Chapter 32 Look at Her

By Saturday morning it was law.

Someone had pinned a white card to the wooden post beside the feed bin, at exactly the height of a peacock's eye, and on it, in black ink and the most beautiful copperplate I had seen outside a museum case, was one word: PASKETTI.

I stood in front of it in my coat with my coffee going cold in my hand and read it three times, partly to be sure and partly because the capital P had a flourish on it that a person could have hung a hat from.

"Mr. Tolliver," I said, when Ambrose arrived at my elbow with the feed bucket, as he arrived everywhere, without any evidence of having walked. "Did you do this?"

"Miss Pippa issued instructions, madam." He threw a handful of grain across the grass. "I felt they ought to be recorded."

The big peacock came stalking over at the sound, tail folded, head pumping, and set about breakfast with the air of a bird who had answered to Pasketti since the Coolidge administration. The smaller one followed at a distance. It was a quieter, plainer creature, bronze and green where the other was blue, and it pecked with one eye kept on the house at all times, in the manner of a tenant expecting the rent to go up.

"And that one?"

"As yet unnamed." Ambrose considered it. "Miss Pippa is deliberating."

---

The library at Whitlock Hall was a long brown room shelved to the ceiling with books nobody had disturbed in years, warmed by a fire in a hearth you could have stood up in, and by the window two leather armchairs faced each other over a small table with a chessboard on it. The pieces were old, yellowed ivory against some dark polished wood, and the white king had a chip out of his crown.

Felix sat in one armchair with his feet a foot off the floor. Ambrose sat in the other, upright, still in his gloves. I stayed in the hall with my second cup, because if Felix saw me he would stop.

"Again, Master Felix. How many squares?"

Felix's finger traveled the bottom row, then up the side, then back along. His lips moved. When he had finished he lifted one hand with all five fingers spread and one thumb from the other hand beside it, held that up for Ambrose to see, then folded the six away and showed four.

"Sixty-four is correct." Ambrose lifted a piece, a horse with a flaring carved mane. "And this gentleman. Do you recall how he moves?"

Felix touched the horse's head with one finger, then leaned sideways toward the hearthrug, where Pippa lay on her stomach coloring a shark the color of a fire engine, and whispered for a long while.

"He says the horse goes crooked on purpose," Pippa reported without looking up. "Two and then one sideways, like an L, and it jumps over people. He says that's cheating but he likes it."

"It is not cheating." Ambrose set the knight down two squares forward and one aside, over the head of a pawn, without a sound. "The knight, Master Felix, is the only piece that can never be blocked. Others may stand in its way. It simply goes over them."

A log slumped in the grate. Felix waited for it to finish settling before he picked up his own knight, the white one, and hopped it two and one over his own pawn, then looked up at Ambrose to see whether he had it right.

Ambrose inclined his head perhaps a quarter of an inch, and Felix went pink to the tops of his ears.

On the rug, Pippa put down her crayon and sat up.

"I've decided."

"About what, Miss Pippa?"

"The other bird." She went to the window and flattened her nose against the glass. Out on the lawn the quiet peacock stood alone by the feed bin, staring at the house. "He's Lord Tuesday."

Ambrose turned in his chair. "Lord Tuesday."

"Because Tuesday is the worst day. It isn't the start and it isn't the middle and nothing good ever happens on it, and he looks like he knows that." She turned round to face the room. "So he's a lord. So he feels better."

Ambrose studied the bird through the glass with the gravity of a man asked to witness a will.

"I shall prepare a card."

---

Sloane arrived at eleven without calling.

I heard her first: a car door, heels going over gravel faster than gravel allows, then the great front door swinging back on its hinges and her voice gusting down the hall.

"Grand-mère! I know you're in here."

Beatrix was in the morning room with the papers and did not get up. I was on the stairs with a sweater for Felix and stopped halfway.

Sloane came into the hall in a camel coat, sunglasses parked in her hair, a folded page of newsprint in one fist and a little enamel heart on her lapel that read BRAMPORT HEARTS. When she saw me on the stairs her whole face narrowed.

"So it's true." She shook the page at me; I could see Crane's photograph across the top of it, my front door and its broken lock. "Everyone at the club is saying it. She's *living* here. You've moved Calloway's poisoner into Grand-mère's house."

"It is my house," said Beatrix from the morning-room doorway, leaning on her cane, "and Grand-mère is me, and you are shouting in it."

"Somebody breaks into her place and she runs straight to *us*? What is she to us? A doctor who listened to your heart once. You don't even like doctors. You threw a stethoscope at your own cardiologist."

"He deserved it."

"This is insane. This is exactly what Daddy said would happen, he said she'd get her hooks in and—"

"*Ça suffit.*" Beatrix went on in French, low and quick, for perhaps half a minute. I caught one word in five, and one of the words I caught was a word Agathe had once used about a man who parked across the bakery's delivery door, and Agathe had apologized to me for it afterward.

Sloane's mouth fell open. She swung toward Ambrose, who had come silently into the hall with a white card in his gloved hand.

"What did she say?"

