The Stress of Her Regard (4 page)

Actually he was afraid Boyd had not been quite that drunk.

The party was clearly over. Lucy and Louise were complaining about having to go to bed with wet hair, and Appleton was evasively irritable and, as if to confirm the soured mood, the landlord muttered angrily in his room and caused either his knees or the floorboards to creak threateningly. The women abandoned the lantern and fled to their rooms, and Appleton shook his head disgustedly and stalked upstairs to go to bed himself. Crawford and Boyd appropriated the lantern and tiptoed to the closed door of the taproom and tried the lock.

It wouldn't yield.

"Probably just as well," sighed Crawford.

Boyd shook his head heavily, then turned and started toward the stairs; halfway there he paused and without looking back said, "Uh . . . thanks for getting me . . . out of that, Mike."

Crawford waved, and then realized that Boyd couldn't see the gesture. "No trouble," he called softly instead. "I'll probably need something similar myself sooner or later."

Boyd stumped away, and Crawford heard his ponderous footsteps recede up the stairs and down some hall overhead. Crawford tried the taproom door again, with no more luck than before, briefly considered finding out where the barmaids' rooms were, and then shrugged, picked up the lamp and went upstairs himself. His room wasn't large, but the sheets were clean and dry and there were enough blankets on the bed.

As he got undressed, he thought again of the overturned boat and the house across the street from the pub. Twenty years had passed since that rowboat foundered in the Plymouth Sound surf, and the house had burned down nearly six years ago, but it seemed to him that they were still the definition of him, the axioms from which he was derived.

Long ago he had started carrying a flask so that he could banish these memories long enough to get to sleep, and he uncorked it now.

Thunder woke him up hours later, and he lifted his head from the pillow and reflected sleepily on how nice it was to be drunk in bed when the lanes and trees and hills outside were so cold and wet . . . and then he remembered the wedding ring he had left in the yard.

His belly went cold and he half sat up, but after a moment he relaxed. You can get it in the morning, he told himself—wake up early and retrieve it before anyone else is up and about. And who's likely to be rooting around out behind the stables, anyway? Sleep's what you need right now. You're getting
married
later today—you've got to get your rest.

He lay back down and pulled the blankets up under his chin, but he had no sooner closed his eyes than he thought,
stableboys
. Stableboys will probably be working out there, and I'll bet they're on the job early. But maybe they won't notice the ring on the statue's finger . . . a gold ring, that is, with a good-sized diamond set in it. Very well, then surely they'll report the find, knowing that they'll be rewarded . . . after all, if they tried to
sell
it they'd get only a fraction of its real value . . . which was two months' worth of my income.

Damn it.

Crawford crawled out of bed and found the lamp and his tinder box, and after several minutes of furious striking he managed to get the lamp lit. He looked unhappily at his sodden clothes, still lying in the corner where he'd thrown them several hours ago. Aside from one change of clothes, the only other things he had brought along to wear were the formal green frock coat and embroidered waistcoat and white breeches in which he was to get married.

He pulled the wet shirt and breeches on, cringing and gasping at the cold unwieldiness of them. He decided to forego the shoes, and just tottered barefoot to the door, trying to walk so steadily that his shirt would not touch him any more than it had to.

He almost abandoned the whole undertaking when he unbolted the outer door of the spare dining room and a rainy gust plastered his shirt against his chest, but he knew that worry wouldn't let him get any rest if he went back to bed without fetching the ring, so he whispered a curse and stepped out.

It was a lot colder now, and darker. The chairs were still on the porch, but he had to grope to know where they were. The south end of the yard, where the stables and the old carriages were, was darker than the sky.

The mud was grittily slimy between his toes as he stepped off the porch and plodded out across the yard, and he hoped nobody had dropped a wine glass out here. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, for in addition to worrying about cutting his feet he was remembering Boyd's eerie ravings of a few hours ago, and he was acutely aware of being the only wakeful human being within a dozen miles.

The statue was hard to find. He found the stable, and plodded the length of it, dragging his hand along the planks of the wall, with no luck; he was about to panic, thinking that the statue had been carried away, when he rounded the corner and dimly saw the inn buildings away off to his left, which meant that he had somehow been checking the south wall instead of the west one; he reversed course and carefully followed two more walls, conscientiously making the right-angle turn between them, but this time he found himself dragging his numbing fingers along the wall of the inn itself, which wasn't even connected to the stable; he shook his head, amazed that he could still be this drunk. Finally he just began stomping out a zigzag pattern across the nighted yard with his arms spread wide.

And he found it that way.

His fingers brushed the cold, rain-slick stone as he was groping back toward the stable wall, and he almost sobbed with relief. He slid his hand up the extended stone wrist to the stone hand—the ring was still there. He tried to push it up off of the statue's finger, but it was stuck somehow.

An instant later he saw why, for a flash of lightning abruptly lit the yard: and the stone hand was now closed in a fist, imprisoning the ring like the end link of a chain. There were no cracks, no signs of any fracture—the statue's hand seemed not ever to have been in any other position. Rain was streaming down the white stone face, and its blank white eyes seemed to be staring at Crawford.

The nearly instantaneous crash of thunder seemed to punch the ground spinning out from under him, and when his feet hit the mud again he was running, racing the tumbling echoes back toward the inn, and it seemed to him that he got inside and slammed the door against the night just as the thunder crashed over the inn like a wave over a rock.

* * *

When Crawford awoke, several hours later, it was with the certainty that horrible things had happened and that strenuous activity would soon be required of him to prevent things from getting even worse; his head was throbbing too solidly for him to remember what the catastrophe was, or even
where
he was, but perhaps, as he told himself blurrily, that was something to be grateful for. More sleep was what he wanted most in the world, but when he opened his eyes he saw a smear of nearly dried mud on the sheet . . . and when he threw back the covers he saw that his feet and ankles were caked with it.

With a gasp of real alarm he bounded out of bed. What on earth had he been doing last night? Sleepwalking? And where was Caroline? Had she thrown him out? Perhaps this place was some kind of madhouse.

Then he saw the portmanteau under the window, and he remembered that he was in a village called Warnham, in Sussex, on his way to Bexhill-on-Sea to get married again. Caroline had died in that fire nearly six years ago. Oddly, this was the first time since her death that he had even momentarily forgotten that she was gone.

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.

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 accordionlike 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 somehow—"

"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.