Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow Read online

  We went down a hallway, like the rest of the hospital all gray linoleum and white walls in need of repainting, and into a windowless cubicle furnished with an examining table, a sink, and a metal cabinet with lots of shallow drawers. Archie was on his feet now, a stethoscope hanging around his neck, pulling open one drawer after another and exploring among the sharp instruments inside. A young man in a white coat was trying frantically to pull him away from the cabinet, but Archie was small enough to dodge him and, obviously, well enough to enjoy the game.

  Emily approached from behind and swiped him up before he saw her. She looked him over and gasped at the swelling behind his ear.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Tyler,” the doctor said, lifting his stethoscope off Archie.

  “Dr. Barnes,” she said with a distracted nod.

  “I don’t see any sign of concussion,” he told her. “Young children easily develop these startling swellings, but they recede quickly. I think you’re quite safe taking him home now. In fact, as quickly as possible.”

  People were suddenly crowding through the door behind us, filling the little room. I turned and saw Tom first with my son-in-law, Peter, beside him. Rose, Archie’s young nanny, trailed behind them, and then I caught a glimpse of the man I had loved and trusted for thirty years. A curving, green blur was now attached to his left side, and that was all I wanted to see of the woman who had broken up my marriage. I quickly fixed my eyes on the far wall. I had never seen her, didn’t even know her name. Emily and I always referred to her as “Barbie,” knowing she had to be the kind of sexpot the dolls were modeled on.

  Archie leaned out from his mother’s arms and enumerated, “Papa-Danda-Zanny-Vofe!” He pointed at Tom and said, “Dat?”

  Rose ran over to embrace him, tears running down her cheeks. He ignored her, still pointing at Tom and demanding, “Dat? Dat?” until Tom realized what was needed and said, “Oh—Tom.”

  “Ta,” said Archie with satisfaction.

  He started squirming, trying to get down from Emily’s arms. Her father stepped over and took him, raising him way up over his head. Archie shrieked with delight, Emily gave a strangled cry, and I yelled, “What do you think you’re doing, he’s got a head injury!”

  Shock and anger forced my eyes to Quin, although I’d sworn I would never look at him again. There was the same cocky grin I knew so well, the thick, wavy hair, not yet all gray like mine, but grayer than the last time I’d seen him, the sharp blue eyes that met mine with an expression I’d never seen in them before, like a challenge he wasn’t sure that he could carry off or that I would meet. He lowered the baby against his chest.

  “Calm down, Kit,” he said quietly. “He’s okay. When Emily hit her head on that swing it swelled up just as big and it went away within an hour. Remember?”

  That damned overconfident grin, the nerve of that demand that I share a memory with him, and, most of all, that blur of green attached to his side, filled me with poisonous vapors that threatened to explode and take the whole room out, until I released it in a voice that betrayed me by cracking: “Shut up!” I shrilled.

  “Shup!” Archie echoed with delight.

  “Archie!” Emily cried. “No, no, nice little boys don’t tell people to shut up.” She glanced at me indignantly.

  The doctor, obviously anxious to be rid of the lot of us, broke in, “As I was saying, it will be quite safe to take him home so long as he’s watched for signs of concussion. Those would be excessive drowsiness, confusion—”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I interrupted, driven into a fury at everybody, myself included. “You haven’t had him x-rayed for a fractured skull, and something has to be done about that swelling! How can you say people with no medical training can recognize symptoms of concussion? He needs to be here, with proper medical supervision!”

  “I assure you, this child does not have a fractured skull,” the doctor said with growing annoyance. “He is anything but lethargic.” He gestured toward Archie, now bouncing up and down in Quin’s arms, chortling, “Shup! Shup!”

  “He shows no sign of dizziness or disorientation, his pupils are normal—in short, he doesn’t require an X-ray and, as we do have other patients waiting to be seen, I feel quite confident in releasing him.”

  “What are you, an intern?” I demanded. “I want him evaluated by a specialist.”

