"He must have forgiven me", Henrietta murmured to the room.
The absolution of Doaty's last will and testament was proof enough of that;
Doaty would never have left her house to a godless woman.

She found herself wishing an old wish, that she had told Doaty she was running away, that she had left something more behind her than the loving, sorry note and her best garnet pin.
Perhaps Doaty had guessed already and kept her counsel.

Henrietta thought, It's extraordinary how much she always knew about both of us.
There had been more to know about Hetty, inevitably, and most of it unfavorable.
Adelia was the good one, or, if not always good, less frequently tempted.
Their childhood would have been quite circumspect without Hetty's flair for drama, especially through the long summers.
In winter, in the city, there had been the Maneret School, which taught excellently with a kind of austere passion for knowledge;
there had been lessons in French from a small Polish nobleman with a really profound distaste for his pupils;
there had been the dancing class -- Miss Craddock, thin and tireless, with her supervising wand and her everlasting one-two-three, one-two-three.
There had been supper parties and teas, fetes and little balls, Mama small and pretty and gay and Papa enormously jocular, enormously possessive, the sun around which the Blackwell planets revolved.

Mama had died before the corruption of the family circle, the interruption of Charles.
It was safe to assume that Papa, sighing heavily, had said many times to his remaining daughter, "Thank God your poor mother was spared this", and indeed it might be true that it had been easier for Henrietta to leave, with her hand in Charles' hand, just because her "poor mother" was gone already and would never know.
Mama was vulnerable;
one had always felt the need to make a safe world around her.

But I would have gone anyway, thought Henrietta.
She had always been able to ignore the moral question because there had been no choice.
Only at this moment -- perhaps because it was before dawn and she was lying in Doaty's bed -- she found herself examining how others might regard her.
Perhaps they would argue that morality consisted just of that ability to see a choice.

She turned on her side, finding the idea oppressive.
If Adelia had felt about someone as Henrietta felt about Charles, would she have run away with him?

Impossible to imagine Adelia feeling so about anyone.
No temptation, no sin.

No temptation, no virtue?

A curious thought to end a curious night.
The birds were really awake now in a colloquy of music, and light was beginning to creep across the room, touching sill and door, table and chair and all of Doaty's flowers in their artificial blossom and leaf.

Before anything else, she would go to Doaty's grave with flowers from Doaty's forgotten garden.
Everything must wait upon this mission, this sentimental duty of a pilgrim whose nature avoided graveyards.
She closed her eyes, remembering the small French cemetery, enclosed by stone walls.
It had always seemed to rain there, and even the grass was gray.

After the sad impatient moment, waiting for comfort which could not come, she slipped out of bed and went to the open window.
The garden below was lacy with dew and enchanting in its small wildness.
Leaning out, she could see a tangle of rosebush and honeysuckle, one not quite come to bloom, one just beyond it.
On a thrusting spray thick with thorns and dewdrops and swelling pink buds, like a summer Valentine, a bird balanced and sang, nondescriptly brown and alive with its own music, a little engine of song.

It was so pretty and artless that she felt like a child again and would have enjoyed running out barefoot to play on the wet grass with all the growing things, but Doaty never permitted bare feet and she was decidedly not a child but une femme d'un certain age.
Feeling suddenly neat and subdued, she dressed quite soberly and went downstairs.

Rosa, unbelievably, was not yet up and about, reassurance that Rosa was human.
Feeling protective toward this sleeping being, Henrietta found a yesterday bun and milk in a white jug, a breakfast which was somewhat the equivalent of going barefoot.

Outside, the garden, the tame wilderness, yielded a patchwork bouquet of daisies, sweet william, scented stock and lady's bedstraw, which she tied with long grasses and took back to show Rosa, who was now stirring about the kitchen and haranguing Folly.
The poodle came gleefully to Henrietta and begged for the flowers, supplicating the air with prayerful forepaws.

Henrietta held her bouquet out of reach and said it was for Doaty.
"Rummaging in the dew", said Rosa coldly.
"Go change your shoes before you turn around".
She sounded so exactly like Doaty that Henrietta obeyed her under the clear impression that she could either comply or stay home.
Folly danced, eager for whatever lay beyond the door.

To a Blackwell, there was only one church.
The cemetery slumbered just behind it, and the way lay through the village and close to the sea.
For the first time in thirty years, Henrietta walked down the narrow street with its shuttered shops just stirring and its inhabitants eying her with the frankest curiosity.
She smiled and bowed, recalling the princess-in-a-carriage feeling she had enjoyed when she was a child.
Now, some of the acknowledgments were cautious, but all were interested.

An old man, sitting against the wall of a cottage and waiting for the sun to find him, gave her a more than reflective look as she passed, the sap still plainly rising in his branches.
On an impulse, she turned back and said good morning.

He cupped his ear and shook his head at her repetition, announcing in a nettled way that he had heard her the first time.
He then offered his own estimate of the weather, which was unenthusiastic.
"Summer's been slow to come", he said.
"It's my dryin' out time".
He scowled at her flowers.

"I'm taking them to the cemetery", said Henrietta, out of a vague feeling of hospitality.

