“At the moment it is the girl’s body, and the use you have made of it, which endangers her soul. Cast out in her condition, she shall have no choice but to leave her home and become a whore. Her child shall grow up a beggar and thief, and then the fate of two souls shall be laid to your door, William Fitzjames.”
‘‘And what would you have me do, marry the slut? Has the Church then turned in favor of harems such as the heathens keep?”
‘‘I don’t commend her to you as a concubine, my lord. You must take the girl into your household as a servant and put her child under your protection.”
“What? Bring up a peasant bastard? The wench lies, Gervaise. I won’t have her in my house. Good God, man, you’d have every peasant within a day’s ride bringing me his daughter in the hope I’d enlarge her belly and then make her one of my servants. No, no; it’s out of the question.”
For a moment Lord William regards Gervaise with outrage; then a crafty smile appears. “Perhaps, good Father Geoffrey, you could use a wife yourself—someone to cook your meals, care for your cottage, warm your bed ...”
“I am forbidden by Church law to take a wife.”
“Nonsense. All our village priests have had wives in the past and were much the better for it. Besides, you needn’t marry her. Take her as your servant; I’m sure she’d repay your kindness, as only a woman can.”
Gervaise sees the fiend in Lord William’s eyes, urging remedies he dare not consider. “You refuse, then, to do anything for the girl? This is your final answer to the voice of your conscience and the authority of the Church?”
“Don’t parade your churchly authority in front of me, zealot. I can send you packing anytime I like. The damned country is crawling with clergy, and an ignorant village lad would suit our needs much better than a scholar like yourself. Go back to the village, where you belong, and let the pretty maidens stroke your pious balls. God’s blood, I hate priests!”
Gervaise turns to go, then swings suddenly back upon the drunken nobleman. ‘‘I shall leave your house, Fitzjames, but I shall not abandon my flock. Nor shall I abandon the poor girl who bears your bastard. I shall tell the villagers from the pulpit whose child she carries. And every man in the village shall curse you as a tyrant, fiend, and enemy of Christ!”
Outside the manor house, Gervaise sees the stars brilliant and cold above him. He walks back to the village, his eyes turned up to the stars and to us who watch him from the other side of time. But there is no sign from heaven—after all these years, still no sign!—and the priest’s mind turns as ever to that poem over which he labors by candlelight, night after night, seeking not the answers he knows he will never find, but the pleasure of a more artful question. How is it that the just can live by faith whereas the doubters must make poems? To make a world of words is not to rival but surely to mock the Creator. Hell must be full of poets, and chess players too.
Gervaise is already crossing the pasture outside the village when he hears the sound of horses and armor. He is slow to turn, and already the horsemen loom above him, black shapes like centaurs against the stars. He jumps from the road, but can’t evade the flat of a sword, which topples him senseless into the ditch.
The riders draw in their horses, dismount and gather around the fallen priest. Though their faces are hidden behind iron masks, Gervaise knows who his assailants are, and who has sent them. He expects the rush of steel through his innards, the explosion of gore; he is almost glad life will come so abruptly to an end.
But the knights have not come to murder Gervaise. They beat him with mailed fists, armor-sheathed arms and legs; they kick at him with heavy boots. Sparing only the shell which encloses his madman’s brain, they leave him battered and senseless in the blood-smeared mud of the ditch.
Gervaise lies moaning in delirium a long time beneath the silent stars. Spirits and demons, the imps of ancient Celtic legend, peep out at him from the nearby grove of trees, the hedgerow, the dew-drenched grass of the meadow. The stars shine upon his agony with cold indifference. The priest’s blood seeps into the earth and the dampness of the soil permeates his body.
Toward dawn the two monks set forth from the manor and find Gervaise in the ditch. Knowing better than to seek help at the manor, they go into the village, where a peasant offers his ox and cart. The journey to the monastery takes the better part of the day, and the peasant’s wife holds Gervaise’s head upon her lap while her husband shields the priest’s eyes from the sun. Gervaise cries out in agony as the cart bounces along the rutted track. By evening he is back within the shelter of monastery walls, once more a refugee.
