JEFFREY HELD THE door open. The old lady and the widow stepped from the rocking coach and climbed some wide stone steps into a darkened hall where two maids stood by with sour faces and hands crossed apron-wise. Full of “Madam” and “Right away,” they hurried about, collecting the old woman’s shawl and bringing her house shoes. One maid was small and mousy and never met anyone’s eye. This was Emily. The other was tall and wide-shouldered and had the bearing of a man. She was Zenta. Emily went off down the hall, shuffling her feet. The hall windows had been darkened by heavy curtains. The widow stood in the cool gloom and they listened to Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot discuss her case while the widow’s eyes adjusted and objects rose up out of nothingness. A ticking clock upon the hall table. A chair with petit point backing that featured a unicorn kneeling in a garden. A Persian runner carpet at her feet. A convex mirror above the hall table in which the old lady and her maids appeared in remote tableau, small and hunched together as if conspiring.
“What’s her name?” Zenta was saying.
“Goodness, I don’t know,” said the old woman. She turned to the widow. “What is your name?”
The widow was about to say “Mary Boulton” but realized in time that she must not use her real name. “Mrs. Tower,” she said.
The old lady’s intelligent eyes scoured her again, just as in church, and again wintry suspicion crept into them. “Are you lying to us?”
“No.”
“She’s lying,” announced Zenta.
“What is your first name, then?”
The widow’s head was pounding. There was no answer; nothing came to her.
“I told you!” said Zenta, triumphant.
The widow went to the chair by the stairs and sat on its edge. She put her head down. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m hungry, and I feel a bit faint.” This statement caused a great excitement in the women. Together they hurried down the hall crying, “Emily!”
The widow could hear the old woman’s peeved voice from the kitchen, then Zenta’s rough reply. A small pot bonged. A cupboard door slammed shut. The widow saw the front door, still open, where the day burned upon the stone landing. On the stoop was a rough grass mat crusted with dried mud. She sat upright again and her eyes darted toward the sounds coming from the kitchen. She did not know where she was, or how far from the road she might be. She stood up, light-headed, swaying beside the hall table. On its surface lay a pair of gloves, a shoehorn, some envelopes. An enamelled Chinese bowl held keys and coins. On her way to the door the widow clawed up a handful of coins. She pulled out a little velvet pouch she kept hung about her neck on a black sash under her clothes, and into this she dropped the coins, adding theft to her list of crimes.
She rushed to the threshold but stopped and went no further, for there on the gravel drive was the coach, and next to the horses was Jeffrey. Crows high up in the trees made craggy calls. If not for this man standing in the way of her flight, those crows would have seen another black thing moving into the trees.
Jeffrey stood with his back to her, idly polishing some brass harness ornament, and he spoke to the mare, a poor-looking blue roan, as gently and reasonably as if it were a woman he loved. His hand swept in pacifying strokes over the mare’s shoulder, and traces lay loose upon its speckled grey hide. The widow’s heart pounded. She felt a braid of intention unravelling within her. Ghostly plans of flight, so recently formed, unformed themselves. A wandering puff of cooking smells came to her, and her stomach answered with a terrible pang. She could hear women’s voices somewhere in the unknown house. Were they coming back to get her? Surely they would not leave her alone for long. Someone heavy-footed was coming down the hall.
Still, the widow was unable to take her eyes from the brightness of the day, from freedom. Someone called out, “Mrs. Tower!” At that sound, both horse and man looked around to where she stood in half darkness, their eyes moving like twin shotgun barrels. The widow let her knees go out from under her and fell unresisting to the floor.
SHE HAD BEEN carried up the stairs by Jeffrey, the women behind him shouting orders as he went. She had not fainted, nor was she unconscious: twice he knocked her ankles on door frames and twice she tucked her feet in. The women sat her on the bed and shooed the man out before setting about a feminine reclamation of this wreck. They stripped the outlandish funeral costume from her body. Among its folds they discovered a pocket containing the widow’s small Bible, very expensive and of fine paper, which Zenta thumped onto the bedside table without comment. The old woman flipped a few translucent pages and stopped. She stared at the minute marginalia therein — inscrutable symbols and signs drawn by an inexpert hand.
