by Zenith Brown
She dumped the ash-trays in the copper basket by the fireplace and went swiftly past him out into the hyphen and up the stairs.
O’Leary stood, semi-dazed for a moment, suddenly sick, sick of himself and the whole bloody mess he’d made of things. It was his fault. He should have fixed the ceiling and pumped out the well pit, and he should have kept his blasted mouth shut about Dunning. He knew then what he’d know when he barged into the Three D, ready to tear Dunning apart. It wasn’t Dunning, it was Ashton. Everything shot to hell, O’Leary acting like a schizophrenzied fool . . . He took a deep breath and shook himself, trying to get the blistering scorn in Molly’s voice out of his ears.
He reached over and switched off the lights and was half-way up the stairs when he remembered the oven. He plodded down and out through the old cottage to the kitchen to turn it off and take out the casserole. He went back upstairs. His bed was turned down but Molly’s wasn’t. He listened a moment before he went over to the bathroom and opened the door. She wasn’t there and her toothbrush was gone from the rack. He went out into the hall. The guest room door was shut.
“Molly?” He stood a moment, waiting for a blistering response, but none came. He put his hand on the knob. The door was locked. “Molly! I’m sorry. Please, Molly.”
She didn’t answer.—The O’Learys and the Dulaneys. What do two reds make? Blue, I think. Blue blazes and brimstone. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time she’d ever locked herself in the guest room and refused to answer when he’d knocked, sometimes when the fault was his and a lot of times when it wasn’t. He stood there a moment, put his hand in his pocket for a cigarette, and felt the brittle wax seals on the envelope he’d forgotten in the general lack of sanity mucking up the last hour. He glanced at the solidly shut door and the equally solid wall of silence behind it. Maybe it was just as well Molly wasn’t around when he read it. If the old judge had any suggestions, however unorthodox, O’Leary was ready to take them. With Sudley prepared to back down if Ashton would, it might even be that Molly would never have to know anything at all about it. Always try to look on the brighter side of things, Mr. O’Leary.
He grinned and went quietly back to his room, the reprieve in force again as the long shadow of the old judge’s hand seemed to lie on his as he broke the other seals and slit open the flap. He took out the letter. It was three closely-written sheets of air mail paper folded around a second envelope, sealed but without the wax. He looked at it first.
“To be opened as directed—N.T.” It was written with the same pen that sputtered, the same heartbeat pulsating in the fine uneven strokes. In the long silence, Spig was conscious of the eerie monotony of the tap he’d promised to fix and hadn’t, dripping with a kind of sympathetic hopelessness through the bathroom, as he read the enfolding sheets.
“My dear Spig—I don’t know the precise circumstances under which my son will hand you this, as I shall be purposely inclusive and purposely vague in my directions to him. The possibilities I see, and one of which he will remember my discussing with him, are these:
“I. You may have trouble with Ashton. Aside from reminding you of the black snake seven feet long the day you came to Devon, I can only assure you that Nat has a sound knowledge of the law and is not as entirely unimaginative or legally unresourceful as he thinks he is. If there is a way out, he will find it for you, slowly but surely—I hope.
“II. Martha Sudley may finally persuade Harlan to sell the farm so that Prince Charlie won’t callous his hands working in the vineyard. In this event, communicate with the eldest son, who is anxious to keep the old Sudley land grant intact, and has great influence with his father, who is a bull-headed man but an honest one.
“III. Old David at Eden may die. In which case you are to open the enclosed letter.
“IV. The determined virgins, married and single, male or female, of this community may decide Miss Fairlie should be sent away, when I am no longer here to prevent it. Open the letter. I count on you and Nat to act in my stead as your heart and his head best advise you, remembering that Celia Fairlie is very dear to me.
“V. Celia Fairlie may die or become seriously ill physically. Open the letter.
“VI. With the rapidly changing scene in Devon, unforeseeable situations may arise. Your own discretion will direct you.
“In the side of your fireplace facing the river, there is a stone that can be removed. Celia Fairlie and George Sudley used the space behind it as a post box. I don’t believe that anyone alive when you read this—except Celia, David and yourself—will be aware of its existence. If you have no more securely fireproof place in the house, find it and put the letter where it will be safe and still at hand. Death is a flower that blooms at night. You may tell Molly or not, as you wish. You alone are to open it, but Molly should know that in any emergency you are to be called as immediately as possible.
“I sent for you to-day to give you the enclosed with my own hands, and to tell you what I am now writing. But we were not sufficiently alone, and I should have added base ingratitude to my other many and grievous sins had I made an issue of it at a time when devoted care is the last kindness my family can show me.
“I told you once that if I were superstitious, I might believe Miss Fairlie knew you were coming to Eden that day. As my life draws to its close, I no longer call it a superstition. I have faith that you were sent to finish the task I must leave unfinished. May God in His wisdom be with you, and in His mercy be with you and with us all.
Sincerely,
Nathan Twohey.”
The spigot dripped its monotonous threnody as Spig sat there on the side of the bed, remembering Christmas Eve. He and the kids were coming in from the woods with their Christmas tree when Nat Twohey called and he went quickly into town.
