Chapter Five: Trespass Vi et Armis

            Starling crouched in the corner of the sofa, trying to focus on a teacup blurred with tears.  She heard a click in the hallway, soft footfalls, the restrained growl of a Jaguar’s engine, the crunch of gravel.  He was gone, and she was on her own.

            Her throat burned and her shoulders ached.  Her lungs felt like she’d smoked a whole pack of Marlboro Reds in an hour.  But her body’s pain was only counterpoint to the wreckage within.  She wondered if he’d cut more strings than he knew.  No.  Of course not.  He’d meant to do this, meant to ransack her mind like a looter, like a…  She dropped her head down to the arm of the sofa.  The soft fabric of the couch beneath her cheek seemed bizarrely out of place.  She ran her hand across the material, felt it snag on the coarse caress of her fingers.

            Alone.  Ha!  Wherever she turned in herself, he was there.  Mocking and, more rarely, approving, but always with an equally perverse droll gravity.  Her mind smarted under the lash of his contempt and burned beneath the velvet of his sanction.  Her last defenses had crumbled under his rapier attack, and she had been laid bare before him.  Her courage and her incorruptibility were a joke now that she had admitted her weakness.  She had betrayed every ideal she’d ever held dear.  He was a criminal, she was a federal agent.  Their roles should have been clear, her actions defined.  Instead, she was behaving like a two-year-old.  “I don’t want to,” she whispered.  When had that ever stopped her before?

            Slowly, deliberately, she drew a finger up to her forehead and twisted a few strands of hair around it.  When she felt the blood supply to her fingertip wane, she jerked her arm down.  Hard.  It stung.

            She let the momentum carry her into a sitting posture.  Pressing her palms against her eyes, she rubbed until the itching stopped.  When she opened her eyes again, her vision was clear.  The bone china teacup, filled with amber liquid, sat quietly on the table.  It made a small, unsatisfying tinkling sound as it shattered on the hearth where she threw it.

            She sank back down into the couch cushions, flopped over onto her side.  For a moment, she lay still.  Then fingers curled into a fist, came down with a thump.  Again.  And again.  And again.  She thought about every good thing she’d ever done.  Thump.  She heard Jack Crawford’s warning for the umpteen millionth time.  Thump.  She saw a birthday gift in a crowded parking lot.  Thump.  The crunch of snow underfoot while she searched the sky.  Thump.  Scent of L’Air du Temps and Coach leather.  Thump.  Taste of orange.  Thump.  Lambs.  Thump.  He was there for all of it, watching from the wings in the theatre of her mind, quite enjoying the show.

            She stopped only when she realized that she’d clenched her hand so tightly that her fingernails had drawn her own blood.  And then she pounded some more.  He might have left, but he had not gone.  She sat there then, for hours, as still as a stone caryatid, as crumpled as yesterday’s junk mail, but she could not make herself deny the choice that had manifested inside her.  If he would not go, then she would have to be the one to leave.  If she could.  All she had to do was get up and go.  There was nothing to hinder her.  Except her own stubborn will.

            She finally gave up, exhausted.  Rolling off the couch, she landed on all fours on the Persian rug.  Slow and stiff, she got to her feet, wobbling a little as blackness surged beneath her eyes and then retreated.  She stepped out of the room and into the hall.  The setting sun torched the leaded glass in the front window, sending tongues of amber flame along the hardwood floor.  She reached over, grabbed her keys from the table, and headed up the stairs.

            She went down the hall to the room she’d slept in, pulled the sweater he’d left for her from the armoire and laid it on the bed.  Taking the jeans in her hands, she held them at her waist.  Would be snug in the hips, loose everywhere else.  Oh, well.  She tossed them over the sweater.  Shrugging the robe off her shoulders, she hung it back in its place, closed the door. 

            The bedroom was to the rear of the house, and the window viewed twilight over the steel waters of the bay.  Beneath, a dock and a rowboat.  She lifted the sash and the screen and leaned out, bracing herself against the frame with her arm.  The wind tore through the thin silk nightshirt like it wasn’t even there.  Naked.

            She had, once upon a time, been a second-string pitcher on the girls’ softball team.  She didn’t have room to get good extension here, but, even so, she caught the glitter of the keychain in the light from the back porch, a respectable distance away and a pretty damn good throw if she did say so herself.  Hands empty, she shut the window.

            The water in the tub came up to her chin, and she let herself enjoy that.  She soaked awhile, sluiced the suds off under the showerhead, and dried off in the biggest towel she’d ever seen.  The jeans were not as bad a fit as she had imagined, pretty decent if your aim was to accentuate the feminine.  The fine knit of the sweater draped over her loosely, and she briefly regretted the lack of a foundation garment, then saw herself in the glass.  No, this would be just fine.  She inhaled deeply, watched the movement of her chest in the mirror, smelled just a trace of his cologne.

            She walked down the stairs, back into the living room.  The chill of evening was beginning to settle in the old house, and she examined the fireplace.  Functional.  Good.  She laid a fire, careful not to kneel on the teacup pieces that she really didn’t feel like cleaning up just yet.  She let the blaze take hold, felt its warmth lick at her core.

            She settled back into the couch, pulling a blanket on top of her.  Comfort enveloped her like a web.  For just a minute, she felt like the fly.  Come into my parlor, she thought, hearing his voice in her head, and laughed out loud.  He was still inside her.  Always had been.  Always would be.  He’d just never put forth the full power of his presence, not until today.  She wondered if he knew just how potent a force he was, walking the paths of her mind.

