by Paul Hazel
In the years of her death it was less.
He moved quickly to the top of the stairs, to the place
where even now some part of her, entrapped, was still lost.
He paused, staring blankly. His hand, the hard blunt fingers,
clutched Nora’s arm. It was scarcely an instant. His attention
turned.
"Yes,” she told him, speaking swiftly so that she would
not change her mind.
He was about to answer.
“If you wish,” she whispered, unwilling to be interrupted.
"But I shall remain in the house.”
He watched her for a moment.
She waited as he opened the door of the headmistress’s
office.
Wykeham smiled, at her perhaps, or at the florid woman
looking up from a book at the receptionist’s desk.
“Mr. Wykeham?” the woman asked.
Wykeham nodded.
The headmistress came away from her desk and gave
him her hand and shook his vigorously. She made a scrupulous effort to avoid noticing his youth.
"I am pleased you could see m e,” Wykeham said. “My
sister,” he continued.
“Miss Wykeham,” the headmistress said charmingly, steadying her gaze on her. She was a woman of forty, athletic and handsome. Her hair was cut close to her forehead. She wore
a white blouse, a purple scarf, tweed skirt and great brown
riding boots. She took Nora’s hand firmly. Pressing it, she
ushered them both to a set of black chairs arranged starkly
around a small table. A very elegant little table, Nora noticed,
on which there rested a vase and a lamp. Nora looked around
silently. The office was large and well proportioned, with two
fine long windows looking out on the court. Yet somehow she
got the impression of darkness. There was a strange smell,
stale and disturbing. Nora found it vaguely menacing and she
caught her breath. Perhaps she was not, even now, quite
accustomed to expensive things. She turned a little. The
woman was watching her.
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1 4 9
“What a wonderful room,” she said suddenly.
The headmistress smiled. “Of course we have your family to thank,” she said evenly.
Wykeham’s eyes darted toward Nora.
“You are kind,” Nora answered. But her face was glowing. She took a seat quickly at the end of the table.
The headmistress selected a chair across from her. “Not
kind at all,” she said crisply, “simply honest. It was a most
generous gift.”
Wykeham frowned. “It was long ago,” he said.
For the first time the headmistress looked at him directly. She became aware of his solidity and his quiet and was puzzled. She knew well enough what she thought of old
money; she was less certain what she thought of young men.
Although men, the trustees had the good sense to absent
themselves from daily affairs. Having more pressing concerns, they hurried through the accounts and passed on, thankfully, to the brandy. After a few tedious hours, they
were gone. Wykeham, on the other hand, had been seen
lingering on the grounds of the school on six separate occasions.
On each he had spoken with the Hawleyville girl. He
had spoken as well to several of the teachers. They had the
impression that he was a student of provincial architecture.
In any event he had asked a good many questions about the
hall. It had come out eventually that he was a descendant of
the school’s great benefactor, that he had, in a sense, a
proprietary interest. Word of his presence had come to her. If
by the third visit she had detected a delicate situation, the
headmistress allowed herself the benefit of a doubt. A renewed
acquaintance with the Wykeham fortune would be advantageous. She had not acquiesced yet she waited.
His letter had arrived in a fortnight. If she had hoped to
prove to herself that the situation was not really delicate, the
letter put an end to it.
She let Wykeham see her look when she glanced down
at the letter she had carried away from the desk when they
entered.
“It was good of you to come and explain,” she said.
“It is naturally a concern of yours,” Wykeham answered.
The headmistress smiled. “I took,” she said, “the precaution of writing myself,”
“To the father?”
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W IN TER IN G
Her smile lingered a second or two. "H e has concerns
himself,” she said coolly. “Regrettably, his business keeps him
away. So it has been left, as with matters of her welfare
generally, in the hands of the academy.”
“She will be disappointed,” Wykeham said.
“Do you think so?”
“Not to see him,” Wykeham added, “now with the term
ending and the summer ahead of her.” He looked across at
Nora. “It is with that in mind,” he said, “that my sister and I
have proposed an alternative.”
“You are not actually acquainted with the family, I believe,” the headmistress said.
“No.”
“You, in fact, only just met her.”
“Only recently, here at the school. I had come to look at
the hall.”
He was not looking at her but at Nora. He continued to
stare, frowning slightly. She stared back at him, uneasy,
knowing more was expected but too uncertain and too nervous to venture anything. She knew she should leave this place, leave him as well almost certainly. Only there were
moments, few and rare enough, but moments, like the
instant on the stairs when he had taken her arm, which she
saw as proof of his feeling for her. It could not be, must not
be, without reason. Did she not, sometimes, fill his thoughts?
