by Paul Hazel
“What’s this square?” she asked, pointing down at the
tower.
He did not look. “Tell you later.” he said for he was
eager to hear Wykeham’s answer.
She pressed her thumb on the undecipherable blur of
lines. “Tell me now .’
He looked straight at her and then at the paper. Half in
anger, he smiled.
“Just a window,” he said quickly, solicitiously, already
looking back at Wykeham.
“I guessed that. But who is inside looking out?”
“Who?”
“Obviously there is someone. A face.” But she saw all at
once that he did not see it, that she was being foolish. It was
only a blot. It was astonishing how much she read into things.
She lifted her head. In a moment she was able to laugh at
herself. She was thankful at least she hadn’t actually mentioned
she had thought that the face was Nora’s.
Wykeham, who had pretended not to hear, studied the
paper. He kept his square shoulders turned, excluding Plum.
7 8
WINTERKING
But even from the back she thought he looked preoccupied
and ill at ease.
“This figure,” he said, addressing himself to Longford,
“the one the river is changing to.”
Longford pointed to the lines again, ran his hands sharply
in the air just above them. “Of course I cannot he positive,”
he said. “Not without the last measurement. But I believe it’s
a ‘W ’ or will be when the banks have all straightened. And
here.” He pulled the map edgewise so that Wykeham might
have a clearer view of it. “I don’t suppose it means much of
anything. Though it is curious. Having found one letter, as it
were, staring out of the earth. Perhaps your eye just plays
tricks.” His finger rested on a little slip of a lake, south of
East Wood. The lake, probably no more than a large pond,
was curved like the paring of a fingernail. “Of course the
scale is different,” he said. “But they’re both water and from
a certain distance, seen from the air, or on a m ap. . .”
Wykeham shook his head, either in disapproval or annoyance. There was a silence.
“It’s a ‘C ,’ isn’t it?” Plum asked. Longford beamed.
“It is pronounced ‘ku,’ ” Wykeham told her softly. He
had straightened his back. His face, now that Plum saw it,
looked odd. She had noticed it before, a hardness in him
which showed itself only now and then, but which somehow
seemed more like him than his smile.
“I didn’t quite. . .” Longford began.
“ Gw, ” Wykeham said quietly. “Pronounced ‘ku.’ It is
the question asked by cuckoos and owls in the old Triads; the
first question that poets must master since there is no definite
answer. It means ‘where?’ ” He took his outsized hands from
his pockets. “I am surprised you did not come across it in
your reading,” he said, “for it is Welsh.”
Plum could tell from his voice he was leaving. “I shall
think about the tree,” he said in a way that ended the
conversation. He shook hands with Longford, who, because
he did not quite know what to think said nothing. Wykeham
left him standing awkwardly by the desk. "Thank you again,”
Wykeham called back. Plum went beside him to the door and
opened it.
The lamps of Hunt’s garage had been switched off. The
green and the surrounding houses seemed strangely malevo-
The Hill and the Tower
7 9
lent. She was still holding onto the latch. She hadn’t realized,
until then, she was shivering.
Wykeham tilted his head.
"She wished me to ask,” he said in a voice serious and
not unkind, “whether you had managed to send her letter.”
Plum wanted to cry out. But he had taken her hand. Her
fingers which were not dainty or small seemed lost in the
strength of his grasp and, although she had promised herself
she would not answer, she nodded.
5.
Like Luther, His Grace thought, consoling himself, remembering that even the mighty theologian had suffered from the same disorder of the bowels. Humbled, he had
endured the ailment more or less stoically. He refused to see
his physician. He had his port and ate normally. Work
generally set him to rights. With the beginning of each new
week, within an hour after he had returned to his desk he felt
a pressure building in his lower intestine. Then, with a
gratifying urgency, he would head for the lavatory. This
arrangement worked perfectly well. His Grace saw nothing
greatly amiss. He had not fully considered, however, until it
was already too late the effect of retirement on his bowels.
The corners of the Duke’s mouth pulled down sullenly.
In his house across from the park he had been sitting for a
quarter of an hour, counting the diamond-shaped tiles on the
lavatory floor. He had been trying to determine, without
actually looking, the exact number of tiles hidden beneath a
Chinese vanity. He had no particular reason for wanting to
know this yet he had brought a small collapsible desk in with
him. Already he had covered half a page with figures. Down
below a young man from the bank began to knock on the
thick, paneled door. The Duke, his head filled with calculations, took no notice.
