by Paul Hazel
holiday. How pale and injured she had looked then, her short
black hair tousled. Only moments before they had come from
their rooms. He had told her he was leaving her. As he
remembered, a tiny wave of sadness washed back over him.
Her elegant sisters, there by chance, looked up from their
table. Their husbands, being men and more tolerant of
scandal, commandeered the necessary chairs. But her sisters
sat coldly. They had seldom approved of what their older
sister did, certainly not her work for wages at a second-rate
preparatory school for girls of the middle class. They had
approved even less of Joseph Wykeham, although until this
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point he was known to them only by rumor. It was not that he
was beneath their station (as to that the rumors were both
extravagant and reassuring) but even wealth could not bargain away the distinctions of time. Had the situation been the reverse, had Wykeham instead been indisputably twice her
age, the sisters might have learned to ignore the difference. A
husband, even a dull old one, would have provided at least
the outward show of propriety. But it was their Willa, regrettably, who was thirty-seven, nearly old enough, it had swiftly come back to them, to be taken for young Wykeham’s mother. After the introductions, the younger women maintained a grim silence. It was one of the husbands, turning to look at
her more closely, who first realized that she had been jilted.
Motioning to the waiter, he ordered her wine.
The scene had all the elements of farce. Even now as he
went through the sunwashed streets toward the school,
Wykeham recalled with a pang of regret her look of incomprehension, then fear as, easing the chair from the table, he stood. Beyond the windows of the dining room the sea had
been bright; white gulls cried overhead. “Come walk with
m e,” he had said, knowing that she would not. He had not
looked back. He need not have worried. This last time she
had not disappointed him.
In the park the trees were in bloom. Their fragrance
drifted across to him. For the better part of an hour he
walked past the deserted shops, through empty squares,
until, as the first men came into the streets, he approached
the few last substantial white Federal houses and, simultaneously, the foot of the one great hill at the city’s northwest edge. Here on its renovated foundations Bristol Academy
perched overlooking the valley. The school was a fine puzzling mixture of wood and stone, the amalgam of architectural pretension and the plain common sense of its carpenters and masons. Before the turn of the new century it had been
the estate of a brewer who, as the clockworks failed, slid
toward ruin. The main building at the top of the drive had
been converted into a dormitory, the untended gardens and
the west meadow into playing fields. Other buildings, either
rehabilitated or put up through subscription, lay clustered
about the slope. Wykeham looked up, his eyes coming to rest
on one little window, tucked high up under the dark roof of
the main house. There, winter and summer, Willa had had
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her rooms. There, she had once told him, she had often
stayed up, all the lights of the school but her own extinguished, writing him letters.
She was a born letter writer and for many weeks had
continued to fatten envelopes with sheet after sheet of grief
and news even after she had learned that he had been
married all the while he had courted her. She wrote with
quiet gravity of her students and, surprisingly, without malice, of her sisters’ lives. He had told her, as unlikely as it sounded, that he had a son, an infant, whose name, Sebastian,
he had invented as cavalierly as he had invented child and
mother, merely to insure the orderly progress of generations
required for inheritance. But thereafter, as much like a fond
aunt as a lover, in letter after letter she had inquired after the
boy. She made him toys. She was something of a sculptress,
and from her affectionate fingers came dwarfs and winged
rabbits, mischievous goats molded cunningly from clay, and
shy, smiling giants, long-armed and heavy-shouldered, carved
from pitch pine. Only at the end of her letters did she speak
of her loneliness. There had been one long last letter waiting
on the table in the front room at Greenchurch on the day it
was reported that Joseph Wykeham had vanished. He had
picked it up twice. For a time it had even rested in his breast
pocket. But the letter remained in the house when he left.
For another long moment Wykeham stared at the window. After a while he walked on and began to climb the hill.
In the old days, of course, he had driven, in a shining
green roadster, not unlike the magnificent automobiles George
Tennison had watched in quiet despair. It made Wykeham
smile to think, now, how quaint and old-fashioned that car
must seem to any but his own eyes. He stood in the middle
of the drive, halfway up, remembering. He would, he decided, have to talk with Charon Hunt about getting at least one of the cars back into service. He had already postponed their
meeting longer than was wise. Tomorrow, he thought; but his
smile faltered and he shook his head irritably.
