The Secret History - Donna Tartt [48]
Charles skidded down the hill, barefoot, still in his bathrobe, Francis at his heels. Henry knelt and set her on the grass, and she raised herself on her elbows.
“Camilla, are you dead?” said Charles, breathless, as he dropped to the ground to look at the wound.
“Somebody,” said Francis, unrolling a length of bandage, “is going to have to take that glass out of her foot.”
“Want me to try?” said Charles, looking up at her.
“Be careful.”
Charles, her heel in his hand, caught the glass between thumb and forefinger and pulled gently. Camilla caught her breath in a quick, wincing gasp.
Charles drew back like he’d been scalded. He made as if to touch her foot again, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. His fingertips were wet with blood.
“Well, go on,” said Camilla, her voice fairly steady.
“I can’t do it. I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”
“It hurts anyway.”
“I can’t,” Charles said miserably, looking up at her.
“Get out of the way,” said Henry impatiently, and he knelt quickly and took her foot in his hand.
Charles turned away; he was almost as white as she was, and I wondered if that old story was true, that one twin felt pain when the other was injured.
Camilla flinched, her eyes wide; Henry held up the curved piece of glass in one bloody hand. “Consummatum est,” he said.
Francis set to work with the iodine and the bandages.
“My God,” I said, picking up the red-stained shard and holding it to the light.
“Good girl,” said Francis, winding the bandages around the arch of her foot. Like most hypochondriacs, he had an oddly soothing bedside manner. “Look at you. You didn’t even cry.”
“It didn’t hurt that much.”
“The hell it didn’t,” Francis said. “You were really brave.”
Henry stood up. “She was brave,” he said.
Late that afternoon, Charles and I were sitting on the porch. It had turned suddenly cold; the sky was brilliantly sunny but the wind was up. Mr. Hatch had come inside to start a fire, and I smelled a faint tang of wood smoke. Francis was inside, too, starting dinner; he was singing, and his high, clear voice, slightly out of key, floated out the kitchen window.
Camilla’s cut hadn’t been a serious one. Francis drove her to the emergency room—Bunny went, too, because he was annoyed at having slept through the excitement—and in an hour she was back, with six stitches in her foot, a bandage, and a bottle of Tylenol with codeine. Now Bunny and Henry were out playing croquet and she was with them, hopping around on her good foot and the toe of the other with a skipping gait that, from the porch, looked oddly jaunty.
Charles and I were drinking whiskey and soda. He had been trying to teach me to play piquet (“because it’s what Rawdon Crawley plays in Vanity Fair”) but I was a slow learner and the cards lay abandoned.
Charles took a sip of his drink. He hadn’t bothered to dress all day. “I wish we didn’t have to go back to Hampden tomorrow,” he said.
“I wish we never had to go back,” I said. “I wish we lived here.”
“Well, maybe we can.”
“What?”
“I don’t mean now. But maybe we could. After school.”
“How’s that?”
He shrugged. “Well, Francis’s aunt won’t sell the house because she wants to keep it in the family. Francis could get it from her for next to nothing when he turns twenty-one. And even if he couldn’t, Henry has more money than he knows what to do with. They could go in together and buy it. Easy.”
I was startled by this pragmatic answer.
“I mean, all Henry wants to do when he finishes school, if he finishes, is to find some place where he can write his books and study the Twelve Great Cultures.”
“What do you mean, if he finishes?”
“I mean, he may not want to. He may get bored. He’s talked about leaving before. There’s no reason he’s got to be here, and he’s surely never going to have a job.”
“You think not?” I said, curious; I had always pictured Henry teaching Greek, in some forlorn but excellent college out in the Midwest.
Charles snorted. “Certainly not. Why should he? He doesn’t need the money, and