            She wondered drowsily, so close to the edge of sleep that she hoped she wouldn’t remember it when she woke…

Is it still trespass if you want him there?

 

Interlude:  Dress

            The shops at hand in this remote corner of the Chesapeake Bay area were not at all to Lecter’s taste.  Nautically themed, most of them, catering to soccer moms on vacation and the wishfully upwardly mobile.  He sighed at the necessity, then turned his Jaguar towards Baltimore.              The trip would take longer than he liked, but perhaps it was all for the best.  Clarice would need time to assimilate the painful truths she had finally faced, and privacy in which to consider her options.  So, in fact, would he.  He divided his attention neatly between the well-known road he traveled in the flesh and the somewhat less familiar path that lay before him in spirit.

            He had considerable faith that she would be there when he returned.  Her stubbornness was his ally there, as were the careful precautions he’d taken with her car.  He trusted her with his life… but he was not nearly as confident about trusting her with her own.   He had plans for that.

            And then there was more pressing and vexing problem of how to dress her.  He had to account for her personality, of course, since she was hardly the living doll that many fashion plates were, and therein lay the rub.  Frippery would be intolerable, ostentatious glamour out of the question, and there was not much else to be had stateside.  She needed clean lines, deep colors, a minimum of fuss and a maximum of sensible elegance.

            He ran through his mental images of her, in the clothes she’d chosen for herself.  She was cursed with taste and a small budget, as well as a telling lack of superficial vanity.  She favored neutrals, as was wise for someone sans unlimited funds, and preferred understated ensemble pieces with a hint of masculinity.  Probably a concession to her workplace, though he wondered if she realized that the overall effect was to emphasize her femininity most enticingly.  She was not as tall or as thin as fashion favored, but she was well proportioned in a classic way.

 

            He bypassed all the malls and famous makers, heading instead to a small shop well away from the beaten path.  The old Italian tailor who worked there understood the proper drape of trousers and had a positive genius with shoulder seams.  He had once mentioned that his wife ran a ladies’ boutique, and Lecter fervently hoped that she possessed some measure of her husband’s gifts.

            After exchanging a few pleasantries with the tailor, he asked and received directions to Signora Ghilardi’s store, just a few minutes away.  “Your special lady friend will not be disappointed, Dottore.  My wife, she will take good care of you.”

            Indeed, she did, though she was shy with the handsome gentleman and forgot her English, as she had a tendency to do when she was excited.  He saw no need to advertise his knowledge of her language and they communicated primarily in gestures.  He spent much time in the shop, minutely examining the workmanship.  He could find no fault with it, and though the selection was small, every bit of it was quality.  At last, he selected two pairs of woolen slacks, one black, one heather gray, and three silk blouses, black, white, and a blue-gray that was not quite cadet blue but the closest the Signora had to offer.  Her stock of dresses was a little too matronly for Lecter’s purposes but he did manage to find one simple black sheath that would do.  He asked the woman about lingerie and received a referral to another small boutique two blocks away.

            Before he left, he pulled from his pocket a fountain pen and a square of paper.  Quickly and carefully, he sketched a vision and wrote measurements beneath.  He gave it to the Signora with a raised eyebrow.  She took it, looked up at him, and scurried into the back room.  She returned with a large book of swatches.  He flipped through quickly, landing at last on a soft coral silk and a luscious cream lace.  She smiled at him and named a price.  He quoted a figure double what she had said and held up two fingers.  She shook her head and pointed to the lace.  “From Italy.  Four days,” she managed to say, and she would have to put Francesca in the shop and spend all her time at the sewing machine to have it ready by then.  He spread his hands, then reached for his wallet and pulled out the money, laying it on the counter.  She pushed it back towards him.  “Only if you like, Dottore,” she said, a coquettish grin transforming her wrinkled face.

            He bowed and retrieved the bills.  She offered her hand and he took it, brushing his lips across her skin.  Blushing, she walked him to the door.  “Is beautiful, Dottore.  I make it like for my daughter.”

            She waved through the shop window as he strolled away.

            The intimate purchases were easy, though the shoes required a bit more effort.  It was at his last stop, a jeweler’s, that he expended the most care.  The cabochon emerald earrings caught his eye immediately, but the proprietor had unfortunately sold the matching necklace just the previous day.  He took the earrings anyway, to put aside for later, and continued browsing with a critical eye.  He rejected the rather poor quality sapphires, was enticed by a marvelous ruby pendant, but his whimsy ultimately settled on pearls.  The necklace was a choker of Keshi pearls, the small, gray, lustrous orbs studded on a web of silver, with a cunningly wrought clasp in the shape of an oyster.  Larger pearls hung from threads of silver in the drop earrings, and the bracelet was a simple rope, again with an oyster clasp.

            The shop owner tried very, very hard to get Lecter to purchase a diamond ring for “this very lucky lady of yours,” but the doctor would not hear of it.  Diamonds are a recent fashion, little more than a craze in the long history of adornments.  Clarice would wear the jewel favored by Cleopatra, by Rome’s famous courtesans, by royalty the world over.

            The jewelry was fantastic, elegant and beautiful, but hardly for everyday wear.  On his way out the door, Lecter spotted a small case on top of the counter, featuring less expensive wares.  He spoke with the proprietor and waited while his request was completed.  The tiger eyes worked with the golden beads, just as he’d known they would.

            He occupied the drive home planning a supper menu, and composing his thoughts for a note to accompany the pearls.