But he may say he has bought her O.
Furious, Blake strode down the path. Smith's taunting laughter sounding in his wake.
The three Erinyes were waiting for him at the gate, and fell in behind him when he turned down the lane. He lost Sabrina's trail in front of the farmhouse where Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, picked it up again opposite the Mitre Tavern. Presently it veered right, passed between Milton's birthplace and Stratford-on-Avon, and entered a night-image. He was halfway down a dim-lit street, the Erinyes just behind him, before he realized where he was.
Disciplined trees stood at attention along two suburban strips of lawn. Beyond them, half-remembered houses showed. One of them stood out vividly—a round, modernesque affair surrounded by a quarter-acre of grass and shrubs and flowers. It was the house he had rented while Deirdre Eldoria was attending high school. It was a house he had hoped never to see again.
He was seeing it now, though, and he was going to see it at much closer quarters, for Sabrina's footprints led straight across the remembered lawn to the very doorstep. She had not gone in, however, he discovered presently; instead, she had forsaken the door for a concave picture window through which bright light streamed out onto the grass. The depth of a pair of her footprints showed that she had stood there for a long time, peeking into his past. Despite himself, Blake peeked too. So did the three Erinyes.
The room was a far cry from the one he had just left. The hearth was built of meticulously mortared red bricks. The thick rug was a two-dimensional garden of multicolored flowers. There were exquisite tables and flower-petal stools. There were deep chairs that begged to be sat in. A sybaritic sofa occupied an entire wall.
On the sofa sat a man and a girl. The man was himself at the age of thirty-four. The girl was Deirdre Eldoria at the age of seventeen.
Blake Past was helping her with her lessons. The moment was a composite of a hundred similar scenes. Now she raised her eyes from the book on her lap, and Blake Past caught her girlish profile ... and Blake Present, standing in the soft and scented darkness of the remembered spring night with the three Erinyes breathing down the back of his neck, caught it too, and both Blakes knew pain. Now she returned her attention to the book, and Blake Past leaned forward in order to read the passage that she was in doubt about. And as he did so, her copper-colored hair touched his cheek and the warm tingle of the contact traveled down through the years to Blake Present.
Overcome by the poignancy of the moment, he stepped back from the window, colliding with the three Erinyes as he did so. They moved a little distance away, arrayed themselves, and started to raise their right arms. "Oh, can it!" Blake said disgustedly. In the darkness behind him, someone laughed. "My love, she's but a lassie yet," Smith sang in a cracked baritone. "We'll let her stand a year or twa, she'll no be half sae saucy yet!"