Free Absent in the Spring by Agatha writing as Mary Westmacott Christie Page A

it?’
    â€˜Yes, from the sonnets.’
    And he had said:
    â€˜ Let me not unto the marriage of true minds admit impediment ? That one?’
    â€˜No, the one that begins, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day .’
    And then she had quoted the whole sonnet to him, really rather beautifully, with a lot of expression and all the proper emphasis.
    At the end, instead of expressing approbation, he had only repeated thoughtfully:
    â€˜ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May … but it’s October now, isn’t it?’
    It was such an extraordinary thing to say that she had stared at him. Then he had said:
    â€˜Do you know the other one? The one about the marriage of true minds?’
    â€˜Yes.’ She paused a minute and then began:
    â€˜ Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments. Love is not love
    Which alters where it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove:
    O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
    That looks on tempests and is never shaken,
    It is the star to every wandering bark
    Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken .
    Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
    Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom .
    If this be error, and upon me prov’d
    Â Â Â  I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d .’
    She finished, giving the last lines full emphasis and dramatic fervour.
    â€˜Don’t you think I recite Shakespeare rather well? I was always supposed to at school. They said I read poetry with a lot of expression.’
    But Rodney had only answered absently, ‘It doesn’t really need expression. Just the words will do.’
    She had sighed and murmured, ‘Shakespeare is wonderful, isn’t he?’
    And Rodney had answered, ‘What’s really so wonderful is that he was just a poor devil like the rest of us.’
    â€˜Rodney, what an extraordinary thing to say.’
    He had smiled at her, then, as though waking up. ‘Is it?’
    Getting up, he had strolled out of the room murmuring as he went:
    â€˜Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.’
    Why on earth, she wondered, had he said, ‘But it’s October now’?
    What could he have been thinking about?
    She remembered that October, a particularly fine and mild one.
    Curious, now she came to think of it, the evening that Rodney had asked her about the sonnets had been the actual evening of the day when she had seen him sitting with Mrs Sherston on Asheldown. Perhaps Mrs Sherston had been quoting Shakespeare, but it wasn’t very likely. Leslie Sherston was not, she thought, at all an intellectual woman.
    It had been a wonderful October that year.
    She remembered quite plainly, a few days later, Rodney asking her in a bewildered tone:
    â€˜Ought this thing to be out this time of year?’
    He was pointing to a rhododendron. One of the early flowering ones that normally bloom in March or the end of February. It had a rich blood red blossom and the buds were bursting all over it.
    â€˜No,’ she had told him. ‘Spring is the time, but sometimes they do come out in autumn if it’s unusually mild and warm.’
    He had touched one of the buds gently with his fingers and had murmured under his breath:
    â€˜The darling buds of May.’
    March, she told him, not May.
    â€˜It’s like blood,’ he said, ‘heart’s blood.’
    How unlike Rodney, she thought, to be so interested in flowers.
    But after that he had always liked that particular rhododendron.
    She remembered how, many years later, he had worn a great bud of it in his buttonhole.
    Much too heavy, of course, and it had fallen out as she knew it would.
    They’d been in the churchyard, of all extraordinary places, at the time.
    She’d seen him there as she came back