men. And of the river the following spring, with Jacob sitting on its banks, staring into the rushing waters and seeing bliss.

If somebody had asked him what all this meant, he wouldn’t have had any answers. But he would not have cared. Jacob had filled up some empty place in him with these pictures and he was grateful for the gift.

At last, Jacob roused himself from his reverie and, giving the fire one last, desultory poke, said, “There’s something I need you to do for me.”

“Whatever you want.”

“How strong are you feeling?”

“I’m fine.”

“Can you stand?”

“Of course.” Will proceeded to do so, lifting the coat up with him. It was heavier and more cumbersome than he’s imagined, however, and as he rose it slipped off him. He didn’t bother to pick it up. There was scarcely any light for Jacob to see him naked by. And even if he did, hadn’t he taken Will’s clothes off, hours before, and laid him down beside the fire? They had no secrets, he and Jacob.

“I feel fine,” Will pronounced, as he shook the numbness from his legs.

“Here,” Jacob said. He pointed to Will’s clothes which had been laid out to dry on the far side of the fire. “Get dressed. We have a hard climb ahead of us.”

“What about Mrs. McGee?”

“She has no business with us tonight,” Jacob replied. “Or indeed, after our deeds on the hill, any night.”

“Why not?” said Will.

“Because I won’t need her for company, will I? I’ll have you.”