by Bart Casey
Margaret turned on her own torch, aiming it at the decorative Vavasour monument above.
“This is what I remember,” said Margaret. “I always thought the bodies were inside that altar there. I didn’t realize they were all under the floor. That’s actually very creepy…but of course it makes sense. I remember my mother and I standing here looking at it, and her telling me Anne Vavasour was our black sheep. I always thought she couldn’t be too awful because she was kneeling down there reading something. I thought she might be praying or doing her homework—I mean, how bad is that?”
“Not bad at all. And someone had a lot of money to spend on this. It’s the same quality as you find for swells in Westminster Abbey. You’d have to go to some ghoulish workshop and place your order for a class A decorative monument and have it delivered and installed here. You’d also have to hire a whole troop of masons to construct the vault underneath. It probably cost more than building a house.”
“And it lasted much longer,” said Margaret. “The date on the top is 1612—that’s three hundred and eighty years ago.”
Stephen took out his pocket notebook and pen. “Margaret, can you just keep the torch shining here? I want to copy out the inscriptions. They might help me understand some of the things that are said in the papers.”
At the top, underneath the word “Vavasour” and the “1612” was a brief Latin phrase, “Christus Mihi Vita et Mors,” which he jotted down.
“What does that say?” asked Margaret.
“Pretty normal stuff—something like ‘Christ be with me in life and in death.’”
“Not very original.” She sighed.
“Maybe we’ll get to that underneath,” replied Stephen.
On the face of the altar, under the main tableau of Lady Anne kneeling in front of her lectern, were two crests framing a brass inscription plate. Stephen turned and handed Margaret the notebook and pen. He stood carefully over the edge of the exposed vault, perilously close to falling in.
“Do you mind writing this down as I read it out? Odd it doesn’t seem to be in English.”
“Sure,” said Margaret. “Go ahead.”
The inscription was in two parts, separated by a horizontal line across the plate:
DU TRES HONORABLE CHLR
HENRY LEA CHLR DU TRES NOBLE
ORDRE DE LA JARRETIERE LE XXIIII
DE MAY AN. 1597
“I can assure you that’s French,” said Margaret. “It says, ‘The very honorable knight’—I think that would be an abbreviation for ‘chevalier’ or ‘knight’—‘Henry Lea, knight of the very noble Order of the Garter, the twenty-fourth of May in the year 1597.”
“Okay, then there’s a poem under the line—and it bloody well is in English, Stephen said, smiling:
If Fortune’s store or Nature’s wealth commends
They both unto his Virtue praise did lend
The Wars abroad with honour he did pass
In Courtly Jousts his Sovereign’s knight he was
Six Princes he did serve and in the fright
And change of state kept still himself upright.
With Faith untouched, spotless and clear his fame
So pure that Envy could not wrong the same
All but his Virtue now (so vain in breath)
Turned dust lie here in the cold Arms of Death
Thus Fortune’s Gifts and Earthly favours fly
When Virtue conquers Death and Destiny.
He continued, “Then there’s a shorter one below that under the name ‘ANNE VAVASOUR’”:
Under this stone entombed lies a fair and worthy Dame,
Daughter to Henry Vavasour, Anne Vavasour her name.
She living with Sir Henry Lee for long time did dwell
Death could not part them but here they rest within one cell.
“That’s it,” he said. “The crest on the left says, ‘Vavasour of Copmanthorpe.’”
“Yes, that’s our ancestral village in North Yorkshire,” said Margaret.
“And on the right it says, ‘Lee,’ with ‘Fide et Constantia’ underneath—that would mean ‘Faithful and Constant,’ I suppose.”
“So, it’s actually a double tomb—I never knew that. And they don’t even have the same name. Were they married?” asked Margaret.
“No, the biography says they were just living together, but for twenty years or more. Maybe that’s why she was your black sheep,” said Stephen.
“Indeed. What’s inside down here? Although I suppose it must be just Anne and Sir Henry. Let’s have a look.”
While Stephen was righting himself from hovering precariously over the vault, Margaret started striding down the rubble slope toward the manhole opening.
Stephen thought there was simply no stopping her. She was absolutely fearless. No thought of corpses, vermin, spiders, or ghosts in the tomb at all.
Not even slowing down, Margaret bent down and crawled through the manhole and was suddenly crouching on her knees inside the vault, peering around. And he had shirked going in at all, just gingerly reaching in from the outside.
“Well, it’s a lovely vault,” she said. “It has a nice curving arch for its roof. And there are indeed two bodies inside—one on either side of the center, and one is larger than the other. They seem to be encased in some kind of silver metal and sit on top of islands of brown dust.”
“That would be lead that was loosely shaped around the actual bodies. Sir Henry must be the larger one. And the dust is all that’s left of the wooden outer layer that once held them. Verger Andrew said he was going to sweep all that out before it was closed back up. The ebony of the boxes didn’t disintegrate like that—it’s much denser than our native woods. Finely preserved objects made of it even survive from King Tut’s tomb.”
