“Ugh. A grisly business, I should imagine. Pretty Vicky fainting with relief at the sight of some bloated stranger, Dr. Sawyer ready with the smelling salts—”
“It was your body, Elliott.”
She had expected him to look shocked or furtive or frightened. Instead, he put his hands behind his head and leaned back against them, smiling at her. “How is that possible, sweet Anne? Or have you been having the vapors, too?”
“How did you get from the river to Haddam, Elliott? You never told me.”
He did not change his position. “A horse was grazing by the riverside. I leaped upon his back, the true horseman, and galloped home to you.”
“You said you got the horse at an inn.”
“I didn’t want to offend your sensibilities by telling you I stole the horse. Perhaps I overjudged your sense of delicacy. You seem to have no qualms about accusing me of—what is it exactly you’re accusing me of? Murdering some harmless passerby and dressing him in my clothes? Impossible. As you can see, I am still wearing them.”
“My cloak is ruined beyond repair,” she said slowly. “My boots were caked with mud. The hem of my dress was stained and torn. How did you manage to ride a horse all the way from Haddam in a storm and arrive with your boots polished and your coat brushed?”
He sat up suddenly and grabbed for her hands. She stepped back. “You did all that for me, Anne?” he said. “Waiting on the island, drenched and dirty? No wonder you are angry. But this is no way to punish me. Locking me in this dusty room, telling me ghost stories. I’ll buy you a new cloak, darling.”
“Why haven’t you eaten anything I’ve brought you? You said you were famished. You said you hadn’t eaten for days.”
He let go of her hands. “When should I have eaten it? You’ve been here all this time, badgering me with silly questions. I’ll eat it now.” He picked up the paper packet and set it on his lap.
Anne watched him. His hands were windburned to a dark red. The body’s hands had had no color. It was as if the river had washed it away.
Elliott fumbled with the brown paper on the bread. “Bread and cake and my own sweet Anne. What man could ask for more?” But he still didn’t open the packet, and after a few minutes he replaced it on the seat. “I’ll eat it after you’ve gone,” he said petulantly “You’ve made me lose my appetite with all this talk of dead men.”
When she went back the next day, he was fully dressed, his gray handkerchief neatly folded in his vest pocket, his coat on. “What time’s the funeral?” he said gaily “The second funeral, of course. How many funerals shall I have, I wonder? And will I have to pay for all the flowers when I return?”
“It is this afternoon,” Anne said, wondering as soon as she said it if she should not have lied to him. She had dressed for the funeral, thinking all the while she would not go see him, that it was too dangerous, concentrating on dressing warmly in her brushed and cleaned wool merino, on taking her muff. But the key was in her muff, and as soon as she saw it, she knew that she had meant to go see him all along. It was just like the night she had gone to meet him on the island. She had not cared about warmth then, only about not being seen, and she had dressed in her black cloak and her black dress, her black bonnet, as if she were going someplace else altogether. As if, she realized now, she were dressing for a funeral.
“This afternoon,” he repeated. “Then Victoria’s father is back from Hartford?”
“Yes.”
“And my father, is he well enough to attend? Leaning on his cane and murmuring, ‘A bad end. I knew he would come to a bad end.’ Is it to be a graveside service?” Elliott said, picking up his hat.
“Yes,” she said in alarm. “Where are you going?”
“With you, of course. To the funeral. I missed my first one.”
“You can’t,” she said, and backed slightly toward the door, clutching the key inside her muff.
“I think,” he said coldly, “that this little game has gone on long enough. I never should have let you dissuade me from walking in on the first funeral. I certainly shall not let you keep me from this one.”
Anne was so horrified she could not move. “You’ll kill your father,” she said.
“Well, and good riddance. You shall have someone to bury then besides this poor stranger who is masquerading as me.”
“We are burying you, Elliott,” she said, and there was something in his face when she said that that gave him away “You know you’re dead, don’t you, Elliott?” she said quietly.
He put his hat on. “We shall see if my fiancée thinks I am dead. Or her father. How glad he will be to see me alive and free of debt! He shall welcome me with open arms, his son-in-law to be. And pretty Vicky; she shall be a bride instead of a widow.”
Anne thought of Victoria’s kind gray eyes, her little hand holding Anne’s hand in the doctors kitchen, of Victoria’s father, grim-faced and protective, his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “Why are you doing this terrible thing, Elliott?” Anne said.
“I do not like coffins. They are small and dark and dusty. And cold. Like this room. I will not let them lock me in the grave as you have locked me in.”
Anne sucked in her breath sharply.
“They will be so overjoyed they will quite forget what they have gone to the cemetery to do.” He smiled disarmingly at her. “They will quite forget to bury me.”
Anne backed against the door. “I won’t let you,” she said.
“Dear Anne, how will you stop me?”
She had not locked him in, not since the funeral. She had left the door unlocked each night in the hope that he would come out. “Leave the door open,” he had shouted after her, but he had not opened it himself. When she went back the door was still shut, as if she had locked him in. “I will lock you in,” she said aloud, and clutched the key inside her muff.
Elliott laughed. “What good will that do? If I am a ghost, I should be able to pass through the walls and come floating across the cemetery to you, shouldn’t I, Anne?”
