“I said, _did you give him the sedative I gave you_?”
“I don’t know. Some tea, I think. And bicarbonate. And—and water of course.”
“I don’t know. I tell you I don’t know. What are you driving at? Answer me! What do you mean?”
Sydney Crawford’s eyes seemed to return at last from the cosmic universe. They contracted and shivered to points of horror. Everything about her, from her clinched hands to her vivid chalk-white face, put itself headlong into one word:
And Nadia Mdevani was looking all too ready to be one when Julian, standing in the door, interrupted them.
“Don’t tell me anything’s wrong,” he said with a thin sarcasm.
Poised against each other as the two women were, it took them both several breaths to withhold their momentum and divert it to new channels. Nadia was the first to recover.
“We need a doctor, Mr. Prentice,” she said quietly. “And we need him soon.” She threw a glance in Crawford’s direction and, in a low voice, risked more: “I’ve seen a few poisons in my day, and this _is_ a poison! Arsenic. You know how rapid that is.”
“Don’t go, Mr. Prentice! I tell you if you go—”
But Julian had fled; down the corridor, down the dim stairs, and out into the fog. They heard the door close loudly behind him. Sydney dropped her hands loosely, resignedly, at her sides. “That’s that,” she said quietly. “Not that it really matters. I am completely at your mercy, Miss Mdevani. You may think it makes a difference. It doesn’t. There are others now who care as little as Bertrand Whittaker cared.”
Nadia looked her up and down with cold contempt and a colder pity.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Crawford. Your time is not yet. Not _quite_ yet.” She pushed back her shining ebony hair with her two hands. “It appears I must be the one to do it at that—the chosen of the Lord. For the mortification of the flesh.” She was speaking to herself, not to Sydney.
“Yes?” Sydney neither stirred, nor looked toward him.
Neil seemed to be considering that. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, and on the backs of his hands lying weakly on the coverlid. His dry lips thinned perceptibly. Then, on a breath, he only said again:
“It’s up to you, Mrs. Crawford,” Nadia cried softly.
“Sydney.” Crawford’s monotonous, sad repetition of her name was the tragic undertone in the room.