by Bart Casey
“It’s funny,” said Margaret as they strolled, “they told me in the town this river was the border between Occupied and Vichy France in World War II. You actually needed a pass to go from one side of the river to the other. Hard to believe that war would have waged all around here,” she finished.
“Not too hard,” said Stephen. “This is also where all the maneuvering was before the Battle of Poitiers in the Hundred Years War, when the Black Prince defeated the French king in the 1300s and took him and his youngest son back to England. Maybe that’s why they don’t seem to like the English very much around here. And even before, this was about where Charles Martel defeated the armies of the Caliphate in 732. If he hadn’t won that, Europe might have been Muslim today. That’s in Creasy—you probably know his book The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, and so on.”
“No, I don’t know it. You are the history wonk, aren’t you,” teased Margaret. “What about Julius Caesar and the Gallic Wars? At least I know about him from Asterix and the comics.”
“Most of that was actually northeast of here—over closer to Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. Caesar’s big battle was at Alesia—we can go there on the way up to the airport, if you like. And Asterix’s village was supposedly in the northwest corner of France, right on the tip.”
“Oh, really!” She laughed. “By the way, that point about hating the English is really a myth,” Margaret observed. “English, American, Japanese—the French don’t like anyone who doesn’t at least try to acknowledge them and the fact they’re standing in France. I mean, there’s a big difference when you wait on people demanding an English menu and another where the tourists attempt to speak French and try to chat. Shows they respect where they are, I think. I would get so angry at the coach tourists—there are so many together they usually don’t make the slightest attempt to acknowledge they are in another country. That bunch the other day just shouted out what they wanted in English at me. The real girl who’s the waitress wouldn’t have had a clue what they were barking at her. Germans do the same thing in German—very annoying.”
Soon the path they were trodding came to an ancient bridge over the river, near a café with tables scattered outside under a spreading oak. Stephen and Margaret couldn’t resist the opportunity to sit down, rest, and admire the view. The proprietor came out, and with a nod of her head, Margaret whispered out an order of ham and cheese crêpes with a carafe of vin rouge. Her French was pitch-perfect, as she went back and forth with the man in a rapid-fire conversation before he happily went back inside.
“He said the goat cheese they use in the crêpes comes from those goats over there,” Margaret said, pointing toward small figures in a farmyard about a quarter mile away across the river. “It’s like heaven here, isn’t it?” The house wine was as good as most pricey labels in a London restaurant, Stephen remembered, but there it was the same price as the Badoit bottled water.
For the fifteen minutes of this reverie, Stephen was back in the warm summer of a French afternoon with his pretty new love, and not all alone in his small English flat getting ready for school the next day. But he didn’t have to come back to earth with sadness or irony, thank god, because he just fell asleep in his chair.
Stephen drove over to the hospital after work on Thursday evening. He found Margaret pacing outside the main door, more upset than before.
“Any news?” he asked.
“Nothing good,” she said, pausing a moment to light another cigarette. “I came here happy as a schoolgirl this morning. I’d convinced myself he’d be awake today—at least certainly by now. But the doctors are telling me it could go on much longer.” She hissed out a cloud of blue smoke with a will.
“Did something change?” asked Stephen.
“No, it’s more like nothing did change. I had to press them to cough up more details for me. Turns out they use some sort of scale—the ‘Glasgow Scale,’ of all things—to grade people in comas. They score whether their eyes are open, or if they respond to someone talking, or move their limbs and so on. And my dad just zeroes out on all of the bloody thing—nothing at all—naught, naught, naught. So now it’s not just as simple as waking up from a fall—in fact, the only thing they’re certain of is that falling didn’t make any of this happen.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know Verger Andrew told us he thought Dad must have gotten dizzy or something, and then hit his head falling down in the kitchen.”
“Yes,” said Stephen, remembering.
“That wasn’t it. The wound was a blow from above—on the back of his head. And it packed a real wallop. They’ve even had to tell the police about it—I mean, because everything suggests an assault.”
“Oh my god.”
“Well, it makes sense. I mean, this all happened just after that damn article in the Village Advertiser about ‘treasure in the tombs’ or whatever.”
“That’s insane,” said Stephen. “These papers aren’t just something to steal and sell to crooks at a jewelry shop in London. But your dad’s still strong, isn’t he? You know, his breathing, heart, blood pressure?”
“Yes, the basics are all fine. But he’s been unconscious for two full days now and all bets are off. Christ, one of the doctors even said ‘if he wakes up’ to me.”
She turned quiet, took another drag, and started to quiver, as if she were going to crumble in front of him. He reached over and hugged her. “Oh, Margaret,” he said, and they just stood together for a long moment, holding on.
“Do you want to go up to him again now...or get something to eat?” Stephen asked finally, stepping back.
“No, not just now. And I don’t want to go home either—not to an empty house—or out to a fucking pub or restaurant. I’m too jumpy.”
“Well, come over to my place for a minute and have a glass of wine. I’ll show you what I’m doing with your papers, and then we can get some takeaway or go out, or whatever.”
