Nor was the woman herself. Every word, every glance, every small detail that related to Nina Trafton increased Sarah’s conviction that she had been the victim of some uncontrolled love or hate or jealousy; that she had died simply because she was Nina. She had thought she could balance a tightrope, walking delicately among these various personalities and enjoying the risk, and she hadn’t made it after all.
Sarah was queerly sorry for her, because whatever else she was she had been warmly alive, and whatever else she had done she had made Edward Trafton perfectly and innocently happy. Even now, after all these months and by a total stranger, she had to be shaken consciously free of, like a beguiling dream.
Looked at in one light—the fact that Charles had indeed drugged Miss Braceway and gone to Nina but left her alive, perhaps in her bedroom, perhaps coolly gathering her towel and shampoo—the nightmares made a sensible pattern. He would have blamed himself for her death, which must have come as a tremendous shock in spite of his bitterness, but the tragedy for which he had set the scene was simply that —until the murder of the nurse. Sarah could still remember his whitened face on the late summer afternoon when Kate had told him. His inescapable conclusion then would have been that Miss Braceway, doggedly defending her own reputation, had remembered or suddenly been able to prove something that turned Nina’s death into murder.
And it had to be one of the people among whom Charles lived who had known that the scene was being set, that the nurse would be unconscious and Nina, to all intents and purposes, alone. Someone in whom he had rashly confided, or who had overheard him confide in Harry Brendan, and watched him very carefully after that.
Peck’s arrest had been a reprieve, because if the nurse had been the victim of a drunken and senseless violence, it didn’t go back to Nina. Charles was still morally guilty, but he had not been an unwitting accomplice to murder.
With Peck’s release, the black burden would have become, as all burdens put down even briefly, intolerable. He did not even have the relief of sharing it with his wife. Obsessed with his guilt, unable to forgive himself, he could not believe Sarah’s judgment would be less damning than his own. He did not have the courage to face what he thought would be her inevitable rejection of him, although he knew that his silence was wrecking their relationship as surely as a confession would. His marriage was cracking up, he had alienated himself from his family and friends. He had lost any hope he might have had that time might solve his problems. He must have decided to come forward, at whatever cost to himself and one other member of that close little group, and he must have said so.
Memory prickled coldly at Sarah, presenting her with the day Charles had come home edged and driven, gaze unnaturally brilliant, mouth twisting with irony at her suggestion of a weekend at the farm. He had made himself an outsize drink with careless haste, but when he repeated his salutation it hadn’t been careless at all but intent and down-staring. “Here’s how . . .”
X—and what a frightening faceless sound that had— would have soothed him down, would have said, “Wait. Think of Sarah. It’s her future too, you know, and besides, you can’t be sure that the nurse’s murder wasn’t freak coincidence. Look here, I’ll give the police up there a jog and get in touch with you.”
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
