The Sibyl in Her Grave by Sarah Caudwell Page A

things they tell one to do in first-aid classes, but I already knew she was dead. The vulture knew it too, and was looking at Isabella in a way I didn’t much care for.
    I didn’t think I was the right person to break the news—I asked Daphne who her aunt’s doctor was.
    “Aunt Isabella doesn’t believe in doctors,” she said, looking more frightened than ever. “She says that Nature has a cure for everything if you know how to look for it.”
    I said that nonetheless her aunt must have professional attention, and sent her off in the end to fetch Dr. Selkirk. He’s not the doctor I’d normally call-a bad-tempered little Scotsman, semiretired, with a bee in his bonnet about keeping fit, and not much in the way of a bedside manner—but he was the one who lived nearest. I knew at that hour of the morning he was more likely to answer the doorbell than the telephone, and I thought that with any luck she could bring him back to the Rectory in ten minutes or so.
    If I’d gone myself, I could have probably persuaded him more quickly, but I couldn’t leave poor Daphne on her own with a corpse, and we couldn’t both go. I’ve lived in Egypt and Syria, and I’ve seen what buzzards can do. So someone had to stay and discourage the vulture.
    I don’t know quite how long I waited for them—it seemed a good deal more than the
mauvais quart d’heure
I’d bargained for. Isabella still seemed to be staring at me with her little black-currant eyes, and from time to time the horrible Roderigo spread his wings and screeched at me. Having only my nightclothes on under my raincoat made me feel ridiculously defenceless, and I wished I’d something more effective than my bare hands to ward him off with if he tried to challenge me for his breakfast.
    The worst thing of all, though, was still the smell—it wasn’t simply disgusting but somehow narcotic, so that I felt dizzy as well as sick from it. I wondered if Isabella and her visitor had been smoking marijuana—I suppose it would be quite an effective way to heighten the atmosphere for a séance, or whatever one’s supposed to call it. It’s some years since I smoked any, and I don’t remember the effects being so unpleasant—but that was in Paris and in better company.
    There were no ashtrays, though, and no traces of smoke in the room, so perhaps I was wrong about that. There weren’t any dirty glasses, either, which struck me as rather odd. Whatever else one might say about Isabella, I wouldn’t have thought she’d have sat all evening with a visitor without offering him a drink, and having one herself. Anyway, there were two empty champagne bottles in the wastepaper basket.
    And Daphne had been sent straight to bed when she got home the night before, so she couldn’t have washed them then, and she certainly wouldn’t have stopped to do it after she found Isabella in the morning.
    Well, of course, it wasn’t really at all odd—it simply meant that Isabella had washed the glasses herself, and then come back and sat down again on the chaise longue. That’s not at all an odd thing to do—it’s what I’d have done myself. Just not what I’d have expected Isabella to do—I’d have bet almost any sum you like to mention that she’d have left them for Daphne. Which shows how one can misjudge people. Or perhaps she’d just taken them through to the kitchen, and left them there to be washed.
    It occurred to me, thinking of the kitchen, that I might find something there that I could use to ward off Roderigo. So I went quickly in there, leaving the door open so that I could keep an eye on him, and found just what I wanted—a long-handled broom, which made me feel much braver. But no dirty glasses anywhere, so Isabella must have washed them up after all. And yet somehow I still just couldn’t imagine her doing it, so I decided that it must have been her visitor—the man in the black Mercedes.
    Dr. Selkirk, when he at last arrived, declined to examine the patient