by Paul Hazel
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mantel behind him. Its clasps were bronze; its hem, if once
stitched with care, now was tom. Somewhere a window
was open. Assailed by a gust of air, the ancient fabric
turned restlessly, first one way, then another. Wykeham
lifted his head.
“Is Mrs. Norfolk here?” he asked.
As if on cue Lizzy appeared in the doorway. She had
washed her hands and abandoned her apron. Her heavy gray
hair had been pushed into a bun.
“Lizzy," he said, “this is Miss Hawleyville.”
Jane felt in that instant somehow different. Wykeham,
his mind elsewhere, scarcely looked at her. Yet she knew
unmistakably that the situation which should have been
awkward would not be and that, curiously, he was the cause
of it. She had been conscious of this oddity from their first
meeting. Nothing directly happened and yet always something was set in motion: slowly, with an almost casual inevitability, everything she expected, all that she had been taught to expect, changed.
The mountainous old woman bent one huge knee, curtsied.
“I hope you will be pleased with us,” she said. Though
she did her best to smile, her eyes, Jane thought, were more
suited to fierceness. Yet a charm seemed to hang on them.
They jerked to Wykeham’s face, suddenly, fondly, and then
back again. The woman took a step forward. There was
something knotted in her hand.
“It is but a token, miss,” she said.
“Oh I couldn’t ,” Jane protested, not even seeing what it
was.
Wykeham laughed. “Then you must say no to all of
them.” His voice had become a deep chuckle.“And to me as
well.”
She had thrown back her head to look at him, when he
kissed her. It was the first time they had openly kissed, there
in the great room, in front of the women. He was still holding
her, his hand pressed quite deliberately under her breast,
when a second figure edged the door open and came into the
room. She had not even a moment to collect herself or to
savor her feeling of wonder.
The man was tall and stoop-shouldered, his large horse-
teeth stained. But his wild hair had been combed and he had
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been fitted out in a jacket that looked as if it had been
borrowed.
“My lord,” he said softly. He moistened his lips.
“Say what you have come to say,” said Wykeham.
Fred Norfolk pulled his big hands from his pockets. He
turned what he had brought over in his fingers.
“Lady,” he said slowly, seeking courage, “it is well you
have come. A woman is a prop for a man in times of great
trouble. In such tim es. . . In these tim es.. . . ” He moved a.
little, uneasily. Because he had come into the light she could
see his face struggling and guessed that he had rehearsed the
words. Norfolk took a great breath. “Lady, it is well,” he
began again.
Without looking she knew that Wykeham was smiling. It
gave her a mysterious pleasure to feel how easily she had
come to read his moods. The man had grown pale. He
loomed over her, clearly trembling, his practiced words tumbling over each other. With a part of her mind she listened, trying to discover why he stood there and what he wanted.
But the other part, detached and unpuzzled, felt Wykeham’s
hands pressed hard above her waist.
“On this night of all nights,” Norfolk went on solemnly,
“I am honored to greet you. . . our little sister... our mother...”
Lizzy hissed at him.
Norfolk turned red. Quickly he gave what he held into
Jane’s hand and drew back.
The room became quiet. The only sounds were the one
the little breeze made and the rustling of the cloak. Jane’s
eyes moved between them, uncomprehending.
“L-lord, I never,” Norfolk stammered.
“There is no harm,” Wykeham answered, “only eagerness.
How could I fault eagerness?” Wykeham smiled at him. “On
this night of all nights?”
Jane was sitting up stiffly. “What is he saying?” she
asked.
“Hush,” Lizzy told her.
Once again the door opened.
One by one they entered now, making their way in from
the dark hallway. For a moment they hesitated before her,
watching her, lingering as long as they dared: George Tennison
first, then Olivia. Adam France and Jakey pressed in close
behind. Then suddenly the room was filled with a great
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cheerful company, nudging and laughing. There was a line
coming in from the kitchen, small farmers and their wives
who now and again did a job or two at Greenchurch and a
man who had walked the ten miles from Ohomowauke,
though the moon that night was only a sliver. By ones and
twos they came forward and presented their gifts. But along
the wall a woman, afraid her child would cry, kept back
timidly until Wykeham saw her and called her out. Beaming,
he took the child and let him crawl in his lap while the
woman approached, curtsied, and pressed a small parcel into
Jane’s hand.
Jane was left staring blankly.
“I was hoping you didn’t mind,” the woman told
her.