“How queer,” she murmured and put it aside.
The widow sipped some clear broth from a double-handled soup bowl, and then they made her eat a little buttered toast off a napkin. As soon as the widow lifted the slice of toast, Zenta retrieved the napkin, inspected it for butter stains, then popped it in the pocket of her apron. The widow recognized the motive. Linen napkins might go a month without washing if you were careful. They were laid across your lap only to catch disastrous spills on skirts and pants, which were far worse trouble to clean. Seeing Zenta’s hard hands, the widow had a sudden vision of yellowed squares of cloth laid out upon the grass to bleach in the sun.
Finally, she was taken to a bath and washed by Zenta, who scrubbed her as if she were a child, lifting limbs and pulling hair and swivelling her about for a better grip as the widow’s buttocks squalled against the glazed metal tub. Water sloshed and a wooden brush bobbed upon the waves. She could not remember the last time someone had washed her. And Zenta was strong. It caused in the widow a fleeting sense of the physical submissions of her own childhood, the helplessness of it. Then later, the sudden onslaught of her husband’s hands and face and body. The way he might seize her in the midst of his urgency and roll her over to get at her from behind, like she were a doll or some other invulnerable thing.
“That weren’t a real spell you had. I know that much.” Zenta scrubbed at her shoulder blades, the back of her neck. “And you’re not the first one she’s brought home.”
“The first what?” the widow asked but was yanked by the upper arm to twist and face her keeper.
“Don’t be smart. I despise a smartarse. You remember where you are, missy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Hand me that brush.” The widow handed the wooden brush over her shoulder and submitted to a brutal currying of her hair, her scalp pulled taut and her eyebrows raised. She was obliged to hold on to the edge of the tub with both hands.
“She takes it too far, I say. Bringing home all manner of rubbish so Emily and I have to deal with them. Charity is one thing. Letting ’em steal the silverware’s another. Pissing in the coal room. Making off with my Sunday roast in their jackets. And guess who doesn’t like it when there in’t any dinner?” Zenta’s hands were like hooves pounding a flinty road, her breath stormy on the widow’s cheek. “And now it’s you, little miss sly-boots. I’ll tell you one thing: if you hurt that old woman’s feelings or abuse her kindness, it’ll be a damnation on you. I’m not like her, you know. I don’t believe you’re mad. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you a’tall.”
“I’m not mad,” the widow said.
“I don’t wonder you’re weak, though,” the woman said. “You’ve had a baby. I can tell by the look of you.” She gestured at the widow’s sore and laden breasts. They had been used, then abruptly unused, and the widow had had no clue how to remedy the disaster.
Zenta’s eyes shone unkindly, she was pleased with her cleverness. “How long ago? I’d guess two months. Where is he now?”
There was no answer, which indeed was the answer. No lie could touch the question. The widow’s mind shut off the image that had grown up before her, ghastly and sudden. She met Zenta’s eye, a ragged, hot attention forming where before there had been nothing. Zenta saw it and her face fell.
“Oh no. You didn’t . . .” Her voice became soft and peculiar. “Did you lose it?”
The widow’s long hair dripped, strewn in weedy patterns across her back. “Yes.”
“Did it live long?” Zenta asked with a strange eagerness. How precious news of suffering is, how collectible.
The widow looked down to where her toes were splayed out against the tub and saw for the first time that several nails were dark with blood. One middle toe was badly cut. She did not know what had caused this. She felt no pain there, nor anywhere else in her body. Did he live long? How far away from here? How long ago?
She brought the heel of her hand to her mouth and bit down hard, waiting to feel the yank of pain. The hand was not numb, in fact she knew she had broken the skin, but the throb that came afterward was distant, a fretful voice floating on the air. Both women gazed at the ring of marks left there on her palm, a pink stain forming slowly.
Zenta’s scrub cloth hung frozen in the air. “You can get up now,” she said, wholly unnerved. “Get up.”
BEFORE SUPPER, a storm gathered to the east. Clouds dimmed the air and smears of rain angled near the horizon. A blue haze of humidity hung everywhere. Inside the house it was cool, the hallways shadowy. Evening seemed to fall, then fall again. They had taken supper early, the old lady alone in the dining room, mirthless, as if eating were a chore. The widow ate in the kitchen, sitting on a high stool, holding her plate on her lap. Food! She was so grateful for it.
