by Paul Hazel
strong indeed to climb so high, with great hands to hold
onto the roof and large shoulders to ward off the wind. But he
would be hungry, she knew, his hard, clever mouth seeking
her. Feverishly, thinking of his hunger, she drew her hands
up under her breasts, pushing them, as his huge dark face
would push, to start the flow of milk. He would be hungry
and lonely and cold. Such a cold morning to come into the
world, she thought. Once more she attempted to look at the
window.
“Do you see him?” she asked.
Holmes could see the sharp points of her breasts just
under the sheet, see them lift and fall with the fierce, failing
struggle of breath.
Nora bent down beside her. In the lamp’s glare, watching
both faces, Martin Callaghan found himself filled, first with
irritation and then with what he recognized was jealousy,
“My God,” he said suddenly, realizing they were the same
women he had seen on the platform following William out to
the train.
“What is she saying?” Plum asked.
Holmes shook his head. Not even hearing, he reached
forward, touching the vein of the neck.
Though he was tired and sick at heart, the Duke stood.
He went to the bed and, prying the lamp from Holmes’s
fingers, carried it to the window ledge. Just for an instant,
looking out, he saw the deep drifted snow on the roof. The
shoeless prints came up to the window and stopped. He
turned his back on them, not knowing yet what they meant.
But of one thing he was certain.
“He has one more death,” he said grimly.
Nora glared at him. She could feel her whole body shake
with rage against him, against all men who, finding a death,
admitted no more than a single loss, one cruel absence, when
it was worlds that went.
W intering
2 5 1
“The child,” she said desperately, “And the child that
might have come from that child and from that.”
She was looking hard at him, seeing the dark molding of
his flesh against the vague, snow-filled window. Her face was
scarlet. For one awful moment each understood that she had
meant herself.
“Hush now,” he said softly; then quietly, as a father
might take a child and yet not that exactly, though it was no
less kind, he extended his arms and drew her to himself.
Wykeham sat without moving, the ragged cloak draped
over his shoulders. The chairs, as the men had left them,
were turned about in disorder. The women scratched at the
door but he sent them away. Jane had come, incautiously,
calling him. But when he did not answer, she had slipped
away again to the kitchen.
His Grace listened to her footsteps retreating. “Which
one is she?” he asked bitterly.
Wykeham did not try to look up. “From the school,” he
said.
“As before?”
“Yes.”
“It was a girl’s voice.”
Wykeham turned his eyes on him. They were young
man’s eyes and it hurt His Grace to look at them. Wykeham
rested his hands on the table.
“We tried to walk to New Awanux once,” he said. “I don’t
suppose I wrote you that? One evening I drove to the school.
It was late and I stood under her window in darkness,
throwing stones at the glass. When she came down, she was
yawning and only half in her dress. It was too far, of course.”
He looked down at his hands, thoughtfully, as though measuring himself against an obstacle. “We only made Bristol.” He paused. “Before it was light, I found a cab to take her back.”
He stopped once more. “I do not think, Martin, there was a
time when I was happier.”
His Grace waited until he was certain Wykeham was
finished.
“It was a risk,” the Duke said.
Wykeham shifted; his face did not change.
“There were always risks. But none to myself. You must
remember that. There was never a moment when I could not
2 5 2
W1NTERKINQ
as simply have walked away. One more Wykeham vanished.
Lost overboard, presumed drowned. Even now I could go
out that door and in an hour I would be on a train. There are
ships in New Awanux. I made certain I remembered ships.
One would be waiting.”
The words slowly took hold. “This house?” His Grace
said.
Wykeham almost smiled. “I have told you.”
“This room?” His Grace persisted. He looked around
uneasily beginning to understand all that had been done.
“Chairs?”
“Even chairs.”
His Grace shuddered. “And in your bed?” There were
tears in his voice suddenly.
“No!” Wykeham shouted. “No, I never— ”
Just at that moment Longford burst through the doors.
He tore the cap from his head, flinging cold drops from it. He
stomped his boots on the carpet. Morag came after him,
pawing his nose with his wool-gloved hands. But the stench
clung to him, was mired in his clothes and his skin. Even the
tramp through the fields, stumbling against the storm’s icy
fury, had not rid him of it.
“Burned,” Longford said.
Morag closed the doors tightly. He did not want the
women to come in.
“It is the one thing that was not supposed to happen,” he
said. “It was painted. I had seen to it.” He looked briefly at
His Grace, who was glaring uncomprehendingly.
