Winterking (1987)

by Paul Hazel

  shone like gold in the dusk of the shop. “My ship lay over in

  the harbor,” he said, “buying herring. Too soon we were

  gone.”

  Wanting to keep him she said, “It is so far away. You

  could not have been more than a boy.”

  Someone was shuffling along the dark aisle lined with

  books or rather the shadows of books, brown and sour as

  leaf-mold, piled high to the ceiling. “Nora,” a man’s voice

  called out sharply.

  A gray head ending with a grizzled beard thrust itself

  into view. It belonged to a short, wiry man of about fifty. He

  had on an old sailor’s cap worn to the same indefinite color as

  his hair. He glanced about suspiciously. Grown apprehensive

  under his gaze, the woman turned from him.

  “I will make tea,” she said. “You would like that.”

  “Yes.” Wykeham said softly. “That would be kind.”

  Wykeham sat in an armchair watching the empty street

  fill with rain. In silence they drank the tea from delicate

  china cups whose touch made the shopkeeper moody and

  uncomfortable. He finished while the tea was still too hot and

  put the cup down.

  “Well and good," the man said. He made a point of not

  looking at his wife. “This is, after all, a business."

  Wykeham put aside his cup.

  “Is there much of a market for antique books?” he

  inquired mildly.

  “Ah!” the shopkeeper cried. “Not just old books. I have

  everything!” He pointed down at the floor. “Underneath,” he

  said, “I have two great rooms. And above.” He raised his

  arm, lifting it dramatically. “Six floors, groaning under the

  burden.” He smiled inwardly, his impatience forgotten. “One

  must try to have everything.”

  “Will you have a cake?” asked the woman.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Wykeham.

  The shopkeeper did not blink.

  “There is not a book so awful,” he said, “that it will not

  have its adherents. Or a book, however marvelous, that

  doesn’t for a time fall out of fashion. Sooner or later, then, I

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  have them: old books, yes. But new ones as well, picked up

  for a song and waiting discovery.”

  “You have, I believe,” Wykeham said, “two volumes on

  order for the Reverend Mr. Longford.”

  The woman stopped. She knew she had no more to offer

  him.

  “You are n o t. . .” she said.

  “Hardly.” Wykeham smiled. “I am merely doing a favor.”

  “Perhaps there is something.” She looked around

  desperately. “Carl, where is that nice picture book on Norway?”

  It was not what she meant to say. She had not wanted to

  involve her husband, but she was frightened and the words

  fell from her mouth.

  Wykeham looked across at her. “I regret,” he began.

  The shopkeeper had risen. He walked to the front of the

  shop, where he rummaged under the counter. He kept his

  back to them but she knew he was listening.

  When he stood again before them, two small books

  under his arm, she still had not spoken. Yet she reached out

  impulsively. Digging between her husband’s shirt and the dry

  leather bindings, she took the books into her own fragile

  hands. The shopkeeper grunted with surprise.

  Ignoring him, she turned back the front cover of the

  largest volume, finding a bill resting on a lithograph of a

  huge, naked Indian. The bill was marked in her husband’s

  clear black letters. Timothy Longford, Greenchurch Parsonage, it read, 8, Paid. She was quite certain Wykeham had seen it.

  “That will be ten pounds,” she whispered, looking straight

  up at him in terror.

  Wykeham paid without protest. When he had gone, she

  went upstairs immediately and got into bed, where she lay on

  her pillow, listening to the storm. But it was the sound of the

  crowded streets she heard and the knock of the herring boats,

  rocking in the great distant harbor. Later, when her husband

  came into the room, his eyes were watchful. Nevertheless,

  thinking of his wife’s cleverness, how with a cup of tea and a

  half-eaten cake she had earned him more than double the

  price, he gave her a grin.

  A strand of her light brown hair lay wet on her cheek.

  The years in a different country had made her timid and she

  would not look at him. It had been another woman altogeth­

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  WINTERKING

  er, a girl of seventeen who in another place and without

  encouragement dared talk with strangers. She had not meant

  to remember her. She had put her away. It was for her

  awakening, into a world that had no place for her, that

  something was owed; for that she had demanded payment.

  Wykeham sat at his desk past midnight, under the

  yellow light of the one lamp that had not been packed away.

