by Bart Casey
“Another hour or so of pumping and she’ll be empty,” said Andrew. “Then we’ll go down and have a look ’round before we set up fans to dry out the damp.”
Around the corner, in the Lady Chapel, was a second hole, this one in the plain stone floor just in front of the memorial to Lady Anne. Vicar Hamilton went over and looked down at the words carved on a stone slab lying akimbo to this much smaller hole: “Vavasour,” the family name, and then “Constantia et fide” just below. He translated the Latin to himself: “Constant and faithful”—a very good motto indeed, for both the living and the dead. There hadn’t been nearly as much water here as in the larger vault, but it had still had a bit of a soaking. Bending down to try to see into the hole, he felt dizzy, so he straightened up slowly, deciding to take a closer look later.
The vicar turned to Verger Andrew and said, “Well, there are several centuries of our village history down there. And my dear wife’s ancestors as well.” Then his profound musings were interrupted by the sounds of the workmen restarting the pump in the nave.
~
Stephen didn’t recognize it at first. A noise…a bell…a buzzer…repeating…and staying there…coming back…again and again. Go away!
He turned over onto his back and opened his eyes, squinting. Light was streaming in to his bedroom—the morning was incredibly bright, hard to focus. And still the ringing.
Oh Christ! It’s the phone.
Up now on two elbows he looked across the bed. Miranda was still sleeping, one arm cocked up, hand back under her head—a fetching, but almost ludicrous pose while asleep—her mouth slightly open, her left breast and nipple peeking out from under the covers. She could sleep through a train wreck, he thought.
One giant effort and he stretched over her, carefully pushing himself up to not wake her. He grabbed the phone just as he saw the clock: 0740, and it was a bloody Bank Holiday Monday morning as well.
“Hello!”
Just the dial tone. Damn!
He put the receiver back in the stand and sank back into the bed, closing his eyes. Back to sleep, or up now? The light was
so strong.
No use for it—he was awake. Pushing off the blankets, he angled himself up to sit on the side of the bed.
Stephen’s bedroom was crammed full with books—some new but the vast majority old, booty bought over the last ten years from secondhand bookstores all across Britain. Smallish ones were lined up in double rows on the wide shelves of the bookcases that were his bedside tables. Other larger ones were stacked up in piles about three feet high along the walls, festooned with discarded neckties.
In his front room, a large bookcase with glass doors held his treasures. What would be old and obscure books for almost anyone else were vibrant and alive with delights for Stephen: old leather backs, many crumbling but still dignified and proud of their frequent use. And some important ones, like his Third Folio of Shakespeare, printed in 1664. That one had come to him from his late father, along with the edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales printed by William Morris at his Pre-Raphaelite Kelmscott Press. A smaller bookcase held his sixteen-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary.
By the bay window looking out over the common garden and courtyard of the apartment complex, Stephen’s ancient refectory table was also piled with books, computer equipment, cigarette packs, and a circular rack with six or seven well broken-in pipes.
Just next to this, on the wall was a map of Switzerland and Italy with pins marking the spots from Geneva to Naples he planned to visit the following spring, following in the footsteps of Byron, Keats, and the Shelleys. He used his holidays to make history come alive by visiting the places where great events happened. In fact, planning the trips was almost as good as going, since it kept his enthusiasm growing all through the winter. And what Englishman wouldn’t want to end up in Italy in the spring?
Here and there a tennis racquet and sports bag challenged the books along the walls. And one corner was consumed with cricket gear: kit bag, gloves, bats, batting pads, and a set of wickets and bails, with one wicket jauntily wearing his tricolor club hat of white, purple, and black.
Higher on the walls, Stephen also had a few prints of the buildings and deer park around his Oxford alma mater, Magdalen College (pronounced “maudlin”), plus a poster from a favorite show at the Tate Gallery and, most important, two framed pages from a medieval manuscript with lovely gold-leaf illumination, his graduation gift from his parents over four years ago.
