by Paul Hazel
put him in charge of the Wykeham Trusts.”
The Duke looked down at his fingers. “He was a man like
myself,” he said quietly. “No better, perhaps, but no worse,
not above doing what had to be done. He was supposed to
meet Wykeham only once. Only talk to him once. It is written
right into the Will, was written, over three hundred years
ago. Surely that never changed. But Houseman. . . Did I say
the young man’s name was Houseman?”
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Harwood shook his head.
The Duke studied his fingers. “Well, it was Houseman,”
he said.
“There was a young man,” Harwood repeated. “And he
took a train.”
“And he should not have.”
Harwood’s eyes clouded over. “Does that matter?” he
asked.
“Wykeham was on the train,” Holmes said evenly.
“And there was a prohibition against that,” said the Duke.
Harwood threw up his hands.
“The man died,” Holmes said.
“He was murdered,” the Duke added quietly.
Holmes’s eyes darted up. “We don’t know that. We
cannot be certain.”
“You might as well be,” said the Duke. “You took the photograph. One of us, at least, should admit it. And you told me about the woman. I never saw her. Never heard what she said.”
“What woman?” Harwood demanded.
Holmes turned to look at him. “There was a woman on
the train,” Holmes explained, “with the body.” He waited,
but Harwood only stood staring miserably. Holmes rested
back on his arms. “A wretched, stupid woman, I think. She
believed, quite inconceivably, that Houseman was drunk.”
The Duke watched Holmes carefully. “It was what she
said.”
“What Houseman said really,” Holmes corrected him.
“She was simply repeating it. Saying it over and over. As he
did.”
“Which was?” the Duke insisted.
“The world’s coming apart,” Holmes said, each word
measured and spare, but the meaning fell heavily.
The Duke nodded, content. “That was the first instance.”
“Of what?”
Almost in spite of himself, as if enjoying Harwood’s
confusion, the Duke grinned. “Of anyone noticing. Seeing
the world pulled two ways at once, literally ripping apart.
Everything he knew and he trusted dividing inside of him.
And not stopping. Never stopping.”
The Duke tilted his head. He squinted at Harwood’s
round face. “You saw it yourself,” he said, “for an instant,
outside the barn.”
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Harwood would not look at either of them; he was trying
to think. But all he saw or could think of was Wykeham.
“Maybe he was a little stranger,” he said, “a bit quieter. But
he was kind.”
Harwood felt his mouth tighten.
“He would smile, I remember. Never much of a smile,
as if things he knew amused him. But he never spoke of
them. Three years and I barely knew him. Then one day he
brought me a letter.”
Harwood paused. He seemed to be listening to an inner
voice. “The next day he was going. I went down to the
train.”
He heard his own rough sounds of grief and looked away.
From the windows he saw across the green the bleak
college towers jutting into the morning.
All his adult life he had spent cloistered in private rooms
with the Dutchman, with Austen and James, believing each
word added wisdom. And it was nothing. In a wink it could
be replaced.
“There was a crowd,” he said. “I n e v e r.. . ” He lowered
his head.
Holmes returned the letter to the desk.
The four sheets of white paper lay in front of Harwood.
In that instant he knew.
It made no difference. He had abandoned any plan of
action. What action is possible? he wondered. Yet it was
abundantly clear. He had already read the letter. Not this
letter, or course. But he had sat, with Wykeham beside him,
at his own desk with such a letter, staring into the morning,
Harwood looked across at the desk. The events of his
life, all of which he had thought chaotic, whose scattered
moments he had always found bewildering, fitted, he realized, row on row, in a line of cunning duplicates. He did not look ahead. The world was behind him.
He reached back and unfolded the sheets of paper.
“My dear Martin,” he said, reading. He looked up.
“That is your name, Your Grace? Your Christian name?”
Martin Callaghan, the Duke of West Redding, moved in
his chair. “Yes.”
Harwood nodded, returned to the paper. “My dear
Martin,” he repeated, his voice clear and precise and a little
too loud as it always was when he was excited. The sun had
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lifted well above the harbor; the room, although it had been
garish, was filled with an easeful light.
“In a little while it will be night again,” he read. “I have
done what I could yet the war is near. I have a daughter.
Before too much longer you must come for her. . . .”
Michael Morag was having trouble adjusting his eyes.
The breasts for one thing, though they were certainly breasts,
seemed to bulge and lean without a normal regard to the
stresses and strains of flesh, without respect for the sensible
laws of gravity. For another, they hung so near to his face,
were each so amply capable of filling his sight, that from one
moment to the next he could not decide which to stare at.
