"No," she answered. Her eyes were steady on his in the dimness of the room. "Nothing."
He tried to pick up the thread of what he had been saying.
"You see he had always been alone inside, always…" His voice ran down. He put his hand to his forehead, felt dampness, and took it away again. "What was I saying?"
"You're probably tired," Amanda leaned forward in her chair. "You were saying Donal was always alone. But he wasn't. He married Anea of Kultis."
"Yes, but that was his mistake. You see, he was hoping then that, after all, he could still live an ordinary life. But he couldn't. He'd been committed so early… it was something like the mistake Cletus made with Melissa Khan; although that was different, because all Cletus had to do was finish his book…"
His thoughts slipped away from him once more. He wiped his forehead with his hand and felt the cool dampness of perspiration.
"I guess you're right," he said. "I guess I am tired - it's been a large day…"
He was, he realized suddenly, exhausted, sodden with fatigue.
"Of course it has," said Amanda, gently. "I'll show you how to get to your room."
She rose, taking one of the candles from its stand, and led the way into a corridor beyond a further doorway in the wall to the left of the fireplace. He lifted himself woodenly to his feet and walked after her.
Chapter Forty-three
His sleep was a dead sleep, so heavy as almost to be exhausting in its own right. He roused once during the night, for only a moment, and lay there in the darkness in an unfamiliar bed, wondering where he was. Remembering, he dropped like a stone back into sleep again.
When he woke again, the bedroom in which he lay was, bright with morning sunlight diffused through thin white drapes. He vaguely remembered Amanda as she had turned, candle in hand, to go back down the hall, telling him that there were two sets of window drapes to pull, the light and the heavy. Clearly, he had forgotten to pull the heavy, outer set.
But it did not matter. He sat up, swinging his naked legs over the edge of the bed. He was now up for the day; and he felt fine - except for a mild fuzziness in the head that made his surroundings seem at one remove from him. The room he was in had no lavatory facilities. He remembered something else Amanda had said, put on his pants and found his way down the hall to another door which let him into a lavatory.
Fifteen minutes later, cleaned, shaved and dressed, he walked into the kitchen of Fal Morgan. Amanda was there, seated at the round table, talking on the phone with her sister. Hal took a chair at the table to wait for the end of the conversation. The sister, seen in the screen high on the wall, was more round of face and yellow, rather than white-blond, of hair, but unmistakably a sibling. Like Amanda, she was beautiful, but the intensity Hal had noticed so clearly in Amanda was missing in this other Morgan - or, he thought, perhaps it just did not come through as well on a phone screen.
But his inner senses rejected the latter explanation. The intensity of Amanda was a unique quality, something he had felt in no other human being until now. It was beyond reason to suppose that her whole family shared it.
Amanda had been explaining that she had to take Hal to Graemehouse first before arriving as promised. Now she ended the talk, shut off the phone and looked across the table at him.
"I was just about to wake you," she said. "We should be going as soon as you're fed. Do you feel like having breakfast?"
Hal grinned.
"As much as it turned out I felt like having dinner," he said. His appetite was back to normal.
"All right," said Amanda, getting to her feet. "Sit tight. It'll be ready in a minute."
Fed and mounted, they started off in the morning light of Fomalhaut, a brilliant pinpoint now in the eastern sky, making the snowfields of the mountains just below it glitter like mirrors. It was a cool, clear, still morning with only an occasional cloud in view. The horses fought their bits and waltzed sideways until they were let run to the edge of the tableland on which Fal Morgan stood. At the edge of that flat stretch, however, Amanda pulled the gray under her back to a walk and Hal followed her example.
They plunged over the edge onto a steep downslope thick with variform conifers and native bush forms. The clear ground between the growths was stony and only sparsely covered with small vegetation. They rode through such gullies and alternating stretches of open mountainside for perhaps ten minutes before they came out into an area of high rolling hills covered with the brown, drying grass of late fall. Tucked back up on a high point above these hills, so that it was not visible until they came up over the crest of the slope below it, was a shelf of long, narrow land on which Graemehouse stood.
It was a house of dark timber, two-storied, but low looking in relation to its length, that seemed to hug the slight curve of the earth on which it and its outbuildings stood. Barely a dozen meters behind it, the ground lifted suddenly in a bare, steep slope toward the mountainside above. They climbed their horses onto the shelf and approached the homestead from the side. The morning sun was ahead of them as they rode toward the buildings; and Graemehouse itself sat at an angle to their line of approach, facing south and downslope toward the lower hill area from which they had just come.
"Not as sheltered as Fal Morgan," said Hal, almost absentmindedly, looking at it. Amanda glanced over at him.
"It's got other advantages," she said. "Look here - "
She reined to her right and led the way to the edge of the shelf. Hal halted with her. From the edge they could see clear down to the river below and Foralie Town.
"With a scope up on the roof of that house," Amanda said, "you can keep a watch on half the local area. And that rise behind cuts off most of the snow and wind that would ordinarily bury a homestead this high up and exposed, when winter comes. Cletus Grahame knew what he was doing when he built it - for all that he called himself a scholar instead of a soldier."
She turned away from the rim and walked her horse toward the house. Hal rode with her. At the front entrance, they dismounted and dropped their reins. The horses lowered their heads to nibble at the grass of the front lawn.
Amanda led the way to the front entrance, and put her thumb into its lock sensor. The wide, heavy, dark door there swung open. She led the way into a square entry-hall with pegs on the walls, from some of which sweaters and jackets still hung. Straight ahead was an open archway into what seemed a lounge - or, as Amanda had called the equivalent space at Fal Morgan, a living room.
The atmosphere in the house was still and empty, without being lifeless. Amanda turned to Hal.
"I'll leave you now," she said. ''I'll be back either right around noon, or shortly after. In the meantime, if I get delayed and you want something to eat or drink, the kitchen and storage rooms are at the west end of the house, to your left. Help yourself to whatever's there - that's how we do things here. I don't suppose I need to tell you to clean up after yourself."
"No," said Hal. "But I'll probably just wait to eat with you."
"Don't hold back out of politeness," she said. "The food and drink are there to be used by whoever in this house needs them. You'll also find phones in most of the rooms. My sister's married name is Debigné. Just code for the directory and call me if you need to."
"Thanks again," said Hal. A certain awkwardness of feeling came over him. "I appreciate your trusting me this way, leaving me here alone."
Her curiously intent gaze held him. Once more, he felt the strange wash of feeling between them.
"I think the house'll be safe enough," she said; and turned toward the door. "I'll be back in a few hours."