Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.

Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,

And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,

That thus so cleanly I myself can free.

Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,

And when we meet at any time again,

Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain.

—Michael Drayton

I
t was no use lying to myself, the baby was not in the house. I had searched every nook a sixteen-month-old boy could fit in, and Rowan Cottage had far more nooks than most houses. He was gone.

And it was my fault. What kind of grandmother leaves a toddler sleeping on the sofa and goes out to dig a damn perennial border, just because a sunny April day is a rarity in England? Although Archie had never shown any ability to reach, let alone turn, a doorknob, I knew how determined he was to figure things out. Emily was right, I wasn’t fit to watch him. This time she would cut us apart.

When I had moved to this Gloucestershire village almost two months before, the plan had been for me to take care of him almost every day while my daughter practiced psychotherapy at the hospital in Oxford. But when I unwittingly put him in mortal danger not once, but twice, she had revised it to a visit or two a week. Not that I’d ever intended to put him in harm’s way, but Archie, at barely a year and a half, and I, at sixty, were so alike in our impulsiveness—our need to pull back veils had caused us to stumble through one where a murderer waited.

I went to the front door and grabbed hold of the lintel, weak with apprehension, looking out at the one road through Far Wychwood, a two-lane that connected with a main route to Oxford a mile beyond the village. People went down our little road pretty fast, although there was a four-lane several miles away that got most of the traffic.

The scruffy black cat that had adopted me peered around the door of the potting shed by the stone wall. It was his favorite place of refuge when Archie visited, though I had also known him to simply disappear for days. He was so easily spooked that I hadn’t yet been permitted to touch him. I had no doubt he deeply resented that I gained his trust with tuna fish and then brought in a toddler on him.

“Where’s he gone, Muzzle?” I murmured.

That ridiculous name was the one he had come with, given by the old man who had lived across the road when I first moved to Far Wychwood, the only person the cat had ever completely trusted. I glanced over at the piece of ground where his cottage had stood, just an empty rectangle of tall weeds under the April sun. The ruins of the burned-out building had been cleanly removed, as if George Crocker’s long life there had never been. “Muzzle” was the old man’s country pronunciation of “mouse hole,” the cat’s field of operations in that ancient cottage.

I stepped out into my front garden, and he came toward me warily, tail in the air. The scar on my right arm throbbed dully as the sight of the old man’s property raised subconscious memories of the day I’d been caught in the blaze that destroyed the cottage.

A few seconds later a shock went through my whole body at a screech of brakes and a shout off to my right. I ran into the road, my heart knocking the breath out of my chest, knowing what I would see.

A tiny shape lay unmoving on the shoulder of the road by the waist-high stone wall in front of the old village schoolhouse. I knew it was Archie by the overalls and the ringlets of yellow hair, and despair slumped like a sinkhole into my brain.

Running toward him, I was vaguely aware of some kind of car sitting slantwise across the road and a male figure with something red about him, standing there looking down at Archie.

I stopped a few feet from the man and screamed, “Stupid, stupid—Couldn’t slow down, could you? You’ve killed my baby!”

“No, no, I didn’t, I swear!” he stuttered. “I
didn’t
hit him, he fell—”

I sank to my knees beside Archie. His quicksilver presence, incessantly searching and questioning, seemed utterly stilled. He was sprawled on his stomach with his blue eyes closed, his soft pink lips open, even the curls seeming to lie lifeless against his head. My faithless husband, my brilliant Emily—it seemed to me at that moment I’d never loved them or anyone except this child lying like a piece of refuse beside the road.

I heard the man babbling on, “I was driving along, at the speed limit, I assure you, and I saw the little boy standing on the wall there, and then as I reached it I saw him lose balance and fall. He hit his head against that large rock, do you see? I stopped to help him…”

Then, incredibly, Archie made a little moaning sound and turned on his side. His features puckered into a frown, his eyes still shut.

Relief flooded through me. The man exclaimed, “There, he’s not—He’s knocked himself out, that’s all! Best to take him round to your local GP. Let me carry him for you.”

