Трейси Шевалье - Falling Angel

I have just come back from the cemetery, of course. Our lives seem to revolve around it. I had gone there on my own to visit our grave. I wanted to, just before the King’s funeral. Mama of course couldn’t come because she is still in bed, with little Georgie at her side. When I left they were both asleep, which is good as I didn’t want to leave her alone otherwise. Elizabeth is there, though I don’t trust her with Georgie-I’m sure she would drop him on his head. Papa is at work, though he said it has been very dull and quiet there this week, everyone with long faces and doing very little-waiting for the King to be laid to rest.

I could have asked Maude to go with me, but we spent all of yesterday together, queueing up Whitehall to see the King lying in state, and I was rather happy to be in my own company.

I went to our grave and placed a new posy for Ivy May, and weeded a bit-around the Colemans’ as well as ours, for it needed attention. The Colemans can be rather lax on that front. And then I just sat. It was a lovely, sunny, quiet afternoon. I could just feel the grass and flowers and trees around me growing. I thought about the new king-King George V. I even said it aloud a few times. It is easier to accept him now that I have a brother named for him.

Then I had the idea to tour the angels. It had been so long since I had seen them all. I began with ours, of course, and walked around counting. There are far more than thirty-one now, but I looked only for those old ones from my childhood. It was like greeting old friends. I reached thirty but for the life of me I couldn’t find the thirty-first angel. I was deep in the cemetery, up by the northwest corner, still searching, when I heard the bell ring for closing. Then I remembered that I had forgot the sleeping angel, and hurried down the Egyptian Avenue to it. Only when I’d seen it, lying on its side asleep, wings neatly tucked, did I feel I could go.

I rushed down the path toward the entrance. It was really very late-no one was about, and I worried that the gates might already be locked. Nonetheless, I ran into the meadow just for a moment to say good-bye to Ivy May.

And there I found Simon and Joe and Mr. Jackson, beginning to pry up the granite slab on the Coleman grave! I was so shocked I just stood there, my mouth hanging open. For an awful moment I thought I had lost Maude too. Then Simon saw me and dropped his spade, and Joe and Mr. Jackson stopped as well. They all looked so guilty that I knew something was wrong.

“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” I cried.

Simon glanced at Mr. Jackson, then said, “Livy, come sit a minute.” He waved at the foot of my angel. I sat under it rather gingerly-I have never quite trusted it since it fell.

Simon explained everything. At first I could say nothing. But when I had got my breath back I said, “It is my Christian duty to remind you that what you are doing is both illegal and immoral.”

“We know,” that naughty boy replied-he said it almost gleefully!

“It is what she wanted,” Mr. Jackson said very quietly.

I gazed at him. I could have his job, and Simon’s. If I told the police about this, I could ruin his life, and Simon‘s, and upset Maude and her father dreadfully. I could.

But that would not bring back Ivy May.

They were looking at me fearfully, as if they knew what I was considering.

“Are you going to tell Maude?” I asked.

“When the time is right,” Mr. Jackson said.

I let them wait a little longer. It was very quiet in the cemetery, as if all the graves were waiting for me to reply.

“I shan’t tell anyone,” I said at last.

“You sure, Livy?” Simon said.

“Don’t you think I can keep a secret? I haven’t told Maude about what happened to her mother, you know-about the baby. I did keep that secret.”

Mr. Jackson started and turned red. I looked at him and, after years of leaving the puzzle unfinished in my mind, I at last allowed him to take his place next to Kitty in the story. To my great surprise I felt sorry for him.

Another secret. But I wouldn’t tell. I left them to their gruesome task and ran home, trying not to think about it. It was not so hard-once I’d got in and was holding my baby brother in my arms, I discovered it was quite easy to forget everything but his sweet face.

It was long past midnight when Daddy and I came to the top of Parliament Hill. We had gone to the Hampstead Scientific Society’s new observatory by Whitestone Pond to look at Halley’s Comet, and were walking across the heath on our way home.

It had been a disappointing viewing-the waxing moon was shining so brightly that the comet was rather indistinct, though its long curved tail was still spectacular. But Daddy loves the observatory-he campaigned so hard to have it built-and I did not want to spoil his evening there by complaining about the moon. I was one of the few ladies present, and kept very quiet.

Now, though, with the moon lower in the sky, the comet was more visible, and I felt more relaxed than I had been in the dome with its narrow slit of sky, crowded with men drinking brandy and smoking cigars. Lots of people were still out on the hill, looking at the comet. Someone was even playing “A Little of What You Fancy” on an accordion, though no one danced-the King was being buried in a few hours’ time, after all. It was strange that the comet should be in the sky the night before his funeral. It was the kind of thing Lavinia would make a great deal of, but I knew it was simply a coincidence, and coincidences can often be explained.

“Come, Maude, let’s go home,” Daddy said, flicking a cigarette butt into the grass.

Something flared in the corner of my eye. I looked across at the next hill toward Highgate and saw a huge bonfire burning, lighting up the trees around it. Among the dancing branches I thought I saw the cemetery’s cedar of Lebanon.

That fire was certainly no coincidence-someone had probably lit it for the King. I smiled. I love fire. I felt almost as if it had been lit for me as well.

Daddy disappeared down the hill into the darkness ahead of me, but I remained a little longer, my eyes flicking back and forth between the comet and the flames.

It takes a long time. We’re at it all night. He were right ‘bout the bones.

Afterward as the sun’s coming up we get some buckets and half fill ‘em with sand. We mix the ashes into it and we sprinkle it all over the meadow. Mr. Jackson has plans to let wildflowers grow there, like she wanted. That’ll make a change from all them flower beds and raked paths.

I still got a little left in a bucket and I goes to our granpa’s rosebush and dump the rest there. That way I’ll be sure of where some of her is, if ever Maude wants to know. ‘Sides, bone meal’s good for roses.

The acknowledgments is the only section of a novel that reveals an author’s “normal” voice. As a result I always read them looking for clues that will shed light on writers and their working methods and lives, as well as their connections with the real world. I suspect some of them are written in code. Alas, however, there are no hidden meanings in this one-just an everyday voice that wants to express gratitude for help in several forms.

Sometimes I wonder if acknowledgments are even necessary, or if they break the illusion that books emerge fully formed from a writer’s mind. But books don’t come out of nowhere. Other books and other people contribute to them in all sorts of ways. I used many books in the making of this one. The most helpful were The Victorian Celebration of Death by James Stevens Curl (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), Death in the Victorian Family by Pat Jalland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Death, Heaven and the Victorians by John Morley (London: Studio Vista, 1971), and, best of all, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries, and on the Improvement of Churchyards by J. C. Loudon (1843; facsimile published Redhill, Surrey: Ivelet Books, 1981).