by Ellis Peters
He started up in the straw, huddling his feet under him, shivering violently, not yet fully awake. The desolate early morning was shockingly unfamiliar without walls and a bed, and he had leaped so suddenly out of sleep, stung by the cold biting into his flesh, that his head swam again, and he had to shut his eyes tightly, and shake his head fiercely, to clear his vision. But the second time he looked at the field before him, and the distant grouping of the farm buildings in their circle of trees, he knew the scene, and as abruptly remembered the occasion.
He was alive! The weight of his body, its complicated aches from being misused thus in the cold May night, assured him that he was truly alive. He felt at his shivering flesh, he stared at the desolate indifferent monotone of the daylight, reluctantly beginning to tint the darkness with a suggestion of dawn. Sounds came out of the wood behind him, a fluttering flight, small among the bushes, a tentative, sleepy call. All these overwhelming things fell upon his senses as if there had never before been sight or hearing or touch. Even so faint a light dazzled him with its implications of radiance, even such stiff and painful movements delighted and astonished him with the marvel of his own intricate and exquisite body, and the faint first call of the bird in the wood filled his ears with the whole possibility of music. He was not dead. He breathed, he felt, he exulted, he was alive! It had all been a folly, a dream!
Then his mind cleared, and he knew that it had been no dream. He was surely alive, but the empty phial was in his pocket, the two glasses had been realities, the imminence of death no illusion. Only it had not come for him.
The terrible thought lifted him out of the straw, and drove him fumbling and clawing at the heavy latch of the gate in the stone wall. Two glasses, and one of them she had held so carefully, so scrupulously against her breast, for fear he should mistake which was meant for him! While she watched him with the strange tears on her lashes, and that look of withdrawal and farewell upon her face! She, who had never intended violence against his or any other life, except her own! Except her own! Yes, they had come to a nadir out of which only one of them could hope to climb. Only her answer had been different. Now he knew! Now he knew everything!
He did not wonder, or question his knowledge. Why should it be so clear to him that because she had not poisoned him, she had not poisoned Theo, either? He did not know, but he knew that it was clear, that nothing could ever call it in doubt again. He had the answer to everything, the insecurity which had lived within them and eaten them from within was gone, like a cloud torn down out of the sky to uncover the sun. Only he was afraid in his heart, he cried out with fear at every step of the scrambling, gasping way home, that the sun had come out too late.
He plunged through the level rim of the trees, and began to drop down through the wood by its steepest slope, direct to the corner of the garden. It seemed an infinitely long and wearisome distance, the spur of trees devilishly prolonged, draped with a deceptive twilight to hamper his journey, beset with trailers of bramble and low-growing thorn trees to fend him off. He went down through it in a series of leaps, crashing through the clawing undergrowth, tearing his hands and cheeks on the hawthorns, tripping and wrenching his ankles among the broken, pitted surfaces and the tussocky grass. Recklessly, spreading his hands blindly in front of him where the light did not penetrate, to thrust himself off from crashing into trees, he plunged downhill, out of breath and gasping with the urgency of his fear.
She was everything she had ever been to him, she was the heart in his body, the centre and reason of his life. It needed only the suggestion of loss to quicken his mind to the realisation of the value he set on her. It no longer mattered that they had cost each other a world of pain, and brought each other to the final lost levels of despair. That was over and done, and if it were not, what did he care? Nothing must or should induce him to turn away his eyes again from the greatest experience he was ever likely to know. Let her bring the world down over his head, if only she would be there alive when he reached the house, and remain beside him until the sky toppled upon them both. Now he knew everything. Now there was no Theo standing sadly between them; the guilt they shared towards him was no more than they could face and bear. They had not killed him. Some instinct in Theo himself had taken the material of their love, and translated it into a death, and if they must answer for that, some day, somewhere, they would answer. But they had not killed him! Now he was answering the question which had never been asked, which never need be asked. They had broken through the silence, they could meet again, a true meeting. If only she had not drunk it! If only the doctor had given her something harmless, the sort of suggestive nothing you give to neurotics who induce their own insomnia! ‘Oh, let her be alive!’ he thought, stumbling down the last rough course of grass, and leaping over the ditch full of brambles at the foot. ‘Oh, Spiri, don’t die, just when I’m alive again!’