Learning of the source of his friend’s injuries, the abbot sends his servants to the village to fetch Gervaise’s few belongings. As a scholar and disciple of the archbishop, the priest is welcome at Blackstone for as long as he cares to stay.
The servants return bearing word of a recent tragedy in the village. Richard the Red has murdered his daugh-ter. Her bruised body was found lying in the church, in a pool of blood from her aborted fetus, and just beneath the body of her father, who had hanged himself from the wooden angel which adorns the confessional.
By Tuesday morning the clouds were gone, and Stephany informed her father at breakfast that she was taking me up the coast past Wimsett to scout seascapes. Trevor-Finch seemed pleased and blessed the excursion by saying he had some calculations to test in his tower laboratory which would keep him busy all day.
I was in my room lacing up a pair of hiking shoes when Mrs. Mortimor appeared in the doorway.
“Sorry, sir. I thought you’d gone off. I was just going to do up your room.”
“Go right ahead,” I said. “I’ll be off in a minute.”
She emptied ashtrays and ran a dust rag across the dresser top. “Lovely day, ain’t it, sir?”
“Indeed it is. I was beginning to wonder if spring ever does come to the British Isles.”
She chuckled, glad to take a break for a little conversation. “It does seem ever so late this year. Of course, the spring is always late up here. I do miss them lovely springs we used to have in the south.”
“You’re from the south of England?”
“Dorset. Mr. Mortimor and me, we had a nice little bed-and-breakfast establishment in a little town called Wopping. Don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Wopping, but it’s right on a lovely little river and ever so nice.”
“The Wendle, by any chance?”
“Why, yessir. Do you know that part of England? We were just a few miles from Paxton-Brindley, where all the tourists go to see Westchurch Hall. It’s been restored right back to what it was in the old days, and they have a lovely little museum, too.”
“I haven’t been there, but I’d like to see it before I leave England.”
“It’s well worth the trip. Mr. Mortimor used to have a good many friends in Paxton-Brindley. He belonged to an outing society of sorts, though it did seem they spent most of their time in the pubs. They was good chaps, for the most part. It’s a pity we had to leave—and just when our little place was doing so well, too.”
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
Her plug-ugly face clouded over. “Them were troubled times for us. Our poor boy, Jamie, got himself into a bit of trouble, you see, and . . . But I shouldn’t be telling you all this, now, should I? There’s Miss Trevor-Finch, waiting for you out in the hall.”
Stephany gave me a disapproving look as I left the room. “Really, David,” she said as we went down the stairs. “If you want to become a proper English gentle-man, you must learn not to get on so well with the servants.”
“How do you know that’s what I want?” I asked her.
“It’s fairly obvious,” she said. “If it weren’t for your accent, and that habit you have of leaving your collar unbuttoned so that your tie comes loose all the time, you’d be scarcely distinguishable from the real thing. Not that there’s any great merit in making yourself like us, for heaven’s sake.”
“I admire the E
nglish,” I said. “And English girls are totally charming. I dote upon English girls.”
“I’m sure you’ve known a good many,” she said with a smile, and led me out of the house.
“By the way,” I said, as we settled ourselves in the bucket seats of her sports car. “Did your grandmother have anything to say about me yesterday?”
Stephany revved up the engine. “Only that I shouldn’t trust you.” She laughed, and pulled away from the house with a squeal of tires.
I said no more until we were well on our way to Wimsett and I had accustomed myself to Stephany’s passionate performance at the wheel. She was leaving a good deal of rubber on the turns and I had several dizzying glimpses of the surf foaming over rocks below us.
“Do you trust me, Stephany?” I finally asked.
She took her eyes off an approaching curve and barely got them back in time to corner the sports car smartly. “I don’t really know you yet, do I? Why don’t you ask me that on the way home?”
“You started to tell me yesterday about your mother.”
