Wickhollow

Kestrel

The clock in Augustin Marrow's bedroom has stopped at twenty past eleven.

I note it as I enter. It is a habit. A carriage clock on the mantel, in a case of black marble, with a white enamel dial: Breguet numerals, blued hands, a pendulum that does not swing. Someone has forgotten to wind it. Or someone has wound it past the stop. In a house where every clock is exact to the second, a house in which a servant is dismissed for a minute's lateness, it is the first thing I see.

Twenty past eleven. And it is not yet midnight.

"Ambrose," says Cordelia.

"Cordelia."

"He is on the bed."

I cross the room.

It is a great room, in the old manner, hung with faded crimson silk, with a four-poster bed the size of a ship. The curtains have been drawn back. The fire has been built too high, and the air is stifling. In the middle of the bed, under a pile of white pillows, lies a very old, very small man with his mouth hanging open, breathing in rasps. One side of his face has slipped. The left eye is shut. The right is open, glassy, fixed on the canopy.

I put my fingers to his wrist.

Sixty. Thready. Irregular. I lift the lid of the right eye and shine a small torch into it; the pupil is wide and sluggish. I check the left. It is the size of a pinhead. I lay my hand on his sternum and feel the great slow thud of a heart that has been laboring for seventy-one years.

"Well?" says Cordelia.

"A hemorrhage. Left hemisphere, I should think. Possibly the brain stem." I straighten. "He should be in a hospital."

"He will not go."

"Then he should have a nurse."

"I have a nurse." She does not take her eyes from the bed. "She is on her way from Poughkeepsie. In the meantime I should like you here."

"For how long?"

"Until I say."

…

I have known Cordelia Marrow for thirty-one years, and I have never before seen her sit on a bed.

She does it now. She lowers herself, in her black silk, onto the edge of the mattress beside her husband's hip. She takes his hand. It is a ruin of a hand, mottled and spotted, with the blue veins standing like cords; and she cradles it between her own two small dry palms, and looks down at his face. She does not speak. She does not weep. Her expression is that of a woman examining a document for forgery.

"He called me by her name," she says.

I say nothing.

"At dinner. He called your guest Rosalind. And tonight, at ten, when I came up, he took hold of my wrist and called me Margarethe." Her mouth moves. "He has not said a name in eleven months."

"The mind rummages. At the end."

"Is it the end?"

"I would not say so."

"But you would not say otherwise."

"No."

She nods slowly. The firelight dances on the cameo at her throat.

"He was a very handsome man," says Cordelia. "You would not know it. When I married him he had a head of hair like a lion, and a voice that would carry across a field. I was twenty-two. I thought he was the most remarkable person I had ever met." A faint dry breath. "I was quite right. He was remarkable. He was remarkable in every way that a man can be remarkable, and a number that are not on the list."

I look at her.

"You know," she says. "Don't you?"

"I know a great deal."

"You know what he did."

"I know what you did."

The silence in the room deepens. The dead clock ticks nothing. In the bed, Augustin Marrow draws a long, rattling breath and lets it out.

"Yes," says Cordelia. "That is the other half."

…

It is Pruett who brings the news.

He comes in without knocking, which in forty years he has never done. He is in his shirtsleeves. His white hair is awry. In one trembling hand he holds the cordless instrument from the hall, and his face, that long, patient, tortoise face, has gone the color of tallow.

"Madam," he says. "Forgive me."

"What is it?"

"The telephone. It is the fire brigade at Millbrook." He swallows. "They are asking for the doctor."

I do not move.

"There is a fire at Aldenmoor, Madam. A very large one. The east wing." His voice shakes. "They say it began in the boiler house. They say it has reached the roof."

I feel it.

I feel it happen in my body with a perfect clarity: not a thought but a physical sensation, a cold fist closing in the pit of the stomach. The Quiet Room. The coal gate. A hundred and eleven steps in the dark. A woman in a navy coat with a lantern in her hand.

She has gone.

She has gone, and it has burned behind her.

I put on a face.

It is the oldest instrument I own. It is a smooth, grave, civil mask, the face of a man who has been told a patient has died and who is entirely composed. I turn it on Cordelia. I let a little color drain from the cheeks. I let the eyes widen.

"My God."

"Ambrose."

"The patients."

"They will have been evacuated."

"The Quiet Room." I say it low. "She is in the east wing. The girl. You had her moved."

"I had her moved." Cordelia's eyes are hard. "Warren moved her, at my instruction, at four on the twenty-ninth."