“Greenchurch,” Morag whispered, his face wretched.
“Green as oaks, as a hedge. Not an English church.” His old
desperate eyes fixed on Wykeham.
Wykeham turned to the window, watching the storm.
“But white,” he said softly, “when snow covered it.”
Martin Callaghan moaned. He threw himself into a chair.
“One of us had to think of that,” he said, grumbling.
Suddenly they were all very still.
Wykeham studied them. “You will each deny it, I deny it
myself.”
For a while longer no one spoke.
“All the same it wouldn’t matter,” he went on, “if that
were everything. If it stopped. But it won’t.” He was still
Wlnterking
2 5 3
watching them, his eyes settling on each face for a moment,
considering. “How many are missing?” he asked.
“Five,” Morag said at once.
Wykeham rose from his chair. “Then we had better find
them ,” he said.
George Tennison came from the cellar, from making both
coffins. His fingers were stiff from the cold and he was
covered with sawdust. Fearful of a new catastrophe, he edged
back the doors. Holmes, who had just come himself, pulled a
chair to the table. “Where is Harwood?” he asked, glancing
swiftly about the room. In fact, Harwood was sitting alone by
the window, keeping watch on the hill. His face was unshaven
and his head hung morosely to one side. In front of him the
heavy wind washed streaks of ice across the panes.
Snow was everywhere. One
of the great elms had toppled
under the weight. It lay sprawled across the yard, its limbs
fattened and nested until the shape was nearly unrecognizable.
Harwood stared, spellbound.
He had not heard the tree fall but it had fallen, he was
certain, sometime during the night. The snow, he imagined,
had muffled the sound. Still, he should have felt something.
A tree crashing. A young woman dead. Each hour of the night
he had lain awake, listening to the woman beside him, the
child at the end of the bed. Outside the endless snow was
filling the darkness. The world was being purified, was being
remade. He had only felt cold.
He still was. He was shivering when, tilting his head, he
caught sight of the sleigh. It was only a speck at the bottom of
the hill. But the speck grew and, when it made the next turn,
there were four horses galloping into the yard, sending up
waves of white snow. For a terrible moment Ha wood had
the impression that the horses were coming onto the porch.
Then he had a glimpse of red hair. A flurry of arms, jacketless,
immune to the cold, jerked at the reins. When the snow
settled, it was Hunt who climbed down. He handed the reins
to the stableboy. Fred Norfolk followed after him. It was not
more than a minute later they were both in the house.
“Greenchurch is burned,” Morag told them.
“An Indian,” Longford said.
“Though I had it painted,” Morag added.
2 5 4
WINTERKIHG
“But we never thought of the snow,” Longford said
bleakly.
Hunt moved across the room, passing slowly among the
chairs. They watched his heavy shoulders and thick arms
from which the snow had already melted, and thought how
little it must interest him whether there were fires or blizzards or the earth itself opened. His dark quiet eyes looked around the circle of faces.
“And one of us must have thought of it?" he asked dryly,
not bothering to look at one any more than another, not
caring.
“Someone had to,” Martin Callaghan said.
“And you will find him?”
The Duke nodded,
“And when he is found?”
The Duke stopped. He had been answering, not thinking where the answers led.
“There are women here,” he said angrily. “A world just
beginning.” He turned abruptly, staring at Wykeham. “Lives”—
he began.
“Against one life?” Hunt asked. “Where is the worth in
that? What is saved in the end? You all die.”
His Grace stood mute.
Quite unexpectedly he found himself remembering the
young woman he had held in his arms. It was unreasonable.
He had held her only a moment. How odd and old-fashioned
he must have seemed to her, patting her shoulders, running
his stiff, old hands along the side of her neck. Yet, although
he admitted as much, he couldn’t bring himself to feel
ashamed.
“It matters,” he said. “Although I never thought to stop
its coming, it matters when.”
“No longer,” Hunt said.
The Duke had raised his head, to debate with him, when
the house shook.
Suddenly George Harwood, who had been staring without point or purpose, began to scream.
For a moment there was no other sound, only his high,
choking sobs and the creaking floorboards as the men rushed
to the window. Then the house shook again. The flames in the
hearth shuddered and in a dozen rooms the pictures of horses
and cities fell from the walls.
W intering
2 5 5
The men stood before the glass.
On the windward side of the hill, where the whirling
snow poured into the cuts and breaks between the trees, the
nine advanced. Their shapes were tall and black against
the frozen wood. Their ancient faces, carved and pitted in the
rock, were sad and still. But when they moved, the earth
groaned under them. And they went on moving, their heavy
footfalls, slow, unturning, across the cold white lawn.
