Read Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery for Free Online Page B

pounds heavier but, as they say of an old work horse, I’m sound in wind and limb. And I want to go to war. In a swift poignant wave of memory I could see the mud of France, feel the rain and cold, and smell the sweet, sickly odors of ether (until it ran out) and of antiseptics—all of it in the past these twenty years. I thought of that—and of Bataan and Corregidor, and the nurses who were there and what they did.
    My heart gave a kind of bow of homage. But it was heavy with longing, too. So I tried to put the war out of my mind and looked out at what I could see of the landscape from the window.
    The Brent house stood on the very edge of a little town called Balifold; it was not quite country and not quite suburb. It was, I believe, among the outlying hills of the Berkshires, not far from Lenox and Stockbridge, although we had changed trains, I think, at Springfield. It had once been, and indeed still was, a rather elegant neighborhood. The Brent house itself was enormous, solid and ugly, except where ivy had crept over the chimneys and around the stone balustrades, softening their rather grim outlines.
    The grounds were extensive and were enclosed with a very high and solid stone wall. There were tall, grilled iron gates, formal lawns, thick, clipped shrubs, old trees and, directly below me, a wide slope of lawn, bordered by a tall thick hedge. This hedge was broken at one end by steps and another gate which led. I guessed (and correctly) to the garden, where my patient was said to have been cleaning a gun—at eleven o’clock of a dark February night.
    I was looking down at the lawn and steps when there was a flutter of a blue cape and Drue came hurriedly from somewhere out of my range of vision and crossed the lawn. She was running, so the red lining of her long blue nurse’s cape fluttered, and I could see the hem of her starched white skirt. Her hood was pulled up over her head but still I was perfectly sure it was Drue. She disappeared down the steps and behind the hedge and was there for a long time, for I watched.
    Indeed when she did finally emerge it was perceptibly darker with the fall of an early, dreary twilight. She came directly toward the house and she was carrying something under her cape. I was sure of it because of the way she held the edges of the cape together, the crook of her elbow beneath the heavy folds, and the oddly surreptitious way she hurried toward some side door.
    However, it wasn’t more than ten minutes after that that she came, all fresh and crisp in her white uniform and cap, with only the color in her lips and in her cheeks to prove that she’d been, not a quarter of an hour ago, running across the lawn in what I could only describe as a surreptitious way. She came in quietly, closed the door behind her and went at once to stand beside the bed. Her eyelids were lowered, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could see her mouth and the passion of anxiety in the lines of her slender figure.
    Young Brent moved a little and spoke again. He said, “But that’s murder. Murder. Tell Claud. There’ll be murder done.”
    He said it clearly; he said it imperatively; he said it with a complete, forceful conviction. He was drugged and unconscious and did not know what he was saying, at least, I sincerely hoped he didn’t know.
    But Drue cried, “Craig!” in a sharp whisper. “ Craig—what do you mean ?”
    She waited and I waited, and he didn’t move, or speak.
    “Delirium,” I said finally, my voice sounding unnaturally high.
    “Delirium?” She seemed to weigh it, still watching him fixedly, and to arrive at some secret rejection. “Why would he say that? If it’s delirium.”
    “Why wouldn’t he?” My voice was still a little high. “They say anything in delirium. Who’s Claud?”
    “That’s Dr. Chivery,” she said. “The Chiverys are very close friends.”
    It didn’t help much; if there was any remote and fantastic grain of truth in Craig Brent’s words, which