Because although Charles’s death sentence had been passed, it mustn’t be executed until it could be explained away in character. (Like Nina’s vain and reckless concern with her hair, like Peck’s drunken stumbling into a brook —Peck, who had tended the pheasant pens.)
Three weeks had been allowed Charles, for three visits to a carefully selected psychiatrist and the laying of a trail to Sarah in case his suicide didn’t pass muster. By plane, Boston was commuting distance from New York, and who in Preston was to know that X hadn’t simply gone into Boston to do some Christmas shopping or attend a pre-holiday party?
They had been three weeks of growing strain for Charles at what he intended to reveal about himself and, unavoidably, Nina, so that Sarah had said yes, her husband had been markedly nervous of late; his office had said that Mr. Trafton had been most unlike himself. . . .
And whom had he had a luncheon appointment with, on the day he died? Kate Clemence.
Sarah hadn’t a watch, and time had gone peculiarly astray for her, but there was still a faint warmth to the sunlight on the wet black boughs of the cherry tree. She hadn’t loaded a camera since she was fourteen, but this particular make hadn’t changed. She went downstairs for her coat; idly, like someone bent on capturing only the brilliance of the pheasants, she went outside.
xiv
THE REEVES and the Lady Amherst were dancing.
Sarah had seen the courtship before, on weekends before her marriage, but it always held her still and amazed; it seemed a ritual you could only expect to observe after days of patient vigil in some secret part of a woods.
Both cocks, the Reeves in his cold gold satin-and-lace, the Amherst warmed by red and gold and shifting blue-green over his white breast, seemed to be demonstrating for each other as well as their bored and restless hens. They ran lightly and delicately for a few rapid steps, then the capes flared at once outward and upward to the very edge of the round and fiery eyes, while the brilliant bodies were tipped steeply on one leg for a full display of plumage. Each pause was accompanied by a hiss and a spreading of the gay fringing tail feathers. Both hens seemed to have urgent errands inside, but they were cut off by more short gliding runs and tips and flarings and hisses.
In the middle of the three runs that opened off the stable, the Silver watched with outrage. His shining black crest was erect, his red felt seemed to have extended so that he looked like an aroused chieftain dressed for war. In spite of the wire between them, Sarah took an instinctive step backward when he suddenly stood erect, grunting with anger, and began to beat his powerful snowy wings with a peculiar rushing and clicking sound.
“He’s a devil, isn’t he?” said Hunter admiringly at Sarah’s side. “And look at old Trooper there. Not as romantic as he looks. Watch.”
He extended a fragment of bread through the wire. The Amherst cock stopped in mid-dance, took the bread eagerly, waited to see if any more were to be had, and resumed his pirouetting. Sarah, waked out of her absorption, realized that with the loss of Peck everybody had been pressed into service. Milo was coming forward with an empty feeder, Bess had emerged from the Manchurians’ pen with one of the big blue birds in a firm and expert grip.
She said worriedly to Hunter, “Where’s all this eye trouble coming from? Get the Argyrol, will you, and some cotton and boric acid if it’s there?”
The pheasant submitted to doctoring with an almost trance-like docility. Bess walked away with it, talking quietly and steadily, and Hunter looked at Sarah’s camera. “Going to take some pictures?”
“I was,” said Sarah carelessly, “but I don’t know how fast this film is. I doubt if it could keep up with the Amherst.”
“Bess had very good luck with a batch she took last spring. I’m sure she has an extra set somewhere.”
Was this the automatic politeness it seemed, or a test? Sarah smiled at him. “I’d like to try my own luck,” she said. “Would you have any more bread to entice him with?”
Hunter gave her a long level glance that she came close to flushing under before he said pleasantly, “Yes, I have,” and glanced around. “I think over here . . .”
The spot he led her to was perfect: sun slanting over her shoulder, the Amherst cock a fairy-tale bird against the dark snow-sifted pine boughs. Sarah moved the camera imperceptibly, under the guise of focussing, until the tiny glass aperture held Hunters profile, sharp, vivid, alert. Something, the context or the gilding of light on his hair, gave him an elusive resemblance to Charles. She said over the camera, “I’m sorry to keep you; this thing seems to be—” and Hunter turned his face instinctively.
