Charles Todd - Watchers of Time

Dr. Stephenson, climbing the stairs once more, found that the priest was right: Herbert Baker seemed to be resting quietly, slowly losing his grip on life.

In the small hours of the night, the man died peacefully, his family gathered about him. His daughter, Ellen, sobbed quietly and his two sons watched in anguish as he drew several short, uncertain breaths, then stopped breathing altogether, only a thin sigh passing his lips. The Vicar, by his side, prayed for Herbert Baker’s soul as the sigh faded.

The funeral was well attended, and Herbert Baker, coachman by trade, was sent to his eternal rest with the goodwill of a village that had known him to be an honest and plainspoken man with no vices and no outstanding talents, except perhaps for loyalty.

A week after the funeral, Dr. Stephenson returned to his surgery late one afternoon to find Father James just walking out the door.

“Well met!” Stephenson exclaimed, with pleasure. “Come in, let me pour myself a drink, and I shall be at your service. First babies are not to be hurried! This one kept his mother and me awake all of the night and well into the afternoon, and I’ve missed my breakfast, my lunch, and my usual hours.” He led the way back through the doorway, down the passage, and into his private office. The room smelled of wax and disinfectant, a blend that Father James found to be a sneeze-maker. He dragged out his handkerchief, sneezed heartily three times, and grinned crookedly at Stephenson.

“You should hear me when they’ve waxed the pews and the confessional at St. Anne’s! The blessing is, I’m not bothered by incense.”

The office was small, painted a pleasing shade of blue, and offered three chairs for visitors as well as the more comfortable old leather one behind the doctor’s broad wooden desk. Dr. Stephenson settled into that, and Father James took his accustomed place in the ancient wingback. As Stephenson lifted the bottle of sherry and offered it to him, the priest said, “No, thank you. I’ve another call to make, and she’s temperance-mad. I’ll lose my reputation if I reek of good sherry.”

Stephenson grinned. “How does she manage communion wine, then?”

“It’s consecrated, and the evil of the grape has been taken out.”

The doctor chuckled, then poured his own glass. “Yes, well, the mind is a wonderful thing, wonderful.”

“It’s about the mind I’ve come,” Father James said slowly.

“Oh, yes?” Stephenson sipped his sherry with relish, letting it warm him.

“I’d like to ask you if Herbert Baker was in full control of his faculties when he called me to him on his deathbed.”

“Baker? Yes, well, that was an odd business, I daresay. But he was dying of congestive heart failure, and his mind was, as far as I could tell, clear to the end of consciousness. Any reason why you feel it might not have been?” His voice lifted on a query. Stephenson was a man who liked his own life and that of his patients as tidy as possible.

“No,” the priest replied. “On the other hand, I’m seldom asked to second-guess Mr. Sims’s parishioners. Or he mine, for that matter. It was curious, and I found myself wondering about it afterward. Baker most certainly appeared in full control, though understandably weak. Still, you never know.”

“Which reminds me,” Stephenson said, turning the subject to something on his own mind. “There’s one of your flock I do want to talk about. Mrs. Witherspoon. She’s been refusing to take her pills again, and I’m-er-hanged if I can understand it.”

The priest smiled. “There’s a challenge for you. At a guess, I’d say that when she feels a little stronger, she’s convinced she doesn’t need them. Then she feels unwell again and quickly takes two to make up for it. A good-hearted woman, but not overly blessed with common sense. If I were you, I’d have a talk with her husband. She pays more heed to what he says than to anyone else. The sun shines out of Mr. Witherspoon, in her view.”

The ironmonger was the most lugubrious man in Osterley.

Stephenson laughed. “The eye of the beholder. Well, there’s a thought. That woman will make herself seriously ill if she doesn’t heed someone!” He looked at his wine, golden in the little glass. “I had a patient once who swore that sherry was Spanish sunlight caught in a bottle. Never been to Spain myself; I’m hard-pressed to escape for a few hours in Yarmouth. But there’s most certainly medicinal magic in it.” He finished the wine, then said, “How are those triplets of yours?”

Father James beamed. The triplets were his younger sister’s children and lived some distance away. “Thriving. Sarah is coping, with the help of two nuns I found for her, and every member of the family we can dragoon into service. I’ve done my own turn walking the floor at night. I expect those boys will be holy terrors by the time they’re eight. Their father was something of a devil himself at twelve!”

Stephenson said, “Aren’t we all? But responsibility comes soon enough.”

The priest’s face changed subtly. “It does. I’ll be on my way, then. Get some rest, you look as if you could use it!”

Watching him out the door, Stephenson had the curious feeling that Father James should take his own advice.

Nearly two weeks had passed since the funeral. Stephenson, rested and busy, had long since put Herbert Baker out of his mind when he took his wife to visit friends.

It was a dinner party like a dozen others the doctor attended with some enthusiasm whenever he could. There were eight couples, and he’d known all of them for years. Comfortable with each other, sharing a common history, they had found in one another a companionship that had few boundaries. Stephenson could count most of them as his patients, and his wife had sat on committees of one sort or another with every one of the women-church bazaars, flower arrangements, food baskets for the poor, spring fetes, charity cases, visiting the sick, welcoming newcomers to Osterley, and generally forming an ad hoc social group that was as small as it was select.

He couldn’t have said afterward how the subject arose. Someone asked a question, another guest expanded on it, and a wife raised a laugh by adding her own views. Stephenson found himself picking up the thread, and the next thing he knew, he was telling the story of a dying patient who had wanted to hedge his bets in the next life by seeing both the Vicar and the priest.

One of the guests leaned forward. “Was that old Baker? My wife remarked to me that she’d seen Father James walking out of Baker’s front door one night in a pouring rain, saying good-bye to young Martin on the step. I told her she must have been mistaken-Baker was sexton for seventeen years at Holy Trinity!”

Richard Cullen said, “Had the right idea, though, didn’t he? Who was it that said Paris was worth a Mass?”

That dissolved into a debate over whether it was Henri IV and progressed to a recital of the opening lines of “The Vicar of Bray.” Herbert Baker had been forgotten once more.

It was late in the evening on the second of October when Father James returned to the Victorian Gothic house that served as St. Anne’s rectory. He let himself in through the unlocked kitchen door, grateful for the lamp still burning on the small table by the window, and sniffed appreciatively at the lingering aroma of bacon. He crossed the room to peer into the oven. His dinner was sitting on the rack in a covered dish. Lifting the lid, he saw that the contents were a little dry but certainly still delicious. There were onions as well, and what appeared to be a Scotch egg.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Wainer, had-as always- remembered that the body needed nurturing as well as the soul. He could feel the saliva flow in his mouth. Onions were his greatest love.