Lake of Sorrows

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the Guards,” Quill said. “I have a suspicion about who might have been threatening Ursula. She told me that she had a brief—and, by her account, wholly unsatisfactory—liaison with Owen Cadogan last summer. It was long over, at least on her part, but Cadogan was evidently having trouble letting go.” So the contempt she had seen in Ursula’s face, and the anger in Cadogan’s eyes, had been real, Nora thought. She had been witness to the unraveling of a relationship, with all the pain and bitterness that entailed.

Quill drew back slightly and studied her expression. “You think it strange that Ursula would tell me about her affairs.”

“No, not necessarily.”

“You do. That’s all right, too. She wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into with her. Thought that, if I knew the worst about her, I’d be warned off; but it didn’t work that way. She fascinated me, absorbed me. Why am I telling you all this?” He stared down at the whiskey, then up at her. “She wanted to tell me about her lovers. And I wanted to hear because she felt the need to tell me. No doubt some people, maybe even most people, would think that strange. I can’t say it’s not. I don’t defend or deny. It’s just a fact. It is. And I daresay there are stranger things in the world than the need to confess, to take someone into your confidence. Lets you feel, perhaps, slightly less alone.”

“Why you? Why did she choose you as her confessor?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve refrained from passing judgment. Isn’t that what love does?”

Nora thought it quite possible that she’d never had such a peculiar conversation with a complete stranger. Sometimes death had a way of cutting through polite social customs. And, in a way, she found Quill’s lack of embarrassment quite exhilarating. His fingers circled the glass in front of him. They were long and slender, almost out of proportion to the rest of him, and Nora felt as if she could see clearly, through the skin, how each finger’s knobby metacarpal fitted against its cuplike base.

“I didn’t really know Ursula,” she said. “I only met her a few times, out on the bog. But I found her this morning, and I suppose that makes me feel as if I should have made an effort to know her better.”

“What do you want to know? I wonder what it says about the human race that we’re so much more interested in the dead than in the living. While she lived, no one inquired after Ursula—what sort of a person she was, what moved her, excited her, allowed her to get out of bed each morning. Now that she’s dead, you’re just the latest in a series of people who’ve asked me that same question. I’m not trying to make you feel bad, Miss Gavin; it’s just curious to me. Being with Ursula was like getting a strong electric jolt. Everything she did crackled; there was no sitting things out, no passivity. Who would want to see that extinguished?”

Nora thought of the Ursula Downes she’d seen, provoking Owen Cadogan, mocking Charlie Brazil, and wondered whether Desmond Quill’s judgment had been clouded by his feelings. Then she remembered the ghastly sight that had greeted her only a few hours earlier and knew that, no matter what she’d done, Ursula Downes hadn’t deserved the death she had met today.

“We met only a few months ago,” Quill said. “An exhibition opening at the National Museum. We were strangers, passing at a reception. I know it seems ridiculous, but sometimes you experience a kind of sudden recognition, and that’s what I felt from the start. No illusions. Ursula was the only person with whom I ever felt that sort of kinship. The world saw us both in the same light, I suppose: cold, a little hard, perhaps. I prefer to think of it as being unsentimental. But there was ample reason for Ursula’s mistrust of the world. It’s a common reaction to betrayal. Think of it; the one person you depend on for protection, turning around and using that very vulnerability against you.” He stared into the nearly empty whiskey glass, his expression distant, remembering.

“I don’t think Ursula ever told anyone except me what her stepfather made of her. He used her mother’s illness as an excuse, started coming to her room when he’d closed up the dry-cleaning shop for the night. She was just a child, and there was no safe place to run. Eventually he stopped. She grew up, you see—became a young woman, not a child anymore, and so she no longer fit within the bounds of his twisted fixation. Ursula said that sometimes, after everything else, it still felt as though the worst cruelty was the way in which he finally rejected her. That she actually came to hate herself for growing up. Can you imagine such a monster? He left his mark on her. It wasn’t just the physical scars that remained forever.”