by Paul Hazel
him a double set of ears and eyes, the second detached and
sardonic, gazing with amused interest over the dark plowed
earth of the delta, over the sky’s illimitable whiteness, watching,
listening to the hobnob of women as though he were watching
and listening to the strutting and hooting of birds.
What he had not expected was the invitation, dated six
months in advance— for October— to a dinner at Wykeham’s
Devon estate. Puzzled, the Duke laid the letter aside on the
table. The butler had long since gone beyond hearing.
“What do you make of that?” His Grace asked no one in
particular.
It was not chance that brought them. Yet it must have
seemed like chance to the two young women arriving separately
but witbin a few moments of one another at the information
desk in the waiting room at Water Street Station. The Duke
lifted his eyes from the timetable to look across at the
dark-haired woman asking the track number of the evening
train to Devon and at the woman behind her, listening closely
to the clerk’s answer. The answer given, he watched them
turn quickly away, in both faces the same apprehension and
seriousness. He recognized at once that in some fashion they
were Wykeham’s and that each had come alone, unaware of
the other. His eyes followed their long legs and slender hips
into the crowd. In his imagination younger women were
always slender, and he congratulated himself on sharing
Wykeham’s admiration for the clear bold grace of slender
women. He wondered whether Wykeham had managed to
sleep with both of them.
The waiting room was dim. The air, pulled in from the
platform, was full of the smell of steam. When he looked
around again, he had lost them. He stood off to the side,
watching quietly, for he knew there was plenty of time. A
man pushed hurriedly past him, inquiring anxiously at the
desk. He was tall and balding. He had on a new gray overcoat
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of such elegance that for a moment the Duke was certain he
must have met him. Then suddenly he got a glimpse of the
man’s wet shoes. He has walked here through puddles,
the Duke reflected, disappointed. The discovery remained on the
Duke’s face, mingled with bewilderment, until he overheard
the clerk answer: “Devon? Certainly, sir. Track nine.” His
Grace smiled. Wykeham, he thought, still enchanted but wiser.
Harwood turned his eyes doubtfully and began to hunt
for the gate,
“1 beg your pardon,” the Duke said, moving nearer.
“Nine is out by the river. If you will permit m e . . .”
“I’d be obliged,” Harwood said. He fell in beside the
older man gratefully.
Neither was carrying luggage.
“I’m not actually catching the train,” Harwood said.
“Like yourself,” said the Duke mildly, “I have been
planning to miss it.”
It was Harwood’s dinnertime and except for the coat
he would not have come. But the obligation nagged at him.
Late in the afternoon he had gone to Wykeham’s room in the
college, thinking he still might find him. When he had
knocked, no one had answered. He had tried the next door
and met a sullen-looking boy who barely knew Wykeham and
was of no help. He had intended then to return to his rooms
but walking across the courtyard, he had encountered a
groundsman counting a few crisp bills with his blackened
fingers.
“Paid me right well,” the man had answered him breezily. “Not many like him. Though I’ll admit I had a bit of trouble with all them boxes.” He folded the bills twice and
thrust them into his pocket. The man grinned. “Engaged me
for three hours and paid me for six, it’s being Saturday and all
and my own time. Though I’d have settled for four. But me
and Jake got him oft.”
“W here?”
“Down to Water Street.”
‘T-I’m sorry I don’t— Harwood stammered.
‘ To the trains.”
Watching Harwood turn and rush into the street, the
groundsman shook his head. But then it had been his experi
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ence that education, if it did anything, made it harder for
those who had it to find their way around.
An hour before closing Carolyn simply walked away from
her desk. The woman who worked with her had to admit she
hadn’t been of much use anyway. She had arrived late and
kept going to the bathroom. When, looking owlish and tired,
she managed to stay at the desk she uncrinkled a piece of
paper, read it again then crushed it only to repeat the process
a few minutes later. The circles under her eyes seemed to
darken like bruises. “Why don’t you just go home,” the
woman had whispered to her kindly. But as a matter of pride,
she stayed. Gradually the students marshaled behind her
desk drifted to other lines. Carolyn no longer looked up. The
clock behind her started the little whirring sound it made
before it announced the hour. She closed her eyes tightly.
Then she collected the paper, slipped the strap of her bag
over her narrow shoulder and went toward the stairs. He had
never made a secret of how and when he was going. He had
simply taken for granted, she thought, hating for a moment
his arrogance, that because he had not specifically requested
it she would not come to watch him go.
