by Sarah Smith
“About cheating on me?”
“What? Harry!” she protested.
“I saw how he looked at you. What have you two done together? Pretended he was me?”
“Harry!”
“Get away from that piano.” He took her by the shoulders and shook her, half lifted her away from the piano bench. “What happened to your promise? You’re supposed to stay away from the piano. Did he let you off it? What did he do to you? Has he got everything he wanted?”
She could not misunderstand him. She backed away, blushing fiercely. This was not kissing at a dance. “Harry, you have got to say what you mean.”
“Why don’t you say what you mean?” She heard the sound of the piano cover being thrown back. Harry began to hit the piano notes one at a time, thudding his finger down on the low notes. “You always liked me. I thought it was me. Now he’s got the money. And all of a sudden—” He hit a whole fistful of notes at once. “You’re all around him. He says you can do everything—” Another fistful of notes, he was banging against the keyboard now. “Be my wife and go off to New York too. And he can say that, can’t he, because he’s Richard Knight and he’s everything. He’s nothing. I can send him away. Does he take you with him to New York? He won’t, I can tell you that. What did he get from you, you fool?”
“Harry,” she said, half crying, “I love you.” But she wanted him to stop banging against the keyboard.
“You love your music! You’re selfish, that’s all you care about. It would serve you right if I didn’t care about you. You could keep on with your career, just like you want. Just stop thinking about getting married to me. Would that make you happy? You could give music lessons, and everyone would come to take music lessons from you because you’re such a good pianist. And you wouldn’t ever have to get married, or have children, they wouldn’t get in your way.”
“No, it wouldn’t make me happy,” she said in a low voice. But stop hurting my piano, Harry. Stop hurting me.
“Isn’t that what he’s been saying? Forget your marriage and get on with your career, isn’t that what he says?”
He took her by the shoulders. His voice deepened and lost its sarcastic tone. “Pet, you can’t go on like this. I don’t think you’ve gone too far—look at you! blushing like a dear!—I didn’t mean to talk to you like that, it’s just that he’s playing with you and that hurts me. Anyone can see he doesn’t care anything about you. I care. I want you for my own, forever, all my own. You’re the sweetest girl in the world. I want to marry you. Don’t cry like that, Pet.” He put his arms around her and kissed her cheek.
She wasn’t crying. She wanted to cry but she could not.
“I don’t have to choose between you and music,” she said, rigid in his arms. “Harry, it’s you who say I do.”
“I do say so.” Harry took her left hand and tugged at the engagement ring as if he were going to pull it off. “This means something, Pet. You can’t get married and expect to be who you were. I won’t have any wife of mine pay more attention to some sticks and wire than to me, and I’ll say it plain, I won’t have any other man as much as think he can look at you. We’re engaged and you’re mine. Stop thinking like you could do anything and be anybody. Just love me. That’s all I want you to do. I don’t want you to love anybody but me.”
He left her. She sat down on the piano bench again. These were his terms for loving her. I don’t have any terms, she thought. I’m not allowed any, I’m only supposed to love him. Under her fingers the piano keys were quiet and familiar. She wondered if Harry had done the piano any harm by slamming his fist on it. She could check it, just by running a set of scales up it, but that would break her promise too.
Didn’t she have terms for loving Harry?
If she loved Harry enough, she would close the piano cover now and wouldn’t even check if there had been harm to it. She wouldn’t need it anymore.
She had already gone beyond that.
After a moment she touched the lowest notes and then, one by one, each of the eighty-eight keys, and every note sounded familiar and true.
She could not marry Harry.
A fight
Out on the verandah, Harry saw Gilbert still asleep and Reisden coming around the side of the hotel. “Wake up,” Harry said, shaking Gilbert’s shoulder.
“What? Oh, hello, my boy.”
“I’m not your boy and neither is he. Come here, Reisden.” Harry knocked on the window. “Come out here, Perdita.” Reisden came as far as the verandah stairs. Perdita stood at the door, and Gilbert, still blinking, went to stand by her.