  “Come along, Catherine,” said Peter, obviously embarrassed. “You’re making too much of a bit of a bump. I’m sure we can trust the doctor’s diagnosis.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Emily said. “He is our child after all, and if Peter and I are satisfied that he’s not seriously hurt, that’s an end to it.”

  “We’ll be with him till it’s time to go to Peter’s award ceremony,” Quin had to put in, “and we’ll watch him all the time. And of course little Rosie will call us if there’s any problem later.” Rose, standing across from me, blushed and smiled shyly. “You can even come back with us, Kit, and help us watch him. How about that?”

  I hadn’t thought the level of anger inside me could rise any higher, but now I felt the way Krakatoa must have just before it leveled Sumatra.

  I shouted, “Don’t you tell me what I can do! And don’t call me Kit!”

  “Mother, stop it!” Emily commanded.

  “I really must ask you to take your discussion to some other area,” the doctor said stiffly, “as this room is needed. And should you require a consultant—”

  Blundering out the door, I heard Emily saying earnestly, “Certainly not, Dr. Barnes, and do let me apologize—”

  The woman who had been with Emily upstairs was now standing beside the reception desk, tearing a tissue to shreds as she watched the door to the examining rooms. Her hair had come loose and was falling around her face. Her black eyes kindled, looking over my shoulder, and then I heard Emily again, her voice soft and steady: “Have you been waiting all this time, Mrs. Stone? Everything’s all right, we’ll be able to finish our session after all.”

  She came around me and took the woman’s arm, deftly removing the shreds of tissue from her hands and putting them on the desk. Mrs. Stone’s tense face relaxed, and she clutched Emily’s hand as if it were a lifeline. They moved toward the doors.

  “Mrs. Tyler is such an excellent therapist,” the young black woman said to me, and a smile again softened her ultracompetent manner. “She has a real gift for coping with disturbed patients. But of course you know that.”

  I hadn’t known. Her profession had always been a bone of contention between Emily and me. I believed neurosis was just another name for self-indulgence, that a no-nonsense attitude and plenty of outdoor exercise were of far more use than complaining to a psychologist. But it was good to hear that people who worked with her thought she had “a real gift.”

  “Now,” I heard Peter say softly, “you’ve got it over with, you’ve seen and dealt with him, so you’ll be able to come to the presentation of the headship tonight, won’t you?”

  I turned and saw him looking down at me with genuine eagerness in his intelligent brown eyes. He was a tall, angular young man, rather good-looking once you got past his scholarly stoop and self-effacing manner. I had always been fond of him, and I was touched to see that he really did want me there at his big moment.

  “Oh, Peter.” I sighed. “Are you sure you want to take the chance of another scene like that one? I knew if I was forced to be in the same room with them, I’d behave badly.”

  “You’ll not need to go anywhere near them,” he assured me. “There will be nine people there besides you and them. Please say you’ll come. It means a lot to me.”

  How could I refuse that? It was true, the first encounter had to have been the worst. I vowed silently that I’d stay on the other side of the room and prove to everybody that I could control my emotions.

  Tom Ivey drove me home, chattering nervously, glancing over occasionally to be sure I was not going to burst into another temper tantrum.

  “I am glad you’ve
agreed to come tonight,” he said as we pulled out of the hospital’s parking lot. “I’ll be able to introduce you to Gemma, my—my fiancée, even if just now things have been rather put on hold. She’ll come to her senses, of course. She’s also a junior fellow at Mercy. We’ve both worked with Peter, although of course Edgar Stone ultimately heads the area the three of us work in.” He was frowning now, and his hands had tightened on the wheel.

  “Stone? Wasn’t that the name of that woman Emily was treating?”

  “Ah, yes, she’s his wife. Everyone at the college feels most awfully sorry for her—everyone except for her husband, that is.” His scowl deepened. “He’s a cruel bugger, always doing the poor woman down. There”—he pointed at the windshield—“we’re about to pass their house.”

