by Paul Hazel
and along the left side by its ear. “I shall see it,” he said,
smiling, staring over the valley.
The stone moved beneath him.
Wykeham turned, too swiftly perhaps to have noticed.
Pressed by its own enormous weight, the stone never
felt the weight of the man. There was nothing to be felt. (It
was not as yet aware of the difference between one thing and
another, certainly not between a man coming into the wood
and a man, after a time, leaving it.)
It seemed only a moment.
Old R’gnir reeled back, rising from the unspeakable
. darkness, from the choking stench of his blood. .. .
It had seemed like forever.
Stupid with fatigue, he had pulled himself up the rough
tower stairs, away from the battle. He had expected the pain.
In his heart he had known he was dying, was perhaps already
dead. He pushed the monstrous thought from him.
In the end he had only been crawling. Yet it had been
too much to crawl and to think, too much to listen to the
pounding of boots gaining behind him. It had been enough to
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141
know that he must not die trapped in the rock, in the
darkness.
At the top, before the high windows, he looked at the
waste of the city, at the world that was gone.
The blow had come at his b ack .. . .
R’gnir moved his thick neck. The live, bitter fragrance of
oak-flowers filled his nostrils.
He looked up at the blue shining sky. He looked down.
At his feet there was a solid mass of trees and beyond it the
green shut-in valley. Loping across the field a dark-haired
young man lifted his arm. A crow fluttered out of the sunlight.
R’gnir blinked. It did not matter that everything shifted.
There was a white bird now and a black field. It was all much
the same.
The young man, his hair pale as the ghostly blankness of
a photographic negative, continued to raise his long arm.
Nora drew back the thick curtain, on the chance of
getting one last look at the diminishing figure, in a print
dress, striding heavily away from the house. Instead she saw
the stableboy digging his boot in the gravel in the shade of
the drive. Wykeham had come into the room. He stood
silently just inside the door.
Nora pulled her hand back.
Her face, she was convinced, was scarlet.
Deliberately his eyes did not rest there. Rather he
looked where she was staring. A single branch, growing close
to the ground, swung idly in the breathless air. Deer perhaps. Even in daylight, the deer, wandering among the bracken and the May-bushes, often came quite near the
house. But the hearts of the deer were gentle. The least
gesture caused them alarm. Wykeham held his head still.
Whatever had been there had gone.
“Is there some trouble in the village?” he asked.
Before she turned to him she had tucked the letter in
the waist of her skirt. “Only women’s talk,” she said mildly,
certain that this would not interest him. She ran her delicate
fingers along her neck.
He would not let her see he was smiling.
“Put on your shoes,” he said. He did not have to explain
they were going to Bristol.
*
*
*
1 4 2
WINTERKING
Her breasts jiggled.
The Pope-Hartford, which was higher and grander than
she had first imagined, gave a second alarming bounce. Nora
held herself tightly. The river winked in and out between the
dark trees. The car swerved, pulling her away from him.
She had been caught off her guard. Somehow the letter
had slipped down under her skirt.
She gave a wriggle, trying to draw it back. The letter,
unmoved, felt satisfyingly thick against her.
It was an immense sum, nearly three hundred pounds.
Undoubtedly the steamship agent had sent a cheque. Somehow Plum had managed to cash it. Not that Nora had exactly asked her; under the circumstances, ignorance had seemed
perhaps safest. But, however it had been accomplished, Nora
was genuinely glad.
She was free, or could be, if she wanted.
Now, in the streets of Bristol, or, passing speculatively
along the aisles of a shop, she could, if she dared, walk away
from him. He would miss her then. Nora smiled. He would
be in a panic. But when he returned to the house, she would
already be stepping out of a taxi she had hired herself,
wearing a dress that was already bought and paid for. She
teased herself with the thought. It was as lovely as the feel of
the letter, sharp-cornered and snug, pressed into her thighs.
Only it made her blush more deeply.
“I should like a blue dress,” she said all at once.
The sides of the car, like the sides of a carriage, were
open and her hair blew all over her face.
Almost tenderly he drew a strand away from her mouth.
“A half dozen blue dresses,” he said. “But there will only be
time for one fitting.”
“Are we in a hurry?” Her voice sounded odd because she
had been holding her breath.
For an instant his eyes left her. “I have been thinking,”
he said. “It is a big house. You and Olivia can scarcely be
expected to keep up with all of it.”
For a moment he seemed not quite to know what he
wanted to say.
