Her guests each took a pastry from the silver plate. Lucy picked up the pitcher of unsweetened grape juice and poured each guest another glassful. Then she drank hers down and set the plate of beignets on a large silver serving tray beside the bowl of beef tea, saying, “I shan’t be a moment, my dears. Do go right on eating.”
Richard Norville was on his feet in an instant. “Let you carry that heavy thing, ma’am?” He beamed at his shapely young hostess. “Not while I know it.” So saying, he snatched up the footed silver tray and nodded for her to show him the way, which she did, with much simpering about his gallantry.
They went up the stairs, stopping outside the closed door of Philip Todhunter’s bedroom. Lucy tapped softly and called out that dear, kind Mr. Norville had graciously carried up Philip’s breakfast tray, and that he proposed to pay his respects to his ailing friend.
“Let him come in then,” growled a voice from the other side of the door. “I’m not contagious.”
As cheerfully as ever, Lucy eased open the door, bustled over to her husband’s bedside, and bestowed a wifely peck on the cheek of the invalid, who scowled at her. “Is that my juice?”
“Yes, dear,” she replied. “But do try to eat something as well, won’t you?”
“Stop clucking over me,” said Philip Todhunter, waving away the beef tea. “You know I can’t touch that muck, Lucy.” He reached for a sugared beignet from the pile on the plate. He was a dark-eyed man, lean of feature, with a sallow, waxy complexion beneath a graying beard. He had never been handsome, but prosperity had given him a certain air of distinction, now lacking in the querulous invalid before them.
Richard Norville began to regret his gallant gesture. “See here, Todhunter,” he said in the gruff voice that signifies embarrassment, “I can go if you’re not up to receiving visitors, but hadn’t we better have the doctor round to look at you?”
“I can manage without one, thank you,” said Todhunter, holding up his pastry in a mock salute. “I haven’t eaten in a day and a half. Starve a fever, they say. Better than the quack remedies you get from the medicos.”
“Is it the grippe, do you think, Todhunter? Or worse?” Norville edged away from the bed.
“I feel like the little Spartan boy who put the fox in his tunic,” said Todhunter. “Even now it gnaws through my vitals seeking egress. And there is a numbness in my limbs, worsened by this cursed cold.”
Norville raised his eyebrows. The weather was quite mild, in fact, and there was a coal fire in the grate; but he did not care to argue with a man who was suffering. “Well, I hope you throw it off soon,” he said.
Dutifully, Lucy sat down in the chair beside the invalid’s bed and patted his hand. “Do let me know if you would care for anything else,” she murmured. “I worry so.” Absently, she broke off a bit of her husband’s pastry and nibbled on it.
Her husband finished the rest of it and sank back against the pillows with a sigh. “I feel like Death’s orderly,” he remarked to Norville, wiping his sugared mouth against the back of his hand. “But perhaps a bit of nourishment will do me. It always does, doesn’t it, Lucy dear?”
She nodded, looking distressed. “Philip-”
“That will do, Lucy. Norville and I have business to discuss.” He leered up at her. “Isn’t she lovely, Norville?”
“The flower of Virginia womanhood,” said the railroad executive with borrowed gallantry. He had heard the phrase used by a Southerner at a party once, and he’d committed it to memory. Apparently, these people expected you to say things like that.
Lucy smiled uncertainly. “Is there anything else I can get for you, Philip?”
“No,” he said without looking up. “Norville, did you bring the papers?”
“You will drink your beef tea, won’t you, dear? It will give you strength.”
“Damn the beef tea!” shouted Todhunter, slamming his fist against the tray and spilling the contents of the bowl. Tray, bowl, and pastries tumbled to the carpet. “Can’t you see you’re not wanted…?” His words trailed off into a howl of pain as he doubled over in the bed, clutching his abdomen.
Norville watched his friend in silence for a moment, and then turned to the pale young wife. She had poured herself some grape juice in Philip Todhunter’s crystal tumbler, and she was sipping it in an abstracted way, her hands trembling as she lifted it to drink. “Mrs. Todhunter,” said Norville, “whatever your husband may say to the contrary, his illness is grave. Either you summon a physician, or I will.”
MACPHERSON &HILL
ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW
DANVILLE , VIRGINIA
(Pardon the stolen stationery. Elizabeth.)
Dearest Cameron:
I’m back in Virginia, instead of in Scotland, because the remnants of my family still seem to need the presence of a sane person, and since we aren’t related to such a being, I am having to impersonate one. It’s probably good therapy for me anyhow. There’s a very earnest psychiatrist named Freya (no wonder she went to med schooclass="underline" intellectual parents) who insists that no matter what my feelings are, I do not need solitude right now. She uses words like brooding and self-pity and clinical depression. I have pills to take, but they might as well be Reese’s Pieces, because they certainly aren’t cheering me up any. But I take them anyhow, in case they happen to be working, which means I’d be even worse without them. At least I have things to keep me occupied here.
Besides, there’s a limit to the amount of time one can stand on the shore at Cramond, staring out at the dark water of the firth.
Freya says it’s all right for me to write to you. Therapeutic, she called it, in that smug little way of hers. It must be wonderful to be a shrink. I can’t think why I became a forensic anthropologist. Anytime you disagree with Freya, she just smirks and says that you are “in denial,” and therefore she gets to be right all the time. It’s maddening-which drums up more business for her, I suppose. Why do the rural good old boys bother to stage cockfights when they could put two psychiatrists in a pit and watch a real bloodbath?
I’m going to try to stick to what’s going on here, instead of writing analytical and/or maudlin letters about Us. I don’t need to belabor points about missing you, or being paralyzed with worry, because if everything turns out all right, these letters will look ridiculous, and if it doesn’t, I couldn’t bear to have a record of my sorrow. So I will make this a running journal of family life as I observe it.
The first observation, of course, is that there’s damned little family life to observe. I feel more like a war correspondent. Mother and Daddy are still in the process of divorcing, despite the best efforts of Bill and me to reconcile them. Now they aren’t even speaking to each other! We are obviously no great shakes as mediators, my brother Bill and I. If the UN sent us to the Middle East as peacekeepers, we could probably pull off Armageddon in a matter of days.
Bill is still eking out an existence in his Danville law practice with his partner A. P. Hill (who resembles her namesake, the Confederate general, except that she’s much more stern and commanding). I don’t know that I like her all that much, but I admire her for being such a force to be reckoned with. If I were five-foot-three-inches and blonde, I’d have gone for perky and cute, but A.P. somehow manages to be terrifyingly competent.