“—stuck,” said Sarah, but the click of the shutter had been simultaneous with the sudden upward veer of his head.
“Jet,” he said, getting to his feet and gazing briefly at the sky over Sarah’s shoulder. “Did you get Trooper?”
“I think so.” There had been a jet. She could still hear its diminishing scream, but the sky here was so full of them on weekends that they were almost a background noise. They were certainly no novelty to be stared at. “Thanks,” said Sarah, cordial with an effort. “HI see what I can do over here.”
She pretended to photograph the Japanese Coppers, by far the most valuable birds on the place; the going price was something like two hundred dollars a pair, and that didn’t include the price of importing them, maintaining them during the necessary period of quarantine on the West Coast, transporting them here. The corner of her eye saw Milo going on his reluctant rounds, circling closer to her like an inquisitive bee.
Sarah strolled unconcernedly toward the Manchurians’ pen, worrying about the fading light, and was rewarded. Milo presented himself with a mock-offended air. “When do I get to have my picture taken? I’m in full color right now, believe it or not.”
Wouldn’t the man who had masqueraded as Charles realize the danger of a camera in Sarah’s hands? Milo stationed himself at the side of the pen, and she realized with a little shock of triumph that he hadn’t taken off his glasses. People who wore them usually did for this kind of photograph, because of the distorting glitter of light on the lenses. On the other hand, the owlishly round dark frames were the feature a stranger would remember about Milo’s face.
Sarah said into the camera, “There’s an awful lot of reflection from your glasses,” and Milo’s hand lifted and dropped again to his side. “Let’s face it. I’m the intellectual type, and it’s the pheasants you want anyway, isn’t it? Say when, so I can take a manly breath.”
Even then Sarah did not quite trust him. She said, “One second, while the hen comes a bit closer—” and quick as her finger had been on the shutter, Milo was quicker. Deliberately, he had made an elaborate face.
It was the kind of thing he would think amusing, and there was no excuse for the flash-fire of anger that took place inside Sarah; briefly, she could not trust herself to speak. Milo said something innocent about hoping she had done him justice, but she pretended not to hear.
Two pictures taken so far, one a blur of movement, the other a comic-strip grimace. They would have to be taken again, at random, and although they wouldn’t be full-face they would have to do. The color would help. It would show Hunter’s weathered complexion, Milo’s dark hair and glasses, Rob Clemence’s grooved, freckled tensity and sandy curls—if she could ever manage to entrap Rob.
It didn’t, in Sarah’s present black frame of mind, seem very possible that she could. She passed the stable runs on her way back into the barn. The Amherst cock was still absorbed in his delicate enamelled dance, but the Reeves had dropped into a bored walk. The Silver followed Sarah inside as though he had read her mind.
If she were to explore the pens, it would have to be done at night, when the pheasants roosted so numbly that they were at the mercy of any marauder, because Sarah knew she could never face those beaks and spurs and rushing wings by daylight. A pheasant seemed a ridiculous thing to be afraid of, but there it was. Not the least of her fears was that one of them would
fly straight at a window in a panic and drop at her feet with a broken neck.
Sarah had had her head turned, looking back at the dim planks under their covering of litter; just in time, she avoided colliding with Evelyn.
The other woman was unevenly flushed, face blotched with the red patches that appeared under strong emotion or contact with one of her—was it sixty-four?—allergens. She seldom ventured as far as the barn, because of the presence of the quail. She said briskly enough, “Someone’s on the phone for Bess, and I was just running out, but I see she’s busy. Ill tell them . . .”
She turned and went rapidly back into the passage that led to the kitchen—because the phone wasn’t off the hook at all? She not only hadn’t been running, she hadn’t been moving at all; the precise and unconscious part of the ear that counts clock chimes told Sarah that Evelyn had simply been standing there.
She could have been lost in admiration of the quail on the other side of the barn, three crowded tiers of small speckled egg-factories, or been gazing down the ramp into the stable. Or she could have been watching through the barn window into the corral.