“He’s not Richard,” Harry said to Gilbert and Perdita. “Tell them, Reisden.”
Gilbert drew a little closer to Perdita and took her hand. Reisden and he exchanged a complex look.
“Harry,” Reisden said, “would you walk around the comer with me a moment?”
“Tell them.”
“There are things you don’t know. Excuse us.” Reisden gauged Harry, standing at the bottom of the stairs, and didn’t try to make him follow, just stepped down from the edge of the verandah onto the grass below and walked down the gravel carriageway toward the lake. After a moment he heard Harry follow. Just as he calculated Harry was about to grab his shoulder, he turned around and said, quietly enough for only the two of them to hear, “We’ve found Jay French.”
Harry’s hand closed in midair and fell.
“Where?”
“Come, I’ll show you.” Reisden led the way down the carriageway and across Island Hill Road. They stood underneath the pine trees. Across the flinty shore and the water they could see the Knights’ barn. “There.”
Harry laughed like a man who didn’t understand.
“Harry, he’s dead. He didn’t disappear and he didn’t kidnap Richard Knight; he died. The scheme has backfired and we don’t have Richard’s murderer.”
Harry stood with his jaw open, then licked his lips. “You’re lying.”
Reisden thought of the blackened mass under the hay.
“We don’t have him.”
“I see you caring a lot about whether Richard’s dead! As long as I can’t prove he is, you can hang around here, can’t you, playing around with my girl—”
“Very soon,” Reisden said gently, “you’ll say something you’ll regret.”
“Don’t you threaten me!”
“Not a threat, Harry. A presumption on your decency.”
“You bastard!”
“Harry!” Gilbert said.
He had come along behind them. He looked from one man to the other, eyes almost tearing behind his glasses.
“This is an impostor,” Harry said. “Roy Daugherty found him. Ask him anything about Richard! He doesn’t know.”
“Harry, this is very wrong of you,” Gilbert said. “I’m disappointed. This isn’t polite.”
Harry laughed.
“You are Richard,” Gilbert said to Reisden a little breathlessly, as though the effort of making a positive statement was like climbing up a long hill. “It does you credit to say you aren’t. But after all this time, Richard, there will never be certain proof, will there? And what if we should wait and wait, and I were to die? Then everything would be in turmoil. Bucky Pelham has told me so for years. Richard, I’m not entirely certain that I can do this, but—I should like to declare you dead.”
Reisden’s throat closed up, absurdly. He swallowed. “Do, by all means.”
Harry grinned. “That’s the right thing. Finally.”
Gilbert nodded solemnly. “Harry, I’m glad you approve. You’re a decent boy. ” He patted Harry’s arm.
Harry snatched his arm away. “What are you talking about?”
“Perhaps I’m not being clear. Richard is Richard,” Gilbert explained patiently, “and everything is his. Bucky Pelham has told me we can’t give him what is his without positive proof he is Richard, which we won’t have because it was so very long ago. So what I believe I must do is to declare Richard dead. Th
en I will have the money, and I can give it where it belongs, to you, Richard, under your own legal name, whatever name will satisfy the courts and Bucky, as if you were not Richard at all.”
“You can’t do that!” Harry said.
“No, you can’t. Gilbert, you have gone utterly amok,” Reisden said.
“Don’t you tell him what he can do!” Harry said, and hit Reisden.
He plowed into Reisden with his shoulder, football-style, and sent him crashing back into the bole of one of the old pines. Gilbert shouted out. Reisden lost his footing on the gravel and was caught between the trunk and Harry, who moved in with both fists pummeling. Reisden dodged and Harry barked his knuckles on the tree. Harry twisted around and Reisden chopped at him with a right uppercut that made the breath wheeze out of Harry, but Harry came back in, shorter than Reisden but a good fifty pounds heavier, and slammed his fists into Reisden’s chest and stomach again and again. Reisden fell onto the gravel. Harry drew back his foot as if to kick him; Reisden rolled and tripped Harry, bringing him down. The gravel was edged with granite paving stones, blocks the size of bricks, and under Reisden’s hand one was loose. Reisden staggered to his feet still holding it, hefted the weight of it over his head. Gilbert saw Reisden standing over Harry, lips drawn back from his teeth and his eyes completely crazy, like a horse, raising the big stone over his head. Gilbert ran between them, shouting “Richard! Richard!” and shaking him. Reisden stood dead still, with the stone still in his hand; and then slowly brought it down, stared at it, and threw it away forcefully into the grass, away from any of them.