“No,” she said steadily “I won’t let you.”
“No?” he said, and laughed again. “When have you ever said no to me and meant it? You do not mean it now.” He took a step toward her. “Come. We will go together.”
“No!” she said, and whirled, opening and shutting the door behind her in one motion, pulling on the knob with all her strength till she could get the key into the lock and turn it. Elliott’s hand was on the knob on the other side, turning it.
“Stop this foolishness and let me out, Anne,” he said, half laughing, half stern.
“No,” she said.
She put the key in the muff, and then, as if that had taken all her strength, she walked a few steps into the sanctuary and sank down on a pew. It was the one she had sat in that day of the funeral, and she put her arms down on the pew in front of her and buried her head in them. Inside the muff, her hand still clutched the key.
“Can I be of help, Miss Lawrence?” Reverend Sprague said kindly. He was wearing his heavy black coat and carrying The Service for the Burial of the Dead.
“Yes,” Anne said, and stood up to go to the cemetery with him.
The coffin was already in the grave. The dirt was heaped around the edges, as dry and pale as the grass. The sky was heavy and gray. It was very cold. Victoria came forward to greet Reverend Sprague and speak to Anne. “I am so glad you came,” she said, taking Anne’s gloved hand. “We have only just heard,” she said, her gray eyes filling with tears, and Anne thought suddenly, He has already been here.
Victoria’s father came and put his arm around his daughter. “We have had word from New London,” he said. “My son’s ship was lost in a storm. With all hands.”
“No,” Anne said. “Your brother.”
“We still hope and pray he may not be lost,” Victoria’s father said. “They were very near the coast.”
“He is not lost,” Anne said, almost to herself, “he will come today,” and she did not know of
whom she spoke.
“Let us pray,” Reverend Sprague said, and Anne thought, Yes, yes, hurry. They all moved closer to the grave as if that could somehow shelter them from the iron-gray sky “In the midst of life we are in death,” Reverend Sprague read. “Of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee, O Lord?”
Anne closed her eyes.
“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.” It was beginning to snow. Reverend Sprague stopped to look at the flakes falling on the book and lost the page altogether. When he found it, he said, “Pardon me,” and began again. “In the midst of life …”
Hurry, Anne thought. Oh, hurry.
Far away, at the other side of the cemetery, across the endless stretch of grayish-brown grass and gray-black stones, someone was coming. The minister hesitated. Go on, Anne thought. Go on.
“That every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.’”
It was a man in a dark coat. He was carrying his hat in his hand. His hair was reddish-brown. There were flakes of snow on his coat and in his hair. Anne was afraid to look at him for fear the others would see him. She bowed her head. Reverend Sprague bent and scooped up a handful of dirt from the edge of the grave. “Unto the mercy of Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we commend the soul of our brother departed and commit his body to the ground, earth to earth—” He stopped, still holding the handful of earth.
Anne looked up. The man was much closer, walking rapidly between the graves. Victoria’s father looked up. His face went gray
“Unto the mercy of Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed,” Reverend Sprague read, and stopped again, and stared.
Victoria’s father put his arm around Victoria. Victoria looked up. The man began to run toward them, waving his hat in the air.
“No,” Anne said. With the toe of her boot she kicked at the dirt heaped around the grave. The dislodged clumps of dirt clattered on the coffin. Reverend Sprague looked at her, his face red and angry. He thinks I murdered Elliott, Anne thought despairingly, but I didn’t. She clenched the useless key inside her muff and looked down at the forgotten coffin. I tried, Victoria. For your sake. For all our sakes. I tried to murder Elliott.
Victoria gave a strangled cry and began to run, her father close behind her. Reverend Sprague closed his book with an angry slap. “Roger!” Victoria cried, and threw her arms around his neck. Anne looked up.
Victoria’s father slapped him on the back again and again. Victoria kissed him and cried. She took his large hand in her small gloved one and led him over to meet Anne. “This is my brother!” she said happily. “Roger, this is Miss Lawrence, who has been so kind to me.”
He shook Anne’s hand.
“We heard your ship was lost,” she said.
“It was,” he said, and looked past her at the open grave.
Anne stood outside the door of the choir room with the key in her hand until her fingers became stiff with cold and she could hardly put the key in the lock.
There was no one in the church. Reverend Sprague had gone home with Victoria and her father and brother to tea. “Please come,” Victoria had said to Anne. “I do so want you and Roger to be friends.” She had squeezed Anne’s gloved hand and hurried off through the snow. It was nearly dusk. The snow had begun falling heavily by the time they finished burying Elliott’s body. Reverend Sprague had read the service for the burial of the dead straight through to the end, and then they had stood, heads bowed against the snow, while old Mr. Finn filled in the grave. Then they had gone to tea and Anne had come back here to the church.
She turned the key in the lock. The rattling sound of the key seemed to be followed by an echo of itself, and she thought for a fleeting second of Elliott on the other side of the door, his hand already on the knob, ready to hurtle past her. Then she opened the door.