When the dinner platters came back, Zenta and Emily quickly devoured what was left. Without seeming to do so, the widow watched them carefully. She remembered from her father’s house that maids did this. Ordering a little too much at the meat counter, cooking a few too many potatoes, then scavenging afterward. She remembered one thin girl who had been caught pocketing boiled eggs wailing, “But how else am I to eat?” And it was a good question, considering the pay. Her father had counselled tolerance; her grandmother had fired the girl. Secretly she watched Emily scoop up broken potatoes with a serving spoon and shovel them into her mouth. It must have been hard to manage when the old woman ate so little. But, as a guest of sorts, the widow was given her own heaping plate, then begged a glass of wine, and to her surprise was given one. Despite her bluster, Zenta believed everyone deserved a good meal.
The widow lay that night in the wide, cool bed. It was so much like her old bed, in father’s house, so familiar. The room around her was silent, dull as an unrung bell. No wind outside, no rain yet. Just a heaviness in the air that yearned to break. Was she safe here? Could she stay? Would the old lady keep her word? The widow shivered in the heat. Silence invites the mind to murmur; a dark wall waits like a canvas for imagined shapes. As a little girl, she had lain awake at night, staring hard into her lightless bedroom, imagining that the darkness congealed and shifted — a shadow play, black on black — and she had waited for what chimera might show itself. A strange child, she had been unafraid of these things, monstrous figures reaching for one another, sickly shapes boiling up like dumplings in dark broth. Her only fear was that they pantomimed her flaws and sins. Some nights she said her own name over and over again, as protection, as explanation.
She had often been an insomniac, alone in a house of sleepers. Her father could sleep anywhere, even sitting up at the table if he wanted; her grandmother, with her creams and hairnets and blindfolds, snored raucously. Even the dogs lay like corpses by the door, not a tremor betraying them. But she would be awake, wandering the house or leaning on her windowsill to watch the moon rise and wither, to follow the predations of foxes and cats. And then later, when she was married, sleeping in tents with her husband and all the men, she would sit at the tent flap hugging her knees, following with her eyes the wide paths of wolves round the camp. Praying that they would not yip, that the men would not wake, that there would be no rifles.
In the cabin, with her husband asleep and late-spring snow blown under the door and across the floor in sugary whorls, she had lain awake, standing over the baby as he tried to breathe.
The widow shot up, nearly weeping, and staggered from the bed, hands out in front of her. She hurried into the hall and felt her way downstairs to the drawing room, finally opening the French doors. She rushed outside, panicked and stunned. Lightning burst behind the hills, silvering them. She closed her eyes and saw an image burned there, a hole-punch moon above. In your underclothes, where will you run, barefoot and half-dreaming?
Finally, distant thunder came riding down the atmosphere, booming, and the widow stepped back indoors.
DURING THE NEXT two afternoons the widow would peep into rooms to see if anyone was there and, if not, tiptoe in and look around. In this way, she familiarized herself with the house and the private habits and details of the women who lived there. She scrutinized the blotter in the old woman’s library and saw incredible sums mirrored and crawling its lower border. The old lady’s bedroom was as simple as a nun’s cell — two single beds separated by a bedside table and nothing else. All her feminine clutter, what little there was, was packed into the large closet, her late husband’s clothes stuffed to the back. Of the two beds, only one seemed to have borne any weight, and this was the husband’s bed — now dusty and yellowed.
Emily, it seemed, was an amateur artist. Among fallen cardigans and tumbled blankets, the floor was littered with pencil drawings of children: girls in bonnets, boys at the seaside poking sticks into the waves.
Zenta’s room had a strange, unpleasant smell to it, the odour of perfume gone bad with age. An inept alphabet sampler hung over her bed — the widow looked up close with an expert’s eye and saw a thousand minor struggles there. Bless This House Lord. Her father had often rolled his eyes at women and their petitions to God for blessings. “Shout down a well, and tell the frogs what you want,” he’d say, and her grandmother would huff and scold. He had teased her once that he would do his own sampler: Blast This House. “And not one of your tea cronies will notice, because none of them can read.”