“That’s not fair!” Harry shouted, jumping up.
“Fair, boy?” Reisden gasped. “I would have killed you. You’ve won. Go. Get away. Go.”
A revolver
Charlie’s doctor’s bag was old, the handle mended with black cloth tape, but it was the bigger kind that doctors in his early years had used to carry. He had always packed his bag too full: lollipops, a cloth doll, candy pills. He moved everything from the bag neatly into his laundry basket and tucked the basket under the bed, in case a maid should wonder why Doctor Charlie had left his stethoscope in with his dirty shirts. From the linen-supply closet on the second floor he took the oldest and shabbiest blanket, rolled it up, and stuffed it in the bag. Now the bag looked full. He took it downstairs, left it in the hallway by the sofa, and went outside to speak with Gilbert.
“I’m going over to your barn, to look again at—you know. Don’t have anyone come over there.” Gilbert said he wouldn’t. “And stay with Perdita.” Gilbert looked puzzled at that.
The top of the Knights’ barn was full of sunlight and heat. From downstairs in the barn, Charlie brought a flat heavy shovel and a dustpan and brush. He put them all down, opened the doctor’s bag, and took out the blanket. The body lay like a black scrawl in the hay. The doctor picked up the shovel from the floor, hefted it, and held it first by its handle, then like a pick, with his hands on the shaft. It felt awkward, but he lifted it over his head. He thought of Jay French, long ago, with his clear, grey, mocking eyes. It is your business, doctor, to look after the heir. Charlie sighed, lowered the shovel to the floor, and spread the shabby blanket all over the body, from head to foot. It was a grey blanket with a red edge. Then he lifted the shovel over his head and brought it down onto the blanket, over and over again. He paid special attention to the skull, which could show that this was a man’s body and not a boy’s.
When he lifted the comer of the blanket to look, there was nothing left but powder, fragments the size of a fingertip, more like old wood than bone. Charlie’s shirt was stuck to his skin with sweat and both his arms ached. He put the heavy shovel down and sat on the floor for a few minutes, feeling his heart pound and the ache twist in his arms. But he was not done. He got up from the floor again, using the shovel as a cane to help himself up. He took the dustpan and brush, folded back the blanket carefully, and on his hands and knees brushed up every fragment of cloth, every bit of bone, the powder and splinters caught in the cracks of the floorboards, and dumped everything into his doctor’s bag. It took surprisingly little room; there was still space for the blanket. The stain still darkened the floor, yes, there had been a body there, but impossible to tell how tall or how old.
As he got to his feet, he half stumbled across the shovel, which clanked on something in the hay, shifting it so that Charlie could see its shape: it was a revolver.
The gun was terribly heavy, a big machined piece of metal more than a foot long. It was not rusty: Charlie remembered, with terrible clarity, William Knight’s age-spotted hands oiling the metal. He saw the copper-green of a percussion cap still in the cylinder. One of those bullets had been heavy and strong enough to crack a chair in half. What’ll I do with this? he thought. The percussion cap would have lost its strength, the powder would not work; and what did he mean to shoot? He should throw it in the water.
