A Dark and Stormy Night

by Jeanne M. Dams

Light, blessed light. Alan pointed the flashlight at me and nearly blinded me. ‘Sorry, love. I wasn’t sure where you were. Let’s go down.’

  I put on my robe and followed him out the door.

  Other lights were dancing in the corridor. Ed Walinski and Mike Leonard came out of their rooms. Tom and Lynn followed closely in their wake, with Alan behind them while I brought up the rear.

  Our host and hostess, sketchily clothed, were already in the hall. ‘It’s the oak!’ Joyce screamed over the wind. ‘We think it fell on the house!’

  They rushed to the door into the old abbey, and we followed, while other guests arrived in various states of undress, carrying flashlights or candles.

  The Moynihans were having trouble pushing open the door to the old cloister. Tom and Alan helped them shove and kick and shoulder it part-way open, and then shone their lights on what lay beyond.

  Branches and leaves. Broken glass, splintered wood, dust, water.

  The wind rushed through the open door, bringing rain and debris with it, extinguishing the candles. Jim Moynihan withstood it for a moment, then moved away and let the door slam shut. He took his wife in his arms. Tears were streaming down her face.

  ‘It’s OK, sweetie,’ Jim said gently. ‘Lucky it happened there and not in the main house. Nobody’s sleeping in the cloister. Nobody’s hurt, just the house, and we want to keep it that way. It’s dangerous to go out there until the storm lets up. Come away, hon. Nothing we can do till morning.’ He stroked her hair. ‘We’ll see what the damage is then, and start doing something about it.’

  Joyce was still crying. Well, I’d cry, too, if something awful happened to our house. An old house is more than a pile of bricks. It has a soul, a life of its own, echoes of the lives of all the people who have lived there over the centuries, the master craftsmen who built it and put into it their pride of work.

  I wished I could say something to make Joyce feel better, but I didn’t know her well enough, and all she needed right now was her husband.

  Who was treating her with great kindness and understanding. He kept his arm around her shoulder, looked up to the rest of us, and raised his voice. ‘Meanwhile, I don’t suppose anybody can sleep. How about some coffee?’

  The word fell on my ears like a blessing. Coffee! I suddenly realized how cold I was. I took Alan’s arm and snuggled close to him for warmth, and we all trooped to the kitchen.

  The kitchen walls were thick; the noise of the storm was less terrifying there. A gentle light pervaded the vast room, and warmth, and the heavenly smell of coffee. Mr and Mrs Bates were up, dressed, and busy. A fire blazed away in the fireplace. The Bateses had lit kerosene lamps and set out cups, sugar, cream.

  ‘The Aga is out,’ said Mrs Bates, ‘but the water was still nearly hot. We boiled it over the fire. There’s tea, as well, and toast is coming, and I can make cocoa if anyone wants some.’

  The scene took on a festive air, rather like an illicit midnight feast at some boarding school for superannuated children. We chattered eagerly about the storm. ‘Well, I couldn’t sleep anyway, and when I heard that awful crash . . .’, ‘I hope the house isn’t badly damaged. Irreplaceable . . .’, ‘. . . and I swear to you I positively leapt out of bed, a grand jeté if you will . . .’

  ‘If the power is out for very long, I’m afraid we’ll have to put you all up at the White Horse in the village,’ said Jim. ‘We have plenty of lamps, but the Aga is electric, and so is the central heating. We wouldn’t be able to make you very comfortable.’

  ‘Oh, but this is so exciting!’ Now that I was warm and no longer frightened, I was beginning to enjoy myself. The kitchen cat lay purring in my lap, having devoured the saucer of cream I’d slipped her under the table. ‘Lynn, you’ll laugh at me, but I do feel exactly as if I’ve walked into an Agatha Christie. Any minute now, we’ll find the body.’

  ‘I certainly hope not,’ said Jim dryly. ‘But that reminds me. Are we sure nobody’s been hurt? There’s a lot of debris flying out there, and something could have come through a window someplace.’

  ‘Perhaps a head count is in order,’ said Alan. He stood. ‘Joyce, remind me. There ought to be fifteen of us, am I right?’

  ‘Right. Jim and me, Mr and Mrs Bates, and eleven guests. So let’s see – Jim and me and two, four . . . I only find nine more. Am I missing someone in the shadows?’