“There’s no doctor here anymore,” I answered breathlessly. “The one we had’s been gone ever since the murder.”

“Murder?” he repeated, startled.

“But somebody has to examine him,” I went on. “Look where his poor little head’s starting to swell, behind his ear. Concussion, it must be, oh, Archie, oh, God—”

“Oxford’s less than half an hour away,” he said. “We’ll take him to the main hospital.” He slipped his arms under Archie and lifted him from the ground. “If you’ll just hold the door,” he began, stepping toward his car. I scrambled up and jerked the passenger-side door open. “No, best let him lie on the rear seat—” he began, but I broke in.

“I’m going to hold him, don’t try to stop me.”

“Very well, get in and I’ll give him to you.” We accomplished this, and I sat cradling Archie while the man got in beside us and started the car. He glanced over and said reassuringly, “There, his color’s coming back, isn’t it?”

“Just drive!” I snapped.

But as we headed through the village I had to admit that Archie’s cheeks were pinker now, and he had started making mewing noises, scowling, closing his fingers around the bottom of my cardigan. After a few minutes he tried to sit up, pulling on the sweater. His eyes popped open as he got nearly vertical. He grabbed the right side of his head, where the swelling was increasing rapidly, stared at me indignantly, and said, “Ow!”

“Just be quiet, baby,” I said. “I know it hurts, but we’re going to make it all better.”

His face scrunched up and he wept in soft whimpers, knowing another outcry would hurt just as that one had.

My panic had begun to subside and now I felt sorry for my rudeness. It hadn’t, after all, been the man’s fault. I glanced at him for the first time. He was, at a guess, in his early twenties, thin and lanky, dressed in jeans and a red sweater under a tweed jacket. His straight brown hair kept flopping over his forehead, so he had to push it back every few minutes. If I were his mother I’d make him get a decent haircut, I thought fleetingly.

“Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions, but I tend to do that.”

“Not at all,” he said with that embarrassed air the English get when accepting an apology. “Quite understandable. I’m Tom Ivey,” he added shyly.

“Catherine Penny. And Archie Tyler.” I nodded toward my grandson.

“Oh, I say, is
that
who—” His amiable young face was filled with amazement. “Peter Tyler’s son! Of course, and you’re the American mother-in-law. Peter has often mentioned you, said you lived in Far Wychwood, but somehow I never connected—I’m Peter’s colleague, well, that’s to say, I’m only a postgraduate student, a junior research fellow, while Peter of course is a lecturer and, we’re all sure, will be named to the headship tonight, as our current head’s retiring at the end of this term. If anyone at Mercy College would be an excellent head of faculty, he would. And of course you’ll be there to see the presentation, I mean to say, I’m sure the little chap will be completely recovered well beforehand—”

“I’m not going,” I said brusquely. “Can’t you drive any faster, Mr. Ivey?”

“Call me Tom. ‘I hold he loves me best that calls me Tom.’ Sorry, couldn’t resist, that’s from Thomas Heywood, one of the minor Elizabethans. But you probably don’t know of him. Frightfully irritating habit we all have, coming up with these quotations, but our heads are simply stuffed with them. Did you say you’re not coming to the ceremony? Oh, do reconsider. Peter thinks the world and all of you, he’ll be—”

“Before you go any further, I’m telling you I
won’t
be at the ceremony, and before you ask why, I’ll tell you it’s nothing to do with Peter, who I’m crazy about. I’d have to be in the same room with my ex-husband, Emily’s father, and his—dolly-bird, isn’t that the expression? The woman he left me for a year and a half ago, in America. They’re visiting Peter and Emily for a couple of weeks, and I’m not going near Oxford during that time, not for anything. Well, except an emergency, like this.”

“Oh, I do apologize for prying,” he said, in an agony of embarrassment. “Peter hadn’t told me—I didn’t mean—” He fell silent.