"I must go."

"I should prefer that you stayed."

"Cordelia, I have forty patients in that building."

"You have a man dying in this one."

"I have a hospital on fire," I say, and my voice does not break. "I shall be sorry to leave you. I shall send my registrar in the morning. But I am the medical director of Aldenmoor, and if I do not go to it tonight, there will be no medical director in the morning, because the board will have no choice but to dismiss me."

She watches me.

I think she will refuse. I stand with my hands at my sides and meet her gaze, and I wait for the cold small voice that has said no to a thousand men.

"Very well," says Cordelia.

"Thank you."

"Ambrose."

"Yes?"

"Take the Bentley." Her eyes return to the bed. "I shall not be needing it."

…

I find Warren at the foot of the stair.

He is standing in the hall, under the great Philadelphia clock, with a telephone in his hand and an expression I have not seen on his face: a naked, white, frozen look, the look of a man in a dream who has walked into a room and found that the floor is gone. He does not turn his head as I come down.

"He's not answering," he says.

"Who?"

"Hollis." The words come out thin. "I've rung eleven times."

"Warren."

"He's always answered. Nine years. In the shower. In the grave. He's never let it ring three times." He lets the receiver fall. It dangles on its cord. "I told him twelve. At twelve I was to hear. It's twenty to one."

I put on my gloves.

"Perhaps," I say gently, "he is occupied."

His eyes come up.

They are red and swollen and very cold. They travel over my face, slowly, as the light of a lamp travels along a wall. They stop at my left wrist, bare, with the cuff open and no link in it.

"You've taken off your cufflinks," says Warren.

"I lost them."

"Both?"

"I am a careless man."

"You are the most careful man I have ever met."

I smile. It is the same small smile I have worn to the funerals of his friends. "Then you have not met many," I say. "Good night, Warren."

I do not hurry to the door.

I do not hurry down the steps. I do not turn my head. I walk across the gravel to the long dark car that Pruett has brought round, and I get in, and I wait while the old man closes the door on me with infinite respect. I wait while the headlamps rake the white lawn. And I do not let out my breath until the lions on the gateposts have swept past, and the great gray house has dropped behind the hill.

Then I drive the Bentley eighty miles an hour through the snow.

…

Aldenmoor burns like a painting.

I see it from three miles off. A red stain on the clouds, a pillar of smoke leaning in the wind, a glow that wavers and pulses and shows the underside of the storm. I come up the hill with my lamps off and stop at the lodge, where three engines are drawn across the drive and a policeman in a yellow slicker is waving his torch. The whole east wing is alight. The roof has gone. Flames pour from the windows of the ground floor in a bright, quiet, orderly way, as though they had been invited, and above them the stone is black and the sky is orange and the snow falls through it all in slow soft flakes, turning pink as they fall.

I give my name.

The policeman salutes. I walk up the drive among hoses and water and running men, with the heat on my face like the heat of a stove, and I count. I count the patients, in their gray blankets, being led across the lawn to the west wing in lines of ten. I count the nurses. I count the engines. I count the ambulances: two, three.

A stretcher is being lifted into the second.

It carries a big man in a long coat. His face is black with soot and his head is wrapped in white gauze, stained a bright red at the crown. His eyes are shut. A paramedic walks beside him with a bag of fluid held high. I do not need to ask. I recognize the jaw.

"Alive?" I say.

"Skull fracture, sir. Burns to the legs. He was dragged out." The man glances at me. "By one of your orderlies. The little bald one. He's in the lodge. He won't stop talking."

"Talking?"

"Giving a statement. To the trooper." He hesitates. "You'd want to hear it, sir."

I look at the stretcher.

For a long moment I stand in the glare with my hands in my pockets, and I look at the face of the man who has stood outside my door for nine years. I think of a woman on a pantry floor with her cap off. I think of my own hand, a week ago, on the telephone: Go to bed, Bridget. Go to bed.

He is alive, I think.

He is alive, and he is going to testify.

I find that I am glad.

…

Wickhollow is a house on a hill.

I will not describe the drive. It takes an hour and fifty minutes, through the snow, on roads I have not driven in twenty years. I find that I still know the turns. I know the covered bridge, and the dairy with the blue silo, and the three white birches at the fork. I know the long climb through the woods, and the stone gateposts without a gate, and the lane that runs between two stone walls, old and mossed and tumbling, up to the crown of a bald round hill.

It is dark when I reach it.

