She had forgotten the spoons, and the cocoa pot. She carried them to the sink and washed them, making herself move briskly, making more noise than she had to in order to defy the golden kitchen silence, the black windows, the rattling night.
Because of that, she didn’t hear the knock in time. What she did hear was the faint creak of metal as someone tried the knob of the back door. Had it been entirely the lilacs, then? Who—?
Elizabeth was suddenly so terrified that she dropped the dish towel and stood still, one wrist gripped tightly in her other hand. She could feel the receding hollowness in her chest where fear had hit her like a physical impact, and then desperation carried her out into the middle of the kitchen, where she stood frozenly and faced the back door.
It opened, hesitantly, and Noreen Delaney came in.
And Elizabeth stared, shocked into silence.
Thirteen
NOREEN’S FACE, inside the blue figured folds of her kerchief, was white and incredibly worn. The bluebrown shadows under her eyes had deepened until they looked carven, the eyelids themselves were swollen and gray. The small pale mouth was down-drawn and rigid, as though only the most desperate of efforts were keeping it steady.
Relief, and even any kind of normal greeting, fled from Elizabeth for the long suspended moment in which Noreen stared back across the kitchen at her, eyes empty of everything but fatigue. This was the girl who had left the house three days ago, flushed and smiling. . . .
She found her tongue at last and said very gently, “What’s the matter, Noreen?” and Noreen answered her barely above a whisper.
“Do you still want me to work for you, Mrs. March?”
“Of course,” said Elizabeth, deliberately crisp. “Whatever it is can wait until you’ve had some hot tea. I’ll put water on. . . .
So there was a small cup-and-saucer interval in which Noreen could steady herself, and Elizabeth could try to quiet her own leaping urgency. Instinct told her to go very carefully indeed, now that the prize was within her grasp, because Noreen Delaney must be coaxed and not pulled out of her defensive retreat.
She set the tea to steep, listening tautly to the rustle of fabric, the click of a hanger in the small back hall. She jumped when the swing door from the dining-room opened and Maire put her head inquisitively in.
“Out,” said Elizabeth firmly.
“Who came in?” asked Maire, equally firm.
“The wind. Back to your records, it’s nearly bedtime.”
Maire vanished. At the stove, Elizabeth poured tea and was aware out of the corner of her eye that Noreen had emerged into the kitchen again and was standing uncertainly beside the table. She carried the cups over and managed to set them down without a quiver; she sat down herself with an air of briskness, and after a second or two Noreen murmured her thanks and took the opposite chair.
In the living-room, Constance was evidently aware of the situation; the musical nursery-rhymes had reached a strenuous pitch. Elizabeth heard that, and the imperative questions lined up in her own mind. She waited, edged and expectant, while Noreen met her eyes and then bent her head and stirred her tea. When nothing happened at all after that, when the silence grew harder to break with every passing second, Elizabeth looked hard at the slanted-down face across the table and said, “Something happened over Christmas, didn’t it, Noreen?”
“Yes.” It was blurred and almost inaudible, and the girl’s eyes didn’t lift, but still it was a start.
Elizabeth gathered her firmness. “Hadn’t you better tell me about it? If there’s anything at all we can do—” the irony of that struck at her even as she said it “—we’d be only too glad to.” She caught the answer to that before it came, because there was so very much at stake. Everything, in fact, depended on this young and frightened girl, inarticulate to begin with, now frozen into muteness. She said, “People can help, sometimes, even when you think they can’t.”
Noreen looked up then. She said, “There’s nothing you can do,” in a voice of dead quiet.
Does she know, thought Elizabeth in sudden fury, does she know what a knell that is? Half of her went out in pity to the beaten-looking girl opposite her; the other half was tigerish, defending everything she loved, seeing a possible ally turning timidly away.
The anger prevailed. She set her cup down with care and said, watching her words as though they were printed on paper, “Look here, Noreen. What you do with your own time isn’t any concern of mine. I do think that in this instance, for my own peace of mind, I’m entitled to some sort of explanation. In the first place, you look as though you ought to be in bed—and if you’ve been HI, or had any kind of . . . shock—that’s where you better go. Is that it, is that the trouble?”
Silence for a moment, and then the echo of the front door closing. That would be Oliver, Elizabeth thought bleakly, just when she would have wished him miles away.
Noreen was crying soundlessly, her mouth shaking, her lids lowered. The tears slipped down her pale cheeks, and Elizabeth watched them and hardened herself. You could fight fire with fire, but you couldn’t turn timidity on itself.
She said, “Is it something in this house that’s kept you away, Noreen?”
The girl shook her head; she didn’t look at Elizabeth. Was it impatience at her own tears, an effort at control? Or an answer, to be reassured by?
Elizabeth didn’t find out, because the door opened and Oliver came in, with the children noisily in his wake. The kitchen was all at once in turmoil and that, for the time being, was the end of it.
The children were pleased to see Noreen, and Elizabeth watching with a focus that had narrowed to obscure everything else, watched the girl’s arms go tightly around Maire at the