Grey in the grey garden, touched here and there only faintly with the first positive, visible greens of daylight, the house crouched under its hanger, unlighted, no thread of smoke rising from its chimneys. He climbed into the roughly broken ground he had turned only yesterday, and ran to the door of the workshop, but it was empty and cold, the uncovered kiln still cradling indifferently the wreckage of shards, and the undamaged pots about which Suspiria had felt so little curiosity.
He circled the house, his feet slowing now, his knees failing under him. He wanted to cry out to her, but he was mortally afraid of the following silence, and his throat was so dry with dread that he doubted his own voice. He skirted the corner of the yard, and came to the front of the house.
She was sitting in the open window of the living-room, coiled up in the corner of the sill through the darkness and into the twilight of the dawn, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. She was staring steadily, intently down the rutted lane of the drive, towards the gate through which she expected him. Her eyes looked as if they had not once closed, so single and fierce was that stare. The drink she had poured for herself last night stood on the window-sill, close beside her, and he saw that it had not been touched.
He stood still, leaning against the wall, indistinguishable as yet in the vague half-light which had shown her already a dozen illusions of him. He felt so weak, so limp with relief that for a moment he could not trust himself to leave the support of the wall, and walk into her sight. He could not look away from her, she seemed to his new and eager eyes so beautiful; but as if she had been a prism of coloured crystal, he saw the house and the field and the world through her. The sky which had seemed all a monochrome of grey was just beginning to quiver with suggestions of rose and gold, and the green of the grass, putting on colour valiantly, shone with its own vernal light. It was May, the fury of growth throbbed through the soil under his feet, and an excitement as piercing as music was on the little dawn wind. It was going to be a lovely day. He saw everything as if for the first time, and Suspiria as if for the first time after a long journey and a longer absence. After all, he had been dead, and he was alive again; there was every reason for things to look new.
He went towards her at last, almost shyly, and suddenly she heard his step, and turned her head with a passionate lightening of her eyes, and saw him. A blaze like the aurora sprang into her face, though he could not see that it was changed by anything so ordinary as a smile. She sat gazing at him without moving for several seconds, and then she picked up the glass, and emptied its contents suddenly out of the window. As though the action had somehow released them from a constraint which enjoined stillness and silence, he sprang towards the door, and she slid down from the window, and rushed to meet him.
He shut the door behind him, and she was in his arms, pressed to him breast and hip and thigh, and he could do nothing but hug her, and press his cheek against her uplifted cheek, and feel with every nerve and sense, in every contact of their linked bodies, that she lived as newly, as exultantly as he. She felt at him anxiously with her adoring, praying hands, and could not have enough of him.
There was nothing he could find to say that made any sense, only the coaxing, apologetic little endearments men use to disarm their wives when they have done something silly. But how exquisite, how adult, how far from any apology was the joy it gave him to have her fast in his arms again, against his heart.
‘You’re wet!’ she cried, feeling at his coat, which indeed was damp with dew. She had even a new note of exasperation in her voice, a delighted impatience with his follies. ‘Silly child, staying out all night in the cold – without even a coat! You’re sure to catch cold. I can feel you – you’re frozen! Dennis! Haven’t you got even the sense you were born with?’
‘I know!’ he said, shaking and laughing, his arms tight about her body. ‘I’ve been such a fool!’ And suddenly, convulsed by the memory of his terror, he hid his scratched face against her hair, and clung to her trembling. ‘Oh, my dearest – my lovely—’
‘You weren’t the only fool,’ she said, stroking the cheek that was smeared with little beads of blood from the brambles. ‘Never mind it! Oh, don’t, my darling! It’s all over now! Everything’s all right now!’