“There isn’t much to tell. She left us when I was quite young. During the war. I was brought up by Grandmama, and in a series of perfectly awful boarding schools, where I was dutifully taught how to charm young Americans.”
“And you were never told why your mother deserted you?”
“ ‘Deserted’ me? That sounds so harsh. I’m not sure she did, really. A lot of people simply disappeared over here during the war. Some died in the air raids, and some just couldn’t put up with it all and ran for cover. My own theory is that Mother fell madly in love with some dashing Yank from the local air base, and that they’re living happily ever after somewhere in your splendid country . . . I’d like to think, you see, that somebody I know has found happiness.”
Stephany’s face set itself in hard lines, and her foot came down on the accelerator, putting an end to my questions. We drove through Wimsett and continued along the coast. Finally, Stephany braked sharply, pulled off the road and onto a lane that twisted down through the heather to a deserted beach. The white dunes stretched for miles beneath a placid sky. Stephany gave me a blanket and picnic basket from the trunk and we started off across the dunes.
“Uh—what about the mines?” I asked her.
“Mines? Has Daddy been worrying you with that old fairy tale? Three years ago a couple of schoolboys managed to blow themselves up on a beach near Lowestoft and he’s never gotten over it. I suppose there’s a chance in a million that we could both be blasted sky-high with the next step, but what the hell? It’s too nice a day to worry about that.”
And so it was. The wind did magical things with Stephany’s hair and billowed her skirt. After a while she took off her shoes, leaning against me, and wet her toes in the shining wash of booming waves. She ran on ahead and shore birds scattered before her. She was a lovely girl, and our escape from Abbotswold made us both buoyant and blissful. I knew it was going to be one of my lucky days.
After a mile or so we came to a sheltered cove where the heather encroached on the beach and the sea crashed on some fairly picturesque rocks. Stephany picked out a hummock of sand and sat down with her box of paints and sketch pad. I was a little surprised that she really intended to paint.
“Would you like to try?” she asked me. “You can use my paints.”
“I’ll watch,” I said.
She quickly dabbed colors onto the pebble-grained paper. The scene took shape with a few deft strokes—an entirely conventional seascape, but not without its nice touches. Stephany hummed softly as she worked. The wind ruffled her hair and rouged her cheeks. I grew restive and put my arm around her. She ignored it. I tried kissing her ear, but she brushed the kiss away with a sharp toss of her head. I was beginning to wonder if I had drastically misread certain early signals, when she finished her painting and put the sketch-book aside.
“There. Daddy doesn’t know the first thing about watercolors. He’ll think it took me all day to finish that.”
And she turned to me, her eyes shining, her hair full of Sunlight, her mouth parted for a kiss. When, a few moments later, I put my hand to her breast, I found that she was already freeing the buttons of her marvelously burdened blouse.
~§~
It was late afternoon when, gritty with sand and salt, pink from sun and wind, but full of the friendly familiarity of lovers, we stopped for tea at a small, stupefyingly sedate hotel along Wimsett’s pastel sea front.
“Isn’t this a lovely little place?” Stephany asked. ‘‘It would make the perfect setting for an illicit weekend. So refined, you know; so teddibly, teddibly British!”
“Perhaps we can arrange one after I’ve gone back to Cambridge,” I suggested.
“Oh, no. In order to have a proper illicit weekend, we’d both have to be married to other people. That’s how it’s done, you see. One suffers in silence for as long as one can bear, and then one finds a fellow sufferer—male or female, it scarcely matters which these days—and escapes for a discreet and cruelly poignant two or three days of bliss.”
“You seem to know a good deal about it,” I said.
“I’ve been to the cinnie,” she said, “and read all the novels.”
“And your own life?”
“Oh, my own life is quite satisfactory, thank you. I have my scintillating career in London and my set of fascinating friends. I’m really quite an advanced, liberated sort of woman, or hadn’t you noticed?”
She sounded bitter, so I said, “I think you’re a nice girl, Stephany. I like you a lot.”