It is a plain, square, ugly farmhouse of gray fieldstone, two stories and an attic, with a slate roof and a single chimney. Nothing about it is remarkable. Nothing is lovely. It was built by a Dutch tenant in 1810 for a purpose long forgotten, and bought in 1976 by a young doctor named Margarethe Kestrel for a sum that included the furniture. It stands alone on the top of the hill with a wind-bent apple tree at the door, and in the whole of the winter landscape it is the single place on earth that I have never once permitted myself to visit.

There is a light in the kitchen window.

I stop the car. I turn off the engine. For a very long time I sit with my hands on the wheel, listening to the engine tick as it cools.

She is here.

I think it with a kind of wonder.

I get out. I cross the snow. There are tire tracks in the lane, very fresh, and footprints, a man's and a woman's, going in at the kitchen door. On the step there is a canvas sack. Beside it, wrapped in a tartan rug and set carefully on a folded towel, as one might set a child, a walnut clock is ticking.

I stand there.

I stand there with the snow falling on my shoulders, and the clock ticking, and the light coming gold and warm and quite ordinary through the window above the sink. And for the first time since I was ten years old, I raise my hand to the door of my mother's house, and knock.

…

She opens it herself.

She is in a gray wool dress that is not hers, too large, with the sleeves pushed up. Her feet are bare. Her hair, which has grown, I think, a quarter inch in a week, is damp and standing up in dark tufts, and there is soot on her cheek. A smear of coal dust runs from the corner of her mouth to her ear. She has a dish towel over one shoulder. She looks at me, in the doorway, with the snow on my coat and my hat in my hand, and there is nothing at all in her face.

Then she says, "You're late."

"Yes."

"I had your tea ready at three."

"I am sorry."

"It's cold."

"I do not mind."

She stands aside.

I come in.

It is a plain, low, whitewashed kitchen. A long deal table. A black iron range, with a kettle on it. A dresser of blue and white plates. A rag rug. A calendar on the wall, three decades out of date, open to November. The air smells of wood smoke and tea and hot toast. A man I know, with a gray moustache and a chauffeur's cap, rises from a chair by the fire, and looks at me, and says in his slow country voice: "Doctor."

"Marcus."

"I've put the boxes in the cellar."

"Thank you."

"I've put the car in the barn." He hesitates. "I took the liberty of lighting the stove."

"You did quite right."

"The young lady said you'd want tea."

"I should," I say.

I put my hat on the table.

I put my gloves beside it. I take off my coat and hang it on a nail by the door, where a child's coat once hung, and I stand for a moment with my back to the room and my hand flat on the wall.

I feel her come behind me.

She does not touch me. She stands a pace away. I can hear her breathing. The kettle is beginning to sing.

"I did a thing tonight," she says.

"I know."

"I left him in the fire."

"Yes."

"I could have gone back."

"He is alive, Elspeth. I saw him go into an ambulance." I turn. "He will give evidence, with a fractured skull, against the men who gave him orders. It is the single best thing that could have happened."

"Teague."

"Is in the lodge. Telling a trooper about a pantry."

She looks at me.

I see the soot on her face, and the tremble in her chin, and the great dark eyes, and I see her try to keep her face still, and fail.

"Ambrose," she says. "I don't know what I am."

"No."

"I put a man in a trance. I made him strike someone. I made him..." Her voice breaks. "I did it as easily as breathing."

"Yes."

"Don't say yes."

"I am a physician." I take a step. "I do not say things to be kind. You made a man hit another because you were afraid, and he was ready, and the door was open. It is what I would have done. It is what I have done, many times, to patients who wished it." I stop. "You did it to save your life. That is the only moral difference between us."

"Is that a difference?"

"It is the only one I have."

She shakes her head slowly.

And then, quite suddenly, she steps forward and puts her forehead against my chest.

I stand with my arms at my sides.

Then I lift them.

…

We read it in Rosalind's room.

It is at the top of the house, at the end of a narrow stair, under the slope of the roof. I have not been in it for thirty-one years. A small white room with a sloping ceiling and a single dormer window. A narrow iron bed. A deal wardrobe. A bookshelf, with the spines gone pale. On the wall above the bed, in chalk and blue crayon, drawn on the plaster by a child's hand, is a picture of an orchard.

I stand in the door.

The trees are glass. They are drawn in blue chalk, thin and fine, with branches like veins. The apples hang from them in little round circles, each with a tiny scribbled bell. At the foot of the trees are ten steps, going down. And at the bottom of the steps, in the middle of a pale blue pool of chalk, is a little figure in a white dress.

