by Paul Hazel
lying outright, perhaps. He had seen, he believed, the
doctor’s essential honesty. If anything, Holmes had been
forthright and, given the hour, remarkably unresentful.
Presented with a direct question, he could not imagine that
Holmes would be other than equally direct. The distortion,
the Duke decided, had to have been in the question he had
asked.
“Yet you did notice,” he persisted.
Holmes turned, as he had turned in his bed, his mind as
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well as his body seeking a new position. Nonetheless he
found himself again staring over his spectacles into the garden. Disgusted, he drove a quantity of air through his nostrils.
“Not then,” he said, “not at first.”
While he had kept his eyes on the hedge, he saw,
reflected in the window glass, the startling image of his own
sharp features. Was it his own face? Holmes wondered, the
face of a man who was frightened? Because he was frightened. And for no reason. Because he had taken a photograph of blots and shadows. But, of course, he had not looked at it
in the morning. His hand trembled.
A moment passed.
Holmes looked away from the window.
“Your G race,” he said, “I should like you to examine
something,”
Without looking down he found it.
The Duke took the photograph into his left hand, turning it at once another way. With the other he half reached into his pocket, then he stopped.
“A horse,” he said confidently.
But he held the photograph again at arm’s length as if to
be certain. He continued to stare.
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “See, here is a leg. In
fact,” He counted four legs. But before he had finished he
had counted four more. The Duke shook his head. “A rather
peculiar horse, I admit,” he said, “but a horse indisputably.”
3.
Olivia Tennison, who for the better part of a fortnight had
been assistant housekeeper, half-scullion and full-time
drudge, scuttered into Nora’s bedroom without knocking. It
was the end of the week, for there was washing. Her little
wren’s face was darkly flushed. Her eyes had been glaring.
She advanced in fearless little hops like a bird on a wire. She
had already stripped the master’s bed, having removed a
heap of books, a tablet of writing paper, pens and a hunting
cap. His sheets, which were muddied and would cause no
end of trouble, she had bundled into a pillowcase, which,
with an air of injured dignity, she had placed by the door. By
now she was accustomed to his thoughtlessness. More than
once she had found his trousers, with most of a swamp still
clinging to the cuffs, under the covers, where— weary, she
supposed, after half a night’s wandering with her Georgie
through fields and ditches— he had kicked them. He threw
his clothes every which way, more than likely still talking, his
head swimming with plans, with innumerable tasks, changing
every minute, which her Georgie, staggering after him from
one place to the next and even up the old back stairs to his
bedroom, must somehow see to as best he could. Olivia
brooded. As if there wasn’t enough to do, she thought, and
only a few women for the inside work. She would have her
Georgie speak with him. After all, they were thick, those
two. Her face went completely blank. She had left the door
open.
Nora sat at the end of the bed. Bars of dusty light fell
across her bare legs. Because she still had only the clothes
she had come with, she was dressed, as she had slept, in one
of his shirts. She stretched her arms and yawned. The shirt
111
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hitched up on her thighs. Olivia’s pale eyes hardened. She
stood before the bed, staring at rather more of Nora’s rounded legs than she approved of seeing.
“I’ll trouble you for the sheets, Miss Barnacle,” Olivia
said.
Nora reached for a brush and began on her hair. “He
doesn’t call me that,” she said evenly.
“Oh, I’ve heard him, miss. Like a barnacle he says to
Cook. Like those little things that attached themselves to
ships. . . and no one knows how they got th ere. . . and they
don’t come off.”
From where she sat Nora could see out the window onto
the drive. She became aware of a figure, standing in the
gravel, looking up at the house. As the face turned toward
her window, she saw it was the stableboy.
“He wouldn’t ,” she said.
“You’ll suit yourself, I’m sure.” Olivia began to tug at the
sheets. “Though it isn’t for my own good that I mention it.”
Nora climbed down from the bed. For a moment her
fingers lingered on the carved pattern of the walnut post. He
hadn’t, she was certain, even if he had said it, meant anything
of the sort. Nobody could tell her what he thought. She had
listened. More and more she was convinced that he spoke in
a language which was only incidentally directed to those
around him.
There was no sound in the room, only the crunch of the
stableboy’s boots from outside the window. Nora reached
across to the chair. She took the skirt and, stepping into it,
drew the heavy woolen over her legs.