The child was quiet, respectful. His little face peered at
Wykeham, then at Jane. He grabbed at her hair.
“Ah, lady,” the woman whispered, “I just couldn’t keep
myself away.”
Jane was trying to listen, but the words seemed irrelevant. Without giving up the child, Wykeham had slipped his hand down and was loosening her dress. Then once more he
kissed her. In the merest fraction of a second, before she
could make up her mind what she thought, two dozen voices
laughed and cheered.
She rolled over on his bare shoulder. It was not quite
morning. They had not slept. She was certain that she had
not, not that she remembered precisely all that had happened
from the moment he caught her up in his arms. She had
opened the door to his room because he could not have. His
hands had been filled with her and the small, unopened
presents she had borne away in the folds of her dress,
presents which with his fumbling and fiddling had seemed
ever in danger of spilling. And they had spilled, finally, onto
the bed, falling all around her as she fell, drawing him after.
The cool morning air played about them. It swept behind her and snatched one end of the coverlet. With feigned modesty she tugged back and, by chance, touched the edge
of one of the little parcels. Inexplicably, it had not been
scattered by their lovemaking. She moved her fingers over
the tightly wrapped paper and into the loops of the ribbon.
“What are they?” she asked.
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She could not see his face, but she believed he was
watching her.
“What is usually given,” he said.
She let her fingers rest and snuggled into his shoulder.
“It’s customary then?” she said, grinning to hers
elf. “A
poor girl’s deflowering?”
“It’s been done before.”
“Not to me.” It was but a small demonstration of her
independence. But the old memory awoke in him and he
caught himself staring at her, looking at her as if for the first
time, as if, even now in his bed, in his heart as well, she were
a stranger. She was a child, after all. The feel of a man inside
her was new to her. He drew his finger along her thigh.
There were so many things she did not understand, too many
things he had not told her. And he must, despite the enormous difficulty of explaining. And he would. He was determined that this time it would be different. Listening to her breath, he remembered how, on a thousand other nights, he
had been haunted by the terrible knowledge that the arms he
held, that held him, would soon wither and grow old. The
round flesh that bound him and would be bound by him
gladly, would swell and rot. No, he thought, no longer.
He lay back in the darkness.
“They are wiser, love,” he said. “They knew what was
expected. They brought what must always be given.”
He felt her head turn.
“What must be given,” he repeated, “for a.child to
become a woman. Whatever there is to be wished for: beauty
by one, the second virtue, the third cleverness. . . ”
He stopped because she had squirmed.
The grayness grew a little, widened, and he could see
the small line of her breasts.
“You treat me like a child,” she said.
“No,” Wykeham said.
“It is a story for children.”
She was shivering now. This time, when she hunched
over, he did not touch her.
“Tell m e,” she whispered, her face set, only her mouth
working. “One day do I climb the attic stairs to a door? Do I
say ‘Good morning, mother’ to the old woman waiting inside
with her spindle?”
Agony was filling her.
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“Do I prick my finger?" she asked.
He let her go on. Because she was beyond comfort, he
did not try to comfort her. She had grabbed at the bedclothes. He knew that it was his body that she knotted and twisted. Her tears, when they caine, were heavy and splashed
down on his arm. He did not hurry her.
The window, as it would be winter and summer, was
open. The air was thick again with the smells of morning,
hawthorn on the wet porch railing, damp hay, mist from the
river. Morning always came so, he knew, the earth raw and
dripping, as it first rose, from the sea. In the new light he
cast a long strange shadow over her.
So Duinn first saw himself whole, he thought, recognizing the man-shape— in the world before mirrors— in darkness.
He began to speak, so quietly that she had to lean
forward. Thus, in spite of her hurt, she was again drawn to
him and felt, next to his ribs, his heart beat, unexpectedly.
“What if it were a story for children?” he asked. “Would
it matter?”
“Yes.”
“They are all children.”
“I am not." Her eyes were wide open now, staring.
“Everyone. . .”
“O nce,” she insisted. “But it changes.” She had put out
her hand, not to him, but he had clutched it. What she had
reached for was not there. For a moment she had not even
thought of him.
Her mother was dead. Her father, who when his knees
were stiff and his legs unsteady she would help up the stairs
in the drab little hotels where she had been taken on
holidays, whose visits she nonetheless cherished, had been
kept away, the headmistress had said, by his business. She
was his only daughter. Without shame, ignoring the smell of
his whisky, she had cheered him and had comforted him in
his loneliness.