  ‘No,’ said Alan. ‘I believe your sister and brother-in-law are missing.’

  I could have sworn I heard someone mutter, ‘No great loss,’ but it might have been only my own uncharitable thoughts. The party atmosphere of a moment before was certainly gone, though, and that wasn’t my imagination.

  There was an uncomfortable pause before Tom Anderson rose from a kitchen chair. ‘I’ll go and look for them, if you like. They may still be . . . asleep.’

  Well, they would have had to be the world’s best sleepers to slumber through the uproar of the storm. But Dave had been drinking heavily, and for all I knew Julie might have joined him after they went upstairs. Maybe they had just passed out.

  ‘I’ll go with you.’ Jim and Laurence spoke at the same time. Each stopped, hesitated. Finally Laurence spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. ‘Jim, it’s your house, and they’re your family. I should—’

  ‘My wife’s family,’ Jim corrected in a voice with no expression whatever. ‘And let’s have none of this “After you, my dear Alphonse” stuff. You know the house a whole lot better than I do. If they’re not in their rooms, they could be anywhere, and you’re qualified to search. You go ahead, and thanks. They’re in the back wing, at the end – the Palladian suite overlooking the river.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Shall we, Mr Anderson?’

  ‘If I take my flashlight, I’ll leave Lynn without one. Jim, is there another somewhere?’

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’ Mr Bates materialized with a lantern. ‘This will provide brighter light, and will be more dependable. Mind you carry it by the handle – it can get quite hot.’

  ‘I should go,’ murmured Joyce.

  ‘You’re not going,’ said Jim flatly. ‘The storm is getting worse, if anything. This is the solidest part of the house, and the safest. You’re staying here, and I strongly suggest the rest of you do the same. The damned wind can’t last forever.’

  We stayed. Nobody wanted to go back to bed. In moments of stress, humans crave company. But our cozy mood was gone. The cat, sensitive to atmosphere like all her kind, had jumped down and vanished, and my coffee was cold. We sat in silence, watching the flicker of firelight on ancient stone walls and listening to the roar of wind down the chimney.

  I was beginning to feel sleepy again by the time the search party returned half an hour later. They were alone.

  Joyce, who had been nodding on a bench next to Jim, sprang up. ‘You didn’t find them?’

  ‘We found them.’ It was Tom who spoke. ‘They’re not hurt, just a little . . . er . . .’

  ‘It seems they’ve both drunk a bit too much, Mrs Moynihan,’ said Laurence, being very formal. ‘We found Mrs Harrison asleep in a bathtub three bedrooms away from her own, and Mr Harrison on the floor of the small sitting room next to the Blue Room. We did attempt to rouse them, but it proved easier to leave them where they were, so we found blankets and covered them. I fear there’ll be . . . er . . . some cleaning up to do in the morning.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’ Joyce bit her lip and then visibly pulled herself together. ‘Thank you so much for checking on them. In the morning I’ll . . . do what I can.’

  ‘The morning, hon, is now,’ said Jim. It was still dark as the pit outside, but the kitchen clock chimed six. In less than an hour the sun would rise behind those lowering clouds and the day would, officially, have begun.

  I was suddenly unutterably weary.

  FIVE

  ‘What time is it? Why did I wake up?’

  ‘Getting on toward eleven,’ said Alan, ‘and I have no idea why you woke. I was trying to be quiet.’

  ‘
Quiet. That’s it. The quiet woke me. That awful wind has stopped. Well, died down, anyway. How long have you been up?’

  We’d all gone back up to bed to get what sleep we could for what little remained of the night, and I’d conked out as though I’d been hit on the head. I still felt muzzy.

  ‘About an hour,’ said Alan. ‘I went down in search of breakfast, but the pickings are a trifle slim. The electricity is still out, and from the look of things – well, see for yourself.’

  He pulled open the draperies, letting in light. The rain had apparently stopped. I staggered to the window.

  ‘Dear God.’

  I had seen such devastation before. On television. In the newspapers. The aftermath of tornadoes, floods, hurricanes. Of war. I’d never seen it outside my window.

