To Love and to Cherish (15 page)

Selfish, selfish! Why did I do it? A good woman, a
true
friend would have taken pity and let him go, not pleaded with him to let her go on hurting him. But I ignored my conscience. Christy and I established our roles a long time ago, after all: He’s the saint and I’m the sinner.

Anyway, I don’t care, I don’t care, it worked, so I’m unrepentant. He gave in. And I know it wasn’t out of weakness, but because I’d shamelessly convinced him that I needed him—indeed, that
he
would be the sinner if he threw me away. Oh, selfish! It’s not true, I
am
repentant! But not enough to take back a single word. I’m miserable; I’m elated. I vow to keep my promise to the letter.
Friends
, that’s all we are and all we’ll ever be. I pledged it to him, and I’d die before I’d forswear myself.

But—he cares for me. That stays in my heart. I take that hope out and hold it, look at it, stroke it, and whisper to it, like a child with a pet she’s found in the wild and isn’t allowed to keep. I must hide it out of sight and look at it only in the coldest times, the heartless hours. Thank you, Christy, for this extraordinary gift.

X

T
HE FOLLOWING
F
RIDAY
, Christy didn’t come to the penny reading. Mrs. Armstrong began
Ivanhoe
for an audience that had swelled over the last few weeks to almost thirty. Anne’s turn was over, and years ago she’d read all the Walter Scott she ever wanted to, but she came to the reading anyway. To see Christy, of course—except for church on Wednesday, and then only to nod to him sedately, she hadn’t seen him in a week—but also because the gatherings had become a pleasant weekly ritual for her, a time to greet the villagers and ask how they did. “Fine, m’lady,” was usually all she got out of them—except for Tranter Fox—but lately she’d noticed an infinitesimal narrowing of the rigid social gap each time she came, and that was incentive enough to maintain her attendance.

After the reading, she commended Mrs. Armstrong for a job well done, exchanged a few pleasantries with Lily Hesselius, spoke to John Swan about the seeding machine she’d ordered from his blacksmith’s shop—all the while keeping an eye on the door, expecting Christy to come through it at any moment. He never did. Arthur Ludd said as how he hadn’t come to Evening Prayers neither, and like as not somebody in parish was sick or in trouble. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized that Dr. Hesselius was absent, too. Arthur must be right.

Bitter disappointment flooded her, as if she’d drunk vinegar. Afterward, she felt guilty: she ought to be sympathizing with the anonymous sick person. But all she could think of was that she would miss Christy. Their meeting was bound to be somewhat awkward, especially at first, but she didn’t care. And now that she’d lost the opportunity, she realized how very badly she wanted to see him, how much she’d been counting on it.

She wandered outside with the others, calling good night to her neighbors. It was an unusually mild night, moonlit and almost cloudless. Standing in the street in front of the rectory, she actually considered going back up the walk, knocking at the door, and telling Mrs. Ludd she would like to wait for the vicar in his study. Certainly there was nothing to prevent her from doing so; she was Lady D’Aubrey—she could say she wanted to wait for him on the roof, and no one would gainsay her. But she didn’t move. After all that had happened, it seemed too forward. Almost as if she were going back on her word.

An owl gave an eerie hoot from the beech trees at the edge of the green. Anne thought of going home to her empty house, making a cup of tea and carrying it up to her empty room, drinking it in her empty bed.

It wasn’t to be borne. Not tonight. She had her heart set on seeing him. Skirting the light falling on his lawn from the bow window, she moved toward the shadows in the churchyard. She would wait for him there. Just to see how he did. Just to say good night.

She’d been truthful the day she’d told him she loved graveyards. The dead were dead, and there was nothing in this moon-shadowed bone garden to frighten her. Still, she couldn’t help remembering the antics of the village children on All Hallows’ Eve two nights ago. Evil spirits roamed the earth on that night, the people of Wyckerley half-believed. They persecuted poor humans, whose only defense was to put on a disguise and pass for members of the spirit world. On All Hallows’, the children dressed up in their parents’ clothes and flew around the village, shrieking, carrying grotesque, hollowed-out turnips with candles inside, holding them up to cottage windows to terrify the inhabitants.

She smiled to herself, thinking of the thoughtful, sedate, well-reasoned sermon Christy had preached that day—All Saints’, the feast day of his church and thus a fairly solemn occasion. Reconciling modern Anglicanism with still-vital holdovers from pagan rites as old as the Celts must present plenty of interesting challenges to the conscientious clergyman. She never missed Sunday service anymore, because she delighted in listening to Christy’s sermons. Not so much because they were riveting drama—they weren’t—but because they were a window on his mind. And she found Christy’s mind fascinating.