  But for a few clothes and a suitcase the room was nearly as

  bare as on the day he had first seen it. The furniture had

  gone to storage, the odds and ends put into boxes to be

  carted off. He loved the feel of the small empty room, blank

  as the cell of an Irish hermit, loved it more because he so

  seldom chose to live plainly. Wykeham had always been

  fascinated and excited by things. As a result the rooms where

  he had lived had often had the thick and complicated air of

  thirdhand shops where everything is treasured and nothing is

  thrown away: bicycle parts had rested in the bath, books in

  the foyer. Pots, pictures, and embroideries, the enameled

  tooth of an extinct elephant (preserved in the jaw), a chimney

  brush without bristles, a shepherd’s crook, several fish scalers, a pair of surgical scissors and a Chinese lacquer screen, among many more such notable items, he had only lately

  picked from the clutter, labeled and set out for the movers.

  Deep in the evening, before he had finally sunk back

  into the desk chair, turning at last to the letters, he had swept

  the floor. Under the single electric light the plain, tea-colored

  boards, now dull and grim, had reminded him of the thin

  brown layers of hardened silt he had sometimes seen in the

  exposed rock in the hills above Ohomowauke. There were

  millions of years in the stone but almost none of it barren. In

  the dry beds of ancient streams he had found the remnants of

  the changing but never-ending abundance of life, bred generation upon generation, outdated and puzzling but seemingly imperishable. Only now and then there had been a brief

  gritty band, a patch empty of bone and shell, as though for a

  season even the gods, wearied of their hosts and retainers

  and with a momentary sigh of relief, had ordered them gone.

  The open window looked out onto the common. The storm

  had gone and with it the last smoke-like rags of clouds, blowing

  eastward over the sea. The air that crept under the sash,

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  stirring the sheets of white paper, was no longer bitter.

  He finished printing the address on a thick package tied

  with cord, then set it aside. On a fresh sheet he wrote ther />
  name of a girl. He had been careful. There had been nothing

  promised between them but he felt he owed her an explanation. They had said good-bye rather formally at the entrance of the library where she worked behind the order desk on the

  main floor. She had stood quietly watching him descend the

  stairs. When he had turned, she had waved.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she had told him.

  “I know that.” But he knew that it did.

  She spoke Latin and German, had studied Greek, but

  had never been out of the city. They met in the evenings,

  after her work, in a room in the King’s Hotel. He had talked

  to her of ships and of all the places they had taken him.

  “How have you gone so far?” she had asked.

  “I started early.”

  But she had never been content with that. “I will make a

  covenant between you and m e,” she had laughed, baiting

  him. “You will tell me everything about all the great, sweet

  places that ever were and I will show you the mysteries

  sailors dream of when they are far from land.”

  She was nearly thirty, ten years older than she guessed

  he was. Some mornings there were puffy circles under her

  brown eyes. Often, as though troubled, she said his name

  with her lips only. Now she had turned on her side, her

  slender legs curled up and rubbing his. He had told her of

  Antioch and Alexandria, the Canaries and the westward bulge

  of Africa, of camels and the Greenland ice, the Shoulders of

  Jupiter, the docks at Spithead and Madeira and the channel

  towers at Dover burning lime. But he had never promised.

  He sealed the letter and took another sheet. Across the

  way a few cold lights glittered. After a long time even these

  winked out. Two more letters lay carefully folded at his left

  hand. It was very late but he did not move from the chair. He

  felt no weariness. Once again the world stood before him. He

  looked out over the common, its darkness made blacker by

  the fissured shadow of a grove of elms.

  The crow alighted on the window ledge. Its sly head

  twisted around on its neck.

  “Why are you not asleep?” Wykeham asked it.

  “Like you,” the crow answered, "I am waiting for dawn.”

  3.

  In those years the mails, delivered throughout the city by

  postman on foot, moved more rapidly than is now the

  custom. On Saturdays the first delivery was completed by

  eight-thirty. In the outer districts, where the houses were

  spread apart, and on a few of the larger plots, where there

  were bams though there was no livestock, the second occasionally dragged on toward evening. But along the congested streets of the center city the second post arrived no later than

  noon. At twelve-thirty Harwood’s blonde wife brought the

  package in from the porch and left it on the kitchen table.

  When she came in once more from the back for the wash

  and found the package still there, she called out to her

  husband.

  Harwood emerged from his study where despite the

  howls of his daughter he had been trying to rearrange his

  notes on the Dutchman. His skin was white and dull and he

  was wearing suspenders over yesterday’s shirt.

  “No one sends me things,” she said in that tone that told

  him she was making no special claim, only speaking the

  truth.

  A streak of sunlight fell across her faded skirt. Her

  knuckles were red and her forearms were wet to the elbows.

  He sat down at the table and began fumbling with the

  taut cord fastened with sailors’ knots. She stood at his back,

  looking over his shoulder in silence. Inside the heavy paper

  there was a coat of new, thick bog-smelling tweed. He made a

  vague gesture, as though apologizing because his good fortune excluded her.

  “You had better go thank him,” she said.