  The little wood we had driven through yesterday when we arrived was gone. Just . . . gone. As far as the eye could see, no big trees were left standing. They’d been torn out of the ground, their twisted roots pointing distorted fingers at the sky. Among them, saplings looked forlorn, bereft. Nearer the house, what had been the garden was a sea of mud with a few twigs shivering, naked, in cold, unforgiving sunshine. What must once have been a greenhouse lay in a heap of glass shards, and broken slates and bits of carved stone were strewn everywhere.

  ‘But, Alan, this is . . . what happened?’

  ‘Hurricane-force winds. That, coupled with the saturated ground, and the trees went down like so many wisps of straw. I listened to the car radio for a few minutes. A storm the like of which we haven’t seen since 1987. And even that one wasn’t as bad as this, not in this part of the country at least.’ He shook his head and held up his hands in a despondent gesture. ‘Joyce and Jim are beyond distraught. The house can be repaired, but the landscaping! The famous Capability Brown landscaping was one of the things they loved best about the house. They keep talking about it. It’s a bit depressing.’

  ‘Alan, let’s go home! They don’t need company at a time like this. And I want to see what’s happened to our house, to Sherebury.’

  Alan is a lovely man. He was patient with me. ‘My dear woman, how precisely do you think we might get home? Remember the drive, that picturesque mile-long drive from the road to the house? With trees on either side?’

  ‘Oh. I suppose they’re all down.’

  ‘One good big one would be enough to block the drive. Not to mention the state of the roads once one got to them.’

  ‘Trains?’ I asked hopelessly.

  ‘Not running. Nothing’s running. The entire south-east of England is shut down.’

  ‘We’ll go to the pub, then. The White Horse. We can walk there if we have to. Jim said last night . . .’

  Alan just looked at me pityingly. ‘It’s nearly five miles, and your knees aren’t up to that yet awhile. If they’re open, which I doubt.’

  ‘We could call and find out.’

  ‘Love, get a grip. The phone lines are out of service and the mobile masts are down, which between the two of them also puts paid to the Internet and email. Let’s just hope Jim and Joyce laid in plenty of food, because until crews can get the thousands of trees cleared away, we are well and truly isolated.’

  I sat down hard on the bed. It was sounding more and more like an old mystery novel, but I wasn’t having fun. ‘Satellite phone?’ I suggested – one last, feeble attempt to pretend there was some kind of normality within our grasp.

  Alan smiled wearily. ‘Joyce and Jim might have one, I suppose. But not many people do, so whom could we phone?’

  ‘Oh, but . . . other people will be trying to reach us, and when they can’t—’

  ‘They’ll try to reach the authorities, and be told the situation. It’s no use, really, love.’

  I gave it up. In this age of instant communication, it was hard to believe we really couldn’t communicate with anyone, but I would accept the idea for now. At least Alan was here with me. Isolation from the rest of the world was bad enough, but I didn’t think I could manage if I were isolated from him.

  When hunger and cold finally drove us downstairs, there was little cheer. Oh, it was warmish. A big fire in the kitchen fireplace heated the place a bit, but not enough. Lynn was the only person there. She came over to us when we entered.

  ‘Fry your face and freeze your backside – or the other way around? Your choice. Have you ever used a toasting fork?’

  ‘Um . . . maybe for marshmallows, a long, long time ago.’

  ‘It works the same way for bread. If you have patience enough, the bread will toast. If not, or if you get too close, it burns.’

  ‘I used to like burnt marshmallows.’

  ‘I don’t think you’d care for burnt toast. Anyway, it falls in the fire. There’s cold ham, or the pot over there’ – she pointed to a spot in the corner of the hearth – ‘has boiling water for eggs or tea.’

  I ladled some of the boiling water into a teapot. ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘The Bateses are helping Jim and Joyce clear away the tree that fell in the cloisters. So is Tom, and I think some of the other men. I don’t know where the women are. Joyce said we were just to help ourselves to anything we could find. Dorothy, I’m so sorry I let you in for this.’

  ‘You didn’t conjure up the storm. And we’re lucky, really. We can keep sort of warm, and I’m sure there’s plenty to eat – if we can figure out how to cook it. Lord knows there’s enough firewood for ten years – and most of it’s already in the house.’