Harwood braced himself against the chair.
“What do we do?” he asked.
“Ah, Jesus,” Longford moaned. “Jesus.” He had closed
his eyes.
But Wykeham bore the sight a few seconds more. It was
the end, he knew. The world would be broken now, its last
foundations pulled apart and scattered. He had imagined
such a day as this. But it had always been far off. There
seemed so little cause for it to happen. And yet it was not
without justice. He had iived years beyond counting and his
wrongs were many. He felt their weight, each like a stone,
upon him. But the worst were these: he had abused love and
he had murdered. But he thought: “Those I have left were
dying and I could not die. And by taking life there were lives
I kept.” Still, he had found no peace.
He would have died once long ago, died well or badly,
but died in fact had not Duinn, without cause or reason,
spared him. He did not wonder now where Duinn was. He
was near. At the end, when the hills were gone and the sky
rolled up, he would step out on the empty shore. Would he
pity then the dead he made? When the last were not even
memories, when there were no more lives to grieve and
dream, would the silence, empty of windstorms and faces, set
him making worlds again?
In his mind Wykeham tried to imagine other worlds. It
was then he smiled. Himself, he had made them. There was
a meadow running down to the bluffs above Ohomowauke
which was his indisputably. There was a line of workmen’s
cottages, slant-roofed and always falling down, worn by the
use of men whom, one generation to the next, he had set to
scratch and toil on the land. And the house itself, with its
hallways and kitchens, its rooms of horsehair beds and wooden
chairs, its black scalding stoves and cool cupboards of white
china. Each he had set and ordered. And in their places,
2 5 6
WINTERKING
deliberately, the pattern clear before its start, men and
women, ministers and a minister’s wife, the honorable
Callaghan, Norfolk and Lizzy, Harwood with his silent wife
and sullen child, his all too visible sorrow and his attacks of
melancholia, Willa and Jane, both Tennisons, and Hunt who
from the first of worlds had followed him. One by one he
drew them forth to look at them and smiled, contented. They
were his and, although at any moment he might have changed
his mind, he did not wish them other than they were. Their
lives still filled him. Why then did everything end in death?
He had grasped his cloak, his long, blunt fingers worrying the cloth. It was no longer Duinn he thought of but Jane.
“Who has done this?” he thought, his mind wrestling with
the fabric of all he had made, seeking the flaw in it that it might
be mended or willingly, if every weave proved false, to tear it
whole, to cast to the last and final darkness all that by the
force of his will, his lov
e and longing he had shaped and
fashioned, if only she were saved.
What thread was lost? What one thing unremembered?
His mind flew back to Harwood's study, to the train. He
thought of the tree, its endless branches spreading high and
wide across the earth, and of the rout of withered leaves that
blew through Black Wood. He remembered the hill at the
edge of Bristol; and Jane, her figure dark against the windows
of the hall, walking briskly, not paying the least attention,
even at the last instant when she stopped; “Sorry, I was
watching— ”
He looked up, to see the massive shoulders of the stone.
For a moment he was unnaturally conscious of the sound of
the wind.
“It should have been an old Ford truck,” George Tennison
said. Scowling, rubbing his trembling hands on the glass, he
peered down at the sleigh and the horses. “There has been a
mistake,” he said.
No one was listening.
“I see him!” someone cried. The others, staring, could
not be certain whether it was one more shadow or a man that
moved below them.
It was His Grace who realized that it was Houseman.
The face was changed, the gaze colder and more insolent.
The jaw, which was left open, seemed incapable of laughter
or crying or any other human attitude save hate and fear. But
Wlnterking
2 5 7
even dead, the Duke knew him. He looked more real than
ever he had in life. His voice cried out more desperately,
remembering all he had lost, the bitter darkness he had been
given in its place. He unfolded his wings. He lifted up his
huge square hands, the torches in them red with flame.
But it was Harwood who saw the woman, not dressed for
cold weather, running from the house. Her bright yellow hair
streamed from her head. She was running very fast. Caught
by surprise, he wondered, as he had once before, not who
she was but where she was going.
The wind howled. But Nora had no time for that. Too
many things had happened all at once. Even as she ran she
watched the vast cold shapes, their solemn figures moving
roughly into the yard. She had seen them in the wood and
knew there must be nine; and, although they had not begun
in her memory, she had called them forth. What need he had