The Wrong Man to Fear

The track opened for a single afternoon, late in her third week at Hollowmere, the way ice lets go, and Roland came up it before it could close again.

Sabine knew it was him from the morning room window, by the way the car climbed: not Marek's slate Land Rover but a low silver thing, city tyres, sliding twice on the last rise and recovering, a car that had no business on that road and had come anyway. Behind it, keeping a careful distance, a second car, dark and sensible, the kind a firm sends. And the sight of the silver car fishtailing up through the white toward her did a thing to Sabine's chest that she had not felt in three weeks, a loosening, a warmth, because here at last was the one warm thing, here was Roland who had cried, here was family come up a closing road to find her, and she was out of the morning room and across the cold hall and pulling at the great front door before Mrs. Brenner could reach it.

The cold came in. So did her uncle.

"There she is," Roland said, and the warmth of his voice was a fire after the long cold of the house, and he had her by both shoulders and then in his arms, and he smelled of the city, of a world with restaurants and lit windows and people who say they are sorry for your loss, and Sabine, to her horror, felt her eyes go hot. "Oh, my girl. My poor girl. Look at you, you're frozen, what is he doing, keeping you in an icebox. I came the moment they said the road was passable. I have been out of my mind."

"I'm all right," she said, into his coat, and did not believe it, and let him hold her anyway, because she had been so careful for so long, and because there was a terrible ease in being told what she was by someone certain of it. Poor. Frozen. To be rescued. She had spent her whole life being told what she was, and she had never once noticed how much she leaned on it until the cold house took it away.

"You are not all right, you are an orphan in a draughty mausoleum at the end of the earth, with a man your father should never have." He stopped. He set her back from him, his hands still on her shoulders, his face doing the warm worried thing she remembered from the funeral, and over her shoulder his eyes went, just once, past her, into the hall. "Aleksander."

"Roland," said Marek.

He had come out of the dark of the hall silently, the way the whole house came at people, and he stood now at a little distance with his hands at his sides, and the two men looked at each other across the cold flags, and Sabine, between them, felt something she did not have a word for yet move through the air, old and cold and very much not about her.

"I'd have thought," Roland said pleasantly, "you might have telephoned. A girl loses her parents and you cart her off up here without so much as a word to her only living family. People will talk, Aleksander. People are already talking."

"People talk," Marek agreed. "You drove up on a closing road. You'll want to drive back before it shuts, unless you mean to stay, in which case Mrs. Brenner will make up a cold room, and there are a great many cold rooms."

"I won't keep you from your books." Roland smiled. It was a good smile, an easy one, and Sabine watched her uncle use it and felt only warmed by it and did not notice, then, that Marek did not return it, that Marek simply waited, the way the lake waited under its ice. "I came for Sabine, and for two minutes of her time, and then I'll be out of your house and back to civilisation. Sabine. Walk me to the car."

And a younger man got out of the second, sensible car.

He was perhaps Marek's opposite drawn deliberately: young, fair, a good coat worn easily, a scarf, a face that smiled before it was asked to. He came up the steps with a soft leather folder under his arm and a contrite, friendly diffidence, a man apologising for the snow on her doorstep, and he put out his hand to Sabine and said, "Miss Aubry, I'm so sorry to descend on you like this. Tomas Renard. I'm with Ashby Crandall, we administer your family's trust, I do the unglamorous end of it." His handshake was warm and his eyes were kind and they stayed on her face a beat longer than the handshake needed, and after three weeks in a house where one man would not warm to her and one woman would not warm to anyone, the simple ordinary kindness of it nearly undid her. "I drove up with your uncle. There's a paper that wants signing, only a formality, a continuation authority so we can keep the trust's bills paid through the winter while the road's bad. Heating, the gardener, the house insurance, that sort of thing. Nothing that would keep you out in the cold." He said it ruefully, glancing at the white world, charming about it. "Five minutes and a signature and you needn't think about money at all."

"Of course," Sabine said, because that was what you said, because it was a formality, because the man was kind, because her uncle was warm, because she was so tired of carrying things and here were two pleasant men offering to carry one.

Roland already had a pen out. The folder was already open. The paper was already turned to the line, a clean line with her name typed beneath it, S. M. Aubry, waiting, and she had the pen in her hand and the warmth of her uncle at her shoulder and the kind clerk's encouraging face, and she bent over the folder in the cold doorway with the snow beginning, again, to come down.

"No," Marek said.

He did not raise his voice. He had no need to. He simply took the folder out of the clerk's hands, closed it, and held it, and the manner in which he did it was so without violence and so completely final that for a moment no one moved.

