"I showed him how contented I was, there and then. With your father's painted eyes looking down at us, I showed Jefferson how little I cared for marriage.

"We never did it again. I didn't really want to, and I'm quite certain he didn't. His affair with the actress ended in tears, and he went back to his wife."

"But he built you your house, just as he promised he would."

"Oh he did more than that," she said. "He also built a perfect copy of the temple. Perfect down to the last detail."

"Why?"

"That's another question for his ghost. I don't know. He was a strange man. Beautiful things obsessed him. And the temple was beautiful."

"Did he put an altar in it?"

"Do you mean did he have a statue of your father? I wouldn't be surprised."

"Where was this place?"

"Where is it, you mean."

"It's still standing?"

"I believe so. It's one of the best kept secrets in Washington."

"Washington…" The thought that there was a place of ritual sacred to my perpetually priapic father laid in the heart of the nation's capitol astonished me. "I want to see it," I said.

"I'll write a letter of introduction," Cesaria said.

"To whom?"

She smiled. "To the highest in the land. I'm not entirely forgotten," she said. "Jefferson made certain I would never want for influence."

"So he knew you'd outlive him?"

"Oh yes, he understood perfectly, though he never put what he knew into words. I think that would have been too much for him."

"Mother… you astonish me."

"Do I really?" she said, with something approximating fondness in her voice. "Well I'm pleased to hear it." She shook her head. "Enough of this," she said. "I'm quite talked out." She pointed at me. "And you be careful how you quote me," she said. "I won't have my past misrepresented, even if it is in a book that nobody's going to read."

So saying, she turned her back on me, and calling her porcupines to follow, she headed off down the passageway. I called after her:

"What do you want me to do about Marietta?"

"Nothing," she growled. "Let her play. She'll regret what she's done. Maybe not tonight, but soon."

While I was pleased to be relieved of the duty of going after Marietta, I was left somewhat curious as to the felony my half sister had committed. Indeed I was tempted to seek her out and ask her for myself. But I had such a wonderful freight of information from Cesaria, and I didn't want to risk forgetting a word of it. So I went straight back to my room, lit the lamps, poured myself some gin, and started to set it down. I paused only once, to reflect on what it might mean that Thomas Jefferson, the principal architect of the Declaration, the father of democracy in America, should have built a replica of my father's temple. To have gone to all that trouble in pursuit of beauty seemed to me unlikely. Which begged two questions: one, why had he done it? And two, if there was some other purpose, did anybody on Capitol Hill know what it was?

I will revisit Marietta's theft in due course; be assured of that. There are several threads of this tapestry woven together in her crime as you'll see. And-just as Cesaria predicted-there would be consequences.

But first, I must return to The Samarkand, and the pair who'd passed the night upon it.

When Rachel woke, dawn was creeping into the tiny cabin, and by its virtuous light she saw Galilee asleep at her side, one arm thrown over his face, the other across her body. Comforted by the sight, she dosed her eyes and went back to sleep. When she stirred again, he was gently stroking her breasts, kissing her face. Still only half-awake she slid her hand down between their bodies and raised her leg a little to guide him into her. He murmured something against her cheek that she didn't catch, but she was in too dreamy a state to ask him to repeat it. All she wanted was the fullness of him inside her; his gentle motion, his touch. She didn't even need to see him: he was there in her mind's eye when she closed her lids; her perfect lover, who'd brought her more sexual pleasure in one night than she'd experienced in all the years preceding it. She reached out and touched his chest, his nipples, then to his armpit and the mass of his shoulder, luxuriating in the polished muscle beneath her fingertips. One of his huge hands was at her face, stroking her with the back of his fingers, the other down between her legs, parting her, easing the passage of his sex by spreading her fluids down its length.

She made a little sob of pleasure when he was fully housed; begged him to stay there. He didn't move. Just kept his place, her body enclosing him so tightly she could feel the tick of his blood. At last, she began to move; just a tiny motion at first, but enough to send a shudder through him.

"You like that?" she whispered.

He replied with a short expulsion of air, almost a grunt, as he pressed his sex back into her, and the next instant withdrew it almost entirely. She let him do so without protest; the emptiness was delicious, as long as she knew it was only temporary.

She reached up and put her arms around his neck, knotting her fingers at the base of his skull. Then, oh so slowly, she preempted his return stroke by raising her hips toward his.

He spoke again. This time she heard what he said.

"Oh Lord in heaven…"

Slowly, slowly, she took him into her, both of them tender from a night of excesses; the line between bliss and discomfort perilously fine. As she rose he started down to meet her motion, and the image of him she'd had in her mind's eye lost its particularity, his substance dissolved in the wash of pleasure. The gleaming darkness of his limbs spread behind her lids, filling her thoughts completely. He was quickening now. She urged him on, her urges incoherent. No matter; he understood. She didn't need to tell him when to redirect his pressure, she'd no sooner formed the thought than he was doing so. And before he lost control of his body and came, she was distracting him from his crisis, slowing her own motion so as not to have their pleasure end too quickly.

So it went on, for two hours, almost three: sometimes a contest-jabs and sobbing; sometimes so quiet, so still, they might almost have been asleep in one another's arms. They made no declarations of love; at least nothing audible. They didn't even speak, not even to call out one another's name. There was no failure of feeling in this; just the reverse. They were so entirely immersed in one another, so entirely joined in their bliss, that for a short, sacred time they imagined themselves indivisible.

Not so, of course.

The illusion passed when their bodies had been wracked to exhaustion. They lay beside one another shivering in their sweat, gloriously satisfied, but returned into their own skins.

"I'm hungry," Rachel said.

They hadn't gone entirely without sustenance since boarding The Samarkand. Though Galilee had returned the fish to the sea as an offering to Kuhaimuana-all thirty fathoms of him-he'd opened cans of shucked oysters and brandied peaches in the middle of the night, which they'd eaten off and out of one another's bodies, so that the satisfying of one appetite didn't interrupt the satisfying of the other.

Still, it was now midmorning, and her stomach was complaining.

"We can be back on land in an hour," Galilee said.

"I don't want to go," Rachel replied. "I never want to go. I want to stay out here, just the two of us…"

"People would come looking," he said. "You're still a Geary."

"We'd find somewhere to hide," she said. "People disappear all the time, and they're never found."

"I have a house…"

"You do?"

"In a tiny village in Chile, called Puerto Bueno. It's right at the top of the hill. A view of the harbor. Parakeets in the trees."