‘Oh, Spiri, I was so afraid—’
‘I only kept it in case you didn’t come back,’ she said, ‘that was all I was afraid of.’
‘Spiri, I thought – I thought—’ But there was no need to explain anything, no need at all; they were long past the necessity for words, all that was left behind with the silence.
‘I know! You thought I’d given you poison, just as I did to Theo. Never mind it! I didn’t, I didn’t, but never mind it any more. That was how I knew at last that you hadn’t, either. I was so slow!’ she said, her lips against his cheek. ‘I couldn’t understand why you looked at me like that, without a word – why you went out as you did—It was only after you’d gone it dawned on me. The bottle was gone, too, you see, and I knew you must have taken it, and then I understood why. So I had every reason to stay alive, hadn’t I? And all I was afraid of then was that you’d never come back. I didn’t know where you’d gone, all I could do was wait. It seemed a long time, waiting,’ she said.
As long, he thought, as it had seemed to him, that age-long journey down the shoulder of the wood. To have all the crooked places suddenly made straight, and then to fear the loss of your only true companion by the way!
‘It was because of the kiss you gave me,’ she said, ‘that I didn’t drink it. Suddenly you were so strange and sweet, and I couldn’t understand – and then, when you were gone, and I looked for the bottle – then I realised.’
‘And I realised, too, when I woke up.’ He put his head back suddenly, and laughed aloud, to think what a fool he’d made of himself, to think that he had been dead, and was alive, that it was May, and Sunday, and there was a whole world of rediscovered miracles inside the house and out, only waiting for him to have time for them.
‘I’ll light the fire,’ she said, feeling reproachfully at the coldness of his hands. ‘You’re frozen! You’re sure to have a cold. Go and get a hot bath while I make some coffee – the geyser won’t take long.’
He began to go, obediently, but turned back in the doorway to look at her again, to reassure himself of her reality, and his miraculously regained unity with her. ‘I love you!’ he said. He could not help it, the words welled up in his lips, and would be said.
‘And I love you, you crazy kid!’ I can, she thought, now; there isn’t any curse on it. I love you as I did at the beginning of it, and as I shall at the end. I’ll stand by it and answer for it at whatever judgment there is, but I’ll never give it up, any more than I’ll give up my life. My life! She remembered what years of atonement she owed to herself, what prodigies of achievement.
He went out, satisfied, and she heard his footsteps recede down the stone corridor with a joyful alacrity, heading for the bathroom. The boy’s smile had come back to his man’s face, she had the dazzling memory of it in her eyes all the time she was laying and lighting the fire. You cannot turn back, but the road may circle, perhaps, and bring you again a prospect you had lost, and this time a nearer and clearer view of it. Nor could she ever have wished to turn back, it was not in her nature. There was only one honourable way to go, and that was forward.
When the fire was drawing nicely, she made for the kitchen, to prepare breakfast. Her own eyes shone upon her from the long mirror. On its austere round table in the corner the royal purple jar drew to itself the golden red of the morning light, and flushed into the deep crimson of a dark rose. She rang it with her finger-nail as she passed, and it gave out an astonishing, high, full note, purer and less complex than a bell’s tone, a confident natural harmony, serene as its beautiful body. She thought: ‘I must clear away all that rubbish in the kiln. But I’ll work on that glaze, I believe it’s worth it. I believe I can get it right next time!’
About the Author
Ellis Peters is a pseudonym of Edith Mary Pargeter (1913–1995), a British author whose Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are credited with popularizing the historical mystery. Cadfael, a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey during the first half of the twelfth century, has been described as combining the curious mind of a scientist with the bravery of a knight-errant. The character has been adapted for television, and the books drew international attention to Shrewsbury and its history.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1953 by Edith Pargeter
Cover design by Barbara Brown
Illustrations by Karl Kotas
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6416-2
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