Free Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale by Ellis Peters Page A

have known. “You teach,” she said, feeling her way, “at one of the schools in Comerbourne.”
    “I did,” he said distantly.
    “What did you teach?”
    “Art… if it matters now.”
    I wonder, she thought, feeling the shuddering undertones beneath these exchanges, whether he knows what I’m thinking as clearly as I know what’s going on inside him? Kill me here and now, and he’ll have the trouble of carrying or dragging me down to the boat, and the risk of being seen at it. Make me walk there to be killed on board, and he takes the chance that I may try breaking away, even at the last moment. Why not, with nothing to lose? The whole thing
could
go wrong then, even if it’s an outside chance. I
might
survive to talk. No, he’ll want to make sure. It will be here!
    He’s just made up his mind!
    “How odd,” she said, her eyes holding his across the table, her right hand in the open handbag on her lap, “to think that I don’t even know your name.”
    “Why should you?” he said. And suddenly he set both hands against the edge of the table, and pushed back his chair. His face was more dead than alive, blue-stained at lips and eyes, cemetery clay, but he moved with method and certainty, like a machine.
    “Yes, what are you waiting for?” she blazed abruptly, on her feet with the nail-file in her hand. Her handbag went one way, her handkerchief another. “Do you think I don’t know you’ve got everything ready? Even the stone for my feet?”
    He got up slowly and started round the corner of the table after her, hooking a hand under the edge to hoist it aside from between them. She caught the brief reflection of light from eyes opaque and dead as grey glass.
    “I’m sorry!” said the distant voice, from somewhere far beyond sorrow. “What can I do? You shouldn’t have looked in there. What choice have you left me? I
liked
you,” he said, wrenching at his own unavailing pain, “you were
kind
to me! But what can I do about it now?”
    “You could let me walk to my grave,” she said, backing from him inch by inch, “and save yourself trouble.” Anything to spin out five more minutes, three, even one, to give time one more chance. And still, at this extremity, she had a corner of her mind free to wonder where the gun was, why it wasn’t in his hand. He couldn’t be afraid of the shot being heard, not here, there was no other dwelling in sight. If he’d had the sense to use the gun he needn’t even have come within her reach, she would have had no chance at all.
    His hand swung the table round, shedding the tea-pot from its tilted edge, and drove it hard against the wicker arm-chair beside the wall. She dared not turn her head to look, but her hip rammed hard into the arm of the chair, and she could retreat no farther.
    “Not you,” she heard his voice saying hopelessly, “you’d run, you’d swim for it,
I know you
. Why did it have to be
you
?”
    Bracing her fingers round the hilt of her dagger, she had just time to feel one angry stab of amusement, involuntary and painful, at his appropriation of what should surely have been her question. And then the moment and he were on her together.
    He took the last yard in one fast, light step, and reached for her with long hands crooked; and she stooped under his grasp instead of leaning back from him, and slashed upwards at his throat with all her weight, uncoiling towards him like a spring. She felt the impact, and sudden heat licked her fingers, but in the same instant he had her by the wrist, and had wrenched hand and weapon away from his grazed neck, forcing her arm back until her grip relaxed. Distantly, through the roaring in her ears, she heard the nail-file tinkle on the wood blocks of the floor, a light, derisory sound. Then his groping hands found their hold on her throat, and chaotic eruption of light and darkness blinded her eyes.
    She put up her hands and clawed at her murderer’s face, until the pressure on her throat grew to an