“Well, they will be very tidy when it’s closed up. Not even a spiderweb down here,” Margaret said. “I can see why the papers survived so well. There’s nothing to bother them. Just cool and dry stone.”
“It’s very different from the larger vault over in the nave. That was a bloody mess, and I’m glad you didn’t see it,” Stephen said.
“Nonsense. I’m the grizzled war journalist, remember?”
She lingered a moment, taking a last look inside.
“Actually, I’m very glad I didn’t see it as well,” she said, reemerging through the manhole and starting to stand up. “I see enough at work to haunt me. Help me up and let’s get out of here.”
At nine on Friday morning, Margaret was curled up in the vinyl armchair provided for patients in her father’s new room on the fourth-floor men’s ward, comfortable but uneasy. She was almost hypnotized watching the regular rise and fall of his breathing and the steady flashing of the numeric scores on the screens monitoring his vital signs for the nurses. He seemed to be in a deep sleep, and not bothered by the oxygen mask and myriad tubes and needles hooked up to him. But of course that was because he wasn’t sleeping. He was comatose, which actually might mean he might be more than half dead, except for these
bloody machines.
“Enough of these thoughts,” she said aloud, forcing herself to sit up straight and take hold of herself. He’s getting great care. And he’s lucky to have a private room, she thought. Or more likely it’s because they know him. After all, he’s here all the time for visits to patients and families. Okay. But I wish he’d wake up and visit me.
She stood up and walked over to the window. Looking down across the treetops she could see the spires of St. Mary’s and the adjacent St. Luke’s piercing the canopy of green. Life is going on out there—Stephen’s probably in his school right now trying to manage the chaos of the living.
Her mind wandered back, conjuring up her early days with him. He was the one good thing that was happening from all this sadness with her father. She liked seeing him every day again. Back at their beginning, after a week or so ambling around France in the rental car, they ended up back in Oxford for their final year. After twelve months away out
in the world of France, college was a born-again fantasy setting for Margaret, and all about Stephen being the new part of her picture.
He lived at Magdalen College, away from the Oxford town center, a sprawling hundred-acre domain of grand churchlike buildings and cloisters stretched out along the sides of its own deer park on the banks of the twisting River Cherwell, about sixty miles northwest of London. There they would stroll along the manicured walkways without disturbing the almost tame animals grazing behind the fences and take a blanket and picnic lunch down to the riverbank to study, talk, or cuddle. And she lived only minutes away at Brasenose College, which was smaller and more compact, but still the same sort of gothic castle, right in the center of town on Radcliffe Square, overlooking Stephen’s beloved Bodleian Library and the round landmark Radcliffe Camera reading rooms, where they both spent so much time. And since they were both in their final year, they each had the best sort of large private rooms, where they alternated sleeping together most nights after meeting up for drinks or dinner.
She thought about their differences then, too, how Stephen was at the center of his life’s ambitions at Oxford, whereas she was merely passing through to get skills she needed to go elsewhere—out in the world.
Only at Oxford (or also perhaps at “the other place,” as they referred to Cambridge) could one find a substantial community of twentieth-century students still swept up in the everyday life of ancient Rome and Greece. Stephen had signed up for a four-year course that began with an immersion year to learn Classical Greek, of all things, so he could read works in their original language. He said it wasn’t that bad, she remembered, once you got over the strange-looking alphabet. There were so many English words based directly on Greek that it wasn’t that hard to figure out the meaning once you got going.
But that was all about the past, whereas what she wanted was all about the present, and beyond that hopefully some chance for improving a future which she might even be able to help shape in some small way. That’s why she wanted to become fluent in her beloved French, and even learn a little Arabic and Mandarin: so she could understand what people were actually talking about and experiencing around the world today. Journalism was an obvious path for her after school, just as writing and teaching young people old literature and Latin would suit Stephen.
But actually for a long time she was fine with their differences, because vive la difference was a fine state of affairs for young romance. She and Stephen announced their engagement less than a year after finishing school, and that seemed natural because they were in love with each other—passionately. For a short while, he would continue to be a junior teacher by day while working on his first serious book by night; she would keep moving up from an entry-level job in London at the BBC. By god, that all sounded very fine for a start. Soon they would grow up, move away from their home village, and start an independent life together.
But after Stephen’s parents were in that car crash, she became worried. She understood Stephen had to take over the school—or his family would lose all of it. And she respected how brave he was to do it for his mother, his sisters, the staff, and the kids. But somehow the doors of his compatibility started closing for Margaret.