The telegram announcing Houseman’s death arrived at
the bank some hours before dawn on Sunday morning. It had
been received by the watchman, who, because there was no
one to relieve him, had waited until the next man came on
duty before taking a cab to the apartment of the senior clerk.
By then it was nearly seven-thirty. The old clerk, although he
had opposed Houseman’s appointment, had been honestly
80
The Hill and the Tower
81
shocked. He had seen to many of the arrangements himself
and met the train bearing the body. He had even, after he
had informed the chief partners, gone to visit the young
man’s family. Gently he had broken the news to the disbelieving
parents. Houseman had always been neatly if somewhat
inexpensively dressed so the senior clerk had been wholly
unprepared for the deep poverty of the parents’ quarters. The
mother, a large, nervous woman, wept profoundly and had
held onto his arm as though she had feared that he too, a
stranger, might be taken from her. Putting aside his reservations, he had told her how fond everyone had been of her son.
It was left to the partners to inform His Grace. They
conferred in the middle of the day. It had been scarcely two
days since they had been lifted unto the top rung of power
and not, they were uncomfortably aware, by any skill of their
own but by the Duke’s climbing down. Nevertheless they
considered for several hours the consequences of withholding
the news from him. They were not without certain grievances. By rights, a young man from one of their own departments should have been appointed master of the Will instead of Houseman. They had had, of course, their own schemes
>
for getting around him, by taking a subtle control of the
Wykeham trusts until for practical purposes they would ride
them. Accordingly, although it had dramatically cleared the
way, they had little enthusiasm for Houseman’s death. They
could not be certain who would be appointed next. Unsettled, they debated for some time the merits of installing, temporarily, a man of their own.
“It isn’t a question of one being better than another,” the
first partner said. “I daresay, the issue is who Wykeham is
most likely to accept.”
“Which leaves us,” the second partner said, “with His
Grace.”
“The Duke has taken his retirement.”
“Nor would I have him. I was thinking of him simply as
an intermediary.”
“Yet surely, as soon as he had one foot in the door
again. . . ”
“We could see to it that the door was shut.”
“And if Wykeham wanted him?”
The second partner grinned. “It was Wykeham who
8 2
W IN TER IN G
sacked him. Too old, that’s my guess. I think you will find,
gentlemen, that we shall be fairly safe on that quarter.”
The talk turned to other matters. On Monday, two hours
after the bank had opened, a junior clerk, because this
business should not be made to appear too important, rapped
apprehensively on the door of the Duke’s house. The butler
left him on the landing where he waited, blinking unfamiliarly
at prints of old-fashioned gentlemen dressed for hunting. The
Duke emerged presently, engulfed in a roseate dressing
gown. His face appeared similarly colored as though he had
been engaged in some strenuous and, seemingly, unsuccessful labor.
“Your Grace,” the clerk squeaked, “I bring dreadful
news.”
The ponderous brass gate opened. Within, the Duke
pressed the elevator car’s single button and heard, as though
he had never been gone, the magical whine of its motors.
Deus ex machina, the Duke thought mockingly but without
embarrassment. The gentle lights fluttered, reflected on the
walls of rubbed mahogany. It was then, reminded of opulence, that His Grace first realized that the world had been unfair to Arthur Houseman.
It was not the sort of thing which would ordinarily have
troubled him. The death of a man, particularly a young man
without accomplishments, while saddening, was not an event
likely to be much remembered. Yet he had picked this one
man out, though few had seen the worth in him. With
disturbing clarity the Duke remembered the look on Houseman’s face just as Wykeham sat down beside him. Houseman’s face had had a look of extraordinary anticipation, a look which
the Duke had resented bitterly until something of its eagerness
had reminded him of himself. The lines of his own lips
hardened. As well I had violated the prohibition, the Duke
thought, had gone to the station, although the Will required
there be no second meeting. He was acutely aware that he
had entered by chance a world whose dangers he did not
and, despite his skills, might never understand. After two
days’ absence the Duke stepped again into his office. Through
the huge windows he looked out once more on the great
tangled city of New Awanux.
It pleased him to stand again at the center, with the
The Hill and the Tower
8 3
accumulating wealth of the Wykeham trusts passing through
his fingers. In this place he had been a lord in fact as well as
title, able at his word to send from the docks of Cardiff a fleet
of colliers into the Severn fogs or by the mere scratch of his
name to swell or shrink, as the times demanded, the crews of
men who worked the forges and the precision shops in
Bristol.