Just below all of that, on top of the glass-doored bookcase, was his favorite photo of his parents. They smiled at the camera from their rented chairs on the sandy Riviera beach in front of the Hotel Martinez in Cannes—he called it his carpe diem reminder to seize the day before adversity strikes, just as it had struck them soon after.
And also, with pride of place so he saw it from his table, was a small framed poster from the Schools County Cricket Tournament two years before, signed by all the boys on his winning team. Stephen had been their coach and also had just become their unlikely headmaster at St. George’s School in the village, just as he was today.
He stood up naked from the bed, stretched, and tiptoed across the archipelago of abandoned clothing he and Miranda had slipped out of six or seven hours before, and headed toward the hall and the loo. He looked a sight in the mirror, with his thick brown hair askew and standing in spikes. He splashed his face with cold water and then patted down his head.
I’ll just put on the kettle before I take a shower, he thought. The kitchen was a tight space opening off from the front room, but it and the bath were kept almost hospital clean by Mrs. Case, who came in to tidy and take the laundry once a week. She applied most of her attentions to the kitchen and the loo, having been forbidden to rearrange much of anything else in the place. Since Stephen never cooked, the kitchen was always standing at attention for him to make a quick cuppa or heat up some takeaway.
Kettle on now. And then the phone again.
Stephen walked into the front room and sank into the sofa next to the other telephone. The fabric was scratchy against his bare skin.
“Hello?” Of all people, it was Vicar Hamilton from St. Mary’s Church.
“Stephen, hello. Sorry to call so early on a holiday…but there’s something really quite extraordinary I want you to take a look at.” The vicar paused, but then moved ahead excitedly in the silence. “This morning I’ve had workmen over about some flooding in the vaults and among all the rubble and mess I’ve found two chests full of old papers. I can’t quite make out the writing, but I’d say sixteenth or seventeenth century from the little I know—you can tell me after you see them—and most still in very good shape. They were buried right in the Vavasour vault underneath the Lady Chapel—my late wife’s relatives, you know. Quite amazing, wouldn’t you say?”
“Papers?” asked Stephen, the haze quickly lifting. “You mean books and so forth?”
“No. Actually, these are handwritten papers. Some seem to be letters with fold lines, salutations, signatures, and such. Other sheets seem to be lists and poetry—quite an assortment. And a few other things, like a few journals and an embroidered bag. Anyway, I thought you could take a look and help me understand what we’ve got here. Can you come over and take a look?”
“You mean to say these are original manuscripts?” Stephen said, with his voice pointedly rising into the phone.
“Yes, it seems so. I’ve moved most of them. But some are still down in the vault and rather damp—so I’d like some help getting them out before the workmen take over. Can you come straight over?”
“Sure…of course! I’ll be right over. Fifteen minutes. Cheers.”
Manuscripts from the tombs, Stephen thought. Seems too fantastic for words. I wonder how were they protected, and how would they have lasted? Well, probably only old inventories, wills, deeds, and so forth. Really nothing much else was ever saved from those centuries except for legal documents that seemed to have unquestionable va
lue to their owners. They would be astonished to find out those had only questionable value today. We’d see the personal jottings and keepsakes as the real treasures, but hardly anything like that survived. Well, maybe he’s got the dates wrong. I’ll have to wait until I see them. Bloody fantastic!
Getting ready for the shower, he went back into his bedroom. Oh Christ…Miranda! And she’d wanted to spend the Bank Holiday together.
“Miranda, Miranda love, wake up. It’s morning.” He gave her a gentle touch on her upraised arm, and she brought it right down.
“Hmmmmm,” she exhaled, turning away on to her side, still deeply asleep.
