Winterking (1987)

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.

  Faces in the Earth

  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.

  F aces in the Earth

  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,

  Indians

  1 5 7

  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