in this peculiar moment, Gallahad seemed lamblike. Nothing in the intensity of his concentration on the western mountains suggested fierceness or even willfulness.
His nostrils didn’t flare, neither did his ears twitch. His forelock fluttered against his poll as a faint breeze disturbed it, and his mane stirred along his crest, but otherwise Gallahad remained motionless. Even when she stroked his cheek, his nearer eye did not favor her.
Following his gaze, she saw nothing unusual in the foreground, only the next wave of foothills and the mountains in the background, and ultimately the sun swollen by the lens of atmosphere as Earth resolutely turned away from the light.
At her side, Nash Franklin said, “Well?”
Before she could reply, the horses stirred from their trance. They shook their heads, snorted, looked around. A few lowered their muzzles to graze upon the sweet grass, while others cantered in looping patterns as if taking pure pleasure from movement, from the cool air, from the orange light that seemed to burst through the pasture. The Thoroughbreds’ pets became animated as well, the goats and the dogs, the cats, the duck.
All the animals were behaving only as they ordinarily would, no longer spellbound. Yet here in the aftermath of the event, when all was normal, all seemed magical: the whispering grass, the soft incantatory thud of cantering hooves, the canticle of nickering horses and panting dogs, the season’s last lingering fireflies suddenly bearing their wishing lamps through the pre-dusk air, the sable shadows and the gilding of all things by the descending sun, the sky electric-purple in the east and becoming a cauldron of fire in the west.
The grooms and the exercise boys, the trainer and his assistant, Helen and Tom Vironi, and Cammy Rivers all turned to one another with the same unasked and unanswerable questions: Why did the animals seem enchanted? What did they hear if they heard anything at all? What happened here? What is still happening? What is this I feel, this wonder without apparent cause, this expectancy of I-know-not-what, this sense that something momentous passed through the day without my seeing it?
Cammy’s vision blurred. She did not know why tears filled her eyes. She blotted them on her shirtsleeve and blinked, blinked for clarity.
The harrier glided out of the east, into the autumnal light of the declining sun, less than ten feet above the harvested fields, its elongated shadow rippling over the furrowed earth behind it. The bird dropped abruptly and snared something from the ground while remaining in flight. An oarsman in a sea of air, it sculled into the westering sun, passing over Henry Rouvroy as he crossed from the barn toward the clapboard house.
Henry looked up and glimpsed a rodent squirming in the harrier’s clenched talons. He thrilled to the sight, which confirmed for him that he was no more and no less than this winged predator, a free agent in a world with no presiding presence.
During his years in public service, he had come to realize that he was a beast whose cruelest instincts were barely governed by the few tools of repression with which his upbringing and his culture provided him. Not long ago, he had decided to unchain himself and to be what he truly was. A monster. Not yet a monster fully realized, but certainly now a monster in the making.
In the house, he found Nora at the kitchen sink, deftly skinning potatoes with a swivel-blade peeler.
Eventually Henry would want a woman, although not to cook his meals. Nora was sufficiently attractive to excite him, and there was a perverse appeal to going by force where his brother had gone by invitation.
She didn’t realize he had entered the room until he asked, “Does the house have a cellar?”
“Oh. Henry. Yes, it’s a good big cellar. Potatoes keep well down there for the better part of the winter.”
She would keep well there, too, but he decided against her. When the time came to get a woman, he would be better off with a younger and more easily intimidated specimen, one who had not grown strong from farm work.
“Where’s Jim?” she asked.
“In the barn. He sent me to get you. He thinks something’s wrong with one of the horses.”
“Wrong? What’s wrong?”
Henry shrugged. “I don’t know horses.”
“Which is it – my Beauty or Samson?”
“The one in the second stall.”
“Samson. Jim loves that horse.”
“I don’t think it’s serious,” Henry said. “But it’s something.”
After rinsing her hands under the faucet and quickly drying them on a dishtowel, Nora hurried out of the kitchen.
Henry followed her through the house and onto the front porch.
Descending the steps, she said, “So you’ve never ridden?”
“Only things that have wheels,” he said.
“There’s nothing like saddling up and riding to the high meadows on a crisp day. The world’s never more right than it is then.”
Crossing the yard toward the barn, he said, “You make it sound appealing. Maybe I should learn.”
“You couldn’t find a better riding instructor than Jim.”
“Successful farmer, poet, horseman. Jim is a hard act to follow, even for an identical twin.”
He spoke only to have something to say, to keep her distracted. Nothing in his words revealed his intentions, but something in his tone or some unintended inflection given one word or another must have struck her as wrong.
Half a dozen steps short of the barn, Nora halted, turned, and frowned at him. Whatever she heard in his voice must have been even more evident in his face, because her eyes widened with recognition of his nature.
Our five senses are in service to our sixth, and the sixth is the intuitive sense of danger to body or soul.
He knew that she knew, and she confirmed her knowledge by taking a step backward, away from him, and then another step.
When Henry withdrew the pistol from under his jacket, Nora turned to run. He shot her in the back, again as she lay facedown.
After putting away the gun, he turned her on her back. He seized her by the wrists and dragged her into the barn and placed her beside her husband.
The first shot must have killed her instantly. Her heart had pumped little blood from her wounds.
Her eyes were open. For a long moment, Henry stared into them, into the nothing that had once appeared to be something, into the truth of her, which was that she had always been nothing.
Until this day, he had never killed anyone. He was pleased to know that he could do it, pleased also that he felt neither guilt nor anxiety.
Like Hamlet, he had no moral existence, no sense of any sacred order. Unlike Hamlet, his condition did not cause him to despair.