“You’re not to tire him, Mr. O’Leary.” Mrs. Twohey let him in with determined good will on earth and peace to no man if she could help it. “We’re just humouring our invalid to let you come at all.”
The old judge seemed only a little frailer and a little more transparent, sitting up against the head board of the gigantic four-poster in the front bedroom, his eyes as avidly alive as ever as he watched, ironically amused, the delaying tactics of his second wife before she could finally bring herself to leave them.
“Miss Fairlie is coming to you for Christmas, I hear,” he remarked then.
“If it isn’t snowing,” Spig answered. “She told Tip she doesn’t like snow.”
“She doesn’t,” Judge Twohey said. His gaze rested on the door into the adjacent room, or a room very far away beyond it. “There was snow. A great deal of snow.”
He said it as he’d once said, “There was blood. A great deal of blood.”
“Have you heard about the snow?”
Spig looked at him, afraid his mind was wandering, until the old eyes turned inquiringly to him.
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
“It was in February, seven weeks after George Sudley’s accident.” His voice was stronger. “It was a blizzard followed by a heavy freeze that no one expected, when we thought winter was almost over. I was a member of the House of Delegates, home for the week-end. I went out to Eden before I had to go back for a caucus, late Sunday evening. That night the snow came. It blocked the roads and tore down power lines. I didn’t get back out there for two weeks. The thaw had come and taken out the bridges and flooded the marshes. Eden was an island. No one worried. Farms were self-sufficient. But Mr. Fairlie had strained his heart, haying, in the fall, and Celia was not well. I took a boat and went out there, just to see that everything was all right.”
He was silent a long time, living in a world more real than the bedroom with the holly and ground cedar, invincibly cheerful, decorating the mantelpiece.
“The dock was gone. The ice had dislodged the piles and the planking was washed away. I waded ashore. The house was shuttered. It looked as if no one had ever lived there. Then I saw the grave. It was covered with pine boughs. The
garden gate was padlocked and there was smoke coming out of the chimney of the little office, but no one answered my knock and the shutters were closed there, too. It was Mr. Fairlie I kept calling, until I went out to the barns and found David. He told me. It wasn’t Celia who was dead. That had been my only thought, I’m afraid.”
There was a longer silence before he went on again.
“Celia hadn’t got over the terrible shock of George Sudley. The second shock was even more terrible in its way. She was devoted to her father, the only person not afraid of him. He was Scottish, a dour, solitary man—or had become one after his wife’s unfortunate death. One rector we had used to say the ravens fed him, and the picture of Elijah in my mind is always a tall, gaunt windmill of a man striding across the fields of Eden with a grizzled, red beard, in old riding boots and breeches, a Gordon setter at his heels . . . I’d like a sip of water, please. There in the thermos.”
Spig O’Leary roused himself and came over to pour the water. The old judge reached under one of his pillows and brought out a flat pint bottle that wasn’t water. He poured a couple of fingers into one of his medicine glasses, smiling at Spig, nodded to him to do the same, put the bottle back under the pillow and used the water either as a chaser or to wash the glass—it was hard to tell.
“Every man commits suicide in his own way,” he commented dryly. “Ammon Fairlie, with his strained heart, chose to shovel snow. He went out early in the morning to clear a path to get to his prize stock. David was the only one he’d trust to oversee them, and David was laid up with a wrenched back. He keeled over dead. How Celia got him into the house no one will ever know. It was still snowing; she couldn’t leave him out there. The power failure had taken out the oil burner and the lights. She was there with him in that creaking old house in the freezing dark for three terrible days and nights. A farm boy David had sent down saw her and was terrified when she didn’t know him and drove him away. It was three days before he dared tell David. David was the only person she knew then and for a long time afterwards. She and he built a fire under a hog kettle, boiled snow, and thawed out a piece of ground to bury her father in. She wouldn’t go back to the house, and David got blankets and made a bed for her on the old leather sofa in the back room of the little office. He was the only person she’d let come near her. I saw her, but she didn’t know me. She lived there for five years. David and his wife brought her food and looked after her. Perhaps I should have let them take her away, but David thought it would kill her, and so did I.”
He shook his head. “We may have been monstrously culpable in many things. But my faith in the Ultimate Court of Appeals is such that I’m sure David and I will be judged with mercy, as with wisdom. He and I testified at the formal inquest, when the roads were open again. I was executor of the estate under Ammon Fairlie’s will, and the Court appointed me Celia’s guardian. David ran the farm, with Harlan Sudley’s co-management, until one April I was sitting for one of the judges on the Second Circuit and Sudley called me. I got home as soon as I could.”
He smiled then. “Celia met me on the porch. David introduced us. She said she understood from him that I had been in charge of things while she was abroad, and in her opinion I’d done a very bad job of it indeed. Apparently in those five years she’d read all her grandfather’s law books, the estate records, treatises on banking and farming, that are still out in the old office. It was an extraordinary experience, to stand there and have Blackstone, Bentham and Mill, to say nothing of Vergia Georgics, tossed at me one moment, and to be told the next that I would kindly lower my voice, there was a child asleep in the house and she didn’t want it wakened. But she was alive again, and that’s all that mattered. It’s still all that matters. What memory, if any, she has of . . .”
