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they were wrapped and boxed.
    “Less rationally, surely, than should the jewellery and the widow’s cap. I agree with you; I doubt whether this is a memorial marble.”
    Gaskin said firmly: “They’re different. They don’t worry me, memorials never have. But this is different. To tell you the truth, I took against it as soon as it came into the shop. Whenever I look at it, I keep imagining that it’s oozing blood.”
    Gorringe smiled.
    “I must try it on my house guests and watch their reactions. The Courcy play next weekend is
The Duchess of Malfi
. If this were a full-sized male hand we could use it for one of the props. But even the Duchess in her extremity could hardly mistake this for the dead hand of Antonio.”
    The allusion was lost on Gaskin who had never read Webster. He murmured: “No indeed, sir,” and smiled his sly, sycophantic smile.
    Five minutes later, he saw his customer and his parcels formally off the premises, congratulating himself with premature satisfaction—for despite his carefully nurtured sensitivity he had never claimed to be a clairvoyant—that he had seen and heard the last of the arm of the dead Princess.

4
    Less than two miles away, in a Harley Street consulting room, Ivo Whittingham slipped his legs over the edge of the examination couch and watched Dr. Crantley-Mathers shuffle back to his desk. The doctor, as always, was wearing his old but well-tailored pinstripe suit. Nothing so clinical as a white coat ever intruded into his consulting room, and the room itself with its patterned Axminster carpet, its Edwardian carved desk holding the silver-framed photographs of Sir James’s grandchildren and distinguished patients, its sporting prints and the portrait of some solidly prosperous ancestor holding pride of place above the carved marble mantelshelf, looked more like a private study than a consulting room. No apparent effort was made to keep infection at bay; but then, thought Whittingham, germs would know better than to lurk in the well-upholstered armchair in which Sir James’s patients awaited his advice. Even the examination couch looked unclinical, being covered with brown leather and mounted by way of elegant eighteenth-century library steps. The assumption was that, although a number of Sir James’s guests might wish forsome private whim to take off their clothes, that eccentricity could have nothing to do with the state of their health.
    Now he looked up from his prescription pad and asked: “That spleen troubling you?”
    “As it must weigh twenty pounds and I look and feel like a lopsided pregnant woman, yes, you could say that it’s troubling me.”
    “The time may come when it’s better out. No hurry, though. We’ll have another think in a month’s time.”
    Whittingham went behind the painted oriental screen where his clothes were folded over a chair and began to dress, drawing his trousers up over the heavy belly. It was, he thought, like carrying one’s own death, feeling it drag at the muscles, a foetus-like incubus which never stirred, reminding him with its dead weight, by the deformity which he saw in his mirror every time he bathed, what it was he bore within him. Looking over the screen, he said, his voice muffled by his shirt: “I thought you explained that the spleen is enlarged because it’s taken over the manufacture of the red blood corpuscles which my blood’s no longer producing.”
    Sir James didn’t look up. He said with careful unconcern, “That’s more or less what’s happening, yes. When one organ ceases to function, another tends to take over.”
    “So would it be tactless to inquire which organ will obligingly take over the job when you’ve whipped out the spleen?”
    Sir James guffawed at this witticism. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?” He had never, thought Whittingham, been a man for originality of speech.
    For the first time since his illness began Whittingham would have liked to ask his