The Stress of Her Regard (5 page)

The only jarring moment came when they were passing the north face of Windover Hill, and Crawford awoke from an uneasy doze and saw the giant figure of a man carved crudely into the chalk of the distant hillside; Crawford instantly scrambled up into a crouch on the seat and grabbed the door as if he intended to vault out of the carriage and simply run back toward the sea, but Boyd caught him and pushed him back down into the seat.

He stared fearfully at the figure, and his companions shifted around to see what had so upset him.

"For Christ's sake, Mike," said Boyd nervously, "it's only an old Saxon hill figure, like there's dozens of throughout these parts. The Wilmington Long Man, that lad's called. It's just a—"

Crawford, still not completely awake, interrupted him—
"Why is it watching us?"
he whispered, staring across the miles of farmland at the pale outline on the hill.

"You were having a dream," said Appleton a little shrilly. "What do you drink for if it gives you dreams like this?" He dug a flask out of his coat pocket, took a deep swallow, and then leaned forward and ordered the driver to go faster.

Late in the afternoon they passed the first outlying stone-and-thatch cottages of Bexhill-on-Sea; a few miles farther and they were among the shaded lanes of the town, driving past rows of neat seventeenth-century houses, all built of the local honey-colored limestone. Flowers brightened the boundaries of the yards and lanes, and the house at whose gate they stopped was hardly visible from the road because of the hundreds of red and yellow roses that bobbed on vines woven around the posts of the front fence.

As Crawford climbed down from the carriage to the grass, a boy who had been crouched beside the gate leaped to his feet and sprinted across the lawn and into the house. A few moments later the abrupt, mournful wail of a bagpipe startled birds out of the trees overhead, and Appleton, who had followed Crawford out of the carriage and was now trying to pull the wrinkles out of his coat, winced when he heard it.

"Blood sacrifice?" he asked politely. "Planning some sort of druid rite, are you?"

"No," said Crawford defensively, "uh, it's going to be a traditional Scottish ceremony, I understand. Wrong end of the island, of course, but . . ."

"Christ," put in Boyd anxiously, "they're not going to make us eat those stuffed sheep stomachs, are they? What do they call it? Havoc?"

"Haggis. No, the food'll be conventional, but . . . oh, they'll have whitened Julia's eyebrows with antimony, and I sent ahead a jar of henna so the bridesmaids could stain her feet with it after they wash them—"

He was reaching toward the back of the carriage for his portmanteau when he froze.

"Hey, Mike," said Boyd, leaning down from the carriage to grab Crawford's shoulder, "are you getting sick? You're suddenly pale as a low sky."

Crawford shivered, but then continued his interrupted reach to the boot; with trembling fingers he began unbuckling the leather straps. "N-no, I'm fine," he said. "I just . . . remembered something."

Mention of the washing of feet had brought back a hitherto-lost memory of last night—he
had
washed his feet, and taken off his muddy trousers too, after fleeing back to his room from the statue; and he hadn't cleaned up because of any particular fastidiousness, it seemed to him now, but out of an irrational fear of Sussex dirt. So he must have gone outside one more time . . . at least. He searched his memory now for any recollection of it, but could come up with nothing.

Could he have been searching for the ring again? The question frightened him as soon as he posed it to himself, for it implied the conceivability of some
other
reason. He forced himself to concentrate on unstrapping his luggage.

People were coming out of the house now. Crawford recognized the minister who had had him and Julia to tea at the local rectory a fortnight ago; and the man behind him was Julia's father; and the lady in the blue velvet stole—whose shuffling, undersea-creature gait was the result, he decided, of a reluctance to look down at the stepping stones for fear of disarranging her tall rose-studded coiffure—must have been Julia's aunt, though previously Crawford had only seen her in a housedress, with her hair pulled up in a tight bun.

And the scowling girl hanging behind, he thought warily, must be Julia's twin sister Josephine. She's got Julia's coloring, I suppose, but she's far too thin—and why does she hunch her shoulders so? Maybe this is the defensive "mechanical" pose Julia told me she assumes in stressful situations—if so it's even less attractive, and far less funny, than Julia described it.

