Winterking (1987)

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

  1 0 2

  F aces In the Earth

  1 0 3

  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

  104

  WINTERKING

  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

  Faces in the Earth

  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

  1 0 6

  WINTERISING

  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

  Faces in the Earth

  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— ”

  1 0 8

  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

  1 0 9

  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