Perhaps Innes would provide her own punishment.
That, now she came to think of it, was how she had first thought of Innes, on that Sunday afternoon under the cedar. The stake or nothing. A self-destroyer.
That she had destroyed a life that stood in her way was almost incidental.
It had not, in any case, been intended as destruction; Lucy was quite sure of that. That is what made this business of starting the machine so repellent, so unthinkable. All that the insecure pin was meant to achieve was a temporary incapacity. An assurance that Rouse would not go to Arlinghurst in September-and that she would.
Had she had that in mind, Lucy wondered, when she refused the appointment at the Wycherley Orthopaedic Hospital? No, surely not. She was not a planner in cold blood. The thing had been done at the very last moment, in desperation.
At least, it had been achieved at the very last moment.
It was possible that its lateness was due to lack of previous opportunity. The way to the gymnasium might never have been clear before; or Rouse may have got there first.
"A Borgia face," Edward Adrian had said, delightedly.
And Teresa's great-grandmother's grandmother, whom she resembled, she had planned. And had lived a long, secure, and successful life as a widow, administering rich estates and bringing up a son, without apparently any signs of spiritual suicide.
The wind flung itself into the room, and Innes's window began to rattle. She heard Innes cross the room to it, and presently it stopped.