He had been completely unaware that his own daughter did not, strictly speaking, read. She read the way others might make their way through a mathematical equation, each part decoded in turn, held in the memory while the next was decoded, the whole revealing itself over a long time. As a child, she was never expected to write anything. Her small hands got better at needlepoint, forming rows of letters; she listened as a young maid sang the alphabet song in the kitchen; she watched as her father set up block letters on the church sign. L-U-K-E. She suspected that for other people words might come fully formed and recognizable, not a jumble of parts, but as familiar as faces. For her, there were only letters, dull and flat as cars in a train. Words sounded out letter by letter, the sound often defying meaning. Friend. Enough. Go back and try again.
All she was ever asked to read from was the Bible, and that rarely, so she had relied on her memory, and had devised a way to mark the pages so that she could remember. And in this way she managed to hide her weakness. Asked to read from her own Bible, sing a hymn, or chirp along with other parishioners at the minister’s call and reply, she could give a good recitation. If her father had known, what would he have said?
The widow looked now at the woollen letters of Zenta’s sampler. She tried to tamp down a bloated B, plucking at a frowsy thread, but it was hopeless. She listened for the sound of footsteps and, hearing nothing, proceeded to dig through the maid’s closet. She discovered that Zenta’s bedslippers, faded and ugly, fit her very well. The skirts were all short, above the ankle, but this was true of all maids. A servant could not carry a tray upstairs if her skirts were too long.
She went through the little boxes and cloth bags and wrapped packages in Zenta’s cupboard, and she could guess what item of feminine arcana lay in each. She herself had had masses of them. When she had found herself finally in the cabin with her new husband and she had unpacked her trousseau, the dresses with silk-covered buttons had lain in her hands like artifacts from another world. She had stood in the damp bedroom and gazed upon these clothes as if her body still stood in them. She could see herself posing at parties, sitting by a lamp and listening to her father, or huddling under a blanket in a sleigh at night as a lantern swung back and forth behind her. It had been obvious what she must do. She had packed away her former self and begun sewing clothes, rough simple things to fit her new life.
And now here she was, peering into a maid’s cupboards and trying on a maid’s slippers. How shocked her father would be to see his daughter now. She could almost conjure up his uncomprehending, questioning face. And yet he had believed so firmly in the alchemical nature of existence — that the path of a person’s life could be predicted down to the last breath, if only one could see human interaction for what it was: a collusion of physics and chemistry.
What, then, would be his explanation for this? What billiard ball had come along to knock her into this decaying house? Could he have foreseen his daughter running through fields, dogs in pursuit? Or his son-in-law struggling on the cabin floor in his own blood while she stood watching? Could he have even imagined the small grave? The child dying, his breath fading? Surely that crisis should have wrung some forewarning from the very air, from the clouds. It should have come to her in dreams, raging. And yet there had been no warning, and no remedy. From that small devastation, all this had followed. Alchemy, physics, prophecy. Darkness erased them all.
They would come soon, her husband’s brothers. She could almost feel it in the air. There would be gossip among the church people, news travelling like a smouldering fire, driven by vindictive tongues. They could not fail to find her. And yet, she could not run away in the night as she had before, without thinking. She must have a plan, give no warning, take useful things. She picked up Zenta’s boots and slipped one on.
THAT EVENING, she met Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot in the gloomy hallway, the bird lady stepping like a feeble djinn out of the murk. The widow was again in her black clothes, which were now clean.
“Go and get your Bible. Come and see me in the drawing room,” came the order. “You can read to me.”
A few minutes later, the widow came through the drawingroom door. The fire was blazing against a perfectly mild August night, and the old woman sat near it, dandling a glass of amber liquor.
“Sit,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink.”
The old woman went to a table and unstoppered a crystal bottle. Beside it was a bowl filled with huge shards of ice hacked by Emily from the icebox. Each piece was perfectly clear and too big to float. It was not lost on the widow that she was being served by the old woman, as if she were an equal. So, with tinkling glasses, they sat together by the fire. The widow smoothed the fabric of her dress over her knee and sniffed the scotch in her glass. “I don’t drink usually,” she said.