"Aleksander," Roland said, and the warmth in it had thinned, just slightly, the way milk thins, "that is the child's own affairs. You can't seriously mean to stand between her and a routine authority."

"I can read it first." Marek's eyes had not left the folder. "Everything that comes up this track with her name on it, I read before she signs it. That is the clause. You knew the clause before you drove up here on summer tyres, Roland, you have read it more carefully than anyone alive." He looked up, then, and his flat grey gaze went from Roland to the young clerk, who had stopped smiling, and back. "I'll read it tonight. If it is what this young man says it is, a continuation authority, three lines, the gardener and the heating, she can sign it in the morning and you'll have it back inside the week. If it is more than three lines, we will talk." He held the folder against his chest. "You came a long way for a signature. You'll forgive me thinking that strange, for three lines about a gardener."

The silence that followed had a different cold in it than the snow.

Then Roland laughed, and the laugh was warm again, perfectly warm, and he spread his hands and said, "You see what I have to work with," to Sabine, ruefully, fondly, drawing her back to his side of it, and she felt the pull of it, the simple gravity of the warm man over the cold one. "He was always like this with your father. Suspicious of his own shadow. Pierre used to say Aleksander would audit the air he breathed if you let him." He bent and kissed her forehead, and his lips were warm, and he murmured, only for her, "Telephone me. The minute you want to come away from here. The very minute. You are not a prisoner, whatever this clause says, you are my brother's girl and there is always a room and a fire for you with me." He pressed something small into her hand, a card, his number in his own writing, and folded her fingers over it. "Be brave a little longer."

And then he was going down the steps, the kind clerk following, turning at the bottom to give her one more apologetic, friendly smile, I'll see you in the morning then, Miss Aubry, I'll stay over in Crayle, and the two cars were turning in the snow, and the warmth was leaving up the track ahead of the dark, and Sabine stood at the top of the steps with her uncle's card warm in her fist and watched the only kindness she had been offered in three weeks drive away.

Behind her, Marek stood in the doorway with the folder against his chest and said nothing.

She turned on him. The anger from the study was still there, banked, and the warmth of Roland had fanned it, and the cold of three weeks had fed it, and it came up now all at once. "You humiliated me. In my own doorway. You took it out of my hands like I was a child."

"You are not a child."

"Then give me my paper."

"In the morning," he said. "When I have read it."

"It's about the heating, Aleksander." She used his name like a stone. "It's about the gardener. You stood there and made my uncle, who buried my father with me, who is the only family I have left in the world, look like a thief, over the heating."

Something flickered in the flat grey of his face. He looked, for a moment, as though he would say a true thing, the way he had in the study, and she saw him decide not to, saw him fold it away the way he folded everything, into a right angle, behind a locked door.

"Go in by the fire," was all he said. "You'll catch your death out here." And then, lower, as she pushed past him into the dark hall, so quietly that she would lie awake turning it over: "He told you you are not a prisoner. Ask yourself, Sabine, why a man who loves you would think to say that out loud, before anyone had said the word."

She went up the cold stairs counting them, the eleven shut doors of the landing waiting above, the bright brass lock at the end of the dark, and behind her she heard him climb after her at a careful distance, two steps back, always two steps back, and at the turn of the stairs where the loose third tread waited, where the dark was thickest, she stumbled on it, the stair she had been warned of and had forgotten, and her hand flew out for the bannister and missed and found his.

For one second his hand was under hers. Bare, warm, steady, the one warm thing in the whole cold house, and it closed over hers to hold her up, an instinct, faster than thought, and she felt the whole of him go still at the touch, utterly still, the lake under the ice, and then he took his hand away.

He took it away as though it had burned him. He stepped back, the two steps, and more, into the dark, and put the breadth of the landing between them, and his voice when it came was not flat at all, it was rough, it was a thing dragged over stone.

"Mind the stair," he said. "Mind the stair, and lock your door, and do not, ever, give me your hand again."

And he turned and went down into the dark of the house, and somewhere below a door shut, and Sabine stood on the loose stair in the cold with her uncle's card warm in one fist and the ghost of a stranger's warmth fading in the other palm. Two men had touched her today. One had folded a card into her hand and told her, before anyone had said the word, that she was not a prisoner. The other had held her up without meaning to and then recoiled as though she were the danger, and forbidden her, in a voice dragged over stone, to ever give him her hand again.

She was certain, absolutely certain, which of them she had been delivered to in error, and which she should run to the moment the track opened. She would spend the rest of the winter learning she had counted it exactly backward, and by then the road would be shut, and the only door she could open would be the wrong one.