Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf Read Online Free PDF Page A

her point of view there may well be something to regret. I believe it would be better if she knew what it was, and could be forced to accept it. You need not be afraid of the result, if you do run the thing to earth. She has a sense of responsibility to the rest of us too. Whatever you find, you won’t destroy her, you can only liberate her. She knows of what a marvel she is the custodian.’
    Fantastic, Francis thought, shaken clean out of his objectivity. This antique pillar of society, thirty years established, father and grandfather, suddenly wrenching his heart open over a neurotic young woman he never saw before, because some accident of nature gave her the voice of an archangel. And how if he’s right? How if she really needs to be rid of an incubus that might kill her? No more immortal Orpheus, only that lament on a gramophone record, slowly paling for want of new, living breath. Stiff little, grey little stuffed shirt as he might be, Maggie Tressider’s surgeon had the courage of his convictions.
    ‘I take it,’ said Francis carefully, drawing the classic profile of Orpheus on the half-filled page of notes before him, ‘that the best thing I can do is come and talk to Miss Tressider during ordinary visiting hours… This evening?’
    He went home and played the Gluck records. She was better even than he remembered her. It was not a dark, weighty, velvet contralto, but agile, thrilling and true, a quality in it that sheared through the heart like pure pain, like love itself, excising everything of lesser urgency. It was the voice the old man was in love with, of course. No face could live up to it, much less the heart and the being that went with the face.
    She had a crooked mouth in photographs, and a wide, defensive glance, like a child’s, and a more than usually asymmetrical face, larger on the right side.
    Well, there was the voice to be saved.
     
    She was sitting up in bed when he came, looking exactly like all those other women in the long ward next door, polished and brushed and neatly tucked in for visiting-time. She had even the same half-apprehensive, half-expectant look as they had, and her eyes like theirs enlarged in a face blanched and honed to transparency by the experience of suffering, turned towards the doorway of her room as soon as his hand touched the handle, and transfixed him as he entered with their blue intensity. She looked glad, and eager, and afraid; exactly as if he had really been a personal visitor, and one to whom she had long looked forward.
    ‘Miss Tressider? My name is Killian.’
    ‘It’s very good of you,’ she said, ‘to come so promptly.’ Her speaking voice was low-pitched, warm and vibrant. ‘Please sit down. I believe Mr. Rice has explained to you what’s worrying me?… what I want you to find out for me?’
    It seemed that everything was to be conducted with despatch, practically, as between business associates, without any suggestion of anguish. Unless, he thought a moment later, you looked too closely at the fine-drawn lines of her face, which had still something of the chill of shock about them, the faint, reflected image of death as it missed its hold on her, or deeply enough into the wide, wild stare of the eyes to discover the fixed, silvery gleam of panic behind their honest, well-mannered blueness. She shopped for the commodity she needed with the directness of a child, but there was nothing childish about her need.
    It was illuminating, too, that the paperbacks he had brought with him came as a shock to her, and an embarrassment. When he laid them on the bed convenient to her hand she touched them blankly, and didn’t know what to do or say. The thanks came mechanically, and what was really on her mind couldn’t find words. How right he had been to pass up roses! Unless, of course, he wanted her to withdraw the offer of this job? He still wasn’t clear about that, but if he had wanted it, roses would have been as good a way as any of making sure.