“You will. You’ll find it helps. The way some people talk, you’d think the stuff was rat poison. For women, at least.”
The old woman became thoughtful, patted the overstuffed arm of the chesterfield. “You know, I don’t hold with the view that women can’t live like men. We’re not all that unalike, the two sexes. Drinking injures us no more than it does men. Neither does a year or two at university, as I had. Of course, my husband used to say that men are stronger and so must do the heavy work. I say fiddlesticks. Look at Zenta. That woman could throw a horse over a fence.”
The widow snorted and covered her mouth in glee.
“Well,” the old lady laughed, “it’s true, isn’t it?”
“It is. Zenta frightens me a little.”
“If I were you, I’d be afraid too.” The old woman gazed into the fire. “She’s a spiteful woman. And clever. For some reason, she dislikes you more than any other person I’ve brought to the house.”
The fire wheezed in the grate and settled, gushing a renewed brightness into the room. A door to the forecourt stood open and moths floated in, seeking the brighter indoors. It was unearthly quiet.
“Where are you from, my dear?”
The question was unexpected, and it startled the widow. She had not yet constructed a plausible deception, and so she froze, the question unanswered. A lie might have ended things, shrouded her in a dull, forgettable fog. But now, inescapably, she had been silent long enough to call suspicion on herself. There was nothing for it. She simply clammed up. For a few moments, the women sat awkwardly side by side on the massive chesterfield.
“Can you at least tell me where you were born?” The old woman’s voice was unexpectedly gentle.
Still, no lie rose to the widow’s mind.
The old woman simply carried on. “I was born in Dauphin. Do you know Dauphin? No? I’m not surprised. It used to take us a week by ox cart to visit Winnipeg. I thought Winnipeg very grand. Can you believe it? We had a hundred acres, a team of oxen, a large house — well, large for those days — and a barn. My father was a doctor, and my uncle farmed. We were all in the same house. I slept in a bed with my sister until the age of fifteen, at which point I feigned a sleepwalking habit and was given my own bed. That was wicked, I know, but it was the only way. We had no toilet, no plumbing at all. They melted snow in winter for water.”
The widow, too, had melted snow in the cabin. She remembered the taste of it, shovelfuls melting away to mere cups in the pan. She saw the metal pot on the stove, a lavish mist rising into the frigid air, bricks of snow skating the rounded edges as they hissed and melted. A basket of her husband’s long johns waiting to be washed. The baby nearly silent now, needing nothing, wanting nothing, his crying done, his life winding down. And her husband sitting, eating a bowl of soup. Humming. The widow brought the glass to her lips, her hand hovering, then drifting back down to her lap.
“I remember,” the old lady continued, “that all eight of us slept for a while on a large pallet, supported by beams. And we were separated by blankets, for privacy. Since I was at the end, the hired man slept next to me. I could hear him breathing. He had a little dog that snapped at me through the blanket every time I rolled over. It was a wretched dog, named Grenadier. As I recall, it was a hideous colour, like tobacco.”
The widow realized she had been only half listening. She glanced at her benefactor, expecting to see her lost in her own thoughts too. But there was the feral face, watching intently, the eyes moving back and forth as if reading a book. The old woman only talked so that she could observe.
“It was dark much of the winter, and cold. We women spent time in our beds after the chores, just to keep warm. We sat together with the sheets pulled up to our chins, and the dogs lay at our feet and the cats crawled in under the blankets. We all had fleas. You simply lived with that fact.
“One spring, we went off to Winnipeg to buy a new stove. We had a cart and two massive oxen that together could pull almost a ton. They had the ridiculous names of Maxwell and Minnie. I was terrified one of them might step on me and kill me. As they walked past you, the ground shook. My father had purchased this pair of monsters from a man outside Russell. They were tremendously stupid, gentle animals with huge woolly heads. They looked prehistoric. Well, we lumbered along all day and through the dusk into night. There was no moon overhead, nothing to show us our way, but we all trusted in my father. I remember we were lying under many blankets, and the moon was completely blurred by mist, and beautiful, you know? So I went to sleep. Now, when I awoke, it was to the most terrific uproar, my parents shouting, the other girls screaming, and the cart leaping as if the ground itself had begun to tear apart. I realized that we were speeding through the trees at top speed, the oxen apparently gone mad. It was all I could do to seize my younger sister and hold us both to the floor of the cart.”