We were soon climbing a steep hill to the enormous white rectangle of John Radcliffe Hospital, in the suburbs of Oxford. Then down a driveway to a door labeled
ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY
. Inside, about half a dozen people in various stages of misery occupied a row of uncomfortable chairs in a narrow hallway near the reception desk.

“Yes, may I help you, Madame?” inquired a young black woman behind the desk, in a crisp Oxbridge accent.

“The baby fell and hit his head on a rock,” I told her breathlessly. “He’s got a big swollen place on the side of his head there—”

“He’s on our records, is he?” she asked, turning to her computer.

“Yes, Archie Tyler. Can’t somebody see him right now?” I begged. “Just look at that swelling!”

“Must follow proper procedure, mustn’t we?” she said coolly, typing.

Another woman, dressed in nurse white, came through a set of swinging double doors, consulted the list of names, and shouted, “Thatcher!” An old man got up and limped after her through the doors.

“While you wait,” Tom Ivey said behind me, “mightn’t I ring Peter up and let him know what’s happened? He said he’d be at home today.”

I nodded distractedly, and he set off for a bank of phones down the hall.

“Do you know Emily Tyler?” I asked the guardian of the gates. “She’s on the psychiatric staff here.”

She smiled for the first time. “Oh, I know Emily very well indeed.”

“Well, this is her boy. She should be here this afternoon, seeing a private patient. I’ve really got to go and tell her about this.”

“You’d be best advised to remain here, Madame,” she replied. “They might call you and you’d miss your turn. But I’ll ring her consultation room if you like.”

“No, no, I have to see her face-to-face to explain how I let it happen. Somebody else told her the last time, and it was awful.”

“Very well. You can take any of the chairs in the corridor.”

I gave up and carried Archie to a chair. During the ten or fifteen minutes we waited, his weeping subsided and he succeeded first in sitting up, then in scrambling to the floor, uttering an absentminded “Ow!” every few minutes. When he crawled down the line of chairs to start untying the shoes of a woman too sunk in discomfort to notice, I dragged him back.

“Feeling better, I’d wager!” said Tom, beside us again, and I had to admit the boy was recovering at a rate I’d never expected when I’d seen him lying by the road.

When my name was finally called the nurse took Archie from me, assuring me firmly that I’d be allowed in after the doctor had finished his examination. So I went back to the reception desk and got the directions I needed, took the stairs to the next level two at a time, and burst into my daughter’s consulting room. She was sitting in a leather wing chair, dressed severely, as she always was at work, in a plain black pantsuit with her long blonde hair pulled tightly back in a chignon, horn-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. Despite her best efforts, she still looked like a teenager, although she was a licensed psychotherapist as well as a wife and mother.

My lingering apprehension must have showed, because as soon as she saw me she jumped up from the chair and her face went white.

“Oh, God, what’s happened to him now?” she cried.

There was another woman in the room, sitting opposite Emily, but I hardly noticed her as I stuttered out an account of the accident.

“Now, it’s
okay!”
I finished. “He’s conscious, he’s crawling around and causing trouble already. And the swelling will go down, I’m sure, bad as it looks—”

Emily was already headed for the door. The other woman came after her, protesting in a voice stretched taut as a bowstring, “You can’t leave me now. You can’t draw those terrible memories out of me and then just walk out on me!”

Emily turned to her for a second. “We will reschedule, Mrs. Stone,” she said shortly. “It’s my child!”

“What about
my
child?” the woman called after her as Emily went out the door. Her curiously deep voice broke with desperation. She grabbed my sleeve and stopped me as I hurried past her. I saw now that she was tall, thin, with jet-black hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun, and piercing dark eyes that held me almost as irresistibly as her fingers.

“He killed my child,” she said. “That’s what she has to help me deal with. He killed Simon! And I think he’s planning to kill me too…”

A shiver went down my spine. I had never encountered any of Emily’s patients before, and of course she never talked about them. This woman was speaking to me from another realm of consciousness, one I hoped I would never understand. I pulled loose and hurried down the stairs after Emily.