RUFUS MARKHAM
, read a low stone marker beside a border of yew trees. Or possibly
MARKUS
, it was hard to tell. The date of his death was 2 June 1741, but the date of his birth was too worn to read; seventeen-something, so he hadn’t been a very old man when he died. In that case, he probably wouldn’t mind if she sat down on his tombstone. From here she’d be able to hear Christy’s step on the flagstone path to his door. Across the way, someone had a much grander stone than Rufus had, an angel’s statue on a wide pedestal, with all manner of worn writing chiseled in the hard marble. Dead just the same, though, wasn’t he? A mundane thought: had anyone ever visited a cemetery and not entertained it? Maybe not, but that didn’t make it less true, or less subject to melancholy rumination. She let her mind drift. Her mother was buried in Reims, her father in London. She had no other relatives, at least not to speak of; there were probably cousins on her mother’s side somewhere, but she had no idea where. She’d been on her own since her father’s death. So, except for Geoffrey, no one else could die on her, so to speak. Which was one of those good-bad, ultimately meaningless truisms that cluttered the mind and led nowhere.

She sighed, and lifted her head to watch the moon through the trees. Presently the church clock struck ten. She started slightly; she hadn’t realized she’d been loitering here quite so long. Past the high churchyard wall, a light shone from a second-floor room in the rectory. Christy’s bedroom? Perhaps Mrs. Ludd left it on whenever he was out late at night. It must be a welcome sight to him when he came home tired, sometimes dejected. The home fire burning. She sighed again, dejected herself, and not knowing why. A sound made her sit up straight.

Slow footsteps, sharp on the cobbled street, now soft on the grass. She stood, brushing at her skirts, patting her hair, aware of an airy feeling in her stomach. The lych-gate creaked on its hinges and Christy came through. He didn’t see her. He moved away from her, his shoulders hunched, toward an iron bench under the giant copper beech by the wall.

Moonlight through the trees illuminated him in patches, silvering his dark-clad shoulders and even the gold in his hair. As usual, he made her think of an angel. One of the militant kind; a straight-shouldered, level-eyed, sword-wielding soldier of the Lord. Smiling, she took a step toward him—and stopped when he suddenly leaned forward and dropped his head in his hands.

Her heart began to race. Was he weeping? Irrational fear gripped her as every presumption she’d ever made about him was reversed and turned on its head. He couldn’t be—
oh, please don’t let him be crying
, she prayed, forgetting that she didn’t believe in God. Full of dread, she crept forward. Even when gravel rasped under her shoe, he didn’t hear her. She stopped a little distance from him, uneasy, not wanting to intrude on his private distress but unable to leave him now. His fingers tangled and clenched in his bright hair, making it stand on end. She felt as if she were seeing something she wasn’t supposed to see. Every second she thought he would sense her presence and look up, but he didn’t. At last she had to say his name, “Christy,” scarcely above a whisper.

He lifted his head. She saw, to her intense relief, that he wasn’t weeping. But his face was tragic, and she remembered she had seen it that way once before, on the first day they’d met. He had been praying on his knees at Lord D’Aubrey’s bedside—a strange sight, she’d thought at the time, almost embarrassing—and he’d looked up at her and Geoffrey with exactly the same expression of hopeless defeat.

Before she could say anything else, he said, “Anne,” with a kind of resigned wonder, and got to his feet.

His hands at his sides looked too big, almost clumsy. She wanted to reach out and take them in hers, chafe the life back into them, do something to make him better. Not allowed. She stood still and said, “What happened?”

“Were you waiting for me?” he asked, in the same wondering tone as before.

“Yes, I— What’s happened, Christy? What’s wrong?”

He took a deep breath. “Tolliver Deene is dead.”

“Oh, no.”

“There was no warning. He collapsed at the mine office late this afternoon and died a few hours later.”

Now she did take his hand, to lead him back to the bench and pull him down beside her. He put his head back against the rough bark of the tree and closed his eyes for a second, then opened them to stare up at the sky.

“How is Sophie?” she asked.

“She’s completely devastated. Completely. I . . . it’s . . .” He shook his head, as if the futility of words were something he was sick of thinking about.

“Was he conscious before he died?”

“Yes. He knew he was dying.” He brought his hands up and clasped them across his forehead, the fingers locked. “I said all the words, all the . . . words. It didn’t help.”

“I’m sure it did.”

“He was afraid. He didn’t want to die. At the end, he asked me why. I gave him the answers I knew—God’s will, too much for us to understand, going to a better place, all that—” He squeezed his eyes shut, baring his teeth. “So he stopped asking me. Out of politeness.”