“That’s right,” she said, snuffing out her smoke with her shoe and looking up at him. “You’ve gone into a flat, haven’t you? I can just imagine what that looks like. Well, actually, this sounds great—‘now for something completely different.’” She tossed her hair back and wiped her eyes. “Let’s go,” she said grasping his arm, turning her back on the hospital doors, and marching them off to the car.
~
Opening the door of his flat, Stephen was glad his cleaning lady had gone overboard for the start of school. The place was actually quite presentable. He only had to grab some clothes from chairs, throw them into the bedroom, and close that door while Margaret looked around.
“There, that’s better,” said Stephen, watching her take it all in.
“Nice sofa and curtains,” said Margaret, smiling. “And incredibly tidy. Were you expecting some sort of inspection?”
“No,” he laughed. “It’s all from my family house—you, know, I took things out of storage. And my cleaning lady, Mrs. Case, just got a back-to-school wind up this week. She scrubbed, dusted, and hoovered everything in sight. Why not try the sofa and I’ll get us some wine?”
Heading into the kitchen, he opened a new bottle of St. Emilion and poured two glasses. He looked into the fridge and the cabinets, but there wasn’t much else to offer with the wine.
Stepping back into the living room, he began, “We’re in luck. I have some of the good wine your father introduced me to—the St. Emilion from Waitrose. Before we tried it, he gave me a lecture on how you don’t have to buy fancy labels to enjoy really good wine—and he was right about this one.” He stopped rattling on as he saw Margaret was examining the maps he had up on the wall over by his worktable.
“What’s all this?” Margaret asked, looking over the pins stuck in throughout Switzerland and Italy.
“That’s me planning my next holiday adventure—for next spring, hopefully. I’ve pinned all the places I want to stop. I’ll be following in the footsteps of Byron, Keats, and the Shelleys in the years right after Wat
erloo. So I’m starting with their rented villas around the lake at Geneva and then going over the Alps and down to Tuscany. I’ve even rented my own place outside Pisa as a base for a couple of weeks. Then, I think I’ll finish up in Rome—both Keats and Shelley ended up in the Protestant cemetery there—and that’s quite a remarkable place, you know. It’s incredibly beautiful, even though it’s a cemetery. And it’s not on the tourist track.”
“That’s to be your own version of Enchanted April, is it?” she teased him.
“It’s going to be in May actually, but I suppose you’re right. I think I’ll be on to something good—matching their writing with the settings that inspired it all. None of them are read now particularly outside of school, except perhaps Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I was thinking of writing a book or long essay to make it all come alive again. I think people have forgotten their story, and it’s a good one. Anyway, it would be another trip like when we discovered each other in Poitiers…when I was fresh from the battlefields.”
“Actually, going back to the nineteenth century for a few weeks sounds great to me—along with a strong dose of the Italian springtime. I’ve had quite enough of what’s going on in the world today—a break going back in time would be wonderful,” said Margaret walking over to the sofa and sitting down.
Stephen put the wineglasses down on the coffee table and managed to stifle himself from inviting her to come along on his trip. It wasn’t exactly the right moment to try to rekindle their romance, with her father lying comatose across town. But it would be a dream come true.
“Hmmm, the wine’s great,” she said. “Just the ticket.”
He was happy to see a small smile start to come alive on
her face.
Margaret asked, “So tell me about these papers.”
“Cheers,” he began. “Well, there were two boxes down in the tomb. One had older things like Anne’s childhood commonplace book, and even older papers that seem to belong to a Sir Henry Lee, another courtier of the time from the generation older than Anne. He’s in the documents so much I ordered his biography through the library. I just got it today and scanned it a little before I saw you at the hospital. He and your Anne Vavasour were very close, actually living together, it seems. Then the papers in the other box start off in King James’s reign, sometime around 1610, and keep going until around 1650. So, all told, they cover almost a hundred years. One interesting thing in the second box was Sir Henry’s will—he was very rich—and he left a substantial bequest to Anne.”
“They must have been lovers,” said Margaret, cutting through everything.
“I expect so. You get right to the heart of things, as usual.” He was taken aback at how quickly she discovered the likely answer, while he was still pondering the possibilities.
“It’s the BBC training,” she said, cracking a rueful smile, “added to all those speedy ‘critical thinking tools’ they pounded into us in the English department at Oxford.”
“The papers are quite an assortment,” Stephen continued. “Most are letters—there’s even one from Lord Burghley—and there’s paperwork from a legal case, all in Latin—which is a bit heavy going because of the jargon. Then I’ve just gone through some poetry. One piece claims to be lines written by Anne together with the Earl of Oxford—it’s rather romantic.”
“My, she did get around.”
“And then there are long pieces—I told your father about the handwritten presentation copy of Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, as well as a few masques and plays. There’s also a scroll with quotes pasted together to form a long length of joined sheets. That’s one of the things I photocopied bits of and sent off to my old handwriting teacher at college, Professor Rowe—you probably didn’t have him in a course because he’s an Elizabethan specialist. I know that wasn’t your favorite era, but I saw quite a lot of him, especially for tutorial. I also made copies of pages from the commonplace books as well as the Burghley letter—five or six pages all told—and I heard back from him in a phone message quite quickly. It was quite a shock to get such a personal response from the great man; he has a very high opinion of himself. He wanted to know more about what we’d found, and so I’ve planned to go over to see him on Saturday. Would you like to come?”