Charlie put the gun in his bag with the rest, put the spade and the dustpan and brush in their places, and walked toward home. By the bridge over the Little Spruce, he turned away from the path and walked up the rocky bank to the river’s edge. Even in this hot August, the Spruce waters were racing. He knelt on the bank, which was covered with soft star moss, and, opening his bag, he took out the gun and the blanket and laid them down. Then, standing up and leaning out over the river, he held his doctor’s bag by the two ends, turned it upside down, and shook it, the way he had done dozens of times before when some mischievous child had loaded it with treasures of sand or pebbles. Sand and pebbles and powder rained down and were caught in the foam and whirled away. Some fell on the rocks, a white powder that the next rain would mix with the earth. He shook the blanket over the water, and in a moment it was clean too. A fragment of black cloth hung for a few seconds in an eddy, and then a branch came tumbling down the river, a good-sized branch still with its green leaves, and swept everything downstream.
Now the gun. It lay bright on the moss. So big, so heavy. The Spruce waters were strong and high, but it was August; this was not the spring run when the water would sweep away a man. Charlie saw how it might be, the gun tumbling over and over until it came to the rocks in the shallow water, above the Knights’ bridge, then lying there, bright and gleaming, for everyone to see.
It could go into the lake, but Charlie never went rowing. If he threw it in from the shore the metal would shine in the water; someone would see it.
He sat on the moss with the gun in front of him until the water mist made him chill; the gun seemed like a weight on him and his arms ached all across his chest. The ache spread until his eyes dazzled and it was hard to breathe. He was afraid because he was not done. He leaned back on the moss and held the blanket to him, to warm him against the chill of the mist and his own sweaty body. Not yet, he prayed; he still had a letter to write and a gun to hide.
Somehow he got back to the Clinic, inside, and up the stairs with no one seeing him. In his room he wrapped the gun in the shabby blanket and thrust both deep into the bottom of the closet, behind the shelf that the hot-air pipe made. He sat at his desk. He had to hold his left arm against his chest; it felt as though the pain were something trying to crawl out of him. The fingers of his right hand felt the size of arms, uncontrollable. He wrote.
Today, Sunday, August fifth, 1906, I have examined a corpse in Gilbert Knight’s barn. From the number of teeth and the growth of the bones, I have determined that the body is a male child of about eight years. I think this must be Richard Knight.
Charies Francis Adair, M.D.
He fell across his bed and closed his eyes, having told the lie that might make Gilbert end the search at last, and fell into a half-dream. Sometimes he thought he had not written the letter and he tried to get up and then fell back again. Once St. Peter, an old man with a white beard, came to him and told him all his sins had been forgiven him; and then St. Peter showed him the shabby blanket with the red edge, and laughed at him with Jay French’s quiet, mocking laugh. All y
our sins except one, Charlie. I have not confessed, Charlie thought in his dream, I will die in mortal sin. He prayed to see Father O’Connell in his dreams, Peter O’Connell who would have known God’s will in this. But he dreamed instead that he was in a confessional and asked the blessing, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and no one answered, no one ever answered.
When the shadows grew long he woke up again, sweaty, breathless, not in pain, but feeling as if he had been wrung dry, as if he had no more pain left to offer. The ceiling was covered with a network of cracks. Jay French was dead; Reisden was after Perdita, and would stay until Richard’s body was found. Charlie was helpless; he had nothing to offer but lies.
And he had not got rid of the gun.
Perdita’s birthday
Violet Pelham had set up Perdita’s birthday party for four o’clock in the afternoon. It was perhaps the fate of persons like Violet Pelham always to set up events for the wrong time, Reisden speculated, as it was to say the wrong things and have the wrong ideas. Violet had no control of the heat and nothing to do with the events of about an hour before; but she might have left Harry to his excuses instead of insisting he come to the party, and might have served something other than champagne.
The party was meant to be held in the small parlor of the Clinic, but because of the heat they had all the doors open. There were not many guests, only Gilbert and Harry, Reisden, Charlie Adair, Violet and Efnie, and some of the people from the Shakespeare Club. So few of them wandering over such a large space gave a disagreeable effect, like a vast vase only half full of flowers. Harry drank two tulip glasses of champagne straight off, filled a third, and took Violet and Efnie off to the terrace, from which his voice rose. He was going to be very drunk.