The brash sunlight glinted on the steeple of the center
church. Without quite being able to chart the progress of his
thoughts the Duke found himself wondering how it was that
Wykeham, who might have ruled all this and more beyond
imagining had with no agitation, no perceptible reluctance or
doubt, left these matters in his charge instead. With an
amazement which over the last days had only heightened, he
wondered what Wykeham, his one life stretching out, might
do if he wished. Or what he might have done!
There was a rattle of the gate behind him.
The partners walked in briskly. As they came into the
room they saw the tall old lord by the window. They stood
still and waited. From their places they had an almost equal
view of New Awanux yet they failed to notice either the color
of the sky or the pillars of smoke rising starkly from the mills.
They looked instead at each other.
“Your Grace,” the chief partner said, “it is a bitter day
for all of us.”
“Please have a seat,” the Duke said, his tone gracious, as
though the office were still his own.
They sat opposite him, saying what is always said of
sorrow and disrupted lives. Leisurely, and yet sooner than
perhaps was fitting, the talk turned from death. They began
to explain what they had planned for him, its temporary
nature, its obvious usefulness to the bank. The Duke settled
himself in his chair. His head was tilted ever so slightly so
that he could keep watch out the window. Only half listening,
he gazed across the rows of buildings as though face to face
with a mystery. Even from this height, he could see no
definite pattern. Grumbling, he put on his glasses. To the
younger men he looked suddenly older.
“It need only be for a day or two,” the second partner
said. “Time enough for an exchange of letters. We have a list
of candidates. You might, nonetheless, suggest whomever
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you like. Wykeham trusts you. And certainly the board would
find any suggestion you would care to make acceptable.”
His Grace was silent. He was trying to imagine the city
from the air, to see it whole, but he found his eye dwelling on
one detail after another. The partners were staring at him.
He knew an answer was expected; he was trying to think
of one when once more the elevator gave a groan. The gate
parted and the senior clerk came into the room.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. He nodded to the others.
“Gentlemen.” He had an envelope between his thin fingers.
“It was sent around from your house, Your Grace, and looked
important. Of course I recognized the hand.” The clerk set
the letter on the desktop. Without waiting the Duke broke
open the seal.
The letter was set down in the same small, precise hand
he had expected, I must call you again into service, it began.
For a second or two more His Grace turned in his chair. He
seemed somehow heavier. Suddenly he gave a sly glance at
the clerk, rose and went from the room.
The partners looked at one another in disbelief.
“I don’t suppose you understand any of this,” one said to
the clerk.
The clerk was barely a month younger than the Duke
and had worked for him for twenty years. He did not quite
dare a grin.
Soon after, in a cubicle off the landing, the ancient
plumbing roared.
“This will be your room,” Wykeham had told her, pausing outside the door.
“And your own?”
“Above,” he had said, not even smiling. When he had
told her she must come with him up to the Great House and
■stay there, he had already been half out the door of the old
man’s cottage. She had gone after him, hastening through
Black Wood, dazed but untroubled by the ease with which he
meant to take her in.
“I have left my husband,” she had said.
He had plunged through the trees. “It is time you were
somewhere,” he had answered.
In the wood it had seemed later but it had still been
morning when they had come out on the drive. White moths
The Hill and the Tower
8 5
had fluttered over the dazzling lawn. She had stopped at the
edge of the gravel, quiet and at last rebuttoning her blouse.
Finally he had looked back. “Tomorrow, if you like, we shall
talk,” he had said. “Now there are things I must see to. And
this evening I must go into the village.”
He had avoided the endless turning of the drive and had
led her straight out among the larches and rhododendrons to
a place where the ground rose to the top of a knoll. She had
made him stop.
“He made a very strange sailor,” she had said, not
certain yet, although he was standing close to her, that he was
listening, “For one thing he always carried a bag full of books.
Even when we walked in the streets, with the people staring,
he read aloud to me. But I didn’t care. Sometimes he told me
strange things about myself. Foolish things. The first time he
saw me he said that I would marry him. He had been to
Africa and Marseilles. He was an engineer on a ship named
A nna. He told me how he sat down with his engines,
drinking gin and water and reading through the gales. He
had never, he said, looked at a girl until he looked at me.”
She stared down at her feet. “He does not share the blame. It