"You drew it," says Elspeth.

"I traced it." I do not move. "She drew it first. She was fifteen. On the wall of her room, in October, when she had begun to be unwell. I put my own on top."

"It's beautiful."

"It is an accident."

"Is it?"

"It is a picture of a place where nothing can hurt you." I cross the room. "I thought, at ten, that if I could only get inside it, I should be safe. It took me twenty years to understand that it was not a place. It was a prayer."

I sit on the edge of the bed.

The envelope is in my pocket. I take it out. It is brown, thick, tied with a faded ribbon of green silk. On the front, in a girl's handwriting, round and upright and a little careless, are written four words.

Ambrose — from me — never open.

I turn it in my hands.

"I have carried it for thirty-one years," I say. "Not once have I opened it. Not when I was twenty. Not when I took my degree. Not when I stood in the gallery of the hospital I built and watched them carry out my first dead patient." My voice is very quiet. "I told myself that it was a promise."

"Wasn't it?"

"It was a coward's excuse."

She sits beside me.

She does not touch me. She sits close, with her shoulder an inch from mine, and her bare feet on the cold boards, and looks at the chalk orchard on the wall. And after a while she says, in a voice that is very gentle:

"She wrote never. She didn't write not yet."

"No."

"But she wrote from me."

I look at her.

"I think," says Elspeth, "that is the part that matters."

I break the ribbon.

…

Ambrose,

If you're reading this, you're a big boy now, and I've been dead a long while, and I'm sorry for the mess.

I want to say first that I'm not afraid. Don't think that. I thought I'd be, and I'm not. It's the strangest thing. They say a person who's about to be hanged goes calm in the last hour. I've gone calm like that. I think it's because for the first time in my life I've decided something.

I decided to tell you.

You're ten. You won't understand most of it. I'm writing it in words you can read when you're older, and I'm putting it in a place Mother will never look, which is the one place she's never once gone: the inside of your own head. You'll remember where. You always did remember where I hid things.

Here is what happened.

I stop.

I cannot go on. My eyes will not hold the page. I feel her take the letter from my hand, quite gently, as one takes a glass from a man who has had enough. She smooths it on her knee.

"I'll read it," she says.

I nod.

She reads.

Her voice is low and level and sweet, and I shut my eyes and listen to it, and I see a girl of fifteen with black hair to her waist sitting at a desk by a window with a candle, writing, the night before she died.

In August there was a party. Mother gave it, at St. Brigid's, for the Marrows, because she wanted the house to be given to her, for the hospital. I was made to wear the blue dress. I was told to be nice. I was nice. I was nice to Mr. Marrow, who is the district attorney, and to his wife, who looked at me the whole evening as though I were something she'd found on her shoe.

After supper, Mr. Marrow asked me to show him the library.

I won't write what he did. I'm not ashamed. I know now that I haven't anything to be ashamed of. But I don't want it in your head, Ambrose, any more than it is in mine. I'll only say that I told Mother, and that she was very quiet, and that she said: 'You're a hysterical girl. You mustn't say such things.' And she took me to her room, and gave me a spoon of something from a brown bottle, and I slept for two days.

It happened again in September. And in October. And in the third week of October, I found I was going to have a baby.

Her voice stops. She waits. I do not open my eyes.

"Go on," I say.

She goes on.

I told Mother. She went white. She said nothing at all. She went out, and shut the door, and I heard her on the telephone in the hall, speaking very low. In the morning there was a car. It was Mrs. Marrow's. She sat in our drawing room with her gloves in her lap and drank a cup of tea.

I was in the next room. The door was open an inch.

She said: 'Margarethe, this is an unfortunate business.'

Mother said: 'Yes.'

Mrs. Marrow said: 'The girl is unwell. You said so yourself. A hospital would be best. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere she can be looked after until she is better.' And she put her cup down. 'My husband is prepared to be generous to the hospital. Very generous. The east wing, I think, and the new boiler. And the Foundation will, of course, look after Ambrose.'

Mother said: 'Cordelia.'

Mrs. Marrow said: 'Yes?'

And Mother said: 'How long?'

There is a long, long silence.

The wind rattles the dormer. The chalk apples on the wall are very pale. I do not look at them. I sit with my eyes shut and my hands lying open on my knees, palms up, like a man waiting to be paid, and I listen to Elspeth Calder breathe.