For a vivid moment, in her mind’s eye, she saw his
stooped shoulders, his sad grizzled head.
“You don’t see,” she cried suddenly. “But it changes. We
start off. We have parents. We are their children. But it
stops.”
“And if it did not?”
He had pulled aside the coverlet and she could see
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almost all of him. Except for his face and his arms, which
were deep-tanned, the rest, the lean muscled back and the
long hard legs, although equally dark, were, in a way she
could not quite place, unblemished. Unused, she remembered thinking afterward, protected, like the smooth inner wood under bark.
The sunlight flooded in through the window. He was
sitting up in it.
“What if there were a man,” he said, "in the very
beginning of the world— ”
The light, and the words as well, because they had the
sound of another story in them, annoyed her. “Like Adam?”
she said suspiciously.
“No,” he said. “Just a man.” He leaned back and seemed
to take a long look at her. “Not even a man,” he said. "Not at
first. A boy. But he grew. He turned into a man and, like
other men, he met a woman. And, after a time, there were
children and the children grew, as children always have. But
one day the woman, because finally she was an old woman,
died. The man mourned her. He waited to be dead himself.
But he was not. For something had happened to him. He did
not die. In fact, he had scarcely changed. He was still the
young man he was when he stopped being a boy. But he was
alone, mourning the woman. So in time he found another
woman. Perhaps as beautiful and as kind. Perhaps not. As
before, there were children. But this woman also grew old
and, like the other, also died. And the children, though
themselves parents, also died. But the man still was.”
She was listening but she was not looking at him. She
was watching, as the light turned more gold, the faint variations in the shabby plaster on the bedroom wall, the blistered paint on the door. In the rooms below there had been new
paint and fresh plaster. She had seen that when he had
brought her into the house. On the ground floor there had
been hammering and men in overalls. The workmen, in fact,
had been everywhere. At intervals, through the first afternoon, she had counted over a dozen. But she had lost count altogether, when after dinner they had trooped into the great
room. It was like a small private army. Coming into the room,
she remembered, they had bowed to him.
“They called you lord,” she said in astonishment.
When he was up and gone, she went to the door and
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looked out. Sunlight dappled the landing but the top of the
house was empty. Sounds drifted up from the kitchen. She
closed the door, and, because she was still naked, locked it.
“What if a man kept on having children?" he had asked
her. “Not only for a lifetime but for a hundred lifetimes? For a
hundred times a hundred lifetimes? For longer?” He had
paused.
It had seemed to her like one of those unsolvable
problems they gave you in school. If Adam had two sons and
/> each, in turn, had two sons. . . But that hadn’t been right
either. Not Adam. He had denied that. But some man having
children.
She lay again on the bed. Absurdly, feeling where he had
been, she uncrossed her legs. They had argued. But her
recollection of the argument was muted, was mixed with the
slow warmth of the sunlight and the touch of his arm on her
neck, his hand on her thigh. Now that it was done, she was
much less frightened than she had expected. He had wanted
it but all the while she had known she might have stopped
him and in the darkness it had been she, though he had been
everywhere, who had found him. “I have never been happier,” she thought. “Nor has anyone,” she thought more grandly.
Perhaps it was that that made her remember the argument.
How many people were there in the world? she wondered.
“If one man, the same man, kept having children,” she
had asked, incredulous, “for a hundred lifetimes?” She had
given a little gasp.
“Longer,” he had said. “From the beginning.”
“Then . . .” The word had almost the sound of a conclusion but he had interrupted her.
“Everyone,” he had said, “or nearly that, given time.”
His eyes were black, his hair blacker, like her own. She
could smell the scent of his skin. “No,” she had said furiously.
Long after she could hear the sharp hooves of the stallion
on the gravel below. She was hardly listening; instead she had
pressed her nose into the pillow. By the time she had gone to
the window he was already halfway across the lawn. He was
walking the stallion, its legs and its shoulders deep in the hay.
Clouds had come up but there was still a patch of blue
sky over the top of the hill toward the wood. On the nearer
slope, before he turned and went from sight, she saw him
stop and unbutton his trousers. The pressure of her bare flesh
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on the windowsill awakened a hint of delighted wickedness in
her body. With a tinge of surprise she watched him relieve
himself in the grass.
She had been raised chiefly by women. “He is a boy
after all,” she thought, smiling. As she went on smiling, her
face lost the least trace of wickedness and she went back, for
a moment, to being a child herself. She turned quickly and