Before she expected it, Nora was through the doors of
the station and out on the platform. The woman walked stiffly
in front of her. Because it was already dark and she did not
know the way, Nora hurried after, climbing when the woman
climbed a steep metal bridge which crossed the track bed
nearest the station. A heavy puffing engine passed sluggishly
under her. The steam came up from below.
He will have forgotten me, Nora said to herself, though
she clutched in her hand the ticket that only he, although his
letter had been unsigned, could have sent her.
Half believing it was a college prank, she had left the
shop and gone out into the streets she seldom walked and
barely knew even after a dozen years in this land of strangers.
On her way she had stopped and looked into store windows,
gazing at female mannequins of frozen elegance, wearing
clothes she had never dreamed of. In the end, standing
before a slovenly red-faced agent in the office of the steamship line, she waited as he searched through the records. Yes, of course, the ticket was valid. She saw his sly, conspiratorial
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smile. He leaned forward over the desk on his fat arms. He
remembered now, he said, the man who had made the
purchase. He had no doubt, he told her, that the young man
had ample reason to be grateful.
Her head throbbing, she retreated into the darkening
street just at the moment when Wykeham stepped out of his
cab. A second cab had drawn up behind. Two men began
unloading trunks and boxes on
to the sidewalk. The streetlamps
were coming on and lit her pale tense face. She hadn’t meant
to stay out so late. She coiddn’t think of what after their brief,
odd encounter in the shop she might actually say to him.
Feeling foolish and yet determined, she drifted into the
street. When she had crossed over, the young man, who had
kept his back toward her, had already disappeared into the
monstrous old station. A breath of night air swirled around
her legs. She stood among the trunks and boxes holding
herself so still it almost seemed to the men easing boxes
down beside her that she was waiting to be lifted onto the
loading cart.
“Your pardon, miss,” one of the men said to her. “Is
there something?”
Nora hadn’t noticed the man and so did not hear what he
was saying. The boxes were growing around her like the wild
black hedge that had surrounded her in her dream. Indeed
she felt like the girl in the dream: beset on all sides by great
dangers and yet somehow made larger to meet them. She
was frightened. But because she was frightened she also felt
she carried inside her a braver destiny.
The man jabbed at her with his finger. “Miss,” he
repeated.
She saw him then. At the same time she saw the tag on
the box he had set at her feet. She gave a startled laugh. It is
fate, she thought recklessly, not certain it was so. In the tiny
old-fashioned letters that had been on the envelope she had
read his destination.
Selecting a door at random, she walked past the man and
into the immense dimness of the waiting room.
The train loomed in the blackness, hissing to itself.
“There,” the Duke said.
Harwood walked ahead but the Duke lingered. Hearing
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the other’s footsteps stop, Harwood turned and looked over
his shoulder.
“Are you coming?” he asked.
The Duke shook his head. He smiled. “I can see from
here.”
Harwood nodded and went on.
His Grace held back in the shadows. Perhaps no great
harm would be done if Wykeham should see him. After all,
he had been invited to Greenchurch and so presumably
Wykeham, ignoring the prohibition or perhaps rewriting it,
intended that at last he should meet him face-to-face. But for
thirty-eight years he had been the Will’s most faithful servant
and the Will was clear on that point, as it was on so many
others. His Grace would be granted one audience with but
one member of the family. Thereafter, while he was free to
maintain an active correspondence with its male heirs whether in residence at Greenchurch or scattered over the globe, he must never seek another meeting. And he had met (and
therefore should have been satisfied) the grandfather, Joseph
Wykeham, a grave young man when he stepped into the
Duke’s office, tall and well spoken and, according to the
records, slightly younger than himself. But of course that
had been long ago. Joseph had died or at least had been
declared missing, then dead. Then, from time to lime, His
Grace had written the improbably named Sebastian, the
father, who had been bom abroad, married early and who
with all hands had gone to the bottom in the Gulf of Is-
kanderun without once writing back. It was young William,
for reasons which even now remained largely obscure to His
Grace, who had been set alone on the Turkish coast and,
thereby surviving the disaster, began seven years later to
send letters addressed starkly to West Redding, Leeds Bank,
New Awanux, the Americas.
