Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (36 page)

 
          
Coward. Coward, coward, coward. If you were
going to run, you should have run
away.

 
          
Memories
just beyond her grasp roiled the sluggish surface of Winter's consciousness,
troubling but not enlightening her. But if there were something here in the
house where she'd grown up that she no longer remembered, it could hardly be
important—to her or to Grey.

 
          
With
that thought, a dull spike of pain began to throb monotonously behind her right
eye. She really ought to go down. Waiting would not improve matters, and would
only give Mother more ammunition in her campaign to render Winter a homebound
invalid.

 
          
And why not? Isn't she right? All I proved
by leaving
Fall River
was that I'm not capable of coping with the real world. I set out to remember
the past, and all I did was confuse myself further. I don't even know what's
real any more. I've lost Grey forever, and now I feel guilty about that, too.
And as for whatever it is that's chasing me . . .

           
It wouldn't follow her here to
Wychwood
. It couldn't.

 
          
There
was something so disturbing about that certainty that it made dinner seem
innocuous by comparison. Winter smoothed her dress one last time and hurried
down the stairs.

 
          
Despite
her penchant for continual redecorating, Mother had left the dining room alone.
It was just as Winter remembered it: cream and Wedgwood blue, the colors echoed
in the
Aubusson
carpet and the stiff damask curtains
that stayed closed no matter the hour or the season. The first course was
already on the table and five places were laid. Winter wondered who the holdout
was, Father or Patricia; her mother and her two brothers were already there,
waiting for her.

 
          
"Winter!
How good to see you." Kenny came around the table, looking formidably
stuffy in his three-piece Brooks Brothers suit in banker's gray. He hugged her
in a distant formal fashion, and Winter could smell the mingled scents of bay
rum and expensive bourbon. Kenny was the eldest; in his early forties now. More
whiskey, less hair, but otherwise unchanged from her last memory of him—how
many years ago?

 
          
"Kenny,"
she said. "You're looking well. Is Patsy joining us?" Those were the
things people said, weren't they? Normal people—and people passing for normal?

 
          
An
elaborate
Waterford
chandelier showered light on the silver and
crystal on the table and the mirrors on the walls; a setting as pristine and
inhuman as the surface of the moon.

 
          
"Patricia
had to stay late to show a house farther out on the
Island
. Father will be along when he can,"
Mrs. Musgrave said from the foot of the table. She'd also changed for dinner,
into something
floaty
and formal the color of ashes
of roses. Heirloom diamonds glittered in her ears. "If only you'd let us
know you were coming—"

 
          
"He'd
have had time to beat it out for
Frankfurt
instead of just a late meeting—but I forget,
Winty
,
you were always his favorite," the last of the dinner party guests said.

 
          
The
childish diminutive brought back an instant snapshot memory of her sixth
birthday party—and of the toddler, crowing with delight as he buried his face
and both hands in her birthday cake, ignoring Winter's hysterical screams of
rage.

           
"Hello,
Wych
,"
Winter said. "And it was Kenny who was his favorite, not me."

 
          
A
ripple of surprise spread among the others at this plain speaking; Kenny
coughed and
Wych
grinned maliciously and Miranda
Musgrave sat up straighter in her chair. Disapproval etched stark lines into
her face.

 
          
"Do
sit down, Winter. Father will want us to start without him. And you do need to
keep up your strength."

 
          
"Yes,
Mother," Winter said meekly, her flash of defiance over. She sat down at
the table across from her brothers. The ghosts of dinners past crowded around
her as she picked up her soupspoon and tried to will herself invisible.

 
          
"And
how are things at the bank today, Kenneth dear?" Mrs. Musgrave asked,
smoothly taking command of the conversation.

 
          
Kenny
began his reply—which would be exhaustive yet diplomatic, as always—and under
cover of her mother's ostensible absorption in the discussion with her elder
brother, Winter studied her youngest brother. Everything else was the same—was
he?

 
          
Wych
was dressed much too casually for a dinner at
Wychwood
, wearing a rumpled sport coat over an open shirt.
His hair was several weeks late for a haircut. Like Winter, he possessed the
pale chestnut hair and hazel-brown eyes of their
Wycherly
grandmother, but instead of the stubbornness that dominated Winter's face and the
set of her mouth,
Wycherly's
features seemed forged
by some streak of cowardly cruelty.

 
          
Why am I thinking these thoughts?

 
          
She
glanced toward Kenny. Though he was only a few years older than she, Kenny's
hair had already faded to the color of tarnished brass, and in place of
cruelty, his face showed nothing so much as a bovine indifference to the world
around him.

 
          
"But
you're not eating, dear," her mother said. "Shall I have Martha fix
you something else?"

 
          
So that one moment you can say I'm putting
on too much weight and the next try to force-feed me?
"No thanks,
Mother," Winter said briefly.

