“Dave drove me into town,” she said, “they’re waiting for me in the car park.” She had to keep talking, or something would break. “They’ll only let in one person at a time to see you. Dave plans on marrying his Alix next spring. I thought you might like to know that some good came out of all this. In other circumstances he’d never have met her.”

  She was busy unwrapping the small parcel she had brought with her, and his eyes, for all their unhappiness, could not help following the movements of her fingers.

  “I brought you this—look! I wanted to find something permanent for you, not just flowers. Did I guess right?” She had gone to a lot of trouble to find what she wanted, not even knowing what it would be until she found it. Hospital toys should be special, intensely personal to both the giver and the receiver, and if possible inexhaustible. She had not even realised until now why she was so set on finding the right gift for him, never having considered gifts as a paradoxical mark of proprietorship.

  She set the little painted box on the edge of his bed, and lifted the lid, and the minute powdered musician at the minute spinet within began to make jerky little movements to the tinkling strains of an early Mozart minuet, the notes sweet and fine-drawn as spun sugar. It would have gone on playing for three of their ten minutes, but he was too weak to endure it for so long. He quivered feebly in his plaster, and turned his head away. He was not, in his own view, the kind of person she should be approaching, with her charity and youth and candour. The darkness in his own memory, the bitterness in his own experience stood like a vast wall between them.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked disingenuously. The musical-box continued to spin sparkling strands of sugar. “It isn’t a new one, it’s early nineteenth-century. Don’t you think they did this sort of thing better then?”

  He reached a hand out blindly, found the little box and closed the lid upon it, cutting off the end of the minuet. But he did it with a wild tenderness that was very revealing. “You know it’s lovely… you know I…” He waited a full twenty seconds, motionless and rigid with effort, to regain control of his voice; she recognised that relentless patience in him.

  “Dinah, you mustn’t come here again. You shouldn’t have come now. Much better for you not to know me, I’ve done you enough harm—I and my family. You must realise that I’m a criminal. There are very serious accounts against me, it’s inevitable that I shall be charged…”

  She said not a word about the doubts she held on that score. All she said was: “I don’t mind that. It makes no difference to me.”

  “But it does to me. I tried to tell you, that day.. I couldn’t let you go ahead and link your life… I know I gave you a false impression, I was very clumsy. I wanted to warn you not to waste your youth and warmth and goodness on a Macsen-Martel—to steer clear of us as you would of the plague…”

  “But you’re not a Macsen-Martel,” said Dinah bluntly.

  He was shaken out of his resolute despair as rudely as out of his feudal dream of responsibility. It was salutary. He lay in astonished silence and passivity for a long moment, and then he began to laugh. Rather precariously, because his physical state was still very low, but so gently that she felt no need to hush and soothe him out of it. It ran through him like a life-giving pulse.

  “Oh, Dinah, I’d forgotten,” he said, quaking with the first pure mirth of years, “I’d quite forgotten I’m a bastard. It’s true, my mother’s maiden name came straight out of the commercial midlands—grandmother was the Martel who married money. Do you know what that makes me now? Plain Robert Smith!”

  He laughed himself, predictably, into tears of weakness. She wanted to touch him, to reassure him, to involve him once and for all and drive him farther along the road on which she had already started him; she wanted to open the lid of the musical-box again and set her seal on him as shamelessly as if she had put a ring on his finger, or in his nose. But she did none of these things. The ten minutes were up, and he’d had enough for one day. And she knew how to be patient, too.

  “And what’s the matter with Smith for a name?” said Dinah mildly. And she patted his nearer hand—it was clasped very firmly over her gift—and walked confidently out of the ward.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  [scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

  [A 3S Release— v1, html]

  [June 26, 2007]

  Table of Contents

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  Ellis Peters, The Knocker on Death's Door

 

 

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