“It’s really quite simple,” Cecily Snow said in calm, unworried tones. “Mr. Isinglass robbed my father, destroyed my mother, exiled my brothers, and ruined me. If I catch him asleep I’ll kill him. I do hope you like this pudding. I had to ride quite a way to find the plums.”

5.

The stones of Winds’ Hill were from Texas, but the shape and spirit of the great house were English: it was all turrets and towers, balconies, and bay windows; there were drafty halls where no one went, and half-rooms under the long stairwells for the servants, all of whom were as old as Bertram and the coolie. The kitchen would have provisioned an army; there was an Irish laundry, run by two old crones who spoke only Gaelic. The billiard tables were fine, but the majority of the cues had warped in the summer heat. The library held all the accepted authors in sets, row after row: the Greeks in Greek, the Romans in Latin, the French in French, and, of course, thousands and thousands of volumes of our good English authors, all in sound morocco with Lord Snow’s arms on the covers. There was even a glassed-in arboretum with an artist’s studio behind it; Cecily grew strawberries in the arboretum and used the studio to make the fine drawings of prairie grasses, weeds, and flowers for her botanical masterpiece, The Flora of the Llano Estacado, not published until more than a decade after her disappearance.

I treasure her book now more than any other—certainly more than those trifles of my own. My eyesight’s going, but by squinting through my specs I can still see how fine the drawings are—what a quality of attention, even passion, that gifted woman bestowed upon the sage and buffalo grass and even the rough prairie weeds.

Many a day now I do little more than turn the pages of Cecily’s great book—it’s become quite a collector’s item, I understand. The drawings bring back to my mind’s eye the woman herself: her clarity of eye, the graceful gesturings of her long hands when she talked, her low laugh and high understanding.

That night, standing on the balcony outside my bedroom, watching the white moon float above the prairies, I realized why Lord Snow had named the place Winds’ Hill; in all my weeks in it there was scarcely an hour when the wind was not keening its disquieting symphony, using the eaves and the turrets and the very windows of the house as instruments. The symphony of the winds had several movements, many tones, many tempos, timbres loud and timbres soft; some days the wind sped down from Canada, gathering depth and tone as it screamed over the thousands of empty miles; other days it would turn and float softly up from the south, bringing the warmth of Mexico, or even a hint of salt from the distant Gulf.