Stephen didn’t date much. He had tried a few girlfriends after Margaret, the vicar’s daughter. None really clicked, but Miranda was the one he was with the most. She was just the reverse of himself, unschooled, lowbrow, and incredibly lively and saucy. He had often thought she lived with an intensity that had eluded him. Maybe he had passed too much of his life inside, spending too much time planning, working, and thinking while Miranda was seizing the day and dancing on tabletops. That’s why he always had fun and felt drawn out when he was with her—and last night had been lived to the fullest, as much as he could recall. He remembered belting out song after song down at the annual County Cricket Club dinner, the best one being an old ballad where you went round the room with everyone adding their own bawdy four-line verse before the chorus. His last one had been pretty good, but Miranda had left them all blushing, if he remembered right—which wasn’t at all a sure thing this morning.
Well, I better just leave her. No need to ruin her lie-in this morning and I’ll leave her a note on the sofa. Besides if I woke her, it would be harder to just go off over to the church.
So Stephen hopped in and out of the shower, into his clothes, and down the stairs to where his aged yellow Mini awaited, parked across the street. He literally hurdled across the small hedge separating the entry of the apartments from the pavement beyond, and then skipped between parked cars to his own.
Amazing what that call did, he thought. One minute I’m probably headed for a hangover, and now I’m hopping around like a fool. Adrenaline, I suppose, or maybe just buried treasure.
And so he drove off toward St. Mary’s.
Stephen wound his Mini through the quiet streets at the edge of the village, coming out onto the main thoroughfare of Station Road. Going down the hill, he passed from neat rows of detached houses with their private trees and gardens to streets of plain and smaller semidetached ones, then row houses, and then the British Rail station, with its gingerbread station house with red geraniums bobbing from window boxes. After that came the shops, leading one after another farther down the hill, until finally Station Road ended at the bottom with the pub on the corner of the Oxford road.
He turned right and headed into the center of town. It was a crisp and pleasant morning, with the sunlight and deep blue sky lightening the brown and gray of the walls and pavement.
Waiting at a traffic light, Stephen gazed off across the left side of the road, where the common land began and walking paths led up and down across the picturesque heath, with miles of rolling hills and fields crisscrossed with ancient hedgerows. A group of boys was whacking a round football back and forth across a makeshift pitch, with sweaters piled on the grass as goalposts. He recognized two of them as former students of his at St. George’s—free as birds, and not a care in the world, he thought.
Behind them were all the stalls and trappings of the August Bank Holiday Fair, which came to the village at the end of every summer, with its shooting galleries, tennis ball throws, carousels, bouncy castles, Ferris wheels, and one fearsomely unsafe-looking mini roller coaster. Today would be the third and last day, he thought—and the best one, with good, dry weather. Then, when the crews had packed it all up and moved on until next year, everyone in the village would know summer had ended and another autumn school term was about to begin.
The signal changed to green and Stephen started off, shifting into second and gliding past the high street banks, estate agents, bookmaker, butcher, baker, and ironmonger, until he came to the formal village green tucked away just to the left of the main road.
There the war memorial was picture perfect amid carefully maintained flower beds and winding white gravel walkways. It was different from the thousands of others dotting villages all over England with simple lists of names commemorating the village war dead. Here the memorial committee had reached higher and adorned this memorial with a life-size figure of a handsome young soldier in the Great War, helmetless, on one knee, and holding a rifle with bayonet attached, waiting expectantly for some new assault.
The statue, it had been said, looked just like the poet Rupert Brooke, his hair combed back straight from the forehead and chin raised slightly toward the future—what little future there would have been for him. More than just a written name, the poignant figure animated the sad record of the village’s sons, brothers, and fathers lost in the senseless butchery of those years, dealing a blow from which many villages had never recovered.
Across from this stood the bookends to the village green, Roman Catholic St. Luke’s and the vicar’s Church of England St. Mary’s, facing each other. St. Mary’s was the ancient Norman anchor for the town, built in the early 1200s. St. Luke’s looked old, too, but had really just arrived only one hundred years ago.
