and Ian had looked at each other, and Ian had tried to smile, although his eyes were gemlike with unshed tears.
“It would somehow be easier,” Ian had said, “if she looked . . . looked more dead. I know how that sounds—”
“Bosh,” Geoffrey had said, trying to smile. “The undertaker doubtless exercised all his wit and—”
“Undertaker!” Ian nearly screamed, and for the first time Geoffrey had truly understood that his friend was tottering on the brink of madness. “Un dertaker! Ghoul! I’ve had no undertaker and I will have no undertaker to come in and rouge my darlirg and paint her like a doll!”
“Ian! My dear fellow! Really, you mustn’t—” Geoffrey had made as if to clap Ian on the shoulder and somehow that had turned into an embrace. The two men wept in each other’s arms like tired children, while in some other room Misery’s child, a boy now almost a day old and still unnamed, awoke and began to cry. Mrs. Ramage, whose own kindly heart was broken, began to sing it a cradle song in a voice cracked and full of tears.
At the time, deeply afraid for Ian’s sanity, he had been less concerned with what Ian had said than how he had said it—only now, as he whipped Mary ever faster toward Little Dunthorpe in spite of his own. deepening pain, did the words come back, haunting in light of Colter’s tale: If she looked more dead. If she looked more dead, old chap.
Nor was that all. Late that afternoon, as the first of the village people had begun wending their way up Calthorpe Hill to pay their respects to the grieving lord, Shinebone had returned. He had looked tired, not very well himself; nor was this surprising in a man who claimed to have shaken hands with Wellington —the Iron. Duke himself—when. he (Shinebone, not Wellington.) had been a boy. Geoffrey thought the Wellington story was probably an exaggeration, but Old Shinny, as he and Ian had called him as boys, had seen Geoffrey through all his childhood illnesses, and Shinny had seemed a very old man to him, even then. Always granting the eye of childhood, which tends to see anyone over the age of twenty-five as elderly, he thought Shinny must be all of seventy-five now.
He was old ... he’d had a hectic, terrible last twenty-four hours ... and might not an old, tired man have made a mistake?
A terrible, unspeakable mistake?
It was this thought more than any other which had sent him out on this cold and windy night, under a moon which stuttered uncertainly between the clouds.
Could he have made such a mistake? Part of him, a craven, cowardly part which would rather risk losing Misery forever than look upon the inevitable results of such a mistake, denied it. But when Shinny came in ...
Geoffrey had been sitting by Ian, who was remembering in a broken, scarcely coherent way how he and Ian had rescued Misery from the palace dungeons of the mad French viscount Leroux, how they had escaped in a wagon load of hay, and how Misery distracted one of the viscount’s guards at a critical moment by slipping one gorgeously unclad leg out of the hay and waving it delicately. Geoffrey had been chiming in his own memories of the adventure, wholly In the grip of his grief by then, and he cursed that grief now, because to him (and to Ian as well, he supposed), Shinny had barely been there.
Hadn’t Shinny seemed strangely distant, strangely preoccupied? Was it only weariness, or had it been something else ... some suspicion... ?
No, surely Oot, his mind protested uneasily. The pony-trap was flying up Calthorpe Hill. The manor house itself was dark, but—ah, good!—there was still a single light oninMrs. Ramage’s cottage.
“Hup, Mary!” he cried, and cracked the whip, wincing. “Not much further, girl, and you can rest a bit!”
Surely, surely not what you’re thiynking!!
But Shinny’s examination of Geoffrey’s broken ribs and sprained shoulder had seemed purely perfunetory, and he had spoken barely a word to Ian, in spite of the man’s deep grief and frequent incoheren t cries. No—after a visit which now seemed no longer than the most minimal sort of social convention would demand, Shinny had asked quietly: “Is she—?”
“Yes, in the parlor,” Ian had managed. “My poor darling lies in the parlor. Kiss her for me, Shinny, and tell her I’ll be with her soon!”
Ian then had burst in to tears again, and after muttering some