“What was it?” the widow said.
The bird lady smiled to see how well her tale had taken hold. “Well, I peeped my head over the railing and realized the oxen were charging toward a small light, a house perhaps, I couldn’t tell at first. And then I could see it was a barn. Alone on a frozen field, surrounded by trackless forest, was a farm, and the oxen had found it. In fact, it was their home. This was the very same farmer who had sold them to my father. Without the moon to guide him, my father had drifted too close to Russell, and the oxen had smelled home and made for it, with a vengeance. A pair of oxen can move pretty quickly when they see oats in their future. It makes sense now, doesn’t it?
“The farmer and his wife were nice people, but perhaps a little childish. They put us up for the night and fed our oxen. The wife gave us biscuits and told my sister ghost stories that failed to frighten her but kept her up all night pondering the mysteries of death. She wouldn’t let me sleep, and I was at my wits’ end to shut her up. I remember sitting up and hissing, ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and die then, and let me sleep!’ Finally, in the morning, my mother’s beloved cat could not be found. We all went searching without success for almost an hour, until finally a plaintive mewing was heard, and we found him pressed between our hosts’ mattresses. The wife had hoped to keep him. I still remember her tears as my mother carried the miserable, limp animal to the cart in the frigid morning and placed him in his cage.”
“Your mother kept the cat in a cage?
“That strikes you as odd? I suppose it was odd. But we’d be here all night if I tried to explain my mother’s mind. I’m not even sure I could.”
The bird lady sat stiffly on the soft couch by the roaring fire, her drink almost finished. The thought of her own mother seemed to wither her, to redirect her mind along a sadder path.
“I remember only cold,” she said, “snow against the doors. My father on the roof shovelling it off. Even in spring it was unbearable. My sister was put outside to play one day, missing one mitten. My mother ignored her cries to be let in. You see, in those days children were supposed to get fresh air whether they wanted it or not. By the time she got back in her hand was frostbitten. Almost frozen through. Her fingers never grew properly after that.” The old lady drew a line across the pads of her fingertips. “Never grew past here.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Oh yes. Frostbite hurts a great deal, especially once the flesh begins to thaw.”
“No. I mean, the rest of your body growing and your fingers not growing.”
“No. Well . . . I don’t know.” The old woman smiled. “What a queer question.”
The widow took a little sip of her Scotch, and it burned slowly all the way down.
“You might read to me now.” The old woman’s voice was fading. She seemed to have shrunk even farther somehow, as if she were a miniature version of her already small self, sitting lightly on the soft cushions.
Obediently, the widow put down her drink and took up her Bible. She opened it to a page — it seemed like any page but was, in fact, a deliberate choice — and she began to read in a plain, loud voice. “The Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem; the shepherd’s pastures are scorched and the top of Carmel is dried up.” The recitation went on from there.
The bird lady tried to conceal her fascination, but it proved impossible. Finally, she leaned closer to peek over the widow’s arm at the book. The page was covered in marks and illuminations, strange symbols and pictures. The widow read in halting rushes. She only looked at the book once in a while, as a navigator does to check a map. The rest, clearly, was recited from memory. Well-rehearsed and dreamy, it went on and on, rote memory never failing, a formidable performance. Like watching a sparrow dip and surge in the air, resting as it flies, tireless, without thought. Slowly, there came into the old woman’s eyes the pall of doubt. This pet was not turning out as expected, but was following perverse lines, unknown and covert routes. The old lady looked away, and let the widow babble as she wished. “Enter the narrow gate. The gate that leads to perdition is wide, and many go that way; but the gate that leads to life is small and the road narrow, and those who find it are few.”
When sometime later Emily arrived with a tray of hot chocolate, the old lady bolted from her seat and scolded, “Not now, Emily, not now!” So, the recitation went on unhindered, until the weird symbols petered out, and memory failed, finally, and the lesson died away senselessly, and the book was closed.