Away from the leather-and-meat-pie smell of the carriage, he noticed for the first time the smells of rural East Sussex—clay and flowers and a whiff of a distant dairy. It was all a long way from the musks of sick people and the sharp reek of vinegar-washed hospital walls.

He had got his bags free, and he set them down on the road's gravel verge just in time for the boy, rushing back again, to pick them up and wrestle them in a sort of running waddle back toward the house. Remembering that Josephine disapproved of her sister's marrying a physician—particularly one who currently specialized in an area of medicine that was by tradition the domain of unprofessional old women—Crawford pretended not to see her, and instead made a show of greeting her father and aunt.

"Julia's upstairs," her father said as he led the new arrivals toward the house, "worrying about her hair and her clothes.
You
know how brides are." Crawford thought he heard Josephine mutter something behind him, and then the old man seemed to realize that he had said something awkward. "By which—uh—I mean merely—"

Crawford forced a smile. "I'm sure she needn't worry about such things," he said. "I've never seen her looking less than splendid."

Visibly relieved to have got past his apparent reference to Crawford's first wife, old Mr. Carmody nodded rapidly, blinking and smiling. "Oh, to be sure, to be sure. The very image of her departed mother, she is."

Crawford was glancing back toward the road and the carriage as Mr. Carmody said this, and so he saw the expression on Josephine's narrow face change instantly from spite to vacuity; she kept walking, but her arms and legs were stiff now, and her head, when she looked away, moved in one abrupt jerk, like the instantaneous movement of a spider. Her nostrils were wide and white. Clearly
this
was her mechanical pose.

He looked ahead at her father, expecting more apologetic mumbling for having brought up what was clearly another touchy subject, but the old man stumped on unaware, grinning and shaking his head at some comment Appleton had made.

Crawford raised an eyebrow. The old man didn't seem unobservant or thoughtless—but surely, if the subject of his deceased wife was so evidently traumatic to one of his daughters, he ought sometime to have noticed? He'd have had twenty years to stumble across the fact, for the twins' mother had bled to death minutes after having given birth to Josephine, the second of them.

Once inside the house, the travellers were given mugs of cider and plates of bread and cheese, and, as they worked their way through the snacks, they pretended to enjoy the efforts of the young man wringing doomful melodies out of the bagpipe. At last Mr. Carmody halted the recital and offered to show his guests to their rooms.

Crawford obediently went to his room and washed his face in the basin on the dresser, but then he went back out into the hall and stole down to Julia's room. She answered his knock and proved to be alone in spite of the wedding preparations, and she was still dressed casually in a green cotton dress. With her shoes off she seemed even shorter than usual, making her abundant figure and narrow waist even more startling. Her long brown hair was still slightly damp from a recent washing.

"You're nearly a full day late," she said after she'd kissed him. "Break a wheel?"

"Delayed by a rough delivery," he told her. "A charity ward case—her family only got her to the hospital after some midwife had made an almost fatal hash of the job." He sat down on the window seat. "I finally got to see your sister, out front just now. She really doesn't look well."

Julia sat beside him and took his hand. "Oh, poor Josephine is just upset that you're taking me away. I'll miss her, too, but I've got a life of my own. She's got to . . . become Josephine." Julia shrugged. "Whoever that may turn out to be."

"Somebody in some trouble, I think. How long has she been doing that mechanical trick?"

"Oh, ever since she was a baby, practically—she asked me once when we were children what I did to keep the night-scaries from getting me when I was in bed at night. I asked her what
she
did, and she said she would rock back and forth like a pump-arm or a clockwork or something, so that the scaries would say to themselves," Julia assumed a deep voice, "oh,
this
isn't human,
this
isn't prey—this is some kind of a
construction
." Julia smiled sadly.

"She did it out in the yard a little while ago, though, when your father mentioned your mother. She could hardly have thought the night-boogers were after her then."