He moved his head sideways. The breasts swayed, tugged
asymmetrically, as if he watched them in a distorting mirror.
I’m afraid this won’t do, the Reverend Michael Morag
thought. Reluctantly, he allowed them to vanish.
The world became gray again.
He had a sense, at least, of grayness, of a place somehow
betwixt and between. There was a light but he was outside
the range of its radiance. The shadows lay at a discreet
distance, drab as a monk’s habit and as unremarkable. He
took no notice.
What he needed, he imagined, was something plumb,
with corners at right angles. Something boxlike and square,
he thought, like the cottage in Black Wood. For an instant
the thought was so sharp, so familiar that it made him
homesick. But a cottage, he rather suspected, could be tricky.
After all this was new to him. He might as easily arrive under
the porch steps with old John rocking senselessly above him,
too deaf and, as likely as not, too impaired by his whisky to
heed. And he had no desire to be stuck under the joists, a
fool of a dead man, hollering, banging up at the boards. So in
the end he resisted the temptation.
Nonetheless he was by nature much too cheerful to be
subdued by mere inexperience. It must be, he became
suddenly convinced, that one begins more modestly. Perhaps
with a table, he thought, encouraged.
He happened to glance up.<
br />
Plum was staring across the dinner plates at him. Her
generous bosom, which had become agitated, bounced up
and down with alarm.
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The old minister mopped his bald head. “Ah, m e,” he
sighed appreciatively. He smiled at her. Altogether too broadly,
he recognized, but death, he hoped, had its prerogatives.
He tilted his head and was astonished and more than a
little pleased to discover he was sitting, in fact, in his own
parsonage. He looked around at the heavy plates and thick
glasses, at the starched white linen, relieved that they were
not much changed.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, aware that, as far as he
knew, he was now quite powerless to undo his existence. “I
imagine this is distressing.”
“Who’s this?” Longford asked, coming in at just that
moment from the kitchen.
Plum breathed again.
“He was simply there,” she whispered. But she had
almost said nothing. Morag bestowed a slight gracious bow
and a provocative grin.
“Dear, dear,” he said. “The husband, of course. I might
have thought of that.”
Longford stared. He fancied an unaccustomed pink now
suffused Plum’s cheeks, but her head turned from him.
“Who are you?” Longford asked. “How did you get
here?” He was agitated himself and, although both questions
had been directed at Morag, he continued to look at his wife.
“Name’s Morag,” the other man answered. “Though I’ve
always thought just plain Michael sounded friendlier.” He
spread his hands across his stomach and clasped his thumbs.
“I know I haven’t been asked,” he said thoughtfully, “but
there are a few bottles of porter down in the cellar. Boxes
actually. I laid them in myself. And if it wouldn’t be too much
trouble. . .”
“You’re Morag,” Longford muttered, his voice grave.
The old minister clasped his thumbs tighter; his kindly face
wore an expression of honest bewilderment. “Didn’t I just say
so?” His large bald forehead wrinkled. “Yes, I’m quite certain.”
“The Reverend Mr. Morag,” Longford told him.
Morag stared at an empty glass. "Michael,” he said.
An odd flicker passed across Plum’s face. “The Reverend . . . ” she started.
Old as he was, Morag’s dark eyes filled with laughter.
“No longer, I think,” he chuckled."Not much use. Even less
opportunity.”
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He unlaced his brown fingers and reached for the glass,
“Of course it comes as something of a shock,” he went on,
patting the crystal. “Thirty years in His service. But they
don’t let you know beforehand.” He gave a good-natured
shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not what it seems. Perhaps
He is somewhere.”
Morag was suddenly quiet, wrinkling his forehead and
staring at the glass as if he saw two conflicting shapes in the
reflection and was not quite decided which was wanted.
"Though hereabouts,” he declared, “for the most part it’s
Indians.”
Almost as soon as her head touched the pillow Plum was
asleep. Longford, still dressed in his shirt and his trousers,
lay beside her. From the moment he had succeeded in
getting her off to their bedroom he had wanted to talk. But
she had gone about her preparations with unaccustomed
privacy. While she undressed, he had caught her watching
herself in the mirror, the very lifting of her head, the smallest
turning of her mouth as she smiled, excluding him. It had
seemed to him then that she was half a stranger; indeed it
had seemed so all evening. She had filled a plate for Morag
with her own portion and, with a maternal absorption, watched
the old man devour everything greedily. Later, on her own,
she had disappeared into the cellar, thumping back up the
stairs shortly with four dusty bottles of porter tucked under
her arms.
