Connie Willis - Fire Watch

“The water’s perfectly clear. I would have seen it. Someone would have seen it. It can’t have lain there since 1215.”

“It could have been put there,” Mrs. Andover said. “After the jewels had been removed.”

“So could the colored paper,” he said without thinking, “after the book was taken out.”

“What about the paper?” Mrs. Andover said.

“It’s back in the drawer where Megan found the book. I saw it.”

“You might have put it back.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully, “the pious Reverend Davidson has come back without telling us.”

“For what purpose?” Finney said, losing his temper altogether. “To play some incredible game of hide-and-seek? To race about his church scattering priceless manuscripts and ancient crowns like prizes for us to find? What would we have to find to convince you he’s innocent? The Holy Grail?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Andover said coldly, and started back toward the church.

“Where are you going?” Finney shouted.

“To see for myself this miracle of the colored paper.”

“King John was a pretty lost soul, too,” he shouted at her back. “Perhaps he’s the last on the list. Perhaps it’ll all go bang before you even get to the church.”

But she made it safely to the vestry door and inside, and Finney hobbled after her, suddenly afraid of what his boys might have found now.

Mrs. Andover was staring bleakly into the open drawer as Finney had done, as if it held some answer. Finney felt a pang of pity for her, standing there in her sturdy shoes, believing in no one, alone in the enemy camp. He put his hand out to her shoulder, but she flinched away from his touch. There was a sudden clatter on the stairs, and the two boys exploded into the room with Finney’s cup.

“Look what we found!” one of them said.

“And you’ll never guess what else,” the other said, tumbling his words out. “After you said we shouldn’t look in here, we went down to the sanctuary, only it was too dark to see properly. So then we went into where we all have tea and there were no good hiding places at all, so we said to ourselves where would a cup logically be and the answer of course was in the kitchen.” He stopped to take a breath. “We pulled everything out of the cupboard, but it was just pots.”

“And an iron skillet,” Finney said.

“So we were putting them all back when we saw something else, a big old metal sort of thing rather like a cup, and your cup was inside it!” He handed the china cup triumphantly to Finney.

“Where is it?” Mrs. Andover said, as if it were an effort to speak. “This big old metal cup?”

“In the kitchen. We’ll fetch it if you like.”

“Please do.”

The boys dashed out. Finney turned to look at her. “It wasn’t there. Megan and I looked. You know what it is, don’t you?” Finney said, his heart beating sickeningly fast. It was the way he had felt before he lost his foot, when he saw the ax coming down.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s what you’ve been waiting for,” he said accusingly. “It’s the proof you said you wanted.”

“Yes,” she said, her lip trembling. “Only I didn’t know what it would mean.”

The boys were already racketing up the stairs. They burst in the door with it. For one awful endless moment, the steel blade falling against the sound of his own heart, louder than the drone of scripture, Finney prayed that it was an old metal cup.

The boys set it on the desk. It was badly dented from endless hidings and secretings and journeys. Tarnished like an old spoon. It shone like the cup of the sky.

“Is it a treasure?” the boy who had stolen Finney’s cup said, looking at their faces. “Do we get the fifty pence?”

“It is the Holy Grail,” Mrs. Andover said, putting her hands on it like a benediction.

“I thought it was lost forever.”

“It was,” she said. “I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.’”

Finney rubbed the back of his hand across his dry mouth. “I think we’d better get the children inside,” he said.

He sent the boys downstairs to put the kettle on for tea. Mrs. Andover stood by the desk, holding onto the Grail as if she were afraid of what would happen if she let go.

“It isn’t so bad once it’s over,” Finney said kindly. “What you think is the end isn’t always, and it turns out better than you dreamed.”

She set the Grail down gently and turned to him.

“It is only the last moment before the blade falls that is hard to bear,” he said.

“I have never told you,” Mrs. Andover said, her eyes filling with tears, “how sorry I am about your foot.” She fumbled for a handkerchief.

“It doesn’t matter,” Finney said. “At any rate, the way things seem to be going, it might just turn up.”

She smiled at that, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief, but when they went down the stairs, she clung to Finney’s arm as if she were the one who was lame. Finney sent her into the kitchen to set out the tea things and then went down to the edge of the End to bring the children in.

“Is Daddy here?” Megan said, dancing along beside him with one hand on her crown to keep it from falling off. “Is that why we’re having tea again?”

“No,” Finney said. “But he’s coming. He’ll be here soon.”

“Surely I come quickly,” Megan said, and ran inside.

Finney looked at the sky. Above the church the clouds peeled back from the blue like the edges of a scroll. Finney shut and barred the double doors to the sanctuary. He bolted the side door on the stairs and wedged a folding chair under the lock. Then he went into tea.

When she was forty years old, Elizabeth Barrett sneaked out of her house on Wimpole Street to elope with Robert Browning. It was an astonishing thing for a Victorian woman to do, especially someone who had been an invalid for most of her life. The story has been so romanticized that it is easy to forget that she was running from as well as to something.

She referred to her life with her father, a possessive and autocratic man who would allow none of his children to marry, as “my peculiar situation,” and tried to make it sound amusing. Browning, frantic to get her away from the man who encouraged his daughter’s invalidism, called it slavery and wrote her angrily, “I think I understand what a father may expect, and a child should comply with.”

When Edward Moulton Barrett found out what his daughter had done, he ruthlessly tried to destroy every trace of her, including her precious cocker spaniel, Flush. He didn’t succeed. She had taken Flush with her. But she had left her sisters Arabel and Henrietta behind.

The first thing my new roommate did was tell me her life story. Then she tossed up all over my bunk. Welcome to Hell. I know, I know. It was my own fucked fault that I was stuck with the stupid little scut in the first place. Daddy’s darling had let her grades slip till she was back in the freshman dorm and she would stay there until the admin reported she was being a good little girl again. But he didn’t have to put me in the charity ward, with all the little scholarship freshmen from the front colonies-frightened virgies one and all. The richies had usually had their share of jig-jig in boarding school, even if they were mostly edge. And they were willing to learn.

Not this one. She wouldn’t know a bone from a vaj, and wouldn’t know what went into which either. Ugly, too. Her hair was chopped off in an old-fashioned bob I thought nobody not even front kids, wore anymore. Her name was Zibet and she was from some godspit colony called Marylebone Weep and her mother was dead and she had three sisters and her father hadn’t wanted her to come. She told me all this in a rush of what she probably thought was friendliness before she tossed her supper all over me and my nice new slickspin sheets.