"What secrets are hidden behind the tapestry or dark?"
It was nearly eight when Kate heard the carriage return. A few minutes later, she heard Aunt Sabrina's slow step on the stair, and the closing of her bedroom door. Thinking that her aunt was surely tired and hungry, Kate put on her shoes and went out into the passage. Outside Aunt Sabrina's door, she tapped gently. When she heard a blurred sound she took to be an assent, she opened the door and went in.
Aunt Sabrina was sitting at her dressing table with her back to the door, her head in her hands. She did not look up or turn around.
"You must be tired, Aunt Sabrina," Kate said gently. She needn't tell her now about the altercation in the kitchen, or Tom Potter; the tale had to be told, but it could wait until she was rested. "Would you like me to fix you a bit of hot supper? I could bring it up on a tray."
Aunt Sabrina raised her head and looked at Kate in the
dressing table mirror. Her face was gray and old-looking and her eyes were darkly hollowed, but she managed a small smile. "You needn't bother, dear," she said. "I am not hungry-"
Kate stared at her aunt's reflection in shocked silence. What had happened during her meeting with Mrs. Farnsworth-if that was where she had gone-to turn her skin the color of putty?
Aunt Sabrina turned around. "My dear Kathryn," she said, and then stopped. For a moment she hesitated, as if deciding whether she should speak and how much she should say. Then she seemed to come to some painful resolution and began again, her voice faltering a little.
"Kathryn, I know you are concerned for my well-being, and I very much wish that I could share with you what has transpired today. But I cannot." The lines around her mouth were deeply drawn and the crepey skin below her eyes was smudged with weariness.
"I understand," Kate said, genuinely touched by her aunt's obvious dilemma. She turned to go, but Aunt Sabrina gestured, seeming to want to speak. Kate waited.
"There is one thing more," she said at last. "Please do not distress yourself about your aunt Jaggers, Kathryn. Whatever I must do, I shall do, and quickly." Her voice took on a brittle metallic ring and her eyes, steely now, met Kate's directly. "You will not be sent away. And if something should happen to me, I have seen to it that your future here at Bishop's Keep is secure."
"Thank you, Aunt," Kate said. But she was frightened by the tone of her aunt's voice. What did Aunt Sabrina fear that she would have to do to restrain Aunt Jaggers?
But it was not a question Kate could ask, and when she sought her aunt's eyes again, they were hooded and remote. Kate sensed that she had come at last to some decision, to a choice that brought with it both a desperate regret and a profound pain, so pervasive and wounding that Kate could only guess at its depth and dimension.
Aunt Sabrina turned around again. "Now please allow me to be alone," she said. "I have a great deal to consider." Her
shoulders slumped and her voice dropped, so that Kate almost did not hear her next words. "I fear that my future has been greatly altered-and not just mine, but that of persons for whom I care."
The distance between them was only a few steps. Kate ached to cross it and put her arms around her aunt. But she could not. Whatever was troubling Aunt Sabrina was something she had decided to bear alone. With a murmured "Sleep well" she left. She had the disquieting sense that she was closing the door on a tragedy.
Back in her room, Kate considered whether she should go to bed. But if she did, she would only lie restlessly awake. So she gathered up her papers and went downstairs to the library, where she lighted the oil lamp beside the shrouded Remington. It was after eight o'clock and the old house was silent, the servants in their quarters, Aunt Jaggers in her west wing suite, Aunt Sabrina in her room. It was a good time to type the chapter she had just completed, and to revise and expand it as she went.
Caught up in her work, Kate spent far more time than she had expected. According to the loudly ticking grandfather clock in the corner, it was close to eleven when she finished the last page to her satisfaction. She poked up the dying fire, added coal, and sat beside it in the tall wing chair to read what she had written. Then, seeing that the lamp was about to run out of oil, she turned it out and sat for a few minutes longer in the dark, watching the last flickers of the fire, letting her mind go to the questions that seemed most central to her life at Bishop's Keep.
What was the source of the enmity between Aunt Sabrina and Aunt Jaggers? But, of course, that was an unanswerable question, for it was impossible to know what secrets were buried in the intimacies of sisters. The complex tapestry of the present was woven out of threads of the past, of old loves, old hates, old sins, even old slights. The thing that seemed most trivial, most innocent in intention, was often most deeply felt and long remembered.
But the question still remained, as tantalizing as a book in some foreign tongue. What ancient silence did Aunt Jaggers
threaten to break? What secret did she know that Aunt Sa-brina feared to have revealed-so greatly feared that she allowed Aunt Jaggers to violate moral principles that she held dear? How did this matter concern the vicar, who seemed like an entirely pleasant and harmless old man? And how did Aunt Sabrina intend-if that was her intention-to break her sister's hold over her? Kate shifted in the wing chair, drawing her stockinged feet up under her. And what had happened during the afternoon and evening to bring Aunt Sabrina home looking like death warmed over?
Kate pondered the question for a long time, while the fire burned down and the room grew colder. They were questions like those she often created in her story-making, but they had a real-life urgency that she never experienced in her writing. And they were unanswerable precisely because she didxnot have control over what real people did or thought or believed, as she did over the characters in her novels. It was easy enough for her hero to solve the crime that she put before him, complete with clues that invited his deduction. Not so easy for her to understand the intricacies of a plot she had not contrived, or the hearts of people whose secrets were hidden from her, and perhaps even from themselves.
Kate stirred. She was just concluding that there was nothing to be gained from sitting in the dark, mulling over questions that had no answers, when she heard the noise. It was only a tiny click, and she might not have heard it at all if her ears had not been attuned to utter silence. She twisted around in the chair, startled. Behind her, in the dimness, she saw one of the French doors begin to swing open. Someone was entering the library!
Quick as thought, Kate reached for the poker. With a wild yell, she leaped out of the chair, brandishing the poker, and dashed for the door. On the dark terrace outside, she heard the scramble of feet, a clatter, and a muffled oath as the intruder knocked over a flowerpot, and the sound of running footsteps on gravel. A moment later, there was the thud of a horse's hooves galloping down the lane. The intruder had made good his escape.
"Wha's happ'nin'?" came a sleepy voice from the direction of the servants' wing. A casement window flew open and Mudd, in his nightshirt, put out his head. "What's goin' on out there?" he demanded. "What's all th' noise?"
Kate stood in the doorway, shoeless, the poker still in her hand. Now that the danger was over, she could feel herself shaking. "A thief tried to break in, Mr. Mudd," she replied, trying to steady her voice. Mudd's head disappeared.
Kate went back into the library and, with shaking hands, lighted a candle at a dying coal on the hearth. She stepped out onto the terrace again, sheltering its flame with her hand. There was nothing, of course. The intruder had gotten completely away.
Then her eye fell on something lying on the clipped grass, beside the tumbled flowerpot. She picked it up and turned it in her hands.
The intruder might have escaped, but he had left his brown felt hat behind.