The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  So how had his feet got so dirty? Had he walked to this inn? Surely not barefoot. No, he thought, I remember now, I took the stagecoach here to meet Appleton and Boyd—Boyd is to be my groomsman, and Appleton is letting me pretend to Julia’s father that his elegant landau carriage is mine.

  Crawford let himself relax a little, and he tried to conjure some cheer in himself, to see his recent fright and present sickness as just the consequences of old friends out carousing.

  If I was in the company of those two last night, he thought with a nervous and self-consciously rueful smile, God knows there are any number of ways I might have got so dirty; I suppose mayhem is assured—I only hope we didn’t commit any murders or rapes. As a matter of fact I do seem to recall seeing a nude woman … no, that was only a statue …

  And then he remembered it all, and his fragile cheer was gone.

  His face went cold and he sat down. Surely that must have been a dream, that closed stone fist; or maybe the statue’s hand never had been open, maybe that was what he had imagined, and he had really just drunkenly pushed the ring at the hand and then not noticed it fall when he had let go of it. And then there must have been something else, a bit of wire or something, around the stone finger when he saw it later.

  With the blue sky glowing now in the swirls of the window’s bull’s-eye panes, it was not too difficult to believe that it had all been a dream or a drunken mistake. It had to be, after all.

  In the meantime he had lost the ring.

  Feeling very old and frail, he unstrapped the portmanteau and pulled on his spare set of travelling clothes. Now he wanted hot coffee—brandy and water would be more restoring, but he had to go find the ring with as clear a head as possible.

  Appleton and Boyd weren’t up yet, which Crawford was glad of, and after choking down a cup of hot tea—the only drink available in the kitchen—he spent an hour walking around the inn’s muddy back yard; he was tense but hopeful when he started, but by the time the sun had climbed high enough to silhouette the branches of the oaks across the road he was in a fury of despair. The landlord came out after a while, and though he expressed sympathy, and even offered to sell Crawford a ring to replace the one he’d lost, he was unable to remember ever having seen any statue of a nude woman in the area.

  Finally at about ten Crawford’s two companions came tottering down for breakfast. Crawford sat with them, but nobody had much to say, and he ordered only brandy.

  CHAPTER 2

  I set her on my pacing steed,

  And nothing else saw all day long;

  For sideways would she lean, and sing

  A faery’s song.

  —John Keats,

  La Belle Dame Sans Merci

  The storm clouds had scattered away northward, and Appleton folded down the accordion-like calash roof of his carriage so that as they drove they could bake the “drink-poisons” out of their systems in the summer sun; but most of the roads between Warnham and the sea proved to be very narrow, walled on either side with stones heaped up centuries ago by farmers clearing the moors, and to Crawford it several times felt as if they were driving through some sunken antediluvian corridor.

  Ancient oaks spread branches across the sky overhead, seeming to strive to provide the corridor’s missing roof, and though Appleton’s hired driver cursed when the carriage was slowed for a while by a tightly packed flock of two dozen sheep being languidly goaded along by a collie and a white-bearded old man, Crawford was glad of their company—the landscape had been getting too close-pressing and inanimate.

  At about noon they stopped at a tavern in Worthing, and on a chestnut-shaded terrace overlooking the glittering expanse of the English Channel they restored themselves with several pitchers of bitter ale, and a dozen pickles, and three vast beef-and-gravy pastries with each man’s initials stamped into the crust so that they could keep straight which was whose when they unwrapped the uneaten ends later in the day.

  Eventually Crawford pushed his plate away, refilled his glass, and then squinted belligerently at his companions. “I lost the ring,” he said. The sea breeze blew his brown hair back from his forehead, letting the sun catch the gray hairs at his temples in the moments when he wasn’t shaded by the waving branches or the seagulls sailing noisily back and forth over the shore slope.

  Appleton blinked at him. “The ring,” he echoed blankly.

  “The goddamn wedding ring, the one Jack’s supposed to hand to me tonight—I lost it last night, when we were larking about in the back yard of that inn.”

  Jack Boyd shook his head. “Christ, I’m sorry, Mike, that was my fault, going crazy the way I did—I got no business drinking so much. I’ll buy you a new one some how—”

  “No, I’m to blame,” interrupted Appleton with a smile which, though rueful, was his first genuine one of the day. “I was soberer than you two, but I got scared of the dark and ran out on you—hell, Michael, I even saw you take the ring out of the pocket of your coat, after you’d draped the coat over the barmaid who was getting chilled, and I knew it was risky, but I was in such a sweat to get back inside that I didn’t want to bring it up. I insist you let me pay for it.”

  Crawford stood up and drank off the last of his ale. Even now his face had not lost quite all of the deep-bitten tan acquired in shipboard life, and when he smiled he looked vaguely foreign, like some kind of American or Australian. “No no, I’m the one that lost it—and anyway I’ve already bought a replacement from the landlord back there. It cost me half my travelling money, but I think it’ll do.” He held out a ring on the palm of his hand for them to look at.

  Appleton had at last regained his usual manner. “Well, yes,” he said judiciously, “these southern rustics will probably never have seen real gold … or any kind of metal, conceivably. Yes, you ought to be all right with that. What’s the name of the place again? Undercut-by-the-Sea?”

  Crawford opened his mouth to remind him that it was called Bexhill-on-Sea, but, now that at least a tenuous sort of cheer had been restored, he didn’t want to seem stuffy. “Something like that,” he said dryly as they wrapped up the leftovers and started back toward where the hired driver waited by the carriage.

  The roads were open now, with the sea generally visible to their left as the carriage rocked along past the stone jetties of Brighton and Hove—Boyd made deprecatory remarks about the little boats whose ivory sails stippled the blue water—and even when they turned to follow the Lewes road inland across the South Downs, the green fields stretched broadly away to the hills on either side, and the walls between the fields were low.

  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 t
he 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 ajar 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 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 refreshments, 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—be off 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.