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"Lydia?"

But even before the shadows of the stairwell sed the last echoes of his wife&039;s na

The house was silent, but it was not e No sound came down the shadowy curve of the stairs froh the baize-covered door at the back of the hall to take her master&039;s Oxford unifor chill of the autuht that permeated the place, he could tell that no fires burned anywhere He was usually not conscious of the muted clatter of Mrs Grimes in the kitchen, but its absence was as loud to his ears as the clanging of a bell

Six years ago, Asher&039;s response would have been absolutely unhesitating-two steps back and out the door, with a silent, deadly readiness that few of the other dons at New College would have associated with their unassuue But Asher had for years been a secret player in as euphe philological notes in British-occupied Pretoria or a the Boers on the veldt, in the Kaiser&039;s court in Berlin or the snowbound streets of St Petersburg And though he&039;d turned his back on that Game, he knew from experience that it would never completely turn its back on him

Still, for a moment, he hesitated For beyond a doubt, Lydia was somewhere in that house

Then with barely a whisper of his billowing robe, Asher glided back over the threshold and into the raw fog that shrouded even the front step There was danger in the house, though he did not consciously feel fear-only an ice-burn of anger that, whatever was going on, Lydia and the servants had been dragged into it If they&039;ve hurt her

He didn&039;t even knoho they were, but a seventeen-year ter-and Country had left hi plethora of possibilities

Noiseless as the Isis mists that cloaked the town, he faded back across the cobbles of Holywell Street to the shadowy brown bulk of the College wall and waited, listening They-whoever "they" were in the house-would have heard hi, too,

Lydia had once asked hiuessed, back in the days when she&039;d been a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl playing croquet with her uncle&039;s junior scholastic colleague on her father&039;s vast lawns-how he kept fron parts: "I oes up and they find the Secret Plans are gone or whatever, there you are"

He&039;d laughed and said, "Well, for one thing, no plans are ever gone- merely accurately copied And as for the rest,the sort of person ouldn&039;t do that sort of thing"

"You do that here" Those enormous, pansy-brown eyes had studied higressive bookishness was at that tiile sensuality With the youngto take an interest in her, she didn&039;t wear the spectacles-she was an expert at blind croquet and guessing as on menus But with him, it seemed, it was different In her sensible cotton shirtwaist and blue-and-red school tie, the changeable wind tangling her long red hair, she&039;d looked like a leggy lish schoolgirl "Is it difficult to go froht about it for ayour Sunday best," he&039;d said, knowing even then that she&039;d understand what he ht as the April sunlight He&039;d kept that laugh-as he&039;d kept the da from the Cherwellvoices drifting down froels-in the corner of his heart where he stored precious things as if they were a boy&039;s shoe-box hoard, to be taken out and looked at in China or the veldt when things were bad It had been soh and the still sunlight shining like carnelian on her hair were precious to hi, where one played croquet with one&039;s Dean&039;s innocent niece, but because he was desperately in love with this girl The knowledge had nearly broken his heart

Now the years of scholarship, of rest, and of happiness fell off hiown, and hethe row of its flat-fronted brick houses toward the labyrinthine tangle of the back lanes

If anything had happened to her

Fro in theof his study, though between thewithin A carriage passed along Holywell Street behind hile of harness brasses loud in that narrow corridor of cobbles and brick Froarden, Asher could see the whole broad kitchen, lit like a stage set Only the jet over the stove was burning-even after dusk ell settled, the s let in a good deal of light That put it no later than seven

Put what? In spite of his chill and businesslike concentration, Asher grinned a little at thehis own ho, "Father ill, gone to visit hiht off-Lydia"

Only, of course, his wife-and it still startled hi, he had in fact succeeded in winning Lydia as his wife-had as great an abhorrence as he did of confusion She would never have let Mrs Grimes and the two ht withoutsome provision for his supper Nor would she have done that or anything else without dispatching a note to his study at the College, infored plans

But Asher needed none of this train of logic, which flickered through his ments of a second, to know all was not well The years had taught hi to the tangle of vine that overgrew the garden wall, con-scious of those darkened s overlooking hied toward the kitchen door

Most of the young y, and coe-which had not, in fact, been new since the latter half of the fourteenth century-regarded their men-tor with the affectionate respect they would have accorded a slightly eccentric uncle Asher played to this iood stead abroad He was a reasonably unobtru-sive enerally expressed it, brown: brown hair, brown eyes, brown mustache, brown clothes, and brown own, he looked, in fact, like a clerk, except for the sharpness of his eyes and the silence hich he radu-ates would have said, that he found the deepest shadow in the dark and dew-soaked garden in which to stow his gown and mortarboard cap, the antique uniform of Oxford scholarship which covered his anonymous tweeds Certainly they would not have said that he was the sort of man who could jemmy open a ith a knife, nor that he was the sort of man ould carry such a weapon concealed in his boot

The kitchen was utterly deserted, chilly, and srown cold No steam floated above the hot-water reservoir of the stove-a new A of black rococo iron which had cost nearly twenty-five dollars fro on the stove&039;s nickel-plated knobs, and the silver of toast racks, made the stillness in the kitchen see maniac with an ax behind his back

Few of the dons at Oxford were familiar with the kitchen quarters of their own ho doors that separated the servants&039; portions of the house from those in which the owners lived Asher had made it his business to know not only the precise layout of the place-he could have passed through it blindfolded without touching a single piece of furniture, as he could indeed have passed through any rooe- but to know exactly where everything was kept Knowing such things was hardly a conscious effort anys he had picked up over the years and had never quite dared to put down He found the drawer in which Mrs Gri knives-the hideout he kept in his boot was a sencies-then moved on to the archway just past the stove which separated kitchen from pantry, all the while aware that sohtest footfall

Mrs Griirl Sylvie were all there They sat around the table, a slu from the Cha in the even, vaguely flickering light from the steel fishtail burner by the stove All they needed was a poison bottle on the table between therimness, and a placard:

THE MAD POISONER STRIKES

Only there was no bottle, no used teacups, no evidence in fact of anything eaten or drunk The only thing on the table at all was a bowl of half-shelled peas

Studying the cook&039;s thin form, the parlor maid&039;s pluain that chill sensation of being listened for and known All three women were alive, but he didn&039;t like the way they slept, like broken dolls, heedless of ht, then

The only other light on in the house was in his study, and that here he kept his revolver, an American Navy Colt stowed in the drawer of his desk; if one were a lecturer in philology, of course, one couldn&039;t keep a revolver in one&039;s greatcoat pocket The other dons would certainly talk

He made his way up the back stairs from the kitchen From its unob-trusive door at the far end of the hall he could see no one waiting for hi The door of the upstairs parlor gaped like a dark ht lay across the carpet like a dropped scarf

Conscious of the weight of his body on the floor, hehis head, he could see a wedge of the rooed around to a position in which it would be visible froreen cushions, her hair unraveled in a great pottery-red coil to the floor On her breast her long, capable hand was curled protectively around her spectacles, as if she&039;d taken them off to rest her eyes for a moment; without them, her face looked thin and unprotected in sleep Only the faint move tea gown showed hiht with the business portion of hisin at first sight of her, as indeed his every instinct cried out to him to do

"Co amber chamber of books "I a man who looks after your stables is asleep, as you have found your women servants to be I am seated at your desk, which is in its usual place, and I have no intention of doing you harent in him noted-flawless and unaccented, but Spanish all the saist pricked his ears at solish, a trace of isolative a here and there, a barely aspirated e just flicking at the ends of some words

He pushed open the door and stepped inside The youngat Asher&039;s desk looked up from the disreeting,