Hurting for him, she sat quietly and didn’t speak.

“Then he was gone, and there was nothing I could do for Sophie either. Her heart is broken. I just—watched her. Sat with her, said . . . the words. I wanted so badly to fix it for her, make everything better. Make death go away. Reassure her that all will be well, when it certainly will not.”

He let his hands fall, uncovering all the bleakness in his face. She let the silence stretch between them for a moment, then laid her hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look at her, but he smiled absently, gratefully. “You did your best,” she heard herself say—and if she hadn’t known what he was talking about before, the terrible banality of that would have brought it home with a vengeance. But he didn’t sigh or flinch with impatience; he smiled again, tiredly, and gave her comforting hand a pat with his.

“You see?” she said earnestly. “I just said a stupid-sounding thing, but it consoled you a little. And you helped Sophie and Mr. Deene. You did, but you just can’t see it. You were
there
. You stayed with them, you didn’t run away, the way most people would’ve done—as I’d have done when it got too painful. ‘The family should have some privacy,’ I’d have said, but really I’d have excused myself because I couldn’t stand it. That’s what most people do, Christy, but not you.”

“Because it’s my job.”

“Yes, exactly. And you do it well. You
do
. There
is
nothing to say at those times, you
can’t
make it better. It isn’t answers people need anyway, it’s company. You can’t cure illness or prevent death or suffering, Christy. You can just be there, holding Sophie’s hand. That’s all you can do.”

“No, Anne,” he said gently. “I’m a minister; I’m supposed to do more than that. I’m supposed to bring hope to the hopeless. I should have a vision of God’s plan that’s so powerful, so compelling, it comforts the dying and brings them peace. I’m God’s helper on earth, his priest. I have the sacraments and I have the Bible, but unless I also have God’s spirit in me, giving me the grace to say the right words, do the right things—”

“But you do,” she insisted. “Oh, Christy, you don’t know. You can’t see it, but I can, and I’m telling you that you help everyone you meet.” He laughed at that. She took his hand in both of hers and squeezed it hard. “I watch them, I see people with you. They—
light up
when you come into a room. In church, they never take their eyes off you. And I’m not just talking about all those silly girls either. I mean everybody. What I can’t understand is why you don’t know that everyone loves you.”

He put his head down, pretending to examine their clasped hands. He was moved, and he was no good at dissembling; poor Christy, if he wanted to keep an emotion to himself, the best he could do was to hide his face.

“What are you thinking?” she asked when he didn’t speak.

“I’m thinking . . . that I’m supposed to say that. ‘What are you thinking?’ It’s what I say when people are quiet. To draw them out.”

She smiled. “A fine tactic,” she said softly. “I’m sure you’ve a hundred more and you don’t even know it.” He kept his head down. “Christy,” she whispered. “What are we going to do with you?”

He put his other hand over hers. A light breeze blew, fluttering the tree branches, making moon-shadows in his hair. They both fell silent, and the seconds passed, and she grew obsessively aware of their touching. The texture of Christy’s skin, the warmth of his big hands cradling her smaller ones. The naturalness of this intimacy. She wanted to lean down and rest her cheek on their joined hands. Just that. And stay that way for a long time. He moved, and the drawing away of his hands felt like a caress. But then he stood up, and it felt like an abandonment.

He didn’t go far, just to the iron sundial, inconspicuous among the gravestones. “Watch and pray,” read the inscription on the granite pedestal. “Time passeth away like a shadow.” She watched him for a while, admiring his lean, muscular grace. He was an elegant man, for all that he was a soldier of the Lord in a humble country parish. And her appreciation of him was as earthly as could be. Or did she mean earthy?

The direction of her thoughts alarmed her, and so did Christy’s continued silence. He had withdrawn from her, and she could only think that somehow, because of the innocent intimacy of what had just happened, she’d broken faith with him, reneged on her promise to be his friend and nothing more.

“So,” she said with uncertain playfulness, “am I not allowed to hold my friend’s hand when he’s in trouble?”

He turned around. From here she couldn’t see his face clearly. She held her breath, and finally he smiled. Her relief was so strong, she shivered with it. She patted the bench beside her. “Come back. I’ve decided to tell you my life story. Come, sit, I can’t tell it to you if you’re going to stand over me like—like God,” she said deliberately, and her reward was his light laugh.

He took his seat beside her again, angling his body toward hers and resting his forearm on the low back of the bench. “Are you cold?” he asked, seeing she had nothing but her shawl.