Down the steps from the main house a half dozen young
women, dressed in short gym skirts and sweaters and carrying sticks, hurtled breathlessly into the morning. One was pudding-faced, the rest audaciously thin. From across the
courtyard Wykeham caught sight of dancing patches of blonde
and auburn hair and acknowledged, without actually banishing
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105
Charon Hunt from his mind, that the world’s irritations were
not altogether without compensation. Wykeham found himself hurrying; but when he reached the embankment, they had gone out of sight. He pressed on.
In his will Joseph Wykeham had presented a rather
remarkable sum to the school. The endowment, ignoring
delicacy, had been in Willa’s name, with her as executrix. The
gossips had been left to think what they liked. The trustees
would have found, he had expected, some way of accepting
the gift. He wished frankly to see what she had done with his
money. But he had scarcely taken another step when he saw a
new figure moving against the broad classroom windows. She
strode briskly toward him, her dark head thrown back, intent
on the stout branches of a high-crowned elm growing up at
the side of the court. She had not, even at the last moment,
been paying the least attention to what lay in her path.
“O h .. . sorry,” she said in a flat, puzzled voice. “I was
watching. . .”
She looked up, to see Wykeham smiling.
“Really, I am sorry,” she exclaimed, dismayed, realizing
that he was no one she knew. “There was a crow,” she said
helplessly. Then, as though imagining how it sounded, she
laughed. “An immense crow.” She studied him for a moment.
“As black as a man’s trousers.”
It struck Wykeham, irrelevantly, that her eyes were
blacker. He saw as well that his first impression had
been
mistaken. She was no more than a girl, perhaps fifteen or
sixteen. Her figure, while tall as a boy’s, was yet mostly leg.
Above her narrow waist her torso was only just beginning to
emerge from the compactness of childhood. Only her eyes
and her mouth bore full witness that childhood was past. Yet,
unaware of any discord, she stepped back, now quite willfully,
to get a clearer look at him.
“Are you anyone important?” she asked.
“I like to hope.”
She gave him an appreciative grin. “I mean you’re not a
new teacher or somebody’s brother?”
“No.”
There was a fluttering in the branches. With a startling
cough, the crow launched itself above the court.
“There it is!” she shouted. He turned but she was not at
all sure what it was he was watching. The crow sailed away
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over the treetops. Spots of sunlight winked through the
branches. On the still air they could both hear the faint
cheering floating down from the playing fields. It was excuse
enough if she wanted it. She might have gone. For a minute
neither of them spoke.
A man emerged from between the buildings carrying
buckets of ash. Ignoring them, he went down the path. If
there were faces behind the windows of the main house, they
chose not to look out.
She had grown up at the school. Her father, whom she
adored, traveled most of the year. It had fallen to her
teachers more or less by default to instruct her to be careful
of strangers. They had advised her as strictly as was needed
in a world which, except for the odd-job man, consisted
solely of women. Once, unaccountably, there had been a
male Latin teacher, an unhappy young man with cigarette-
stained fingers and an untried degree in the classics, who,
after less than a month, had fled back to his university.
She stood quite still. The expression on Wykeham’s face,
although well-intentioned, nevertheless had an extraordinary
effect on her. She gazed at him frankly. Surely, someone
would come to call her if she were at fault.
“It was perched on my windowsill,” she said, remembering the cold eyes that had peered in at her as she awoke in her bed. "It was in the yard again after breakfast.” Her
voice, which had sunk to a whisper, communicated a delighted sense of alarm, as if it had been no ordinary crow but a creature she had, with a quiet, amused determination,
summoned.
“Perhaps it is an omen,” he suggested.
“Oh, do you think so?”
The sunlight was warm on her neck. She fancied she
could feel it running between her shoulder blades, buoying
her, covering and uncovering her like the waters of a bath.
For no particular reason, she stretched herself and yawned.
One of them, it was impossible to tell which, took the first
step.
“What is your name?” he asked,
“Jane."
“Only that?"
They walked slowly, each seemingly afraid to outpace the
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107
other. “Jane Hawleyville,” she said, looking down. “And your
own?”
“Wykeham,”
She stared at him over her shoulder. “Like the hall?” she
said softly, thinking that she had found him out. Her smile
darkened. But when Wykeham looked innocently confused,
she pointed.
“Wykeham Hall,” she repeated. But something was wrong
with his understanding and she pointed again at a building at
the far side of the court.
“We have our science lessons there,” she added. “They
have frogs and intestines in bottles.” She made a face. “We
have to cut open cats.” She had turned her back on the
hall and was watching him.
