The Secret History by Donna Tartt Page B

floating up to me. “Come down.”
    So now we were walking in the grove behind the college, down by the scrubby little pine forest at the base of the mountains, with one of them on either side of me.
    They looked particularly angelic, their blond hair wind-blown, both in white tennis sweaters and tennis shoes. I wasn’t sure why they’d asked me down. Though polite enough, they seemed wary and slightly puzzled, as if I were from some country with unfamiliar, eccentric customs, which made it necessary for them to take great caution in order not to startle or offend.
    “How’d you hear about it?” I said. “The lunch?”
    “Bun called this morning. And Henry told us about it last night.”
    “I think he was pretty mad.”
    Charles shrugged. “Mad at Bunny, maybe. Not at you.”
    “They don’t care for each other, do they?”
    They seemed astonished to hear this.
    “They’re old friends,” said Camilla.
    “Best friends, I would say,” said Charles. “At one time you never saw them apart.”
    “They seem to argue quite a bit.”
    “Well, of course,” said Camilla, “but that doesn’t mean they’re not fond of each other all the same. Henry’s so serious and Bun’s so sort of—well,
not
serious—that they really get along quite well.”
    “Yes,” said Charles. “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. A well-matched pair. I think Bunny’s about the only person in the world who can make Henry laugh.” He stopped suddenly and pointed into the distance. “Have you ever been down there?” he said. “There’s a graveyard on that hill.”
    I could see it, just barely, through the pines—a flat, straggled line of tombstones, rickety and carious, skewed at such anglesthat they gave a hectic, uncanny effect of motion, as if some hysterical force, a poltergeist perhaps, had scattered them only moments before.
    “It’s old,” said Camilla. “From the 1700s. There was a town there too, a church and a mill. Nothing left but foundations, but you can still see the gardens they planted. Pippin apples and wintersweet, moss roses growing where the houses were. God knows what happened up there. An epidemic, maybe. Or a fire.”
    “Or the Mohawks,” said Charles. “You’ll have to go see it sometime. The cemetery especially.”
    “It’s pretty. Especially in the snow.”
    The sun was low, burning gold through the trees, casting our shadows before us on the ground, long and distorted. We walked for a long time without saying anything. The air was musty with far-off bonfires, sharp with the edge of a twilight chill. There was no noise but the crunch of our shoes on the gravel path, the whistle of wind in the pines; I was sleepy and my head hurt and there was something not quite real about any of it, something like a dream. I felt that at any second I might start, my head on a pile of books at my desk, and find myself in a darkening room, alone.
    Suddenly Camilla stopped and put a finger to her lips. In a dead tree, split in two by lightning, were perched three huge, black birds, too big for crows. I had never seen anything like them before.
    “Ravens,” said Charles.
    We stood stock-still, watching them. One of them hopped clumsily to the end of a branch, which squeaked and bobbed under its weight and sent it squawking into the air. The other two followed, with a battery of flaps. They sailed over the meadow in a triangle formation, three dark shadows on the grass.
    Charles laughed. “Three of them for three of us. That’s an augury, I bet.”
    “An omen.”
    “Of what?” I said.
    “Don’t know,” said Charles. “Henry’s the ornithomantist. The bird-diviner.”
    “He’s such an old Roman. He’d know.”
    We had turned towards home and, at the top of a rise, I saw the gables of Monmouth House, bleak in the distance. The sky was cold and empty. A sliver of moon, like the white crescent of a thumbnail, floated in the dim. I was unused to those drearyautumn twilights, to chill and early dark; the nights