"No, she isn't afraid of ghosty things anymore, poor thing. Now she just does her clockwork trick when things happen that she can't bear—I guess she reckons that if Josephine can't stand whatever's going on right now, it's best if Josephine stops existing for a while, until it's over."

"Jesus." Crawford looked out the window at the sunlit leaves in the high branches. "Is that . . . I mean, did you and your father . . . you
have
tried to help her over this, this thing about her, your mother, have you? Because—"

"Of course we have." Julia spread her hands. "But it's never done any good. We've
always
told her that my mother's death wasn't her fault. She just won't listen—ever since she was a little girl she's had the idea that she killed her."

Crawford looked out the window at the path on which he'd first seen Josephine, and he shook his head.

"We really have tried to help her, Michael. You know me, you know I would. But it's useless—and really,
try
to imagine what we've gone through living with her! Good lord, until only a few years ago she'd every now and then believe she was me—it was humiliating, she'd wear my clothes, visit my friends—I can't . . .
tell
you how I felt. You must have known some young girls when you were growing up, you must have seen how easily their feelings get hurt! Honestly, I really thought sometimes that I'd have to run away, make new friends somewhere else. And of course my friends had a fine time then pretending to mistake
me
for
her
."

Crawford nodded sympathetically. "Say, she's not going to do it now, is she?" He winced at the thought of Josephine—making some scene by pretending that
she
was his bride.

Julia laughed. "That would be dramatic, wouldn't it? No, I finally stopped it by following her one day and confronting her as she was harassing some of my friends. And even then she tried to continue the . . .
pretense
for a minute or so. My friends nearly choked, they were laughing so hard. It was hard for me to do, to humiliate both of us that way, but it worked."

Julia stood up and smiled. "Now you're not supposed to be in here—scat and get dressed, we'll be seeing each other soon enough."

The wedding was performed at nine o'clock that evening in the wide Carmody drawing room, with the bride and groom kneeling on cushions on the floor. During almost the entire ceremony the late summer sun slanted in through the west windows and glowed gold and rose in the crystal glasses ranged on a shelf, and as the light faded and servants brought in lamps, the minister declared Michael and Julia man and wife by the authority vested in him.

Josephine had been the strikingly unemotional maid of honor, and at this point she and Boyd were supposed to go out to the kitchen and come back, Josephine with an oatcake and Boyd with a wooden stoup of strong ale; the stoup was to be passed around the company after Crawford took the first gulp, and Josephine was to break the oatcake ceremoniously over Julia's head, symbolically assuring Julia's fertility and bestowing good luck on the guests who picked up the crumbs from the floor.

But when Josephine held the little cake over Julia's head, she stared at it for a moment and then lowered it and crouched to set it carefully on the floor. "I can't break her in half," she said quietly, as if to herself, and then she walked slowly back to the kitchen.

"Well, so much for children," said Crawford into the resulting silence. He drank some of the ale, and covered his embarrassment with a savoring grin. "Good brewers they have hereabouts," he said quietly to Boyd as he passed the stoup to him. "Thank God it was the biscuit that they made her carry, and not this."

Actually, Crawford wanted to have children—his first marriage had produced none, and he hoped the defect had been poor Caroline's and not his . . . and he didn't want to believe the rumor that Caroline had been pregnant when the house she'd been living in burned down, for at that point he had not even spoken to her for a year.

He was, after all, an obstetrician—an
accoucheur
—and in spite of the two years he had spent stitching up the wounds and sawing off the shattered limbs of His Majesty's sailors in the wars with Spain and the United States, delivering babies was what he did best. He wished Julia's mother could have been attended by someone with his own degree of skill.

The difficult delivery at St. George's Hospital had made him and Boyd miss the stagecoach they were originally to have taken south from London early yesterday and while they had waited in the taproom of the coaching inn for the next one, Boyd had irritably asked him why, after all his complicated surgical training, he should choose to devote his career to an area of medicine which not only made him late for his own wedding, but which "old wives have been handling just fine for thousands of years anyway."