It was for William only that the Duke maintained a
lasting affection. And yet when the boy, finally a young man,
had come in from his wanderings to begin his studies, His
Grace had kept his distance as the Will required. The letters
still flew back and forth, crossing a few narrow streets where
once they had crossed the oceans. But the Duke had come no
nearer. Faithful to his trust, even when, the latest Wykeham
(for there never seemed more than one at a time) announced
that the Duke’s term would be ended or later when it was
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learned that Wykeham (the first Wykeham to enter the bank
in more than a generation) had come himself to meet the new
man, even then, faithfully, His Grace had left the room as
Wykeham had come in.
The younger men were left to each other’s company.
That was as it should have been. The Duke had been the
servant of the Will for thirty-eight years but for thirty-eight
years he had been its master as well. His hand went into his
pocket, touching the letter. Well, the whole bloody tangle is
Houseman’s now, he thought. How then was he still bound?
The Duke lifted his head.
The realization came to him, almost as a physical shock,
that he was looking directly across the platform at Wykeham.
4.
It was simply that there was no time (both too little and
none at all). It seemed to happen all at once. In an instant
there were men and women of no consequence, milling about
the platform, preparing to mount the steps as soon as the
conductors had opened the doors. While Carolyn was herself
preparing, although for what she was not yet certain, Wykeham
was suddenly walking ahead of her. She had no idea from
where he had come. His dark head was turned, staring
upward into the cars as he passed them. Carolyn opened her
mouth. Then she saw the woman beside her, a woman she
had not before seen, suddenly rush ahead. In the same
instant the conductor swung open the door.
Wykeham stopped, waiting for the thin metal door to be
hooked back. From beneath the engine there still came a
clattering and the laughing curse of steam. And yet, as if by
stopping, he brought her to a stop as well. She waited,
feeling, just for the moment, as though the world itself had
stopped. She did not move. The woman went by her. Carolyn
saw only her profile, sick with longing, and knew beyond
dispute or reason that this woman too had followed him.
It happened all too quickly. The conductor came down
the steps. Wykeham climbed up. He turned left into the car
and was gone. Other people moved into the car, finding their
seats, lifting bags and huge bundles onto the racks. He was
surely one of them. The woman’s lips moved but, as though
trapped by the glass, they made no sound.
It was George Harwood who first noticed her. She was
not especially pretty although he guessed that once she might
have been. Such things are hard to judge but he suspected
that she was several years his senior. He had not meant to
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look at her. He had caught a glimpse of Wykeham just as he
stepped onto the train. He had run forward to meet him but
a crowd of passengers blocked his way. Harwood turned,
walking slowly back
in the direction he had come, looking up
into the windows. It was, he thought later, simply because
she looked so surprised and in his experience people on
trains, their destinations and perhaps even their lives clearly
in mind, never did.
The edge of her cider-colored hair fell across her shoulders. Her eyes were wide open, grown round. She looked, he decided, like a woman in a tale for children. Caught by a
gust of adventure, he wondered not who she was but where
she was going. For a moment, with the extravagance of one
who has read too many books, he fancied that her journey
might take her in and out of sorrow to the ends of the earth.
Harwood shrugged, aware suddenly that he was being foolish. In the cars the passengers had settled. He still had not seen Wykeham.
The conductors reboarded the train, leaned out and
looked down the tracks. The engine uttered a scream.
The last porters scattered. The Duke listened to the pad
of their feet as the platform emptied. Only he had seen
them all, the dark-haired woman wandering aimlessly under
the windows, the man a few paces behind, his hands thrust
clumsily into the pockets of a coat that was too grand for him.
He had not thought about them, nor about the other woman
although he had watched her as well. Even Houseman,
though he should not have been there, had gone from his
mind.
The wind came in off the river, catching the edge of a
sign above his head. The sign creaked and groaned. The
Duke listened without hearing. But all the while he had
watched. He had seen Wykeham’s assured steady gait as he
walked between seats, striding with the same unhurried ease
with which he had once stepped from the elevator into the
room with its great windows. It had seemed a long time ago
and yet the Duke hadn’t needed to explore his memory. It
had been the same long face. The Duke had watched him
stop at the front of the car, reach up with his hand to place a
small package, the one thing he had carried, onto the rack.
And His Grace had kept on watching although, from the first,
he had been certain.
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Wykeham dropped his hand. Showing no consternation,
though the other had no right to be where he was, he slid