“I should like to go in,” he said.
Jane shook her head.
“You needn’t cut anything open.”
“It isn’t that.”
He could hear for the first time a nervous tremor in her
voice.
“No one likes to go there,” she admitted. “Not unless . .
She wanted to say something more but found she
could not. Instead she put her hand on his arm.
He was conscious of her touch, half curious and half
cross with her for her insistence.
“Why not?”
His indignation took her by surprise.
“There was a woman,” she said haltingly. “Years and
years ago. She was a teacher and had the hall built.” She
stopped.
A procession of pictures marched through her head,
pictures she had made up herself because it had all happened
long before she had arrived. Yet, from stories traded from one
girl to the next, retold late at night when the wind blew dead
leaves on the roof and, looking out in the moonlight and
frightened, she could see the hall among the dark branches,
she knew, knew exactly the awfulness.
“One day,” she said, her mouth dry before she had half
completed a sentence, “right after the hall was finished, the
woman went to the top of the stairs. And before anyone had
time to think or could reach her, she hanged herself. And so,
sometimes— ”
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W IN TER IN G
She saw how quickly he looked away.
She had made some terrible blunder.
All at once the excitement that had grown wonderfully
inside of her was threatened. She pulled at his arm.
But his head was averted.
“You won’t laugh,” she pleaded.
But he was merely staring across at the hall.
The sun breaking above the tops of the trees began to
blaze on the windows. Amid the faded ivy stitched to the
walls there were a few sprigs of green. The stone itself, inert,
darkened by the door and blackened under the windows,
took on a warmer tinge in the sunlight.
Wykeham turned.
“Then you must show me the playing fields.” His tone
implied a command. Yet, before he had quite broken off, she
realized that he had never let her hand go. Pressed against
her palm she could feel the rough wool of his jacket and the
arm beneath, tensed and leaning into her.
“Will you?” he asked.
For an instant, looking up into the strong sunlight she
was blinded.
The same sunlight lay across the table in Dr. Holmes’s
kitchen. Holmes squinted. The day was already warm hut
neither man was as yet comfortable enough with the other to
remove his coat. The cook, deprived of her kitchen, sat alone
in the dining room, where, if her employer had had the least
sense, he would have ushered His Grace. With a great
affronted swelling of her bosom she drank herself the last of
the coffee from a proper china cup. The little pinched-faced
maid, intruding on the cook’s misery, hacked through the
door. The maid’s frail arms were laden with dishes she had
been unwilling to set in the sink in front of His Grace. It did
not occur to either woman that the kitchen provided t
he only
uninterrupted view of the garden or that Holmes, having
discovered that the world was far stranger than he had
expected, needed urgently to look at a hedge. But when he
turned back, the Duke was still sitting across from him.
Holmes put aside his napkin. As if to show he was not
hurried, he folded it twice. The death certificate rested on
the table before him. Face down beside it was the photograph
F a ce s in the Earth
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he had taken at the last moment from the surgery. He had
meant to slip it quietly into his pocket.
“Of course the body had been washed,” the Duke had
been saying, describing the funeral. “The mistake, clearly,
was in putting him back into his suit. It was likely his best
suit.” His mouth turned down at the edge, “I am afraid it may
have been his only one.” Remembering the room in the
cheap lodging house where they had set the bare casket, the
Duke paused. He thought of the wealth that had come into
his own hands, that as easily would have come into Houseman’s. In a month, even in a few days, he thought and as quickly cursed himself for thinking it. “The suit he had worn
on the train was in any case all they had. He was a fastidious
man. They had no reason to suspect. Although almost certainly, I imagine, they had taken a brush to the sleeves and gone through his pockets. So it is even more difficult to
believe that they missed it.”
“I’m sorry,” Holmes interrupted, “but I don’t— ”
“The young man stank,” the Duke finished with brutal
simplicity, “like a hostler, as though not five minutes before
he had been mucking a stable.”
Holmes shifted his head.
The Duke glanced up. He did not initially suppose it was
important. It was just one more thing which for the moment
he did not understand but for which, like Houseman, he
shouldered unquestioned responsibility.
Holmes was again staring out of the window.
“Perhaps,” the Duke suggested, “when you examined
him— ”
(
Holmes shook his head. “It would have been fairly
obvious. And it wasn’t.”
The words left a silence behind them. Without being
able to say how, the Duke saw that Holmes was lying; not