  I saw a two-story brick house, much like the others on the street leading out of Oxford, except that it was the only one with a tiny front yard encircled by an iron fence about the height of the average man. All the blinds were drawn too, creating a generally unwelcoming effect.

  “So you and Peter work for this Edgar Stone?” I asked. “I didn’t know they had that kind of working relationship at Oxford.”

  “Well, as I’m sure you know, we’re part of Mercy College’s staff for ‘Elizabethan Dramatists Other than Shakespeare,’ ” he said, with a self-deprecatory laugh. “A small, select faculty, as one might say. Edgar Stone is something of an authority on an author called John Ford. Very rum fellow, Ford, and exactly right for Edgar—his plays are full of women driven mad by sadistic men,” he finished bitterly.

  “I knew Peter’s specialty was Elizabethan authors,” I said as we swung onto the four-lane road that led to Far Wychwood. “He sent me copies of the reviews for that book he published last year, from the Times Literary Supplement and half a dozen other illustrious places. I got the impression it made quite a splash.”

  “Oh, absolutely! The Heroic Villain was the book of the year in academic circles. It’s the reason Peter is sure to get that full professorship tonight. He’s the only one of our faculty who’s published anything at all noteworthy in the past decade. Apart from myself and Gemma, who are really still apprentices, in a manner of speaking, the rest of our little group are in the sere, the yellow leaf, as the Other Fellow says—middle-aged, I mean,” he amended with another little expiatory laugh.

  “ ‘The Other Fellow?’ ”

  “Oh, that’s our name for Will Shakespeare. Bit of a joke, you know.”

  “And though Peter’s made such a name for himself, he’s still considered a sort of employee of this Edgar Stone fellow?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t put it quite like that. Makes us sound a bit like tradesmen,” he said with guileless snobbery. “You see, in order of Oxford rank, we junior fellows, who are not yet through our course of studies, are hoping for eventual promotion to lecturer, a permanent teaching position. Eventually a lecturer can become a reader, with less teaching to do and more chance to concentrate on one’s own research. That’s the highest position most dons achieve. Only the most accomplished are appointed full professor.”

  “But Peter can become head of the department without being a full professor first?”

  “Oh, quite. It’s up to the current chair to make that decision. At present, Peter is a lecturer, so he, as well as Gemma and I, are rather expected to help one of the readers like Stone with research and the like. The other two readers on our faculty are pretty somnolent, haven’t published for years, while Peter’s already made a name for himself. Well, Edgar Stone is involved in this long-term project trying to prove that his chum Ford had a hand in the Other Fellow’s Titus Andronicus. But between you and me, the rest of us think it’s what I believe you Americans call a ‘boondoggle’—just a way for Edgar to claim he’s still working!”

  We were turning off the main road, onto the two-lane that led through Far Wychwood. I felt a surge of happiness every time I came home to my village. I had lived in New York City for over thirty years and loved it, but I had never had the sense of belonging on its streets that I had among these ancient cottages of golden stone and gray tile, the dark forest of giant beeches and oaks that gave the place its name, the fields stretching out on all sides in countless shades of spring green, and the little group of friends gathered in front of my gate with anxious faces as Tom’s car drew up.

  “Ah, your friends have turned out,” he said with a smile. “And there’s my father coming to join them.”

  Beyond the little group of women I saw a lean, white-haired man hurrying along the road from Church Lane, his black cassock fluttering in the breeze.

  “Your father—oh, of course, Ivey!” I exclaimed. “Talk about not making connections—you’re the new vicar’s son!”

  “Yes, that’s why I was here this afternoon—filial visit, you know.”

  He waved to the old man as I got out of the car, then drove off toward the Oxford road as my friends gathered around me with questions about Archie’s condition. I hadn’t seen anyone around when the accident had happened, but by now I knew the mysterious way news travels in a small village.

  “He seems all right,” I told them, “the intern who examined him thought so, anyway. I’d rather have had a specialist, but I was outvoted.” I was still a little sore about that.