“They’re his, after all,” she had whispered, passing her
husband and seeing his frown.
Morag had poured out two glasses for himself. The glass
he had poured for Plum she accepted readily. Longford’s,
untasted, remained in the middle of the table. In a few
minutes Morag had reached for it. He had smacked his lips
happily.
“It’s a pity, don’t you think,” he had said, “to have
wasted so much life wondering if there were delight both
in the world and out of it?”
Longford had turned. He had expected to be frightened
by the old face. He would have been, he realized, had Plum
but showed the least alarm. There was a dead man at his
table. For twenty years he had preached the certainty of
resurrection, but he was not, lacking her, prepared to meet
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its confirmation without panic. Lazarus rose and so did
Christ. He believed in miracles, but only in a far-off time, or
in the world to come.
In their bed, watching Plum sleep, he understood how
thoroughly he depended on her being near him. Every now
and then her breast rose and there came from her lips a faint
and barely perceptible moan, the sound distant and yet
profound, as if something far beyond his reach had shaken
her.
Unable to calm himself, Longford went downstairs. Morag
was sitting where they had left him. The old man had
brought up four more bottles from the cellar. Already two of
these were empty.
“Don’t you sleep?” Longford asked impatiently.
“Perhaps a little,” Morag answered. “Though just from
habit. No point in it.”
Longford stared at him foolishly. He had wanted to rail at
something. Death had entered his house. Yet there had been
no outcry, no horror. He desperately wanted to be driven
against something else, something more clearly appalling and
obscene. He wanted, at any cost, to save his wife. But the
ordinariness of the old man had robbed him of the usefulness
of his anger.
Longford looked down at his feet. He had forgotten his
shoes.
“You might join m e,” Morag said amiably.
“How are you here?” Longford shouted.
Morag raised his glass. “Because,” he said, “I find it
difficult to imagine women.” He held the glass out at arm’s
length and gazed at it thoughtfully. “Have you ever noticed
how difficult it is,” he asked, “to call their faces to mind? Or
any part of them? Not the general idea. That comes easily.
But the specifics. The precise turn of shoulders and noses.
The exact shade of their skin.”
Morag’s large splotched face looked a bit sad in the
gleam that came from the lamp in the parlor.
“Of course geog-aphy’s easier,” he said. “The hills above
the old towns stand out sharply. And the river certainly. From
high up, coming in from the moon, you can se e . . , ’’
Longfor
d gasped. “F-from the moon?” he stammered.
He was struck by a sudden vivid image of the river, not as
he had mapped it, not even as he had imagined it would be
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from the hill above Greenchurch, but from an airy distance
away from the earth. For an intolerable moment he saw it, a
ribbon of cold-blooded light, turning among the hills and the
towers, imprisoned, wriggling back on itself.
Their eyes met.
“Like a serpent,” he whispered, “its tail in its mouth.”
The old man smiled at his innocence. “Like the living,”
Morag corrected him. “Like the dead.”
2.
Jane spread her long legs, enjoying their nakedness. Though
he was gone, the pillow still smelled of him. More than
likely she smelled of him herself. You wicked girl, she
thought gazing contentedly at the tumbled sheets. Her new
dress lay over a chair on the other side of the room. She
remembered that she had been faintly surprised when looking
down from his bed she had seen it there, without her. They
had not, she knew, exactly agreed on any of this.
They had gone directly into the great room after dinner.
For a quarter of an hour she had sat beside him under the
odd old-fashioned woodcuts of horses, on her best behavior.
Through the half-closed door there had come a sort of listening silence. The cook had been introduced at the table. But the old woman waited with the others gathered now in the
hallway, anticipating a more formal introduction, at the head
of the line.
“You’ll do fine,” Nora had told her. Yet the hand which
had reached toward her was trembling.
Jane thought at first that his sister meant simply to
give her a pat, the fingers unheeding and as perfunctory as
the questions about her schooling. But the hand which
dropped into her palm was cold and, when Nora straightened, Jane felt the small weight of the ring she had left there.
His sister glanced at her slyly.
“Heaven knows he will not have thought of that,” she
whispered.
Wykeham, paying no attention, was watching the door.
He was dressed for riding in a suit of brown corduroy and
long black boots. An old cloak hung from a peg on the
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