“I have engaged a maid,” he said quickly. “Or nearly
that.”
“Is it so difficult?”
He touched her arm.
F aces In the Earth
143
“Is that difficult?”
He gave a little bark of a laugh. "Not so that it matters.”
He held his head still. He said: “Yet, in one or two things you
might be of help.”
She tried not to look at him. She did not want to know
what was expected. It was only because the sky was so bright,
she thought, so huge and so empty, that the tears came,
squeezed out almost invisibly from under the lids.
The dressmaker fussed about her with pins. The woman
was old and bent. Her own dress brushed the floor, covering
all but the tips of her slippers. Nora shifted. In the glass she
caught the woman’s shrewd eyes watching her.
“You must hurry,” Nora insisted.
“Don’t you worry, dear,” the dressmaker said. “He knows
well enough how long this takes.
In the hall outside the fitting room a chair creaked. Nora
was silent a moment. “How would he know that?” she asked.
The dressmaker said nothing. Her crooked fingers stirred
lightly on Nora’s back, straightening a seam. She felt the
quick movement of the younger woman’s breath.
“You look lovely,” she said reassuringly.
Nora watched her reflection in the glass. Her eyes were
gray black, hard and shining, like the eyes of a crow.
“What is she like?” Nora asked her.
“Who, dear?” the dressmaker said.
Nora moved. Her image moved with her. Faced with the
inexplicable, N
ora smiled shyly. I am a country woman still,
she thought. The dressmaker lifted her shears.
“Myself I have a shop,” Nora told her. “In New Awanux.”
Her voice was strained. Without knowing why she began to
cry again.
6.
At first Willa Brelling behaved as though nothing had
happened. Her deepest instincts told her that this was
wrong, that some explanation was due her. But it was no good
wishing for one. She was dead. It was impossible to question
that. She remembered the details too clearly. She had been
wholly resolved on suicide when she climbed the stairs. She
had loved him. Because she loved him still, she was not
revengeful. He had deserted her but he was also dead.
Had there been no bequest, no money, she would have
followed him more quickly— with a knife over the thin bones
of her wrist or a pistol at the forehead. (She had never been
squeamish. It was not her own blood she feared.) Sometimes
she wondered if the money were not a form of blackmail. It
was as though, awkwardly and as unprepared as any of her
girls, she had carried his child.
Nightly, the money swelling within her, she would turn
away in the darkness. But he was stubborn and would come
to her in her sleep.
You must care for this for me, he would say, softly,
drawing the covers over his shoulders.
Tortured by longing, she would put her mouth clumsily
against his and feel, instead, the dry woolliness of the blanket. She knew he was only pointing out to her the gulf between the dead and the living.
She did not wish to listen.
“I shall find you,” she would say.
He would lie in the darkness of the bed, still shaking.
He would be so cold he would hunch forward, hugging his
chest with his arms. He had a real child and a wife.
“Let me come to you,” she would plead with him,
1 4 4
F aces in the Earth
145
No, he would whisper, your task is not yet over. The
words were hard. She had given him everything. He had no
right to claim more.
She would press her face into the pillow. Closing her
ears to him, lulled by his silence, she would sink deeper into
sleep. But long after, when he had left her bed, she would
hear his footsteps by the window. She knew he was waiting.
“Yes,” she said, once, quietly, unreconciled.
She lived on. She built the hall.
She hired the architects herself. She visited a dozen
firms in Bristol and New Awanux, interviewing not only the
principals hut the plain draftsmen before she made her
choice. Afterward she sat on the lawn among the confusion of
carpenters with the plans rolled out before her. She was
interested in everything; details great and small kept her
awake at night. During the day she plied the workmen with
questions. She mounted the scaffolding and stood up so close
when the men were lifting the stones for the chimneys that at
last they had to make rules about where she could stand and
when she could shout to them. It was beyond their comprehension that a woman could spend day after day contentedly watching. Yet at the close of each day, as the warm dusk was
deepening and she rose to return to her rooms, out of respect
they stood themselves. They waited until she had departed
before they left the hill.
“Well, that is settled at last,” she said on the day the hall
was finished. She put on a white dress and a veil. She shut
the door behind her carefully and carried the rope to the top
of the stairs. She did not cry out. The immensity of her love
made her shy. “You see I am here,” she told him and very
quietly she broke her neck.
The moment should have passed.