Would Stephen eventually expect her to be the headmaster’s wife, presiding over the new-parent tea parties, or taking charge of the junior school with the beginning students (age four to nine), just as his mother had? Margaret had lived through something like that when she was a child. Back in the 1960s, her mother was a live wire: pretty, vivacious, and talented at music, with a wonderful singing voice that could even have been a career for her if she channeled her energies in that direction. But as her father dug in to his new post as the vicar, he asked her to stop singing—because she was so good, it intimidated the parishioners he was trying to attract into the choir and the weekly life of the church. Couldn’t she just be happy playing the organ during the services when they needed everyone to wake up and sing the hymns, and then help him with making his ministry work? And that was how she came to see her mother as someone who had sacrificed her own God-given talents to spend her life as an aid to her husband’s selfless quest. Sometimes when Margaret came home from school in the afternoon, and when her father was elsewhere, she would sit in the lounge and listen to her mother singing and playing her piano out on the porch off the kitchen. Even as a teenager, Margaret knew her mother was exceptional at that. It was probably part of what made her father fall in love with her at the start, she was so pretty and wonderful. But then he asked Delia to lock all that away because of the damned parishioners. And Margaret wasn’t going to just give up her passions and her dreams to become some kind of drudge junior headmistress in a country village. Well, at least not yet, and not for a bloody long time.
Meanwhile, she had begun hearing the siren call of adventure, which she had always wanted. Her lowly position with the BBC had just been a first step into the exotic life of journalism, and that became the path she continued along. After three months in a cubicle at Broadcasting House in London, making the tea for her seniors and buying lunch from the sandwich lady who walked through the desks, it was off on assignments—very small and local at first. She remembered her piece on the fashions at the Wimbledon tennis was a success. But soon after, the world beckoned, and she was sent over to Paris to be based at the BBC office just on the edges of the city, putting her hard-earned French persona to work.
She started to get quite a reputation at the office because she wouldn’t take no for an answer when she was right. Once, when a junior editor cut an important story down to nothing because of some late-breaking society gossip, Margaret “doorstepped” him, appearing unexpectedly at the door of his apartment at nine thirty in the evening demanding he reinstate the story. He was so astonished that he relented, and she stormed back to her computer at the office to redo the scripts for the midnight deadline. The next morning her colleagues put on a mock awards ceremony for her and gave her the title la tigresse anglaise because she was the English tigress who had devoured the editor.
Visiting home in summer, she knew she was on the way up, and she broke off the engagement with Stephen. Now even the remote possibility of becoming the life partner of a village headmaster was just a nonstarter.
At least she cleared the air, she thought. After all, Stephen didn’t die of those wounds. He didn’t have the time, because he was consumed with his new life-or-death task of reviving the school. And one world crisis after another seemed to be beckoning her. So it was a soft break—if there can be such a thing—and she found herself saying “we may be back together quite soon,” like some melodramatic heroine in an old movie as her train pulled away.
But they hadn’t gotten back together. Not yet anyway. And other things had happened that she didn’t want to reconsider just now. And didn’t want to tell Stephen about yet either.
~
Across town, Stephen’s day was taking a strange turn. He was in his study at work when the school secretary entered with a note. He paused and read with surprise that a policeman, Sergeant Stokes, was in the office asking to see him. That’s a first, he thought.
The secretary went off to retrieve the officer and bring him down to the study. Soon they were sitting across from each other.
“So, what’s this all about, sergeant?”
“Mister White, can you tell me what you were doing on Tuesday night?” asked Stokes, all business.
“Yes. I was having a quiet evening at home and prepping for my lessons this week. I picked up some takeaway and was in my flat. And then sometime after nine p.m. the verger from St. Mary’s Church called me about Vicar Hamilton falling, and I went up to the hospital and tried to see him, but it was too late to visit and I came home.”
“Did you happen to pass by the church and the vicarage at all earlier that day?”
“Well, no. I mean, they’re quite close to the restaurant where I picked up dinner, but they are farther down the high street heading north, and that�
��s away from my flat—farther away from the restaurant. So, no, I wasn’t up around there that day at all.”
“I understand you’ve been seeing quite a lot of the vicar lately. May I ask why?”
“I’ve known the vicar and his family a very long time. In fact, at one point I was engaged to his daughter, Margaret. Then, on August Bank Holiday Monday, the vicar discovered some old papers in the church—things that had been there hundreds of years—and he asked me to help him see what they were. This was all written up in the village newspaper. I’d studied old handwriting in college, and he thought I could make out exactly what they were better than he could. So we’ve been seeing each other about that ever since. In fact, I was also working through some of those papers at home on last Tuesday evening staying in, as I told you.”
“Would you say these papers are valuable?” asked the sergeant.
“They were papers in one of the tombs in the church. In fact, the tomb belonged to Vicar Hamilton’s wife’s family. And they just seem to be family papers—letters and journals and so forth—but unusually old…from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So, they are certainly rare and unusual, but I’m not sure what the monetary value would be. We’re still trying to work out what they are. There are quite a lot of them. Why do you ask?” Stephen was getting a little uncomfortable with the sergeant’s relentless tone of questioning.
“Just a few more questions, Mister White,” said the sergeant. “Can you tell me about your general financial position just now? I mean, are you in any difficulties?”
“No, thank you very much. I have this job as headmaster here and family property I inherited years ago. And I don’t have many expenses—just a small flat, a Mini, and takeaway dinners. I’m sure you’d find my financial mysteries made clear at my bank manager’s office, if you want. May I say I’m not comfortable with your line of questioning and must ask you to explain this intrusion here at the school, sergeant.”