“Sure, if nothing’s changed with my dad. It would be great—and actually my aunt is planning to visit him in the hospital this weekend, too. So she could hold the fort. I’ll just want to telephone and check in every few hours.”
“Okay. Then I thought later I might share those same copies with Soames Bliforth, who was in my year at Magdalen, also in my course on English and the classics. I think you met him a few times when we were going out the last year. Now he’s an antiquarian book dealer in London. I thought he might be able to give us some idea of the market value today and so on.”
“I do remember him. Wasn’t he very posh? I think a group of us were all out for a night of pasta and wine on the town together and he ended up treating everybody,” said Margaret.
Stephen smiled. “That sounds like Soames,” he said. “If he thinks the papers might have significant value, then we should show the collection to experts for a proper evaluation.”
“Who should see it?” asked Margaret.
Stephen thought for a few moments and said, “Well, there are the auction houses—Sotheby’s and Christie’s—if it’s all to be sold. Or libraries and museums, although they would take a long time to research it. Or even the most authoritative book dealer working with real treasures, Maggs and Company, just off Oxford Street in Berkeley Square. And besides that, we should have a paper conservator look at it and make sure it’s stored properly. Everything survived because it spent hundreds of years in a dark and cool low-humidity vault. It could really deteriorate fast if it’s kept in sunlight or near boxes made of modern paper full of chemicals.”
After sitting quietly for a few moments, Margaret said, “I don’t think my father will be very interested in money. He’d just give all the extra cash to the church. So we’ll have to draw him out on what he wants to do later...when he wakes up.” She paused and choked up a bit before adding quietly, “Or if he wakes up.”
That seemed to trigger a break in the dam of her reserve again. She started to rock gently, and tears started to run down her face. Stephen moved quickly over closer to her on the sofa and put an arm around her shoulder.
“It’s all right, Margaret. I’m here for you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I feel as if everything is coming apart. My poor father just seems to be sleeping there in his room, and I can sit and read between the doctor visits. But then he doesn’t wake up. I mean, he’s not asleep—that’s an illusion. He’s comatose, and I don’t know if he’s ever going to wake up, or if I’ll ever be able to talk to him again. It’s all very draining. I don’t know how I’d cope without Verger Andrew coming in the afternoon and then being able to see you in the evening. You’re being really wonderful, you know. I do appreciate it, Stephen—it’s all very upsetting.”
Stephen tried to comfort her. “Margaret, he may wake up tomorrow—Christ, he might be waking up right now, for all we know. We’ll just have to wait and see—and say our prayers. Your dad would like that, you know.”
“Yes, I have been saying my prayers. It took me quite a while to remember all the words,” said Margaret. “You’re right, how he would like that. And then work has been so upsetting lately. I mean two weeks ago an artillery shell hit a crowded market in the western part of Sarajevo, killing fifteen and injuring more than one hundred innocent people. It was a flat-out tragedy—and we had to cut the story down to nothing because all the British people wanted to hear about was Charles and Diana’s bloody marital soap opera—it was just incomprehensible.”
“Look, you’ve had way too much going on. Why not just take a minute and try to calm down. All this has been an awful business, but at least it’s brought us back together for a time, and we can deal with it all together, if we try.”
>
Stephen couldn’t tell if the drivel he was talking was having any positive effect or not, but in a few minutes she stopped sobbing and began breathing more easily, as she took back some control over all her emotions.
“I don’t think I can eat or rest just now,” she said. And then suddenly she sprung up off the sofa like a dancer. “Bloody hell, let’s go over to the church and look around the tomb where these papers were. Andrew said everything is still opened up to dry. It isn’t even eight o’clock yet. I could use some night air. Who knows? We might find something.”
“Yes, why not?” said Stephen, again astonished at Margaret’s natural impulse for action instead of reflection. Like Anne Vavasour, she did everything her own way. “Off we go,” he said standing up and stretching. Actually, he was very glad for the change.
~
It was deepest twilight and almost dark when they went into the church. There was no one around this Thursday night—virtually anything would have been more important than going to church.
Stephen could see the floor of the nave had been restored to its normal condition, with the great marble slabs back in place, although the new grout was still light enough for an astute visitor to notice. Soon that would be tainted dark gray and only Stephen, Andrew, and the village workmen would be troubled by nightmares about the decaying coffins stacked on top of one another underneath the fine floor.
Around the corner, the vault under the Lady Chapel was still open, separated from the playschool by portable fluorescent orange fencing. It gave the room the feel of a roadway work site: you half-expected a man with a yellow hard hat and a reflecting vest to rise up from the floor, but of course there was no one there.
Stephen switched on his hand torch and shone it down to illuminate the entrance to the manhole on the firestone wall of the vault.
“That’s where your dad and I were reaching through to take out the papers. The smaller chest was closer to the entrance, and the larger one just behind, with the end panel broken off. That’s where he could first see the papers inside.”