"Ambrose," she says. "There's a little more."

"Read it."

So they're putting me in the Quiet Room tomorrow night. Mother says it's only to rest. She says I'll feel much better. But I've heard her on the telephone, and I've seen the needle on the tray, and I'm not a fool, Ambrose. I can add.

I'm not writing this to make you hate her. She's weak. She's a very frightened woman who has made herself the only kind of person she knows how to be. I think that when it's over she'll go on being it, and you'll be angry with her, and you'll want to be angry with her forever. Don't. It isn't worth it. She'll punish herself far worse than you could.

I'm writing it because I want one person in the world to know that I didn't do anything wrong. Not one thing. Not one. I was a good girl. I was nice. And a man did what he liked, and the people who could have helped me counted what it would cost, and decided I was cheaper to lose.

That's all.

Ambrose, you have gray eyes, like me. I always wanted to tell you they were the best thing about you. They see everything. It's a terrible gift. But you're clever, and kind, and you'll know what to do with it. You'll do something good. I know you will.

Build me a garden. Somewhere nothing can fall.

I love you. Go to sleep.

Rosa.

…

I do not weep.

I wish to record this, as a physician, as a matter of professional interest. I sit on a narrow iron bed in a white room under the eaves with a letter on my knee, and I do not cry. I feel the whole structure of me, thirty-one years of it, the glass and the pendulums and the careful architecture of a life, begin quietly to come apart. It does not break. It simply unfastens, plank by plank, like a ship's hull in a long swell, and I sit and watch it go.

Build me a garden. Somewhere nothing can fall.

I did. I built it to her drawing, down to the last apple.

I built it, and filled it with other people's pain, and sat in it for nine years, and called it a cure.

"It was never a prayer," I say.

"No."

"It was a tomb."

"Ambrose."

"I put every broken thing I could find into it, and I stood at the door, and I said: I have made you safe." My voice is shaking. "I did not make anyone safe. I made a place for people to be quiet."

"Ambrose."

"She asked me for a garden, and I built her a crypt."

"Ambrose."

She is kneeling on the floor in front of me.

I did not see her move. She has taken both my hands in hers. She is looking up into my face with her large dark eyes, and they are wet, and fierce, and very clear. She says:

"She said go to sleep."

I stare at her.

"That's the last thing. She doesn't say remember. She doesn't say avenge. She says go to sleep." Her fingers tighten. "You've had thirty-one years of nothing else. A watch and a lamp and a hundred patients. But she didn't ask you for any of that."

"Elspeth..."

"She asked you to rest."

I look at her.

I look at the small pale face, and the cropped crow-black hair, and the soot, and the line of the jaw. And I remember a voice in the dark of a warm room, on New Year's Eve: you will sleep. I remember the sweetness of it. The weight of her palm.

I do not know why I am afraid.

"There is a bed in the next room," I say.

"I know."

"It was my mother's."

"I know."

"I cannot sleep in it."

"I know," says Elspeth. "That's what I'm for."

She rises. She holds out her hand.

I take it.

…

I will not describe the rest.

It is a thing that belongs to two people and a candle and a quilt and a very old house. I will say only that she is gentle with me. That I had not known she could be. That she undresses me by the light of one flame as though I were a child coming in from the cold, and that I let her. That we lie in the dark, in my mother's bed, under a patchwork of faded blue squares, and she lays her head on my chest and sings.

I do not hear the end.

She sings it very softly. The two lines. The four notes. The slow falling cadence that I learned from a tape without knowing. And at the word home, somewhere in the deep warm well of the dark, a door that I have held shut for thirty-one years swings open, without a sound, on a pale blue orchard, and a girl in a white dress who is waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

She holds out her hand.

She says: Go to sleep, Ambrose.

I go.

…

When I wake, it is half past ten, and the sun is up.

It is shining on the quilt. It is shining on the wall, where the chalk orchard glows faintly blue in the light, and on the floor, and on a bare shoulder an arm's length from my face. I lie still. I listen. A bird is singing in the apple tree. Downstairs, a kettle whistles, and a man's heavy tread crosses a stone floor, and a door opens and shuts.

I have slept for eleven hours.

I lie on my back and look at the sloping ceiling, with its cracks and its cobwebs and its one brown stain in the shape of Ireland, and I think: I have not slept like that since I was a child.

I think: I did not dream.

I think: She did it.