"They'll be takin' me next", he said pleasantly, "but not so soon's they plan.
See half of 'em in their graves before I choose my own coffin.
It's dryin' myself out that does it".
He regarded her with rising hope.
"You'd like to hear how I go about it".

"It's nice of you", Henrietta said doubtfully.

"Y're welcome".
He straightened himself, soldierly against the wall, and pulled his sprawled feet together so they stood side by side in their old boots.
His stick ceased to be a thing to rest his chin on and became a pointer for emphasizing the finer aspects of his text.
"Every month, f'r three days", he said happily, "I take no water into my system, no water whatsoever.
It rests the tissues".

Henrietta murmured that she could quite see how it would, and he nodded approval of her womanly good sense.
"Rests the tissues", he said, "and pacifies the system.
My dad did it, and he lived to a great age".
He looked up at her sharply.
"Don't remember, do you"?

She did suddenly, through the link of memory with his father, old Titus, who must have been in his nineties when Henrietta ran away.
Next to the Blackwells, Titus had owned the island most, and she and Adelia had often stood in front of him, silenced by his terrible years -- a scanty man with a thin beard and very deep-set blue eyes like a mariner, more aged than possible.
He had never spoken once to the awed sisters, but his son had been friendly, a big fellow of fifty or more, a fishing-boat captain and powerful like the sea.
It must be that son who sat before her now, shriveled to half his size and half his senses.

She said gently, "Of course I remember you".

"Not so well's I remember you", he said.
"Y're the young Blackwell woman.
Ran away on a black night with a lawful wedded man.
I know all about you".

"You do seem to", said Henrietta, impressed.

"Can't blame a man for leavin' his wife", he said quite cheerfully.
"Left mine many a time, only she never knew it.
Man in a boat, there's a lot of places he can put in at and a lot of reasons he can be away for a bit.
Any harm in that"?

"Probably", said Henrietta dryly.

He gave a short hard laugh and looked at her knowingly.
"You'd be the one to say", he observed, and she found herself liking his approval none too well, but she could not defend herself and say that her actions were "different", since all actions had their own laws.
Only, this old man's connivance was even less to her taste than Selma Cotter's open censure.
Well, she had not come back to Great Island to be understood, praised or condemned.
She had come to make her peace with the past, and of that past this ancient of the earth was only a kind of shadow.

She started to move away, just as a woman came out of the cottage, a big-boned, drab-haired figure with a clean apron tied over her limp print dress.
She smiled vaguely at Henrietta and spoke to the old man.
"You've not had your breakfast yet, gran'dad".

"Y'r dam' porridge is no breakfast", he said.
"Milk and sops"!
He beat the air with his stick, and it fell from his claws and clattered on the stones.

"He's lowly today", his grand-daughter said wearily, and bent to pick it up.
"He's got this idea about drying out"

"It ain't an idea"!

"If it ain't an idea", she said, "how comes it you can drink beer but not water"?

He looked piously to heaven and said, "Beer don't affect the tissues none", and the ingenious hypocrisy of this defense pleased Henrietta so that she forgave him his stint of malevolence.

His grand-daughter sighed.
"Come on, do.
The children are eating, and Miss Blackwell's on her way somewheres".

"To the graveyard.
Who ain't"?

"Not me.
I've got a day's work to do.
-- You'll be visiting Miss Doaty, Ma'am"?

Henrietta nodded.
How much they knew about her!

The woman (she must have been a tiny baby when Hetty and Delia had stood arm in arm, watching great age grow small) answered the nod with her own.
"God rest her soul, she was a sweet one.
Come on now".
She put a strong hand under the old man's arm and lifted him up, patiently, with the gentle cruelty and necessary tyranny that the young show toward the very old.
He mumbled at her but let himself be led off inside the house, shuffling mightily to make it clear how weak and aged he was and how he was buffeted about by those who still had their wicked strength.

There was a gabble of voices from indoors, young hungry sounds like cats after fish, and a burst of swearing from the old man.
Henrietta looked down at her bouquet, still lively with its color and scent, and set her feet on their journey's way again, leaving the village street and crossing the first field, Folly dancing ahead of her.

At the edge of the field, the wild rolling land took over, dotted with fat round bushes like sheep.
They were covered with tiny white blossoms, their scant roots clawing at the stony ground, and wild birds darted in and about and through them so they were nearly alive with the rustle and cry.

The air was full of sounds too but placid ones, a terrestrial humming as much out of the earth as out of the blue sky.
She felt mindless, walking, and almost easy until the church spire told her she was near the cemetery, and she caught herself wondering what she would say to Doaty.

Both church and graveyard were smaller than she remembered them (how many things had lessened while she was gone away) but the headstones had grown so thick in thirty years that to find one named "Dorothy Tredding" seemed suddenly impossible.

She sat down on the nearest, fallen with age and gray with sea-damp, her fingers tracing the indecipherable carved letters padded with green moss.
The day's sun was gathering its strength in gold, and she wished she had brought her parasol, if only to shade Doaty's flowers.
A small, rock-carved angel watched her from a nearby tomb, the only angel in the cemetery.

She remembered, suddenly, a night of savage moonlight and scudding clouds when she and Adelia, having dared each other, had stolen out of their great safe house and come here, hand in hand, hoping and fearing ghosts.