CHAPTER ONE
It began very simply: Jepson never came in for dinner that night.
We were nearly finished. I'd just taken my last bite when Agnes looked up at me through the candlelight and cleared her throat.
"Henry. Is it possible you've left the cellar door unlocked?" It was possible, of course, and was even probable, but one must hold firm in the face of accusation.
"No," I lied. "Why?"
"Mr. Jepson's dinner is still waiting in the kitchen." Her tone was dark. The last time I forgot to lock the cellar we lost six bottles and did not see Jepson for two days. He reappeared puffy with gout, covered in mud, and in a state of intense chagrin.
"I don't believe I did, at least," I said. Agnes sighed. I pushed my plate away and smiled at her. "All right. I'll get the lantern and go out and look. You can come along if you like and help me carry him back."
The chilled gaze she fixed on me was the same I've been receiving from her for the past twenty-six years and it had the same effect.
"I'll let you hold the bottom half," I told her, standing up, "as a treat," and winked. She ignored this. "Check the cellar first," she called after me.
.
The lantern's yellow arc jounced beside me down the cobblestones to the groundskeeper's cottage. All around me the night sounds roared. Bullfrogs in the pond, nightbirds rustling and calling, deer and foxes and hares; I could hear them all. What I couldn't hear, as I drew up to it, was Jepson inside his cottage. Its dark outline, unlit, was a patch of silence in the night. I tapped on his cold windowpane with a knuckle; nothing, no sound.
The cottage's thatch looked a wild witches' nest in the moon's glow, and standing there under the brilliant crescent of light I felt like myself, that rarest and sweetest of feelings. For a violent instant the joy of being out in the open moonlight, free and unsupervised, flooded me. Guilt flooded me just afterward.
"Jepson," I called. "Dinner's on. We missed you." Silence. I could feel my face heat and hoped he hadn't watched me standing about exulting, and that if he had, he'd have the decency not to mention it. He knew me about as well as Agnes does- they are nearly of an age- which was to say, since my birth, and totally. Which was also why he could steal his six bottles, once in a while, and I would do nothing about it. Who- what- was I, to tell him otherwise?
"Jepson," I called, louder, and knocked, but the cottage remained darker and more silent than the wood around it, and so I held the lantern up and pushed down the latch on the door. The round disc of light slid over the shabby little room, over the washing-stand, the low trundle bed in the corner, and over Jepson's gaunt face on the pillow where he lay, open-eyed.
To say that he smelled dead would be an inaccuracy. Rather, the smell of him that I knew- the combination of mulch, old age, and talcum powder over sweat, all mixed with the sulphuric tang of his liver- had faded. It was that he no longer smelled alive. My heart turned over in my chest; I went inside; I kneeled beside his bed and held him.
He looked so much smaller now, and strangely emptied of himself. Even the lines in his face had smoothed. His eyelids were soft and loose under the pad of my thumb as I closed them. The knobby hand that lay atop the blanket, the one I'd grown up holding, was now cool and heavy in mine, and in its slackness I felt how utterly absent he was, how completely he had left us. In that moment I realized that my world was halved. Should anything happen to Agnes, I would be left alone.