There was no one there. She knew it before she lit the candle. There had been no one there all week except herself. Her small heeled footprints stood out clearly in the dust. The pew where Elliott had sat was thick with undisturbed dust, and in one corner of it lay the comforter she had brought him.
The toe of her foot hit against something on the floor, half under the pew. She bent to look. The packets of food, untouched in their brown paper wrappings, lay where Elliott had hidden them. A mouse had nibbled the string on one of them, and it lay spilled open, the piece of ham, the russet apple, the crumbling slice of cake she had brought him that first night. A schoolboy’s picnic, Anne thought, and left the parcels where they were for Reverend Sprague to find and think whatever it was he would think about the footprints, the candle, the scattered food.
Let him think the worst, Anne thought. After all, it’s true. I have murdered Elliott. It was getting very cold in the room. “I must go to tea at Victoria’s,” she said, and blew out the candle. By the dim light from the hall she picked up the comforter and folded it over her arm. She dropped the key on the floor and left the door open behind her.
“So there I was, all alone,” Roger said, “in the middle of a rough sea, my shirt frozen to my back, not one of my shipmates in sight, when what should I spy but the whaling boat.” He paused expectantly.
Anne pulled the comforter around her shoulders and leaned forward over the fire to warm her hands.
“Would you like some tea?” Victoria said kindly “Roger, we’re eager to hear your story, but we must get poor Anne warmed up. I’m afraid she got a dreadful chill at the cemetery.”
“I’m feeling much warmer now, thank you,” Anne said, but she didn’t refuse the tea. She wrapped her hands around the warmth of the thin china cup. Roger left his story to jab clumsily at the fire with the poker.
“Now then,” Victoria said when the coals had roared up into new flames, “you may tell us the rest of your story, Roger.”
Roger still squatted by the hearth, holding the poker loosely in his rough, windburned hands.
“There’s nothing else to tell,” he said, looking up at Anne. “The oars were still in the whaling boat. I rowed for shore.” He had gray eyes like Victoria’s. His hair in the firelight was darker than hers and with a reddish cast to it. Almost as dark as Elliott’s. “I walked to an inn and hired a horse. When I got here, they told me you were at the cemetery. I was afraid you’d given up hope and were burying me.”
His smile was more open than Elliott’s, and his eyes more kind. His windburned hands looked strong and full of life, but he held the poker clumsily, as if his hands were cold and he could not get a proper grip on it. Anne took the comforter from around her shoulders and put it across her knees.
“You haven’t eaten a thing since you got home,” Victoria said. “And after all that time in an open boat, I’d think you would be starving.”
Roger put the poker down on the hearth and took the cup of tea his sister gave him in both hands. He held it steadily enough, but he did not drink any. “I ate at the inn where I hired the horse,” he said.
“How did you say you found the horse?” Anne said, as if she had not heard them. She held out a slice of cake to him on a thin china plate.
“I borrowed it from the man at the inn. He gave me some clothes to wear, too. Mine were ruined, and I’d lost my boots in the water. I must have been a sorry sight, knocking at his door late at night. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost.” He smiled at Anne, and his eyes were kinder than Elliott’s had ever been. “So did all of you,” he said. “I felt for a moment as if I’d come to my own funeral.”
“No,” Anne said, and smiled back at him, but she watched him steadily as he took the slice of cake, and waited for him to eat it.
People quote The Revelation of St. John a lot these days. (They also call it Revelations, which should give you a clue as to how careful they are with their quotes.) They don’t quote everything, though. For some reason, busily predicting the day and hour of the Second Coming, they completely ignore, “For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you
do not expect.”
They also ignore what happened to their prophecies before. They all turned out exactly as predicted, but in a way no one expected, and most of them turned out to have meant something entirely different from what they had imagined. “The Son of Man is come to save that which is lost,” Matthew says, but what exactly does that mean?
Lost and Found
“Is it the end of the world?” Megan asked. “Losing your cup, I mean?” Finney had come up to the Reverend Mr. Davidson’s study to see if he might have left it there and found Megan at her father’s desk, pasting bits of cotton wool to a sheet of blue paper.
“No, of course not,” Finney said. “Its only annoying. It’s the third time this week I’ve lost it.” He pulled the desk drawers open one by one. The top two were empty. The bottom was full of construction paper. He limped around the desk to a chair and dropped down onto it.
He watched Megan. The top two buttons of her blouse were unbuttoned, and she was leaning forward over the paper, so Finney had a nice view of her bosom, though she was unaware of it. She was making a botch of the pasting, daubing the brown glue onto the cotton instead of the paper. The glue leaked through the cotton wool when she pounded it down with the flat of her hand, and sticky bits of it clung to her palm. The face of an angel and the body of a woman and she could not paste as well as her nursery church school class. It was her father the Reverend Mr. Davidson’s voice one heard when she spoke, his learned speech patterns and quotations of scripture, but the effect was strong enough that one forgot she recited them without understanding. Finney constantly had to remind himself that she was only a child, even if she was eighteen, that her words were children’s words with children’s meanings, inspired though they might sound.
“Why did you ask if it were the end of the world?” Finney said.
“Because then you might find your cup. ‘Of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.’ When is Daddy coming home?”
Fire Watch Page 7
