“Jerry!” Carlos’ voice was low and urgent. “There’s a car coming up the old right of way through the orchard. You don’t want a guard to stop her, do you?”
“Her?”
“It’s a white convertible, and—”
Already Jeremy was outside the window, Carlos at his heels. Tash and Hilary followed, hurrying around the East Wing to the orchard.
“The old right of way!” cried Hilary. “It’s an unpaved lane, so neglected and overgrown for years I didn’t even think a car could get through, but I should have remembered it.”
“So should I,” said Tash. “Sam Bates told me about it the first time I came here.”
“There’s always a disused place that everybody forgets,” said Hilary. “That’s how the Dauphin was smuggled out of the Temple, to vanish forever during the French Revolution.”
The forgotten lane was deep in shadow under the trees. The car coming toward them so slowly was visible in the moonlight only because it was white.
There was a curve in the lane. The car did not follow the curve. It left the lane and kept on coming toward the house over the grass slowly as if it were rolling in neutral down a slight incline under its own momentum. As it came nearer they could see that the one occupant was in the driver’s seat, but the hands slid off steering wheel while the car was still moving.
Jeremy ran across the grass. The others followed. Evening dew soaked their ankles.
Jeremy got to the car first. It was still moving slowly. He ran beside it, reaching for the hand brake. The car lurched to a stop.
It was she, slumped in one corner of the driver’s seat, eyes closed, head on her own shoulder, fair hair drifting across her face. There was a bruise on her forehead, bleeding a little.
Jeremy opened the car door. Without a word, he lifted her out of the car, cradled her in his arms, and carried her over the grass to the house.
“Look,” said Carlos.
On one side, the whole length of the car was scored with a deep gash from front headlight to rear fender. It looked like a sheet of paper that had been slashed savagely with a bowie knife.
“What could have done that?” cried Tash.
“Some projection that struck the car when it was moving at high speed, sharp enough to plow through its skin of thin modern steel,” said Carlos.
“I’ve seen other scars like that before,” said Hilary. “They happen most often if you try to pass a truck at high speed when you’re shaving it too close. Another millimeter and that would have killed her. I wonder if she was conscious when it happened.”
“Probably not fully conscious, but the other driver may have been. Let’s hope it was too dark for him to read her license plate.”
8
TASH WOKE AT dawn next morning. While she dressed, she listened to news on the radio.
“Vivian Playfair, the Governor’s wife, who was reported missing yesterday, returned to Leafy Way late last night. Carlos de Miranda, the Governor’s A.D.C., told newsmen that it was all a misunderstanding, and Mrs. Playfair is deeply distressed by the anxiety she may have caused for a few hours. The Orioles . . .”
It was still early when Tash left her car in the executive office parking lot. The day was windless, the landscape still as a painting. Birds called to each other in the trees above her head, and sun filtered through the leaves. It would be hot in an hour, but now the delicious freshness of dawn lingered in the mild air.
It came to her then that beauty and peace are largely aspects of vegetable life and inanimate nature. The moment the animal appears, even in his humblest forms, ugliness and war take over. What was an animal but appetite? A mouth, a maw, and a clutch of eggs and sperm feeding on one another?
Such thoughts do not come to people who are happy, especially on a beautiful spring morning. Why was she unhappy?
She met Hilary in the corridor of the office wing.
“I was looking for you. Vivian wants to see you. She’s upstairs.”
They passed through the door to the rest of the house and went up the wide stairway. Hilary led the way down the central corridor and knocked on a door.
“Come in!”
The door was opened by a young woman in a black dress with a black silk apron. One look at her face told Tash that this was Juana. “Monstrously scarred,” Jo Beth had said. It was worse than that. The whole face was puckered on one side by a cruel scar that ran from hairline to chin.
No wonder she had emigrated to America. To live with a face like that in Barlovento, where sex was still a woman’s only value must have left far more monstrous scars on the mind, however invisible. Tash was almost afraid to think of the banked fires that must burn secretly night and day under her unnaturally self-effacing manner.
Opaque curtains were drawn across every window in the bedroom. Only one lamp was burning. Its shaded light fused all the pale colors of the room into a gray monotone.
Vivian was sitting up in a wide bed, propped against a pile of pillows, smoking a cigarette. Even her fair hair and lacy bed jacket looked gray in that treacherous light. Once more her eyes were dull and her face lax and old-looking as they had been the first time Tash saw her. There was a patch of surgical tape on one temple.
She made an effort to smile, but it wavered and collapsed. “I’ve caused so much trouble,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad to see you back. There’s really nothing to be sorry for.”
“Oh, but there is. I should have left word that I was going out. I just didn’t remember to do so. That’s my trouble. I don’t remember things. You are not going to believe this. Nobody else does, but it’s
