Christopher Evans - The Rites of Winter

At length she undressed and got into bed. She always slept nude, piling more blankets on her bed as the winter advanced until she felt like an animal cocooned in a deep burrow. To her surprise, sleep came easily. She dreamt of her husband, remembering the time in summer when a party of six guests had arrived, bound for the city. She had gone to fetch him to help prepare their rooms and had found him asleep face-down on their bed, a winy vomit surrounding him. In her dream the vomit was the colour of bile, and when she rolled him over there was a dark hole where his face should have been. Then the young men of whom she had dreamt earlier were standing in the doorway, pointing at him and laughing. She was smiling at them.

Their laughter grew louder and more staccato until she became aware of a rapping on the door knocker downstairs. She went out into the empty corridor and descended the stairway without haste, her hand on the banister.

The moment she opened the door, the icy wind blew in a flurry of snow. Marguerite was standing there, dressed in white. Her face was as glacially beautiful and as timeless as ever. She smiled her irresistible smile, and Stella felt as if she was drowning in the blueness of her eyes. Then she entered, shaking the snow from her cloak.

Stella followed her like a sleepwalker as she passed through the vestibule, glancing at the empty hook on the key board. The faint aroma of Simon’s pipe-smoking still lingered in the air. Silently Marguerite ascended the stairs.

She went directly to Simon’s room and turned the handle. It opened without protest, closed behind her without a sound. Stella stood outside, her mind blank. Then a shiver freed her from her numbness. She entered her own room and went directly to the spy-hole.

Everything was dark and silent in the room, but she had the strong impression of movement and life. She waited. Outside it had stopped snowing and a sickle moon shone bright between scudding clouds. The stars looked adamantine. She waited.

Abruptly Simon’s room erupted with a brilliant white light which made her recoil from the spy-hole. There was a piercing scream which rent her mind like fingernails scraped on ice. And then silence.

The light continued to pour through the spy-hole as she cowered on the floor. Then, after a long time, it gradually began to fade to orange and then to red. The dimming of the light was slow, but Stella did not move. Nor did she entertain the thought of putting her eye to the spy-hole when it had died completely. Chilled to the marrow, she crawled into her bed. Dawn seemed to come quickly, and she did not know whether she had slept or not. She lay there, watching the gathering of the light and the movement of the clouds, patterns as fickle and inexorable as life itself. Beyond the wall there was no sound. The cradles of snow on the windowpanes began to melt under the sun.

At length she heard a movement next door. She waited. The door opened and footsteps receded in the corridor and down the stairs. She crept to the spy-hole and peered through. The bed was unmade and the curtains had not been drawn. She could not be sure whether the tousled white sheets were darkened with shadows or a greyish dust. She heard the crow give an enfeebled cry, and realised that she had forgotten to take him in that night. She hurried to the window. Simon was walking through the melting snow towards the city road. She opened the window and found the air possessed of all the mildness which heralded a true spring thaw. His long cloak erased his footprints in the snow as he went.

Then she saw that he had taken Thomas from the woodshed and laid him on a pile of straw under the sun. His body already looked free of its surface coating of ice; a black cloth had been tied around his face. At the bottom of the garden Simon had dug a grave.

Before the sun set she would go down and give him a decent burial.