The Secret History - Donna Tartt [47]
We walked a good distance around the lake’s edge, she and I, then started back. Camilla, one hand shading her light-dazzled eyes, was telling me a long story about something the dog had done—chewing up a sheepskin rug that belonged to the landlord, their efforts to disguise and finally to destroy the evidence—but I wasn’t following her very closely: she looked so much like her brother, yet his straightforward, uncompromising good looks were almost magical when repeated, with only slight variations, in her. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.
I was looking at the side of her face, listening to the sweet, throaty cadences of her voice, when I was jolted from my musing by a sharp exclamation. She stopped.
“What is it?”
She was staring down at the water. “Look.”
In the water, a dark plume of blood blossomed by her foot; as I blinked, a thin red tendril spiraled up and curled over her pale toes, undulating in the water like a thread of crimson smoke.
“Jesus, what did you do?”
“I don’t know. I stepped on something sharp.” She put a hand on my shoulder and I held her by the waist. There was a shard of green glass, about three inches long, stuck in her foot just above the arch. The blood pulsed thickly with her heartbeat; the glass, stained with red, glittered wickedly in the sun.
“What is it?” she said, trying to lean over to see. “Is it bad?”
She had cut an artery. The blood was spurting out strong and fast.
“Francis?” I yelled. “Henry?”
“Mother of God,” said Francis when he got close enough to see, and started splashing towards us, holding the skirt of his robe out of the water with one hand. “What have you done to yourself? Can you walk? Let me see,” he said, out of breath.
Camilla tightened her grip on my arm. The bottom of her foot was glazed with red. Fat droplets ticked off the edge, spreading and dispersing like drops of ink in the clear water.
“Oh, God,” said Francis, closing his eyes. “Does it hurt?”
“No,” she said briskly, but I knew it did; I could feel her trembling and her face had gone white.
Suddenly Henry was there, too, leaning over her. “Put your arm around my neck,” he said; deftly he whisked her up, as lightly as if she were made of straw, one arm under her head and the other beneath her knees. “Francis, run get the first-aid kit out of your car. We’ll meet you halfway.”
“All right,” said Francis, glad to be told what to do, and started splashing for the bank.
“Henry, put me down. I’m bleeding all over you.”
He didn’t pay any attention to her. “Here, Richard,” he said, “get that sock and tie it around her ankle.”
It was the first time I had even thought of a tourniquet; some kind of doctor I would have made. “Too tight?” I asked her.
“That’s fine. Henry, I wish you’d put me down. I’m too heavy for you.”
He smiled at her. There was a slight chip in one of his front teeth I’d never noticed before; it gave his smile a very engaging quality. “You’re light as a feather,” he said.
Sometimes, when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things—a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf—are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And that was what happened then, walking over the meadow to the house. It was like a painting too vivid to be real—every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at it. Camilla was limp in Henry’s arms, her head thrown back like a dead girl’s, and the curve of her throat beautiful and lifeless. The hem of her dress fluttered abstractly in the breeze. Henry’s trousers were spattered with drops the size of quarters, too red to be blood, as if he’d had a paintbrush slung at him. In the overwhelming