And then, with a slow cold pleasure that spreads from my chest to the ends of my fingers, I think: she did it on purpose.

I turn my head.

She is awake.

She lies beside me with her chin on her fist and the sheet pulled to her ribs, looking at me with grave dark eyes. There is no triumph in her face. There is no guilt. There is only a kind of wary, watchful tenderness, the look of a woman who has laid a hand on a wild animal and is waiting to see whether it will bite.

I know.

I know in that instant, all of it. I know why I have slept. I know how. I know the word, and the tune, and the touch. I know it as I know my own hands. I have done the same thing a hundred times, to a hundred patients, with a gray watch and a lamp.

I look at her for a long moment.

Then I say, very softly, "How many?"

She does not pretend not to understand.

"Forty-one," she says. "The first night. Eleven last night."

"Ah."

"Are you angry?"

I consider.

I search myself, with the thoroughness of a man who has been trained to look: for rage, for revulsion, for the cold quick hardening of the heart that comes of being used. I find a certain quantity of wonder. A kind of rueful professional respect. And under it, large and warm and entirely unreasonable, a thing I have no name for.

"No," I say.

"You should be."

"I know."

"Ambrose. I've made it so you can't—"

"Sleep without you." I smile. It is a small crooked unpracticed smile, and it feels strange on my face. "Yes. I worked that out at about the sixth hour. In a dream I did not have."

"I'm sorry."

"Are you?"

She looks away.

"No," she says. "That's the worst of it. I'm not."

"No," I say. "I should think not."

I put out my hand. I lay it on her cheek. It is warm, and a little rough, and wet.

"I asked you for a mirror," I say. "I did not know it would be so accurate."

…

The telephone is in the hall.

It is a black bakelite thing on a shelf by the stairs, with a rotary dial. It has not rung in thirty years. I did not know it was connected. When it begins to jangle, at ten past eleven, we both freeze, halfway down the stair, in our borrowed clothes; and Marcus, passing with a coal scuttle, stops and looks at it as though it were a snake.

I answer.

"Doctor Kestrel."

"Ambrose." It is a woman's voice, dry and low and iron. "Miriam Castellane. I took the liberty of getting this number from the letter."

"You are very welcome."

"I have news."

"Go on."

"There was a hearing at nine. Saturday, in chambers, by Judge Hale's special indulgence, as Warren had arranged it. I was there. So was Warren, with two partners and a very tall young man from the Attorney General's office, who looked as though he'd been brought up from the cellar." A pause. "They had a petition. Involuntary commitment of one Dahlia Reeve for a term of two years. The doctor's affidavit, the evaluator's report, the usual."

"And?"

"And the patient was not produced."

I close my eyes.

"Warren stood up and said that she had been removed by an agent of Dr. Kestrel's, in the course of a suspicious fire. He said you had abducted her. He said you'd destroyed a hospital." Her voice is dry as bone. "I said that was a most interesting proposition. I said that, as it happened, I represented a Mrs. Elspeth Marrow, née Calder, a resident of the State of New York, presumed dead on the fourteenth of October. And I handed up a sworn statement, to be read in open court."

"Miriam."

"By a gentleman called Edward Teague. Who was in custody. At the time." There is a silence. "He's been talking since midnight. He has given four hours of statement to the state police. Bridget Sorrell. Christmas Eve. Mr. Hollis's instructions. Mr. Warren Marrow's name."

I lean on the wall.

"Hale was very quiet," says Miriam Castellane. "He removed his glasses. He looked for some time at the ceiling. And then he said, 'Mr. Marrow, I believe I should like to defer this matter. For three days. Until Tuesday the sixth.' And he turned to the clerk, and he said: 'The petitioner will produce the patient on that date, at ten o'clock. In the meantime I order that no person shall attempt to take her into custody. Is that understood?'"

"The sixth."

"The day after the gala."

I cannot speak.

"I thought you'd be pleased," says Miriam.

"I am," I say. "I am pleased."

"You sound as though you've seen a ghost."

I look up the stair.

She is standing three steps above me in the gray dress with the sleeves pushed back, one hand on the rail, the sun from the landing window falling across her face. She is looking at me with a small, grave, questioning frown. She has heard it all. She knows.

"No," I say, into the receiver. "I have not seen a ghost, Miriam."

"What, then?"

"I have slept," I say, "for eleven hours."

There is a pause on the line.

Then, very dry, very gentle, after thirty-six years of knowing a certain kind of man, Miriam Castellane says, "Well. That will do it."