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      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

      Cram, Mildred, 1889-

      Sir : a novel / by Mildred Cram.

       p. cm.

      ISBN 0-86534-339-X (pbk.)

      1. Politicians—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction.

      I.Title.

      PS3505.R2184 S57 2003

      813'.52—dc22

      2003020057

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      1

      Edward always knew when Eithne was about to come downstairs. There was first a rustle along the upstairs hall, then a pause and finally the descent. The taffeta slips she wore accounted for the hissing rustle, but she moved like a snake, not stepping from step to step but coiling down, soundlessly.

      “Edward!”

      He rejected the unpleasant image and forced himself to see her as a handsome woman of forty, his half-sister. The two halves . . . if that was the genetic composition . . . bore no remote resemblance to one another. Brother and sister belonged to the human race, but there the similarities ended.

      “I was just going out,” he said.

      “Where?”

      “I thought of taking a walk.”

      “A walk?”

      “I’m quite up to it.”

      “The doctor said you were not to go anywhere alone. Not for a week at least.”

      “I’m quite all right.”

      “Then I’ll go with you.”

      “Please, no.”

      She made a gesture that meant: “I give up! You’re impossible.” And turning away, went smoothly, effortlessly, upstairs again.

      Edward saw the backs of her legs in seamless beige, her long body patted and steamed and starved into fashionable grace. “Expensive snake,” he thought. And the image took over again.

      “I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” she called down from the landing. “I suppose I’ve got to get used to your being alone here.”

      Edward didn’t answer. He tried not to leap at the door, but to open it calmly and to step outside as if he were doing the most natural . . . the safest . . . thing in the world.

      The wide verandah was in full sunlight. It was warm for an afternoon in March, windless, and not a cloud in the sky. During the summer the lawn would be a lush green, the clover machine-mowed and fragrant, but now it was brown, save where patches of crusty snow melted morosely in the hollows.

      Edward followed a bricked path through the rose garden. The bushes wore their winter overcoats; straw and burlap cones were wrapped around the barren stalks. The tool-house was boarded up; it was still too early to spade the frozen earth. No birds. Not a living thing in sight, anywhere.

      Edward walked slowly, conscious of a certain lack of balance, a sense of physical confusion, as if nothing worked as it should. The veins in his hands felt full. His heart betrayed him unless he took great care to head off its sudden bursts of speed. He had been ill, exiled to a room in a hospital for six weeks, submitting to the faintly contemptuous attention of doctors who seemed convinced that whatever it was that ailed him their science had no way to get at it. None of these highly paid fellows dared to tell him what they really thought: that his sickness was psychosomatic. Had he been a penniless nobody sweating it out in a ward, they would have made short shrift of his symptoms. Did he hurt here, or there? No. Well, then! We’ll test this and that: examine this and that: the brain, the spine, the spleen, the liver. We’ll push and prod and photograph and guess . . . Edward could afford it; he was a rich man.

      The Press was determined to get at the truth of his condition, and newsmen surged through the hospital, clogging the corridors, monopolizing the phone booths. Could they see him? They could not. Was it true that he was paralyzed? No comment. Was he dying? No comment. Could Mr. Reasoner speak to him for a moment? No one could speak to him.

      Finally the pressure was relieved. An official statement was released: the illustrious patient was suffering from a minor concussion, that was all. No injuries: no fractures or burns. A period of complete rest was indicated. Nothing more.

      The path frayed out once it had fulfilled its purpose; the neatly spaced bricks gave way to gravel, then wandered into the pine woods that bordered the estate. Here, centuries of fallen needles had made a tawny carpet so thick that neither man nor beast could dent its surface.

      Edward hesitated and looked back at the house. From where he stood, the windows were like brass shields flashing in the sun; a thread of smoke rose from one of the tall chimneys. Edward had been born here, in a second-story bedroom, on just such a day as this; he could remember his mother’s telling him so: “A warm day . . . there was spring in the air. When you were safely born, I asked to look at you. Oh, Edward, what an ugly baby you were! Who would have believed that you would grow up to be the handsome creature you are!”

      He was not handsome, but he had been called “the young Lincoln” too often not to believe that there was some truth in the comparison: the height, the square shoulders, the blackness of hair and the aggressive nose. With the mouth any resemblance ended, and the attraction for women began. Of this, however, Edward was unaware. If he thought of his appearance at all it was with a sort of futile annoyance at being recognized wherever he went. Even those who had no idea who he was stared at him, but those who did recognize him swung in their tracks to have another look. It was like seeing a character step out from the T.V. screen . . . a strange duality . . . Lincoln wearing Welby’s tunic or Marshal Dillon’s hat.

      For this reason, to escape the probing public eye, he had hoped he could hide from the consuming attention of the crowd and in decent privacy arrive at his own conclusions. He had left Washington at night, and abjuring the black limousine that was the symbol of his office,