  ‘It’s green wood, Dorothy,’ said Alan, a little grumpy now that I had someone else to help me cope. ‘Won’t burn for months.’

  ‘You’re hungry,’ I replied. ‘You always get cross when you’re hungry. How about a nice ham sandwich? And I just made a pot of tea.’

  We both felt slightly better when we had some food inside us, and Lynn came up with an idea. ‘Look, Dorothy, why don’t we see if we can put together a meal? Everyone will be starved when they come in. Surely we can concoct something besides boiled eggs and ham sandwiches.’

  ‘Do you think Mrs Bates would mind us invading her domain?’

  ‘I doubt it. She seems like a sensible woman. Anyway, she’s busy elsewhere, and somebody has to think about food.’

  So we foraged. ‘Make sure there’s an inside latch on that door,’ said Alan as Lynn and I walked into the cooler. ‘I’m going out to help with the clean-up effort, and I don’t want the two of you getting stuck in there and turning into ice sculptures. Yes, I do know the power’s out, but it’s going to be very cold in there for a long time.’ He gave us a dubious look and then left the room.

  ‘There’s a lot of round steak we could cut up into stew meat,’ said Lynn after a moment or two.

  ‘That might do for supper, if it thaws fast. Can’t have it ready in time for lunch. Oh, here’s five pounds or so of hamburger!’

  ‘We could make that into a soup with canned vegetables, and heat it in a big pot in the fireplace. I knew all those years in Camp Fire Girls would come in handy some day.’

  There were obstacles. We had no way to brown the hamburger, so we just chopped it up into the smallest chunks we could manage and put it into the biggest pot we could find. Then the can opener was electric, but I had my Swiss Army knife with me. Slowly, laboriously, we opened tins of tomatoes and corn and green beans. I chopped onions and found herbs. ‘Potatoes, do you think?’

  ‘Not sure they’d cook in time. Better cook some macaroni in the boiling water, if we can find any macaroni, and add it at the last minute.’

  The pot had no bail handle, which didn’t really matter, because the fireplace hadn’t had hanging hooks for generations, probably. We used other pans to improvise a platform for the big pot, thrust it into the fire, and hoped for the best.

  ‘And that’s enough of that,’ I said, dusting ashes off my fingers. ‘I wish we could bake some cornbread, but even if we had the ingredients, I do not know how to bake on an open fire, and I don’t intend to try to find out. What do we do
now?’

  ‘Why don’t we see what we can do outside? We might find roof slates that are reusable, and some of the plants might be salvaged.’

  I had serious doubts about the plants, but it was worth a try. I’m no gardener, but I do love flowers, and the sight of the ruined garden was painful. ‘I didn’t bring my wellies. Do you suppose there are some I can borrow?’

  ‘Bound to be. Shall I go ask Jim?’

  ‘No, don’t bother him. We’ll manage.’

  We found our coats and hats and a variety of footwear. Lynn slipped into somebody’s garden clogs and I found a pair of wellies so big I could wear them over my shoes, and we went out into the hard, bright sunshine and the devastation.

  The wind was still blowing steadily, a cold, insinuating wind, but by comparison to the storm winds it was as a gentle zephyr. We wandered more or less aimlessly, and soon stopped trying to pick up slates. They were heavy, and so many of them were chipped or broken that I doubted they would be of any use. As for the garden, it was heartbreaking.

  ‘Still,’ said Lynn after we had looked in silence at the stripped rose bushes and the flattened annuals, ‘the perennials will come up again in the spring, and the bulbs. Small plants are sturdier than trees, in a way.’

  ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall,’ I said glumly. ‘Look at that oak, with its roots in the air.’ I pointed to one on the edge of the wood. ‘It’s fascinating, in a macabre sort of way. Do you suppose they ever save trees that are uprooted that way?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so.’

  We walked in that direction, squishing through the mud. ‘Well, but they wouldn’t have to dig a new hole,’ I argued. ‘The hole is there, see? Darn it all, if they could just get to it with a crane or something, before it dries out, I’ll bet— what’s that?’

  We were at the edge of the deep cavity left by the fallen giant. Tangled in its roots was . . . something . . .

  ‘Dorothy Martin, if you faint I’ll never speak to you again! You’ve got to stay sensible, because somebody has to, and I don’t know if I can.’