Winterking (1987)

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.

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  “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

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  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

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  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.

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  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.

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  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,

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  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

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  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