![]() He held onto one thought - she was going to lift him into bed, and when she did that she would have to be blind as well as numb not to notice that the back of his underwear happened to be stuffed with little boxes. and your legs must be singing grand opera." He nodded, although the truth was that he could not feel anything - this medication on top of what he'd already given himself was rolling him toward unconsciousness at an alarming rate, and he was beginning to see the room through gauzy layers of gray. "Now let's get you back in bed," she said. She took the urinal away from him and set it carefully on the floor. Without Misery, there would simply be no life left for him, or in him. He loved her so much without her he would die. ![]() Geoffrey was right, of course - dear old Geoffrey was rarely wrong - but sometimes when he was alone, the Gearless of Misery's escape from the Grim Reaper came forcibly home to him, and it was nearly impossible to hold the tears back. The moisture running down his cheeks now was not rainwater but tears. As usual, her mobcap was askew and she smelled of the snuff she still firmly believed, after all these years, to be a secret vice. Ramage, the Carmichaels" crotchety but lovable old housekeeper, asked him as she came in from the pantry. "Dear old Geoffrey" He spoke it aloud this time as he stepped into the huge and stuporously warm West Country kitchen. "Just a minute longer, Paul, and you can take a snooze."ĭistantly, from the parlor, he could hear the rippling strains of Chopin, and he paused with the strip of towel still in his left hand, listening. "By the sound o" ye coat a-drippin" out there in the entry, ye nairly drowned between the sheds and the hoose" He remembered Geoffrey saying You must not cry in front of her, old man - that is the one thing you must never doĪlthough Ian Carmichael would not have moved from Little Dunthorpe for all the jewels in the Queen's treasury, he had to admit to himself that when it rained in Cornwall it rained harder than anywhere else in England. Make sure you do that so if she changes the bed she won't pull them out with the ground sheet. Get them as far under as you can, he thought blindly. Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery. It was only after midnight, an hour after Geoffrey had ridden into the gathering storm to try and fetch the doctor, that the midwife had grown alarmed. Her labor had been long and hard, but no longer and no harder than that of many other young ladies she had seen, the midwife declared. The layers of gauze kept thickening, moving steadily from gray toward black. I'll just put a few things away and come right back." As soon as she was out of the room he was reaching behind him, bringing out the boxes and stuffing them under the mattress one by one. There was an old strip of towelling hung from a hook in the entryway, and after hanging up his dripping coat and removing his boots, he used it to towel his dark-blonde hair dry.
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