He broke off, his eyes sharpening with intense irritation for an instant before he made a patiently resigned movement of his fragile hands on the patchwork quilt. The door of the adjoining room opened and the second Mrs. Twohey came in, very brisk, with a decanter and two glasses on a silver tray.
“I do hope I’m not interrupting,” she said brightly.
“Not at all, my dear.”
“I called the doctor. He said as it’s Christmas he didn’t think a small stirrup cup would hurt either you or Mr. O’Leary, Judge.”
“Very thoughtful of you, I’m sure,” said the judge without a flicker.
She put the tray on the table, poured a far more liberal wallop than O’Leary would have expected, and planted herself, firmly significant, at the foot of the bed.
The judge held his glass, looking at it a long moment. He raised it then, smiling faintly, faintly sad, faintly amused:
“A stirrup cup, Spig, my friend,” he said.
“He hasn’t long, you know,” Mrs. Twohey said as she opened the front door for Spig. His throat was too full for him to more than nod his head and get the hell out. He sat in the car until the great white snowflakes plopping softly on his windshield covered it, and he started the motor and switched on the wipers to clean it. He didn’t know until then that he was crying.
CHAPTER VIII
JUDGE TWOHEY’S breaking off as he had done was like a chord of music left unresolved, his death three days later deepening the frustrating emptiness it was vain to protest. It was seven in the morning when Nat called Spig and asked him to go over and tell Miss Fairlie. It was still dark, but there was a light in the old kitchen on the Plumtree Cove side of the big house. Through a chink in the shutter he could see her, sitting at the table, with a coffee pot and two cups and saucers on it. She had on a white wool wrapper with a shawl around her shoulders, her short, pale hair still uncombed. Spig knocked at the door. She looked up, and in a moment rose and came over. She unbolted the long, green shutters on the door and pushed one of them open.
“You’ve come.” An icy wind was slashing across the crusted snow. She hesitated, glancing behind her. Then she said, “You may come in here. You’ll catch cold out there.”
He stepped in on the brick floor. It was the first time he’d been in any part of Eden. Perhaps it was neutral territory he was in now. She’d let workmen in to modernise it in part. A white enamelled refrigerator, sink and electric range stood cheek by jowl with the old open fireplace with its crane and iron kettle, and the wood range with a fire burning in it. Generations had added but never removed anything. The hooks for hams still hung from the blackened beams and a few bunches of powdery herbs swayed as Spig closed the door behind him.
“It’s about Judge Twohey, Miss Fairlie,” he said gently. “He died last night.”
“This morning around three,” she said. “He came by here a moment on his way.”
It was only the completely matter-of-fact tone of her voice that startled him. “Did you see him, Miss Fairlie?”
Her blue child’s eyes rested on him a moment.
“Spirit is like thought. It has no substance my eyes can see. I woke knowing he was here. He was passing through. Then I heard your dog barking. I thought perhaps he’d gone your way, too. Possibly we all pass for a moment through the places where our hearts have been. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I came out here.
She went back to the table, her tiny figure erect, her eyes blind for a moment. “I made some coffee. I expect it’s cold now, but you may have his cup. You may sit there.”
She nodded at the other chair and poured the coffee. It was very cold, but Spig drank it as she sat across from him, her eyes blank.
What memory she has, if any, of . . .
They sat there a long time. Finally, she rose. “You must go now,” she said calmly. “Thank you for coming. I think Nathan would be amused at our wanting him to stay when his heart was failing and he could no longer move freely about. It would have been quite intolerable in that house, with that woman in possession, all ears, and Nat hovering around like a sheep about to be shorn. I dare say he was content to leave.”
She went over to the big refrigerator next to the hand pump, set in the br
ick floor over the cistern, and took out a handful of cabbage leaves and a couple of carrots. She handed them to Spig. “There’s a red rabbit out in the end border,” she said. “Leave them there for him on your way home, if you please. Perhaps I should have reported him, but I haven’t done it yet.”
“I’d let him go, if I were you,” Spig said. “He’s not hurting anything, I imagine.”
He didn’t know who you’d report a red rabbit to, but he was aware he’d already assumed part of the old judge’s guardianship—before the letters of patent had been formally issued and delivered to him.
He looked down at them now, lying there on the side of his bed, in the silence compounded of the windrift over the river rustling in the oaks and the voices of the myriad things that speak at night—the bathroom spigot, alien, the loudest of them.
He looked down at Point IV. The determined virgins may decide Miss Fairlie should be sent away . . . I count on you and Nat to act in my stead as your heart and his head best advise you . . . Fortunately, the red rabbit had remained strictly in camera, never reaching the eager ears of the local do-gooders. One red rabbit wasn’t enough to set them off, perhaps, but he’d remembered it with a slight chill every time some character at a cocktail party had clucked lugubriously and said, “Something really ought to be done—it isn’t safe for Miss Fairlie, out there in that old house all by herself.” It was the sublimated itch of the pack, now the Master of the Hounds was gone.