“I hold my own here,” she said coolly, sweeping out of
her the last particle of doubt. “I work as much as anyone.” To
keep her long yellow hair from her eyes she had bound it
back with a scarf. "But I get up when I want.” She walked to
the closet and began rummaging. But after a moment she
turned back empty-handed. They were both looking down at
her feet.
“You haven’t by any chance. . .”
“No, miss.”
On an impulse Nora went out into the hall. Her shoes,
tipped on their sides, were in plain sight on the carpet. She
slipped them on, knowing all the while that she had not put
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113
them there. Finished within, Olivia, a new bundle in her
arms, came through the door,
"You’ve found them, miss,” she said with pretended
surprise.
"H e is thoughtful, don’t you think?” Nora answered
steadily. They could think as they liked. The truth was he was
innocent. Often enough she had waited in his bed; but he
had on those occasions slept elsewhere or, for all she knew,
slept nowhere at all. And what she had left of her presence,
shoes or a scarf, the hairbrush (she had so little), he returned
without comment.
Nora stood in the hall until Olivia trotted along down the
stairs. Then she followed. Below a door opened. There was a
faint sound of women’s voices from the back of the house. She
could hear the cook, old Norfolk’s wife, complaining as she
did regularly when, the men already come and gone, the last
pan scrubbed, Nora came late to breakfast. “1 see how it is,”
she announced in the abused tone she saved for those moments she had an a
udience. Yet Wykeham could come in without warning, in midmorning from wherever it was his
jaunts had taken him, and Lizzy Norfolk, her heavy jowled
face bent over the silver, was up in a moment and the kettle
began singing.
“I can readily imagine. . .” The voice drawled on with
accustomed resentfulness.
Nora took a small breath and went out onto the porch.
The stablcboy was waiting. He turned on hear with a
brief bitter smile.
“He is gone,” she told him. “I don’t know where.”
The boy’s eyes fell. His demeanor was intense, almost
desperate; yet it seemed to her that he had no one to blame
but himself. It was the fourth time he had come seeking
Wykeham. She had watched him for as many days, in the
morning, pacing up and down in the gravel, looking uncertain, uncomfortable out in the open before the house. He had never come up the steps, never knocked on the door. It was
as if he waited for her instead, waited to be told over and
over that Wykeham had gone.
“I shall come tomorrow,” he said.
She gave him an oblique look. "You might try after
dinner.” The boy stared back sullenly. She felt a sharp redness come into her cheeks. She had meant to be helpful but
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WINTERKING
it seemed instead that a distance had opened between them.
His grave small features were watching her. She realized
suddenly how hard it was to look at him.
She had an impression of dark, haunted eyes, a plain
lean face. Spikes of black hair fell in several directions across
his forehead. But if she averted her eyes, what was left of her
memory of him? She started to turn away.
He threw her a tortured look.
“Tell him,” he said quickly, “that it is time he spoke with
me.”
As if he perceived as well some danger of vanishing, he
thrust his thin shoulders forward.
“If I see him,” she said. Nora hesitated. “If I do, I will
ask him to come to the stables.” Something else occurred to
her and she turned, staring at the roofs, now partially mended,
of the workmen’s cottages. “You will be there? You do live
here somewhere?”
His eyes had run past her. He was looking instead at the
house, at the wide uneven porch where she waited. The old
railings were threaded with thorns and buttressed with vines,
just now beginning to flower.
“He can find m e,” he said.
There was a long moment. Then he went back down the
drive, heading, it seemed to her, nowhere in particular. Later
in the day she saw him again, shuffling idly along the edge of
the hill. It was one of the last days of April; the sky was
extraordinarily distant. He was standing out in the open
without even the shadow of a cloud to cover him. She
watched him as, unconscious of any immodesty, he relieved
himself in the grass. It struck her then that probably he was
ignorant of indoor plumbing. Looking out from the house,
which now she seldom left, she found herself wondering
where he had come from. Not from this place. He is like me,
she concluded, feeling the tender stirring of sympathy.
There was a movement in the room behind her. Her
heart rose to her throat.
The crow hopped onto the carpet. Shamed by her disappointment, she met its stare.
“Pretty girl, pretty girl,” the crow rasped consolingly.
The voice, however, because it was the first time she had
heard it, only made matters worse.
F aces in the Earth
1 1 5
In the darkness, looking across the valley, George Tennison
rubbed his right hand, acknowledging with a sense of good
fortune and prodigality the thickness of his calluses. There
was a little mound of folded pound notes in his pocket and
more coming at the end of each week as long as the work
lasted. And the work, he assured himself with a private wink,
was sure to last longer than he did. He grinned. The shine of
many twinkling stars winked gaily back at him.