  “What sort of person examined him?” asked Alice White, a fluttery silver-haired lady dressed in her usual lacy dress with gloves and hat. “ ‘Intern’—that doesn’t sound like a proper doctor!”

  “I believe it is the American term for a houseman,” the new vicar said breathlessly as he reached us, “one taking medical training in hospital.”

  “Well,” said my best friend, Fiona Bennett, “I’d not worry about it anymore, my dear. Emily and Peter are the last people to take any chances with that baby. Come along down to my house and we’ll have a nice strong cup of tea to settle your nerves.”

  She was a plump, earthy woman who, like me, was amazed to be entering upon her sixties. She had lovely blue eyes and gray hair in a pair of braids wrapped round her head. She and her husband, John, a detective sergeant in the Thames Valley police, had moved right into my life like the oldest of friends during my first days in the village.

  “Oh, I wish I could,” I answered. “But I have to go to this party tonight, where Peter is supposed to be awarded a headship. I agreed in a weak moment, and now I can’t get out of it.”

  “Ah, your son-in-law is to be made head?” the vicar exclaimed. “How gratifying! I read The Hero Villain last winter in one sitting, really quite thrilling, I could not put it down.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at him, his pale blue eyes alight with scholarly excitement. He was so much the idea I had always had of a rural English vicar, it was almost funny. Our previous vicar had been a loudmouthed young modernist, detested by the entire village. When he was gone, after the murder, we had expected something as bad if not worse, but miraculously we got the Reverend Henry Ivey, a gentle and studious septuagenarian, and such a traditionalist in liturgical matters that some of the villagers muttered about “popishness.”

  “Well,” said the remaining member of the group, our shopkeeper-postmistress, Enid Cobb, “I got the best thing for a blow to the head, Hawkins’ Bruisin’ Compound, only eighty p the bottle. I’d wager they don’t know about it at that hospital. If you really want to help the little feller, you might come by the shop on your way out.”

  I thanked her without committing myself, and she sniffed, giving me a knowing look from her small, squinted eyes.

  The sun was getting low, and I knew I needed a shower and maybe a bite to eat before heading back to Oxford. When they had left I opened the gate and went up the worn brick path. The rose vine that climbed beside the door was green now, and I stopped to check for buds among the leaves. Surely there would be some soon, and I felt certain they would be the old-fashioned, cabbagey kind, with that strong, sensuous perfume.

  If only I could stay home, have a peaceful evening with my music and
books as the the antique mantel clock chimed off the hours—instead of trying to make conversation with people far more intellectual than I was, and to control my temper in the presence of a pair of people I hated!

  I caught sight of Muzzle, almost concealed in the uncut spring grass, just outside his favorite refuge. He must have been watching to see if Archie was still around before he ventured into the house.

  “Oh, Muzzle.” I sighed. “I wish I could hide in the potting shed too!”

  Chapter Two

  ’Tis not a black coat and a little band…

  Or looking downward with your eyelids close

  And saying, “Truly, an’t may please Your Honour,”

  Can get you any favour with great men.

  You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,

  And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

  —Christopher Marlowe, Edward II

  The award ceremony was to be held in the Senior Common Room, where the dons hang out when they aren’t teaching or burrowing in the library. Peter and Emily had given me a tour of Mercy College weeks ago, so I knew where to go. I parked, as Peter had told me to, at their apartment building by Folly Bridge, and walked up St. Aldate’s to the college. It sits between the square, modern city police station, and the great baroque facade of Christ Church College, at the edge of Oxford’s academic center, since it’s an upstart only a couple of hundred years old. Its buildings, forming the usual square around a pampered lawn, are in the classical Roman style of Robert Adam, popular at the time of George III whose statue stands haughtily atop the tunnel-like entranceway.

  The college porter checked a list of names and waved me through. I stopped for a moment and squeezed my eyes shut, reminding myself one more time that I had to play it cool and indifferent. I had let Quin get to me this afternoon, but I would definitely keep it together tonight.