There was a shocked silence as he left, and a few little curls of gray on the icy air as mouths opened involuntarily. Then Bess said violently, “Peck would never—besides, he’s a country man and he’d know exactly where the mink would—”
The second argument was no more convincing than the first; in fact, it was disastrously less so. It outlined an almost classic scheme of revenge, Sarah thought: letting one person’s mink loose to kill another’s pheasants. Everybody lost, because the bludgeoned mink pelt would hardly be salable and even if it had not savaged the pheasant Bess Gideon would have eaten a neighbor sooner than one of her own beautiful birds.
Peck might harbor a grudge against Hopkins because he had been fired from the mink farm; Sarah turned her mind wilfully away from the one thing he might want to pay the Gideons back for. She was relieved when Kate Clemence arrived to borrow some sugar.
Kate had looked smart but ill at ease in New York; here in her own setting she had regained her magnificent, cope-with-anything calm. She was tall, and she ought to have looked masculine and muscular in the man’s beige weatherproof parka, its hood up to show only an uneven fringe of black hair, but she didn’t. It was a tribute to her that they were all diverted from the unpleasant notion that still hung on the air.
She greeted Sarah with a politeness that might have passed for warmth if nobody was listening. She said to Bess when she asked for the sugar, “I could do very nicely without it, but”—she grimaced out of what seemed to be habit— “you know Rob.” Rob was evidently the brother Charles had mentioned, and well known to the Gideons, although Sarah had never seen him. “What are you all standing around and freezing for?”
The mink was exhibited, and Milo’s tale retold. Kate said with unflattering surprise, “Well, good for you, Milo!” and Milo answered modestly, “Oh, come, I’m not all brain.”
“You’ll have coffee, won’t you, Kate? Even Rob can wait five minutes. But first come and see my Manchurians, although they won’t have settled down yet; I only got them yesterday . . .You haven’t seen them either, Sarah,” said Bess, and in spite of the afterthought quality of the invitation Sarah went with them.
The stable had been shadowed, and the silver-polished morning broke upon her like a wave of sound. After the night of freezing rain and sleet, light lay along every twig of every tree, gates and pens were glittering, the grass shattered crisply underfoot. The pheasants, unperturbed by the cold, made patterns of warmth and motion as they began to pace at the sight of Bess.
The blue-eared Manchurians were in the end pen of the row against the pines. Sarah thought at once that every other hen on the place must be hating this one, because instead of the usual quiet variations of brown she wore her mate’s soft slate blue, arced with white at the sides of the head. Only his spurs set the cock apart. They were dowager-like birds, moving with calm slow dignity.
“Aren’t they lovely?” said Bess pleasedly. The water in the rimmed holder had frozen lightly although she had put it out less than an hour ago. She opened the door of the pen and broke the film of ice with a gloved finger. The Manchurians retreated a little, but without haste. “I’m not sure about this end spot for them,” Bess said, frowning as she closed the door. “The man I bought them from had them more enclosed.”
Kate considered. “You could put up pliofilm. Or you could move the Reeves.”
Bess laughed dryly. “You could move the Reeves, thank you. Frightful-tempered things. I only got them because I wanted something that came into color the first year.”
Unnoticed, Sarah went back into the house. Evelyn had made fresh coffee and was setting out cups and saucers; she said over her shoulder, “Kate’s coming in, isn’t she?”
“Yes, in a minute. They’re looking at the Manchurians.” How peculiar her voice sounded, but then it had to filter through the wild amusement that filled her head. “Evelyn, has Bess any Elliots?”
“Now there’s the sugar Kate wants . . . Elliots? Yes, those kind of dark gold ones in the stable. You didn’t get chilled out there, did you, Sarah?”
Reeves and Elliot. Not menacing figures in some hidden segment of Charles’s life, when he wrote down their names on that last day, but pheasants on a farm two hundred and fifty miles away.
viii
IT WAS MID-MORNING before Sarah got an opportunity to give Bess the travelling case and gold watch.
She had sewn the tear in the shirred lining of the case, managing with a great deal of difficulty to get the dangling pink thread through a needle, and although the repair job was far from expert it wasn’t noticeable at a casual glance. Then, because it occurred to her that someone might have thought she would put the gold watch in the suitcase, to be handed over in one gesture to Bess, she took the watch from a compartment in her handbag and opened the back. It shone emptily at her, and although there was another inner casing, that was empty too. She supposed that she ought to have felt ridiculous even in looking, but she did not.
Bess said, “Thanks so much, Sarah; the travelling case was a birthday present from Charles last year. You’re absolutely sure you don’t mind about the watch? It’s one of those foolish family things but I suppose we ought to keep up tradition and hand it on to Hunter.”
Who looks, said Sarah silently, like not having anybody to hand it on to after him. Why? He would be attractive to women, with those cool eyes in the weathered face, and further enhanced by his very inaccessibility, like a fruit at the top of a thorny tree.
They were upstairs in Bess’s room, at her suggestion; she