  *

  *

  *

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  21

  At one o’clock a dozen letters lay unopened on the

  counter of the empty shop on Abbey Street. Out of idleness

  Nora took them up. Her husband, mumbling to himself, was

  unpacking cartons. His voice rumbled loudly but without

  meaning. Her thoughts took no notice. With skillful indifler-

  ence she sorted the letters, bills into one pile, orders into the

  next, a third for the private correspondence that went back

  and forth between dealers with rumors of acquisitions, estate

  sales not listed in the papers, quiet inquiries and lies. She

  spread the unopened letters in front of her like a gypsy

  woman, alone in a booth reading the cards out of habit.

  During the night she had dreamt she had fallen asleep in

  a tower. When she awoke, still knowing it was a dream, that

  she had only dreamt of waking, she had found that an

  immense hedge of thorns had grown up around her. She had

  gone to the window and opened it. The cold, raw morning air

  streamed in. But the din she had expected, the sounds from

  her father’s stables, the clatter of carriages in the yard below

  her, had gone. In the hallway outside her door she discovered

  her little maid, her smock, and her flesh as well, turned to a

  fibrous dust. The tiny gold ring that had been her own gift to

  the girl was hanging loose on the narrow bone of her finger.

  Toward morning Nora had awakened in her bed, next to

  her husband. The delicate pink color of the sky had told her that

  the rain was over. Something was within my reach, she thought,

  but I have not touched it. She placed the last letter down on the

  counter. In a small, spidery old-fashioned script she read her

  name. Within the envelope there were several folded pages and

  a steamer ticket on the Konge. H arald for Bod0.

  The Duke, who had known Wykeham rather better than

  the others, anticipated the letter and had directed his butler

  to bring the post in to him as soon as it came. There was a

  single, deferential knock on the door of the solarium. The

  man entered briskly, bearing a square silver tray on which the

  creamy white envelope rested. When he had set it down,

  the man stepped aside and waited discreetly.

  “There will be no answer,” the Duke said. The man

  prepared to go but the Duke leaned back his head. It was a

  smooth, dark, aristocratic head, not the sort of a head of a

  man of business. Nonetheless His Grace had had his start in

  business and had given his life to it. The title had come late

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  W IN TER IN G

  and had seemed to him both unnecessary and humorous. Yet

  he had never protested. He suspected, though nothing had

  been said directly, that Wykeham was somehow behind it.

  Fortunately, the title was not hereditary. He had never

  married and had no children to be disappointed. Nevertheless, the prospect of its eventual mortality pleased him.

  While, over these last months particularly, he had felt his

  days shortening, he had never cast a covetous eye on more of

  life than God, in whose affective agency in human affairs he

  maintained a guarded disbelief, had allo
tted him. Unlike most

  men, unlike Wykeham himself, he was certain, the Duke

  wished no more of the world when he died than it bury him.

  “Your Grace,” the man said.

  “If you will, John,” said the Duke, “have my driver

  ready at six.”

  When the man departed the Duke unsealed the letter

  and found exactly the blunt, authoritative expression of gratitude he had expected. He had been single-minded in his devotion to Wykeham. That their relationship consisted almost exclusively of the contents of the letters between them, his own, of which he still preserved copies, all bearing the same

  postmark, Wykeham’s sporting stamps of almost infinite color

  and variety, stamps of green mangoes and Spanish kings,

  cathedrals and gardens in Burma, coming to him from every

  longitude and meridian on the face of the globe, that his

  devotion was the product not of smiles and handshakes but of

  written words did not matter to him. Letters, if one took the

  time, could be made clear and definite and might, with

  appropriate care, escape the imprecision which so characterized the shifting, haphazard life he saw about him. Of course the relationship would have gained no footing at all had

  Wykeham not responded in kind. The Duke remembered his

  pleasant shock of surprise when he had read Wykeham’s first

  letter, now thirteen years ago, when Wykeham ought to have

  been a boy of seven.

  The letter had come by steamer from Egypt. The Duke

  had expected some childish babble about pyramids or perhaps, because children so rarely notice what adults take for granted, nothing about pyramids and in its place a great deal

  more than he cared to hear about the ship’s monkey. Instead

  Wykeham had written about women— and not the women of

  the bazaar, leaning over their boxes of figs and shouting to

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  buyers, but rather the wave of young English women who

  had come out with their engineer husbands, women in heavy

  skirts despite the climate who spoke tirelessly of their Queen’s

  setting a formidable example and sent home for dogs.

  He writes as if he were a Roman emperor, the Duke

  remembered he had thought, as though the boredom of the

  long voyage had sharpened the boy’s perceptions and given