"I couldn't possibly, Miss Sloane," said Ambrose, and went past her out the front door toward the feed bin.

Sloane turned back to me. She crossed the hall and stopped at the foot of the stairs with her chin up.

"You'll be gone by summer. I promise you that."

Through the tall window beside the door I could see Ambrose stooping to pin his card to the post, and Lord Tuesday at his side with his head cocked, fixing Sloane's car on the drive with a look of deep and personal grievance.

I came down one step, so that we were nearer to level, and lowered my voice until she had to lean in to hear it.

"Summer's a long way off," I said. "I'd worry about this afternoon. Lord Tuesday was here first, and he's already taken against your car."

She stared at me, then out the window at the bird, then back.

"Who," she said, "the hell is Lord Tuesday?"

From the landing above me a voice answered with enormous authority.

"He's a *peacock.*" Pippa stood at the banister in her pajama top and jeans with my baby blanket knotted round her neck by two corners, the yellow wool trailing down her back to her heels. "Actually, he's a lord. He has a card. Mr. Tolliver did the writing." She peered down at Sloane with frank interest. "Are you the lady who shouts?"

Behind me, in the morning-room doorway, Beatrix made a short dry noise into her hand that might have been a cough if you were being kind to her.

For a moment Sloane's face was nothing but a young woman's face, caught out in front of a child and a grandmother and a butler with a card.

"Back upstairs, Pip," I said.

Pippa went, cape flapping. Sloane dropped her sunglasses over her eyes, turned on her heel and left by the front door, and her car went down the drive spitting gravel onto Lord Tuesday's lawn.

---

Philip and Juliet came at three, "only dropping by," with a lemon cake in a white bakery box tied with string.

Philip came into the drawing room the way he had come round the lunch table in March, hands out, silver and tanned and smelling faintly of mint. "Mother. Margot. We heard about the house. Dreadful business, simply dreadful. I said to Juliet, we must go up and see she's all right." He put the cake on the side table. "Everyone's all right? The children?"

"Everyone's fine," I said.

"Thank God." He sat and looked about for the twins and found them, Pippa upside down on the sofa with her feet climbing the back of it, Felix on the window seat with the white knight in his fist. Philip's face creased into its fond smile and his hand went into his blazer pocket.

"Now. Who'd like a peppermint?"

He held them out on his flat palm, two red-and-white candies with the cellophane twisted at each end, twins of the one he had pressed into my hand in April, which was still in my winter coat pocket, uneaten.

Pippa flipped off the sofa and was halfway across the rug before I was on my feet.

"How kind," I said. I reached him first, smiled down at him, and lifted both peppermints off his palm with two fingers, lightly, a guest taking canapés from a passing tray. "They've just done their teeth. I'll keep these for later."

Philip's smile did not so much as flicker. "Of course, of course. Most sensible. Doctors." He laughed. "Celeste was the same, you know. Nobody could ever get a sweet past her to the children. Well. She would have been."

Pippa looked from his empty hand to mine and then up at his face, settled something in the one second it always took her, and went back to the sofa without a word.

Juliet hadn't sat down.

She had stood just inside the drawing-room door since they arrived, in a long cream coat she had not taken off, pearls at her throat, her handbag held in front of her in both gloved hands like a woman waiting for a bus that was running late. She hadn't touched the cake. She looked at Beatrix, then at Philip, then at me, and I watched a small muscle at the corner of her mouth draw in and hold. Then she turned and walked out of the room.

Philip didn't appear to notice; he was telling Beatrix about a man at the yacht club. I put the peppermints in my pocket and, after a moment, went after her.

She went down the front hall and through the archway at its end into the long gallery that ran along the sea side of the house, forty feet of polished boards and tall windows full of afternoon, and on the inner wall between the windows hung the Whitlocks: men in dark coats, women in pale silk, a sea captain with a beard and a sextant. I had walked past that archway a dozen times and never gone in.

Juliet walked the length of it without looking at any of them, her heels clicking, until she reached the far end, where a single portrait hung by itself in a plain gilt frame, and stopped.

I came up behind her, and saw it, and could not make my feet go any farther.

A young woman sat in a blue chair against a dark ground, in a plain white blouse open at the collar, her hands loose in her lap and her nails cut short. Dark hair pulled back from a narrow face that was mostly bones and eyes, and the eyes were gray, the true gray of the harbor on a cold morning before the sun gets to it. She was not quite smiling. She looked out of the frame as if someone had just said something funny and she was deciding whether to forgive them.

I had seen that face every morning of my life, in the bathroom mirror at Netmaker Lane and in the steel of a scrub sink and in the black of an OR window at the end of a night on call.

The brass plate on the frame said CELESTE.

Juliet didn't turn round, and she didn't lower her voice. She spoke to the painting, and to the long bright room, and to the drawing room at the far end of the hall where her husband's voice had stopped.

"Philip," she said. "Look at her. *Look.*"

Behind us, in the archway, Philip stood with one hand in his blazer pocket. He brought out a peppermint. His eyes went to me, then to the painting, then to the back of his wife's head, and he began to unwrap it, twisting the cellophane at one end and then the other, very slowly.