The window gave a view of all the far pens, and even a corner glimpse of the Amherst run. It would have shown Hunter, Sarah with her camera, Milo and his last-minute grimace. It would have caught Bess’s rapid hardy walk as she went about tending her birds, and, Sarah noted, it afforded a glimpse of the Clemences’ back yard through a ragged break in the pines.
Harry Brendan’s car was back. So, presumably, was Kate.
The pheasant pens would have to wait until some still hour of the night. Kate Clemence, who had loved Charles, who had had a lunch date with him on the day he died, did not.
“Yes,” said Kate, making tea in her immaculate kitchen. The door was closed, shutting out Rob and Harry Brendan and any kind of friendliness. “I was supposed to meet Charles that day, but as he couldn’t make it there didn’t seem much point in mentioning it. I didn’t know you as well then, and I was afraid you might—” her mouth smiled pleasantly and candidly at Sarah “—misunderstand.”
Two body blows, thought Sarah, smiling pleasantly and candidly back. The obvious one, and the implication that Sarah, even misunderstanding, wouldn’t have cared.
She said in Kate’s own tone, “How right you were. Brides aren’t noted for their tolerance. Did Charles by any chance say why he didn’t want it mentioned? It’s an academic interest, I suppose.”
Kate gazed at her and then back at the tea. “Lemon,” she inquired, “or cream? No, I remember, you don’t take anything. I’m sure you’d much rather have had a drink.”
“There you’re wrong,” said Sarah. Her smile felt like a dagger between her teeth. “I’d much rather have tea. Did Charles say?”
“He said he was afraid,” said Kate. It ought to have had a wrung and reluctant air, but it came out like everything else Kate said: calm, open, unruffled.
“Of what?”
“Don’t you think,” said Kate, “that you’re putting yourself through this unnecessarily, Sarah?”
How kind and careful she was, and how solicitous of Sarah’s feelings. Did she never blink? Perhaps she even slept like that, great gray eyes wide and serene, unperturbed by dreams. The dreamer cometh. Where had that sinister little phrase sprung from? Sarah said carefully, “Putting myself through what, Kate?”
Kate glanced down into her cup. “Charles had been drinking when he called me, I gather. That was something new as far as I was concerned, so perhaps I didn’t make enough allowance for it. What he said was that his marriage had been a terrible mistake, and he had to tell somebody, but he was frightened of what you’d do if you found out.”
“Such as . . . what?” said Sarah softly and fixedly; she couldn’t help herself. “Leave him? Push him through a window in a fit of pique?” She walked the length of the kitchen and back again, fast. “Granted all this was true, what could you have done, I wonder?”
It was probably fortunate that the kitchen door opened just then, and Harry and Rob came in for drinks. Rob was complaining savagely about foreign policy; Harry, seeming to inhale the atmosphere between the two women, picked up Kate’s tea and tipped it into the sink. “Did you know,” he said seriously, “that an eminent chemist has succeeded in pickling rhinoceros tendons in that stuff? Whereas with Scotch the same tendons remained fresh and pliable.”
He made Kate a drink and shepherded her out of the kitchen. It left Rob in charge of Sarah; he said dryly, after a lightning glance at her, “A little Scotch for your tendons?” and when she shook her head, “What was the girlish chat about?”
The question was light, something about the pause that followed it was not. “Charles, of course. It’s a subject,” said Sarah shortly, “that seems to be full of little surprises.”
“Oh?” The bottle was tipped in the steady freckled hand; fascinated, Sarah watched a thin stream of liquor splash onto the counter top two inches away from the waiting glass. “For whom?”
“For me. That is, so far,” said Sarah, and as Rob seemed unaware of the puddle of Scotch, picked up the sponge.
He took it from her without moving his sharp gray stare. His jaw had gone tight, making the very amiability of his voice dangerous. “So that’s it, that’s why you won’t let Bess off the hook. You want to get out from under, no matter how. You’re determined to dig up another reason why Charles went to a looney doctor.”
Another reason. Harry Brendan was the only person she had told of even one, and he would not have gone around confiding it to people—would he? Or had he only pretended to believe her, because he was attracted to her and was waiting for this phobia to spend itself?