 
          
"
Wycherly
, do try to sit up straight. I'm sure Winter would
like to hear what you've been doing."

 
          
Wycherly
regarded Winter with sullen resentment. "Oh,
I don't think so," he began nastily, but stopped at his mother's
expression of doe-eyed injury. Surrendering, he'd only gotten a few sentences
into a hopelessly muddled explanation of some venture partnership when Kenny
interrupted with the tale of a boat that he and Patricia were thinking of
buying.

 
          
"—I'd
heard that Stevenson down in Term Mortgages had been looking at something like
it but couldn't quite swing the financing, so naturally I took the opportunity
to ask his opinion—"

 
          
And make sure he knew you were buying a boat
he couldn't afford,
Winter finished for him silently. The atmosphere in the
room shifted like water; water to put out fire. . . .

 
          
Something
was wrong here—more wrong than the clash of weak and spiteful personalities—but
she could not be quite sure what. Of course everyone's family were perfect
horrors; Mother wanted her own way no matter who was hurt, Kenny was a snob and
a tyrant, and
Wych
was as much of a bully as he could
get away with being, but somehow she didn't remember them being quite so
blatant
about it.

 
          
And
if they were all of these things, what was she?

 
          
Dinner
seemed to last for an eternity.

 
          
Kenneth
Musgrave, Senior, arrived as predicted, about the time dinner was over and the
dessert service had been laid out by the ever-faithful Martha. They had always
had servants, and if Winter had thought about it at all, she'd considered it an
automatic sign of privilege—but how much of a privilege was it, really, to have
to wait for and depend on other people to do things you were perfectly capable
of doing yourself?

 
          
She
welcomed her father's arrival with relief. It had taken all her ingenuity to
skate around the gaps in her memory; the only reason she was able to manage was
the unwillingness of the others to mention anything that might open the subject
of Winter's stay at
Fall River
. She wondered what they'd say if she told them her problem had been
diagnosed as poltergeists, not nervous collapse!

 
          
"Daddy!"
Winter cried, flinging herself into his arms with the first unmixed emotions
she'd felt all day.

 
          
"How's
my baby girl?" Kenneth Musgrave greeted her.

 
          
Now
in his late sixties, Winter's father was tanned, silver-haired, and vigorous;
so perfect a depiction of a prosperous Wall Street financier that he might
almost be a symbol and not the thing itself. He hugged his daughter hard and
then released her, studying her with acute steel-gray eyes.

 
          
"And
what brings you to our humble hacienda?" he said, smiling. "I thought
you were settled in to that place you bought upstate.
Randa
,
get me a drink, would you?"

 
          
Winter
let the baffling reference pass as her mother hurried to get her father his
drink. This was what life at home had been like as long as Winter could
remember: Kenneth Musgrave would enter like a conquering lion, and the Musgrave
women would scurry to do his bidding.

 
          
And
the Musgrave men . . . ?

 
          
She
stepped away from her father, glancing at her brothers, the princes in waiting,
to see them both regarding her father with identical expressions of resentful
envy.

 
          
"I
hope you'll be getting back to work, soon," Mr. Musgrave said. "You
can't let one failure define your entire life."

 
          
With
her father's arrival, Winter realized, the last player in the family tragedy
had appeared, and events settled into their accustomed paths as if they had
been repeated every night for a thousand years.

 
          
"Oh,
Kenneth," her mother fluttered, "don't you think it's too soon? After
all, Winter is so fragile. . . ."

 
          
"Fragile
is another word for failure," her father said flatly. "Ken Junior
might not be as bright as his sister, but he's risen right to the top.
Persistence is what matters. You aren't going to fail me twice, are you
Winter?"

 
          
His
pale eyes transfixed her, allowing no room for evasion. All Winter could think
of was every time she'd failed, every occasion on which she'd disappointed this
man.

 
          
"I
won't fail," she said in a low voice.

 
          
Her
father smiled, and it seemed to Winter as if there were something of gloating
in it, as if some victory had been achieved that stretched far beyond her
obedience.

 
          
She
looked around the table, and it was suddenly as if each of them stood in the
shadow of someone she knew: Kenny was Janelle, who'd surrendered everything
she was good at for peace and security and found neither;
Wycherly
was Ramsey, afraid to try and knowing that the failure was killing him. . . .

 
          
Both
of her brothers had lost the golden time that Ramsey had talked about, and were
doomed now to repeat their parents' failures until the end of time.

 
          
And
her parents? Her father and mother? Whose failures were Kenneth and Miranda
Musgrave doomed to recreate? Ramsey had said she'd escaped—she and Grey—but had
he known how easy it was to fall back into failure? No matter what she did
now—fail or win—Winter would disappoint one of her parents, and the realization
was an unbearable, inescapable pressure.

 
          
"I—
Excuse me; I don't think I feel very well." Winter flung down her napkin
and all but fled the dining room.