He had taken her in. He had kept her since. She was
conscious, by the steadiness of his gaze, that she filled his
thoughts now.
She lowered her eyes. She had no doubt that she
disgraced herself. But the whole morning, coming in from
Greenchurch to Bristol, had been shameful. She had not
meant to weep. Though she had told herself over and over,
she understood him far better than anyone, she realized that
she had entirely misread him. Even the old woman in the
shop had seen him more clearly. How often had he gone
there? she wondered. With how many women?
So as not to cry out she stopped herself from thinking.
The headmistress reached out her hand. “Miss Wykeham?”
she inquired.
Nora moved away from her. The envelope, tucked up
where it should have been safe, fell at her feet.
Nora froze in her place.
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151
Unhesitantly, Wykeham leaned forward. Between his
fingers he could feel the envelope’s thickness, could see along
the tom edge as he lifted it the large bundle of pale green
notes. Without a change in expression he placed the letter in
front of her. She did not move to reclaim it. He saw that she
was strange and ill. “Nora,” he whispered.
The sunlight, pouring in through the windows, lit her
face.
She counted her heartbeats, waiting for the woman to
turn on her. The envelope lay face
up and accusatory on the
table, the name typed in clear bold letters by the steamship
agent: NORA B R E L L IN G c /O LO N GFO R D . . .
Not Wykeham, she wanted to scream. Not his sister, not
even his lover, only a harmless lonely woman in a blue dress,
a stranger with no right to be here and no claim on him.
“Nora,” he said.
She struggled helplessly, trapped by all the things she
was not.
The woman sitting across from her did not appear to
notice. Yet her keen blue eyes watched Nora thoughtfully,
looked down at the letter and looked back. Again the woman's gaze met hers, swiftly, but without incrimination.
“I am tired,” Nora admitted. But she realized, her
thoughts unfolding violently, that it could only be the room’s
dimness that made them so stupid and blind. In the court
beyond, the trees caught the day’s pale illumination in their
branches; their long shadows, cast into the room, fell wrinkled, light and dark, on the table.
“If only you could see!” she exclaimed. She reached
across for the lamp.
But just as the light increased, she was distracted. For a
breath’s space she stared, seeing not the letter but the table
under it, its plain surface glowing suddenly as a thousand tiny
scratches caught the light.
She saw the hair first, saw in the nest of serrations the
flat tongues of hair licked down and touching the face. The
head itself was floating. Nora turned. The face turned and she
thought with relief, It is my reflection. For an instant she
wanted to throw back her head, wanted to look at them
boldly.
It is nothing, after all, she thought thankfully.
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WINTERKING
Then the eyes opened. With a shock of alarm they
caught sight of her own startled eyes staring into them.
“Oh, my God,” Nora murmured.
He slipped his arm around her. Both of his hands were
touching her; he was searching her face.
She continued to stare at the head.
“I’m all right,” she told him, nodding, watching the head
nod.
But her eyes were unfocused, as though she were not in
the room but somewhere close by, looking back.
"It is a big house,” Nora said all at once, a mere whisper.
“Day after day, I am alone in it.” For a long jnoment she was
silent.
She could see the head clearly, its poor haunted eyes
straining to look up, to be sure she was there. Such sad eyes,
lonely and watching. Its lips moved.
“My brother,” she said. Her voice stopped.
She looked up and found the headmistress’s baffled face
watching her.
“My brother," she went on quietly, “is often gone. It
would be a comfort to have someone. Someone. . . ” She
extended her hand toward the envelope.
It was a moment more before they understood that she
did not mean to take it, that she was only pointing.
“I would be grateful,” she said, speaking so softly she
could scarcely be heard. “The family would be grateful.
Would be generous.”
They sat motionless.
A soft rustle came from the outer office and then the
sound of a knock at the door. It was the girl. Nora was certain
of that. Still she did not move. She did not wish to see her,
not before it was over, not before it was paid for.
“Please take it,” she whispered, her gray black eyes
watching them imploringly. It had never occurred to her that
it would not be accepted. The head wanted it done; she
wanted it herself. Even her mother, she remembered. . .
“It is not a gift,” she said distinctly; “it is owed.”
IV.
Indians
1
.