Stephen pulled into the driveway of the vicarage adjacent to St. Mary’s and turned off the motor. This was always such an impeccably tidy place. It seemed really odd to have a confusion of hoses and pump smoke disturbing the manicured gardens between the vicarage and the old church.
A few workmen were standing beside the pump with Verger Andrew. Stephen stepped out of the car and walked over.
“Hello, Stephen,” said the verger. “The vicar’s just gone into the house.”
“Well, looks like quite a mess. What’s the damage?”
“The largest of the vaults was full up with water yesterday when we looked in,” Andrew replied. “Now we’ve got the water out, and the foundation seems solid, praise the Lord, but there’s terrible damp—and what’s down there is in dreadful shape. Then the smaller Vavasour vault was not so bad. The vicar has just carried some things he’s found in it up and into the house.”
“Right. He just telephoned me to have a look at them, so I’m going to find him straightaway. See you in a minute.”
Stephen loped with authority across the lawn and opened the hard oak door of the vicarage. Standing in the hall, he could see the corner of the best floral carpet in the lounge. He walked over, bending his head around the doorway. Everything in the room was the essence of neat propriety, he thought, as usual. Only the absence of cut flowers in the vases reminded him that Mrs. Hamilton was no longer there to breathe some life into the place.
Bookcases stood on either side of the fireplace, their shelves lined with volumes of church and county histories and sermons—riveting stuff indeed. Centered exactly over the mantle of the fireplace was the vicar’s favorite painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a reproduction of a medieval work showing the strangely serene saint bare-chested and shot full of arrows. Stephen had kidded him about it before.
At the end of the room the vicar’s reading glasses lay ready on a glass-topped round table next to his favorite chair, which was positioned for maximum light in front of French doors out to the terrace and back garden. That’s where he reads his bible, writes his sermons, and falls asleep every evening, thought Stephen—the same pattern for the quarter century he’s been here.
On the table was a cluster of small picture frames. Here was a large silver one with a decades-old wedding-day portrait of Delia, the vicar’s late wife. Margaret was born less than ten months later, turning her parents’ idyllic world into pandemonium. There were three or four pictures of her growing up, looking out at him with her signature smile which, even as a child, lit up her entire face. Not one of those teeth-gritting grimaces nervous peo
ple show to photographers, but something transcendent and overwhelming. Next to the smiles were school-day images of her being perhaps too rowdy at maypole dancing, judging from the distressed faces of the teachers in the background. And God help anyone who came too close to that hockey stick and tried to get in her way, he thought. And there were several newer pictures: one when she became a BBC-TV presenter; and another of her dressed in a haik, the full-body cover and veil imposed on women in Algeria by the Islamic Salvation Front in 1991. That’s when Margaret went undercover for an investigative exposé on the new government’s harsh treatment of women. There was also one taken just after she and Stephen became engaged.
But so much of Margaret was too hard for him to look at, and he turned back toward the hall.
“Vicar!” he called out into the stillness. “It’s Stephen!”
The reply came instantly from the other end of the front hall behind him. “Stephen, yes, hello. I’m here in the kitchen.”
The vicar was standing over the rectangular kitchen table, which was covered in dish towels. He was lifting out small piles of papers, some wet around the edges, from a cloth shopping bag on one of the chairs and arranging them on the towels to wick away the moisture.
“Jesus Christ,” said Stephen in astonishment.
“Please, Stephen, mind your tongue. But it is quite extraordinary, isn’t it? There are just so many of these. I’m going to have to start laying them out on the carpet in the lounge.”
Stephen bent low over the table to focus on the papers. The old sheets were of varying sizes and cuts—most larger than the common size A4 paper used everywhere in Europe today—and they were all obviously ancient and handmade. In spite of the flooding, they were in remarkable shape, some with reddish ink and others in black, but still bright and clear, with rustlike stains on several where wax seals had lain. Mixed in were some things written on parchment, made from the hides of sheep or goats.