IN THE MORNING, they came up the drive under a canopy of tall oak, walking in the wheel ruts with their rifles across their backs. August dandelion seeds floated across their path, as if nature itself hoped to bewitch them from their purpose and dream them into the trees. But still they came on, over the tufts in their path, through floated cobwebs, their identical faces vigilant and sober. The first building to rise into view was the barn, a wide, unpainted structure with two massive doors standing open, a tin roof, and wooden filigree along its eaves. A little cupola on top watched them come. They could see the house now too but made for the barn, because it was closer.
Jeffrey was in the stalls sorting through old bridles when the door went dim, as if a cloud had passed over. He looked up to see the silhouettes of two large men standing side by side. They had guns. Jeffrey slowly removed his cap and held it uncertainly, his eyes assessing them; then, making a decision, he screwed the cap into his back pocket. He didn’t speak, he didn’t move. He waited. He was a man accustomed to waiting. And slowly, the men, who had been stiff and unmoving as statues, began to shift and shuffle as doubt overtook and annoyed them, impelled them forward on their fine black boots into the gloom of the barn. Two horses watched them come, the animals’ long faces hanging over the stall doors with the guileless, expectant gaze common to all horses, even the hellraisers.
What Jeffrey saw were two men as similar as twins. And yet, after a moment, he could tell they were not the same at all. To his eye one was a follower, a second, identical perhaps in size and shape, and certainly colouring, standing abreast of his brother as if he were his equal, but he was not. He was somehow subordinate, in shadow, a copy not entirely faithful to the original. As if to illustrate, the other spoke first.
“We’re after a girl. People say she came through here. Your missus maybe picked her up.”
“I don’t have a missus,” said Jeffrey. The two redheads moved closer — and he was right, one moved first and the other followed.
Their eyes were the problem, he could see that now — never mind the dour and brutal cast of their faces, the sheer size of their bodies — but in their eyes, a profound cunning. Of course people would talk, yammer helplessly looking into those eyes. The people in this town, normally clannish and suspicious of strangers, would find themselves suddenly blithering. Usually, when you saw that glint in a man’s eye he was a small man, mean, and resentful of being small. How calamitous, then, to see it in a big man, and doubled.
“Who is she then?”
“Who?”
“The woman of the house.”
“My employer. What do you want with her?”
“We told you. We’re after this girl.”
“And people told you what? That we had her?”
“That you might. That your missus picks up lame ducks sometimes.” Jeffrey knew he’d said missus deliberately. “If she’s got our girl, we want to know it.”
“You don’t look like policemen,” Jeffrey said, taking in the cut of their fine clothes, their freshly barbered beards.
“We’ve been deputized, if that’s what you mean. Now, have you seen her?”
One of the horses began to stamp in its dry stall. It jerked its head. Jeffrey’s face registered the movement, as if saying, I agree. Let’s get rid of them.
“She hasn’t taken in anybody for weeks,” Jeffrey said. “Yes, she sometimes picks up the poor, or as you say, lame ducks, people needing help. But we haven’t any girl. Now, if you don’t mind . . .”
The two men shifted a little in the doorway, almost spreading out, enormous impediments. Strong as he was, if Jeffrey had tried to get past them he couldn’t have done it.
“I’m asking you to leave the property,” he said firmly.
A long, tense moment followed, but finally they did turn to go, stepping out onto the grass, where the distaff twin, the copy, turned and said, “She’s our sister-in-law. Does that make any difference to you?”
“None.”
“Nor that she killed our brother?” This from the first twin.
Jeffrey held his hands out in an appeasing gesture and said, “I’m sorry” in exactly the same way he’d said it to butchers and wheelwrights and vagrants looking for a handout, the same way he told the old woman she couldn’t have things before they were fixed, the way he’d said it a hundred times to a hundred other people. He said it the way one jerks the reins on a defiant horse, one hard yank that means no. But in that moment, all was lost, because it did make a difference to him. The girl he’d had in the carriage, the girl who the last two nights had slept under the benevolent old woman’s roof, the dark, furtive girl he’d held in his arms and carried upstairs was a murderess. It made a difference all right. And they saw it in his eyes as clearly as if he’d spoken. Like everyone else, Jeffrey had given them what they wanted.