Another reason. Harry Brendan was the only person she had told of even one, and he would not have gone around confiding it to people—would he? Or had he only pretended to believe her, because he was attracted to her and was waiting for this phobia to spend itself?
Sarah was still stinging with anger from what Kate had said; this new undermining thought undid her caution completely. She said curtly, picking up her bag, “I don’t believe Charles ever went near a psychiatrist. I don’t believe he jumped out of that window. And if you were about to warn me that if I keep on about this I might find out something worse, I’ve already been very thoroughly warned about my own good—and I don’t believe that, either.”
She could not, at just this moment, face either Harry or Kate. There was a back door and she started blindly for it. Behind her, Rob said in a mock-startled voice, “Look out, she bites!” and then, in a very different tone, “Maybe you’ve been warned about this, too, but don’t you think that’s a rather dangerous thing to go around saying, if you’re right?” He was squeezing the sponge out in a grip so tight that his hand looked contorted. “I’m right,” Sarah said evenly, “and I suppose it is dangerous, in the proper quarter.”
She had lost track of the time in this sharp and queerly vivid interval, and when she opened the door the dusk, holding steps and trees and shrubs in a watery uncertain grasp, came as a surprise. She turned as she went out, said pleasantly, “By the way, have you seen Milo’s portrait of your cousin? That’s a rather dangerous thing to go around painting,” and closed the door very quietly behind her.
She didn’t immediately go down the railed wooden steps. She looked back through the uncurtained window into the lighted kitchen, and Rob Clemence was still standing at the sink, sponge forgotten in that tendon-whitening grip. While she watched, he dropped it onto the drainboard, picked up his drink, and walked rapidly out of the kitchen. Sarah saw without surprise that he wasn’t limping at all.
xv
BESS HAD UNDERGONE her usual six o’clock sea-change, short gray hair brushed high and crisp above her eloquent and rather haughty face, figure a spare black cutout after the rough and careless clothes of the day. Sarah realized with a new awareness that Bess exaggerated both her existences, and enjoyed each because of the other. This metamorphosis was not the usual shower-and-change; it was a ritual.
Charles had called her, fondly, the Duchess of Pheasant Pharm. How had that inborn air of command subdued itself to Nina Trafton? How would Bess have felt if, after Edward Trafton’s death, Nina had planned to sell the farm, and with it Bess’s dual life?
The dusk had been navy blue when Sarah stepped out of it into the living room; the primrose light inside turned it to an instant black. And the stage had been set for a talk more formal than the earlier one in Bess’s bedroom.
This was normally the hour for cocktails, but there was no sign of Hunter or Milo or Evelyn. The white door to the dining room was closed, and from behind it, over the gravelly protests of the crow, came the strains of a rhapsody on the record player. Music to Sell the Farm By, thought Sarah sardonically, but she was too tired and too bitter to care very much.
She said abruptly, “You were quite right, Bess. This is a lovely place, but I wouldn’t have the faintest notion of how to hold it together from one day to the next.”
“It is big.” Bess was much too poised to show any easing of tension, any triumph at a mission accomplished; in a classic maneuver, she concealed the depth of her anxiety by an apparently open reference to it. “I won’t pretend that I’m not delighted. I’ve gotten rather bound up here with all those foolish birds. But let’s not talk business tonight. You aren’t going to rush away now that you’ve decided, are you? You’ll stay at least until Monday?”
Sarah nodded. Bess said with an air of keenness, “You’re tired, aren’t you, Sarah? And of course this can’t have been the happiest place for you to come. . . .” She opened the dining-room door as impatiently as though she herself had not arranged the closing of it, and called crisply, “Hunter? You are making drinks, aren’t you?”
Sarah went upstairs. She had a notion that she was going to be examined very thoroughly by someone’s eyes during the next few hours, and she armored herself unconsciously.
She changed her suit for the only dress she had packed, navy tissue wool as slender and active as a fencer’s costume. At her throat and ears she put the pearls that Charles had given her, and then instinctively took them off and wore only earrings, small pale-gold leaves that shone quietly against the short curve of her hair. Leaning toward the mirror, lipstick poised, she remembered without warning the context of the phrase that had jumped into her mind in Kate Clemence’s kitchen.
“The dreamer cometh.” It was from the story of Joseph and his brothers, which had haunted her as a child because, on a thundery summer afternoon, she had found a shirt of once-brilliant calico impaled on pussy willows in a field behind their house. And how did the rest of that infinite cynicism go? “Behold, the dreamer cometh. Come, let us kill him, and cast him into some old pit, and we will say: Some evil beast hath devoured him . . .”
Charles’s dreams, evidence of his breaking-point. Come, let us kill him, and cast him— Sarah shivered once, uncontrollably, and turned her back on the mirror as though the cruelty lay there.
What had Charles wanted of Kate Clemence on that last day, so urgently that he had telephoned her in Preston? Sarah
