The Stress of Her Regard Read Online Free PDF

who's likely to be rooting around out behind the stables, anyway? Sleep's what you need right now. You're getting
married
later today—you've got to get your rest.
    He lay back down and pulled the blankets up under his chin, but he had no sooner closed his eyes than he thought,
stableboys
. Stableboys will probably be working out there, and I'll bet they're on the job early. But maybe they won't notice the ring on the statue's finger . . . a gold ring, that is, with a good-sized diamond set in it. Very well, then surely they'll report the find, knowing that they'll be rewarded . . . after all, if they tried to
sell
it they'd get only a fraction of its real value . . . which was two months' worth of my income.
    Damn it.
    Crawford crawled out of bed and found the lamp and his tinder box, and after several minutes of furious striking he managed to get the lamp lit. He looked unhappily at his sodden clothes, still lying in the corner where he'd thrown them several hours ago. Aside from one change of clothes, the only other things he had brought along to wear were the formal green frock coat and embroidered waistcoat and white breeches in which he was to get married.
    He pulled the wet shirt and breeches on, cringing and gasping at the cold unwieldiness of them. He decided to forego the shoes, and just tottered barefoot to the door, trying to walk so steadily that his shirt would not touch him any more than it had to.
     
    He almost abandoned the whole undertaking when he unbolted the outer door of the spare dining room and a rainy gust plastered his shirt against his chest, but he knew that worry wouldn't let him get any rest if he went back to bed without fetching the ring, so he whispered a curse and stepped out.
    It was a lot colder now, and darker. The chairs were still on the porch, but he had to grope to know where they were. The south end of the yard, where the stables and the old carriages were, was darker than the sky.
    The mud was grittily slimy between his toes as he stepped off the porch and plodded out across the yard, and he hoped nobody had dropped a wine glass out here. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, for in addition to worrying about cutting his feet he was remembering Boyd's eerie ravings of a few hours ago, and he was acutely aware of being the only wakeful human being within a dozen miles.
    The statue was hard to find. He found the stable, and plodded the length of it, dragging his hand along the planks of the wall, with no luck; he was about to panic, thinking that the statue had been carried away, when he rounded the corner and dimly saw the inn buildings away off to his left, which meant that he had somehow been checking the south wall instead of the west one; he reversed course and carefully followed two more walls, conscientiously making the right-angle turn between them, but this time he found himself dragging his numbing fingers along the wall of the inn itself, which wasn't even connected to the stable; he shook his head, amazed that he could still be this drunk. Finally he just began stomping out a zigzag pattern across the nighted yard with his arms spread wide.
    And he found it that way.
    His fingers brushed the cold, rain-slick stone as he was groping back toward the stable wall, and he almost sobbed with relief. He slid his hand up the extended stone wrist to the stone hand—the ring was still there. He tried to push it up off of the statue's finger, but it was stuck somehow.
    An instant later he saw why, for a flash of lightning abruptly lit the yard: and the stone hand was now closed in a fist, imprisoning the ring like the end link of a chain. There were no cracks, no signs of any fracture—the statue's hand seemed not ever to have been in any other position. Rain was streaming down the white stone face, and its blank white eyes seemed to be staring at Crawford.
    The nearly instantaneous crash of thunder seemed to punch the ground spinning out from under him, and when his feet hit