Sarah stood perfectly still, one hand on the latch of the door behind her, ready to re-open the way to security. (Or was it?) She was not brave by nature, and ridiculously sinister notions came to her constantly: what if she looked behind the chair where she was reading and a total stranger stood there, still as a statue, just staring at her? What if she came upon her stone marten scarf secretly chewing a morsel of meat in its narrow dark jaws? What if she went to meet a train and saw herself getting off and coming toward the car, or baby-sat for a friend and saw the tiny pink feet in the bassinet with their soles dirtied?
The night and the barn about her were real, but as yet untried. It was not like a high diving board, mounted in public view; she could lift the latch of the door and go back and no one would be the wiser. Any shame would be as private as the project itself.
It was a trick of light that made up her mind. When she moved the flashlight beam, it shot across the piled logs at the end of the barn. The open doorway into the stable, its wooden ramp hidden, turned into a tall black space like the one Charles had faced. Fatally weak, fatally trusting, plummeting through the bottomless night air.
She would always see that if she went back now. She would remember what all those people had managed to suggest to her, and she would think: Fifteen feet more, or twenty, and I could have proved they were wrong.
Or was the doubt hers, as much as the necessity?
Quiet in her flat slippers, shivering in the thin wool dress that had no collar or folds or loose sleeves to trammel her as she went in and out of the pens, Sarah advanced into the stable. Now that she had committed herself she didn’t hesitate. She picked up the stick Milo had used to kill the mink, telling herself that she might have to pry up a plank, but comforted by the strong well-balanced weight of it. She located the Elliots with a sweep of the flashlight, roosting side by side in their nesting box, and unfastened the catch of the mesh door and went inside.
She stooped consciously, so as not to rise up to her full height and alarm them, but she needn’t have worried; the Elliots, so active and distrustful by day, stared glassily ahead of them without stirring a feather. Perhaps they were terrified into immobility, or adopted it instinctively as a defensive measure. At any rate they didn’t bother Sarah. She stirred the litter away from the planks with her slippered foot and probed at the corners with the stick. The planks were old but tight, and there were no new nail-heads and no stopped-up place to indicate the rat-hole that Peck had found and investigated.
Peck’s death notice, because he had also found a diary?
The Silver had become alerted by the light and the sound of her progress; Sarah heard him grunt throatily and jump down, almost as heavily as a small child, from wherever he had been roosting. In the passing beam of the flashlight he faced her, magnificently black and white behind his crimson face. No one, he seemed to say, is going to bother my wife.
Sarah slipped into the Reeves’ pen. The cock didn’t like it; from an icy gold carving he sprang into a wild whir of wings, veering close to Sarah’s bent face, veering back again. The hen, catching alarm from the beating feathers, shot madly around the enclosure, hit the wire, was stunned, and flew up again to a branch of the leaning bough. Sarah, who had lowered her head and not dared to look, proceeded by inches to the back of the pen.
Like the Elliots’, the planks here were old and firm and untampered-with, at least as far as she could tell. The board partition met the flooring firmly, with no room for crevices. A long arch of barred tail-feather was within inches of her hand; the Reeves cock, however disturbed, could not prevent that in this enclosed place. Sarah moved respectfully around it, edged out of the pen, and fastened the door behind her.
She had somehow known it would be the Silvers: because they had been moved, because Charles had thought their pen innocent; most of all because of her own dread of them. Sarah stood motionless in the stable, the blackness about her deepened and thickened by the ringed disc of brilliance from the flashlight, the barn smell, at this moment, something she knew she would never forget. It was compounded of old timbers and litter and feed, hay and cement and leather, the whole brought alive by the indefinable scent of the birds. It wasn’t a rank scent, or even musty; they were kept too scrupulously clean for that.
Was it possibly the smell of her own fear, or of anything done in darkness and secrecy?
Sarah could hear her heart and feel the moment when it accelerated slightly. Moving quietly, she crossed the cement floor and removed the lids of two metal containers before she found the one that held corn. What had Charles said the pheasants would do anything for? Raisins, or boiled potatoes. She hadn’t seen any raisins on the kitchen shelves; she had an unstrung vision of herself going back inside and furtively boiling potatoes in the dark.
She would have to try the corn.
The Silver cock grunted as she approached the door of the pen, and the throaty sound rose and quickened almost to a honk as she opened it and stepped inside. The door closed behind her, and the cock came unhesitatingly forward; when Sarah released the stream of corn, he struck savagely at one kernel and then another, dashing them to
