Winterking (1987)

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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  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.

  *

  *

  *

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  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.

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  “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

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  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.