Sarah was still stinging with anger from what Kate had said; this new undermining thought undid her caution completely. She said curtly, picking up her bag, “I don’t believe Charles ever went near a psychiatrist. I don’t believe he jumped out of that window. And if you were about to warn me that if I keep on about this I might find out something worse, I’ve already been very thoroughly warned about my own good—and I don’t believe that, either.”
She could not, at just this moment, face either Harry or Kate. There was a back door and she started blindly for it. Behind her, Rob said in a mock-startled voice, “Look out, she bites!” and then, in a very different tone, “Maybe you’ve been warned about this, too, but don’t you think that’s a rather dangerous thing to go around saying, if you’re right?” He was squeezing the sponge out in a grip so tight that his hand looked contorted. “I’m right,” Sarah said evenly, “and I suppose it is dangerous, in the proper quarter.”
She had lost track of the time in this sharp and queerly vivid interval, and when she opened the door the dusk, holding steps and trees and shrubs in a watery uncertain grasp, came as a surprise. She turned as she went out, said pleasantly, “By the way, have you seen Milo’s portrait of your cousin? That’s a rather dangerous thing to go around painting,” and closed the door very quietly behind her.
She didn’t immediately go down the railed wooden steps. She looked back through the uncurtained window into the lighted kitchen, and Rob Clemence was still standing at the sink, sponge forgotten in that tendon-whitening grip. While she watched, he dropped it onto the drainboard, picked up his drink, and walked rapidly out of the kitchen. Sarah saw without surprise that he wasn’t limping at all.
xv
BESS HAD UNDERGONE her usual six o’clock sea-change, short gray hair brushed high and crisp above her eloquent and rather haughty face, figure a spare black cutout after the rough and careless clothes of the day. Sarah realized with a new awareness that Bess exaggerated both her existences, and enjoyed each because of the other. This metamorphosis was not the usual shower-and-change; it was a ritual.
Charles had called her, fondly, the Duchess of Pheasant Pharm. How had that inborn air of command subdued itself to Nina Trafton? How would Bess have felt if, after Edward Trafton’s death, Nina had planned to sell the farm, and with it Bess’s dual
life?
The dusk had been navy blue when Sarah stepped out of it into the living room; the primrose light inside turned it to an instant black. And the stage had been set for a talk more formal than the earlier one in Bess’s bedroom.
This was normally the hour for cocktails, but there was no sign of Hunter or Milo or Evelyn. The white door to the dining room was closed, and from behind it, over the gravelly protests of the crow, came the strains of a rhapsody on the record player. Music to Sell the Farm By, thought Sarah sardonically, but she was too tired and too bitter to care very much.
She said abruptly, “You were quite right, Bess. This is a lovely place, but I wouldn’t have the faintest notion of how to hold it together from one day to the next.”
“It is big.” Bess was much too poised to show any easing of tension, any triumph at a mission accomplished; in a classic maneuver, she concealed the depth of her anxiety by an apparently open reference to it. “I won’t pretend that I’m not delighted. I’ve gotten rather bound up here with all those foolish birds. But let’s not talk business tonight. You aren’t going to rush away now that you’ve decided, are you? You’ll stay at least until Monday?”
Sarah nodded. Bess said with an air of keenness, “You’re tired, aren’t you, Sarah? And of course this can’t have been the happiest place for you to come. . . .” She opened the dining-room door as impatiently as though she herself had not arranged the closing of it, and called crisply, “Hunter? You are making drinks, aren’t you?”
Sarah went upstairs. She had a notion that she was going to be examined very thoroughly by someone’s eyes during the next few hours, and she armored herself unconsciously.
She changed her suit for the only dress she had packed, navy tissue wool as slender and active as a fencer’s costume. At her throat and ears she put the pearls that Charles had given her, and then instinctively took them off and wore only earrings, small pale-gold leaves that shone quietly against the short curve of her hair. Leaning toward the mirror, lipstick poised, she remembered without warning the context of the phrase that had jumped into her mind in Kate Clemence’s kitchen.
So Dies the Dreamer Page 12