XIV

Three hours later, with the gloomy day dawned and a second blizzard moving in, Jacob and Rosa found each other on the Skipton road, a few miles north of the valley. They’d not made an explicit arrangement to meet, yet they came to the place (from different directions: Jacob from the valley itself, Rosa from her rock in the hills) within five minutes of each other, as though the rendezvous had been planned.

Rosa was in a bit of a haze as to what she’d actually done to her pursuers, but it had turned into quite a chase, she knew.

“One of them ran and ran,” she said. “And I was so mad when I caught up with him, I . . . I . . .” She stopped, frowning.

“I knew it was terrible, because he was like a baby, you know? The way they get.” She laughed. “Men,” she said. “they’re all babies. Well, not all. Not you, Jacob.”

A gust of snow-flecked wind carried the sound of sirens in their direction.

“We should be on our way,” Jacob said, looking up the highway and down. “Which way do you want to go?”

“Whichever you’re taking,” she replied.

“You want to go together?”

“Don’t you?”

Jacob wiped his nose, which was running, with the back of his glove. “I suppose so,” he said. “Until they’ve given up looking for us, at least.”

“Oh, let them come,” Rosa said, with a sour smile. “I’d like to tear out their throats, every one of them.”

“You can’t kill them all,” Jacob said.

Her smile sweetened. “Can’t we?” she said, for all the world like a child wheedling for some indulgence. It amused Jacob, despite himself. She always had some little performance to entertain him: Rosa the schoolgirl, Rosa the fishwife, Rosa the poetess. Now Rosa the slaughterer, so busy with her murders she couldn’t remember what she’d done to whom. If he wasn’t to travel alone, then who better to go with than this woman who knew him so well?

It was not until the next day, reading The Daily Telegraph in a café in Aberdeen, that they got some sense of what Rosa had actually done, and even then the newspaper uncharacteristically chose discretion as to the details. Two of the four bodies found on the hill had been dismembered and some portions of one remained unaccounted for. Jacob didn’t inquire as to whether she had eaten them, buried them, or scattered them along her route of retreat for the delectation of local wildlife. He simply read the account, then passed it over to Rosa.

“They’ve got good descriptions of us both,” he remarked.

“From the kids,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I should go back and kill them,” Rosa drawled. Then, with a spurt of venom, “In their beds.”

“We brought it on ourselves,” Jacob said. “It’s not the end of the world.” He grinned into his Guinness. “Or maybe it is.”

“I vote we head south.”

“I’ve no objection.”

“Sicily.”

“Any particular reason?”

She shrugged. “Widows. Dust. I don’t know. It just struck me as a place to lie low, if that’s what you want to do.”

“It won’t be for long,” Jacob said, setting down his empty glass.

“You’ve got a feeling?”

“I’ve got a feeling.”

She laughed. “I love it when you have feelings,” she said, lightly cupping his hand in hers. “I know we’ve said some hard things to one another in the last little while—”

“Rosa—”

“No, no, hear me out. We’ve said some hard things and we meant them, let’s be honest, we meant them. But . . . I do love you.”

“I know.”

“I wonder if you know how much I love you?” she said, leaning a little closer to him. “Because I don’t.” He looked puzzled. “What I feel for you is so deep in me—it goes so far down into my soul, Jacob—into the very heart of who I am. There’s no seeing the end of it.” She was gazing deep in his eyes and he returning her gaze, unblinking. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“It’s true for me—”

“Don’t say it if it’s not.”

“I swear it’s true,” Jacob replied. “I don’t understand it any more than you do, but we belong together; I concede it.” He leaned a little further and kissed her unpainted lips. She tasted of gin; but beyond the alcohol was that other taste, the like of which no mouth but this, his Rosa’s mouth, had in it. If any man had told him at that moment she was less than perfection, he would have killed the bastard on the spot. She was a wonderment, when he saw her like this, with unclouded eyes. And he the luckiest man alive to be walking the earth with her. So what if it took another century to be done with this work? He had Rosa at his side, an ever-present sign of what lay at the end of his endeavor.

He kissed her harder, and she replied with kisses of her own, deep, deep kisses, which inspired him to return them in kind, until they were so wrapped about each other that nobody in the place dared so much as glance their way, for fear of blushing.

Later, they adjourned to a piece of waste ground adjacent to a railroad track. There, with dusk upon the isle, and another snow, they finished the lovemaking they’d left off in the Courthouse. There was no paucity of passion this time: They were so elaborately intertwined that a passenger in one of the many trains that flew by while they coupled, glimpsing them there in the dirt, might have thought they were seeing not two beings but one: a single nameless animal, squatting beside the tracks, waiting to cross to the other side.