Connie Willis - Fire Watch

“The game’s not finished yet,” Megan said.

“What?” Finney slopped tea all over his trousers.

“Go and finish your game,” Mrs. Andover said. “Take the children with you. You needn’t come in till it’s ended.” Now that Finney was looking for it, he saw her nod to a tall girl with a large bosom. The girl nodded back and went out after the children. What else had he missed because he wasn’t looking for it?

“It’s a game of Megan’s,” Mrs. Andover said to Finney “One child’s the shepherd, and he must get all the sheep into the fold by putting them inside a ring drawn on the ground. When he’s got them all inside the ring, then it’s bang! the end, and all adjourn for tea and cake.”

“Bang! the end,” said Finney. “Tea and cakes for everyone. I wish it were as simple as that.”

“Perhaps you should join one of the cults,” Mrs. Andover said.

Finney looked up sharply from his tea.

“They are always preaching the end, aren’t they? When it is coming and to whom. Lists of who’s to be saved and who’s to be left to his own devices. Dates and places and timetables.”

“They’re wrong,” Finney said. “It’s supposed to come like a thief in the night so no one will see it coming.”

“I doubt there’s a thief could get past me without my knowing it.”

“Yes, I forgot,” said Finney “‘It takes a thief to catch a thief.’ Isn’t that one of Megan’s scriptures?”

She looked thoughtful. “Aren’t the lost supposed to be safely gathered into the fold before the end can come?”

“Ah, yes,” said Finney, “but the good shepherd never does specify just who those lost ones are he’s so bent on finding. Perhaps he has a list of his own, and when all the people on it are safely inside some circle he’s drawn on the ground—”

“Or perhaps we don’t understand at all,” Mrs. Andover said dreamily. “Perhaps the lost are not people at all, but things. Perhaps it’s they that are being gathered in before the end. T. E. Lawrence was a lost soul, wasn’t he?”

“I’d hardly call Lawrence of Arabia lost,” Finney said. “He seemed to know his way round the Middle East rather well.”

“He hired a man to flog him, did you know that? He would have had to be well and truly lost to have done that.” She looked up suddenly at Finney. “If something else turned up, something valuable, that would prove the end was coming, wouldn’t it?”

“It would prove something,” Finney said. “I’m not certain what.”

“Where exactly is your Reverend Davidson?” she asked, almost offhand, as if she could catch him by changing the subject.

He is out rescuing the lost, dear lady, while you sit here seducing admissions out of me. A thief can’t sneak past me either. “In London, of course,” Finney said. “Pawning the crown jewels and hiding the money in Swiss bank accounts.”

“Quite possibly,” Mrs. Andover said. “Perhaps he should think about returning to St. John’s. He is in a good deal of trouble.”

Finney pulled his class in and sat them down in the crypt. “Tisn’t fair,” one of the taller boys said. “The game was still going. It wasn’t very nice of you to pull us in like that.” He kicked at the gilded toe of a fifteenth-century wool merchant.

“I quite agree,” Finney said, which remark caused all of them to sit up and look at him, even the kicker. “It was not fair. Neither was it fair for me to have had to drink my tea from a paper cup.”

“It isn’t our bloody fault you lost the cup,” the boy said sulkily.

“That would be quite true, if indeed the cup were lost. The Holy Grail has been lost for centuries and never found, and that is certainly no one’s bloody fault. But my cup is not lost forever, and you are going to find it.” He tried to sound angry so they would look and not play. “I want you to search every nook and cranny of this church, and if you find the cup"-here was the tricky bit, just the right casual tone-"or anything else interesting, bring it straightaway to me.” He paused and then said, as if he had just thought of it, “I’ll give fifty pence for every treasure.”

The children scattered like players in a game. Finney hobbled up the stairs after them and stood in the side door. The younger children were down by the water and Mrs. Andover was standing near them.

Two of the boys plummeted past Finney and up the stairs to the study “Don’t…” Finney said, but they were already past him. By the time he had managed the stairs, the boys had strewn open every drawer of the desk. They were tumbling colored paper out of the bottom drawer, trying to see what was under it.

“It isn’t there,” one of the boys said, and Finney’s heart caught.

“What isn’t?”

“Your cup. This is where we hid it. This morning.”

“You must be mistaken,” he said, and led them firmly down the stairs. Halfway down, Mrs. Andover’s girl burst in at them.

“She says you are to come at once,” she said breathlessly.

Finney released the boys. “You two can redeem yourselves by finding my cup,” and then as they escaped down the stairs to the crypt, he shouted, “and stay out of the study.”

Mrs. Andover was standing by the End, watching the children and Megan wade knee-deep in the clear water. The sun had come out. Finney could see the flash of sunlight off Megan’s hair.

“They’re playing a game,” Mrs. Andover said without looking at him. “It’s an old nursery rhyme about how bad King John lost his clothes in the Wash. The children stand in a circle, and when the rhyme’s done, they fall down in the water. Megan stepped on something when she went down. She cut her foot.”

Water and blood and Davidson reaching out for Finney’s hand. “No!” Finney had cried, “not my hand, too!” Davidson had started to say something and Finney had flailed away from him like a landed fish, afraid it would be holy scripture. But he had said, “The cults did this to you, didn’t they?” in a voice that had no holiness in it at all, and Finney had collapsed gratefully into his arms.

“Is she hurt?” he said, blinded by the sun and the memory.

“It was just a scratch,” Mrs. Andover said. “King John did lose his clothes. In a battle in 1215. His army was fighting in a muddy estuary of the Wash when a tide came in and knocked everyone under. He lost his crown, too.”

“And it was never found,” Finney said, knowing what was coming.

“Not until now.”

“Megan!” Finney shouted. “Come here right now!”

She ran up out of the water, her bare legs dripping wet. On her head was a rusty circle that looked more like a tin lid than a crown, He did not have the slightest doubt that it was what Mrs. Andover said, the crown of a king dead eight hundred years.

“Give me the crown, Megan,” Finney said.

“Behold I come quickly. Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown,” she said, handing it to Finney.

Finney scratched through the encrusted minerals to the definite scrape of metal. It was thinner in several spots. Finney poked his little finger into one of the indentations and through it, making a round hole.

“Those are for the jewels,” Megan said.

“What makes you think that?” Mrs. Andover said. “Have you seen any jewels?”

“All crowns have jewels,” Megan said. Finney handed the crown back to her and she put it on. Finney looked at the sky behind Megan’s head. The clouds had pulled back from a little circlet of blue over the church. “Can I go back now?” Megan said. “The game’s almost done.”

“This is the End,” Finney said, watching her walk fearlessly into the water. “Not the Wash.”

“Nor is it Reading Railway Station,” Mrs. Andover said. “Nevertheless.”