Instead she felt the stone and the wood of the hall
entering into her. She was astonished. Day after day through
the huge arched doorways passed books and laboratory tables, jars of specimens pickled in formaldehyde and brine, glass retorts and Bunsen burners, until, finally, the last room
was filled and ready and the first girls marched up the stairs.
In the beginning she was silent. She simply hadn’t thought of
death in these terms. Impatient with the living, she could
hardly bear to hear the lessons going on inside her. Hungrily,
she waited for evening. The long autumn nights were velvety
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W IN TE R IN G
and cool. The rain trickled soothingly on the tiles of her roof.
She listened to the sounds of the school. The hall was at the
farthest edge of the court and quiet. An acre of lawn separated
it from the main buildings. After evening chapel when the
girls returned to their dorms and the last sounds ebbed into
silence she waited for sleep, waited to extend to him, however
desperately (and if only in dreams), all her unused emotions
of love and longing. But she never slept, and now that she
was dead, never dreamed, and the severe young man who,
once, when she was needing love, had sworn it, never came.
Was he not also dead?
They had told her that.
There had been lawyers and bankers and papers to sign.
There had been no casket, no grave. She had a sense of a
cavernous ocean beating silently beneath the thin crust of the
earth. His death had burst through it. But it was she who was
going to drown.
Now, when the sun rose or was setting, the hall would be
pervaded by a cold miasmic dampness, by the cool smell of
oceans. Darkness lapped in the comers, sunlight danced on
the ceiling, intermittently, unhurried. But now always the
rooms were full of the slow, mournful sound of the sea. The
sound settled on her, came in with long and sharp whispers,
possessing her. Her throat, which had been closed by wonder, by longing and fear, suddenly opened. It was then that she had begun to scream.
She was only wood, only stone, only a blurred mist by
the stairs. No one heard her exactly or saw, beyond question,
her presence. No ropes were found miraculously dangling
from the banister. The beakers boiling in the laboratory never
darkened vulgarly with blood. After a decent interval the
whole affair lay generally forgotten. Within the year the
headmistress, because it was the newest building, removed
her office to the second floor of the hall, not a dozen feet from
the stairwell. When in a span of years she retired, the new
headmistress kept the same office. The death, like so many
deaths, was put aside. The girls who had been taught by
Willa Brelling turned wives or scholars and went their ways.
It was the new girls, daughters, then granddaughters, young
women born decades afterward, for whom Willa Brelling was
merely a figure in a perplexing tale, who in fearing the hall
preserved her memory.
F aces in the Earth
1 4 7
*
*
*
Somewhere over the playing fields a crow sounded its
harsh, mocking call.
The Pope-Hartford stopped at the side of the court. She
<
br /> saw him at once. Out of twenty windows simultaneously she
watched him climb down. She did not move, for she could
not, Though she was burdened and numb, her ardor reached
out to him. He was still distant, yet she felt herself spinning.
Overcome with amazement, she began to weep.
Please God, she cried, let him come.
He walked to the other side of the car, walked as she
remembered, moving casually in a world of his own interests.
He was not a phantom. He was so much like himself she
knew at once he was not dead, could never have been.
The woman tilted her neck. Willa saw her, a plain, rather
unremarkable woman in a blue dress.
She watched him lay his hands on her waist, watched
him lift her, solicitously, as one might an invalid. The woman
appeared to be trembling. His hands still supported her. He
spoke to her quietly. But the woman was frightened. Murmuring
softly, he looked toward the hall. For the first time her
upturned face fixed on him. There was a question in her
eyes. Nonetheless, when he turned away from her, she
followed.
Willa was not prepared for the touch of his hand on the
door. Across the doorposts and along the beams of the ceiling
there was the faintest twinge of alarm. Suddenly he was
inside her, could be felt walking, one direct step at a time,
along the polished boards of the floor.
There was an odd, joyful smile on his face. The woman,
hurrying next to him, weighed the look. “Must I really say I
am your sister?” she asked.
The smile had not faded. “It would be helpful.”
“It would be a lie.”
“Perhaps not so much of one."
“I do not understand,” she said simply.
“We live in one house,” he told her, “chastely, like
brother and sister.”
He began to climb the long stairs. Willa found the sound
of his footsteps confusing. It should not have been so. In
death she was so much larger. Truly, he was no different now
from the other small creatures that invaded her rooms in
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WINTERKING
daylight and went away in the evening: Except that he was
himself. Should that matter? She had known him but four or
five months. In all the years of her life that was so little time.