The letter lay for a moment on the desk where the Duke
had tossed it. At last it was dawn. The sun, rising out of
the harbor, cast a ruddy glow on the paper. Even the faces of
two of the men, His Grace and Harwood, their defiant voices
carrying into the bank’s deserted corridors, were tinged with
red.
The Duke shifted his weight in the chair. He adjusted
his spectacles. The river, to which he had turned to avoid
looking at Harwood, winked between smokestacks and steeples. Holmes’s face alone was without color. He had kept his back to the windows, watching both men. Wearily, he took up
the letter His Grace had discarded.
“He wrote something,” Holmes said. “We accept that,”
“As you might,” the Duke muttered. He was drinking,
had already drunk too much to be quite certain of the
use of "his reasoning. Yet surely some things were beyond
question. “I have had a hundred letters,” he said. “Since
he was . . .”
“A boy?” Holmes asked ironically.
The Duke scowled, recognizing that this was, in fact,
just what he had meant. He had already told them of his
discovery.
For a moment he recalled Wykeham’s face as it had
looked on the train, the same face that had greeted him here
in this room nearly forty years before.
He had explained it all carefully, how he had walked out
onto the platform of Water Street station, how in the window
of the passenger car he had seen the young man, who, after
four decades, was as he had been, exactly.
But it was the face of a boy that was set in his mind, a lad
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WINTERKING
of seven who had written the very first letter that had come,
signed with William’s name, from Egypt. For two months he
had known it was a lie. But it mattered.
The Duke sat very still. He looked down at his own
blunt fingers.
He said, “It is in his own hand. Isn’t that enough? Do
you question that?”
Harwood moved to the windows. “It’s not that it isn’t,”
he said too loudly. “The point is that it needn’t he. Not any
more than at the p it. . .”
He did not continue. Each man knew what the other had
seen. Hours afterward they still felt the thick hands reaching
up from the roots and the gravel, still saw the grotesque legs,
bending what should not have bent, begin to climb.
It all had lasted through the space of counted heartbeats.
Then they had heard the gale scream once more, felt the
rain beating down.
Harwood turned again, wandering. “It’s just that it might
have changed,” he said. “It needn’t be, word by word, what
he sent.” He walked out into the middle of the room. “I know
it’s crazy,” he whispered. “My God,” he said helplessly, “I
thought you were both crazy.”
The Duke poured another whisky into his glass,
Harwood glared at him. “It was you,” he said doggedly.
“You brought me out there. All the way out you kept badgering
me, kept asking me questions, telling me how everything I
thought I knew was changed.” Harwood shook his head
ruefully. “Well, I believe you now. Every damn thing’s changed.
Or could change. Anything m
ight.”
“Almost anything,” the Duke said.
“Is that it?” Holmes asked, surprised.
“Is that what?” Harwood wanted to know.
Holmes stared again at the letter.
“Anything,” he said calmly.
The Duke set his glass on the desk.
“Something has to be fixed,” he said.
“And that one thing. . .”
The Duke nodded, relieved, and at the same time not
caring. He alone knew the immensity of Wykeham’s strength
and his cunning. Knew more, at least, than Holmes, who,
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although he had gone to the train and examined the body,
could not have spoken more than a dozen words to Wykeham.
It was now morning. All night they had sat together in
this room, talking, trying to think through the puzzle they
were caught in.
The Duke glanced Wearily at Holmes. He was aware of
the small man’s good intentions. “Since he was a boy,” the
Duke said, “he wrote me letters.”
“He was not a child,” Holmes reminded him.
“I know."
“It was you who explained it,” Harwood said.
Harwood’s insistent voice interfered with the progress of
the Duke’s thought. He lifted the glass.
They were not responsible. Holmes was merely the
doctor called by chance to the death. Harwood, although he
had known Wykeham longer, nonetheless shared no common
act with him, no olfense.
The Duke sighed.
Wykeham’s life, he was certain, must have touched without consequence a thousand such men. He was not himself so weak and neutral. He had taken hold of what was given
him, coldly perhaps, he knew that, and half in ignorance.
But no matter what he did not know, a man was dead because
of him.
“It was not an accident,” the Duke said. “I will not
accept that it was an accident.”
“Men die,” Holmes said.
Harwood’s eyes moved from face to face. It had been his
argument, but he had lost control of it. "What are you talking
about?” he asked tensely.
The Duke dug his hands into his lap. For a long while he
was quiet.
At last he said slowly, “Two months ago a man died on a
train. He was a young man who worked in this bank. I had