He went across the field and through the gate. Over the
black hill he recognized— or might have, he thought, had he
not been brought up in the smoke of the mills-—the striking
array of fixed stars. They were pictures, he had heard, of men
and beasts, of impossible deeds. A strange excitement filled
him. With the pleasure of Adam, because there had never
been anyone to teach him, he named them for himself.
Cunningly, among the splendid luminaries, he distinguished
the labors of which he was now master: George Tennison
(those three bright stars were his arm, the fourth was a
hammer) restoring breached walls; George Tennison, just to
the left of the moon, climbing over slick acres of slate to
repoint the chimneys. Deep in reverie, he leaned back his
head.
Floating in front of him were innumerable stars, great
stars for the great labors while his back was still strong, lesser
stars, their configurations as yet remote, for the lesser tasks
awaiting his old age. He patted the lump of folded notes in
his pocket. His men would be waiting in the village, drinking
away their salaries in the front room of the Royal Charles. It
was only sociable that he go and have a beer with them— his
fine bunch of Bristol stragglers, laid-off clocksmiths, men like
himself, craftsmen made over into common muckers and
gardeners and lucky, he knew, for the chance. Once or twice
before he made up his mind to join them, but Wykeham had
always needed something looked into and needed it right
then. Indeed, this was the first evening in over a week
George Tennison had had his liberty.
He shambled out of the margins of South Wood. The
Royal Charles was still a good few minutes’ tramp down the
road. He walked stiffly. There was a bit of arthritis in his leg,
which he had got, he suspected, from wading most of the
afternoon in an ornamental fish pond, trying to unstop the
drain. Nevertheless, passing along the dark shut-in corridor
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WINTERK1NG
of branches, he found himself quietly whistling, glad of the
work and glad, at least for an hour or two, to be free of it.
A light burned steadily in the bedroom of the parsonage.
George Tennison turned down the cracked walk under the
trees, passing within a dozen yards of the house without
noticing. He did not know these houses yet; they were
simply houses. He recognized the feed store because he had
been sent there once and Hunt’s garage because it was a
garage and because Fred Norfolk, with whom he had spent a
day shingling the roof of a cottage in Black Wood, had kept
muttering and laughing to himself about Charon Hunt without ever once quite coming to the point. It had merely strengthened George Tennison’s conviction that Devon folk
were an odd sort, not actually a mystery but crackbrained and
out of touch. Like their church, he thought, coming abreast
of it in the darkness. It was an ordinary church, with doors
&nb
sp; and a steeple like any church, except, of course, they had
painted it green. Painted it once, and every fifty years or so it
looked, kept repainting it, not out of some prankish habit, not
because they liked it, but because (it had been Wykeham
himself who had told him!) they believed a green church
would never be burned by Indians. It just makes you wonder,
he thought. But, in truth, he did not. Instead he mounted
the two broad stone steps of the Royal Charles.
"George!” someone called out.
“Mister Tennison,” Adam France added loudly, because,
after all, George was foreman now.
“Ten-thirty,” Jakey shouted, examining his watch. “Well,
you have a bit of catching up to do.”
“A beer,” George Tennison said, passing the counter. He
stopped and, reaching into his pocket, uncurled a pound note
and laid it out on the dark, polished wood of the bar. “And a
whisky."
With a glass in each hand he wandered back among the
chairs and tables where men he had never seen sat quietly
absorbed in their glasses. He glanced abstractedly from one
to the next, taking little notice until Fred Norfolk stood up.
“Come in at last, have you?” Norfolk said. He looked as
though he wanted to shake hands, which, unless George
Tennison put down a drink (and he had no mind to do that)
was impossible. Comrades, nevertheless, Norfolk’s lopsided
grin seemed to announce, men of common understanding,
Faces In the Earth
117
both working up at the great house, their wives too, for that
matter.
George Tennison looked for a way around him.
Norfolk saw it but did not move away. He whispered:
“You come along with old Fred.”
He seemed to realize the Bristol men were watching him.
He winked conspiratorily. “Later,” he said none too softly.
“Been waitin’ a million years. Been waitin’ forever.” He
winked again, the model of patience. “ Keep till you’ve had a
wee drop with your friends.”
Norfolk sat, or rather his big legs folded, compelling the
rest of him to follow. Seated, although undoubtedly the world
wheeled ever faster about him, he held himself still, his huge