She laughed and offered me the plate of pastries. “Said with true Yank simplicity! I can see why Father likes you, and why he brought you down here.”
“Then maybe you can fill me in,” I said.
"Isn’t it obvious? Daddy thinks I should have married a long time ago. He doesn’t approve of the life I lead in London. If he knew more about it, I’m sure he’d be properly horrified.”
I reflected upon the advantages of becoming the professor’s son-in-law. Once he knew me, however, Trevor-Finch would no doubt regret his choice.
“Of course, it’s all nonsense,” Stephany said brightly. “I’m perfectly happy as I am.”
“Stephany,” I said, ‘‘have you decided whether or not you can trust me yet?”
She sipped at her tea and avoided my eyes. “I’m not sure it matters, pet. I rather like having an affair with a man I don’t quite trust.”
I wanted to break through the glaze of London sophistication and self-mockery she relied upon to keep me off balance. “You mentioned yesterday that Abbotswold has a ghost. Last night your father looked as if he saw one.”
“Do you think so? He often has such spells . . .” She drummed her fingers on the table, looking out at the old people on the promenade and at the gulls soaring above a bile-colored sea. “Poor Daddy! He’s had a difficult life. But then, all the Trevor-Finches have been miserable wretches. There’s a kind of bad luck—almost a curse—which hangs over our family.” She turned suddenly and took my hand. “David, if I do decide to trust you—if I tell you something about my father—will you try to help him?”
“What makes you think I could help your father? He seems quite pleased with himself just the way he is.”
“It’s all a pose,” she said. “I know he had a nervous breakdown some years ago and that he’s been seeing a psychiatrist ever since. Whenever he visits me in London he claims to have come on scientific business, but I found out he’s actually there to see his shrink. It’s all got something to do with Mother’s leaving him, and the way his father died.”
“How did his father die?”
“I’m not sure, actually. There was an accident. At the abbey, I think, where Grandfather was conducting an experiment of some sort . . . I really know so little about this, and it’s all so muddled. You must talk to Grandmama. She knows”—Stephany paused to give the next word emphasis—“everything!”
I was not surprised to hear
that the old lady might be omniscient, at least where family history was concerned. “Will you give her a good report on me?” I asked. “Tell her I’m worthy of her confidence?”
Stephany squeezed my hand. “Yes, if you promise to help us.”
I lit a cigarette and gazed at the elderly couples at the little tables around us, each with white linen and a single red rose in a china vase. “I really don’t understand yet what I could possibly do to help anybody. If it involves my research and something I may learn about your family in the process—yes, I will try to help, but your father will have to ask me first.”
Stephany’s face fell. “He’s much too proud. He has nine hundred years of family tradition to uphold.”
“That’s an interesting situation for a radical,” I said. “What makes him so proud of his family name?”
“It isn’t just the name. It’s the sorrow and suffering behind the name. Madness, suicide, broken marriages—God knows everything we’ve had to endure in nine hundred years. Daddy feels it all quite keenly. We all do, David. That’s what it is”—she stopped to consider—“to be one of us.”
And with that we seemed to reach an impasse, our friendly intimacy abruptly broken. I had an impression of growing suddenly older. Stephany seemed older, as well, the two of us fit company for the weary, life-worn couples who surrounded us in that abysmal tearoom, men and women still unsure of one another after years of marriage, still hiding from one another through long and terrifying silences.
We drove back to Abbotswold in the dusk. As we were putting the car away in the garage, I asked Stephany who the gray Anglia belonged to.
“The Mortimors,” she said. “They hardly ever drive it; it’s about ready to fall apart.”
And so it was, but I had a hunch that little car had made it to London and back not long ago.
I did not know what to make of Stephany, so bright and carefree one moment, so solemn and troubled the next. It was as if several personalities contended within her, each of which I sometimes glimpsed but could not fully grasp. I knew one thing, however. Our outing had affected me in ways I hadn’t expected, and which made me distinctly uneasy. For I seemed to have become a member of Stephany’s peculiar family and a party to their fears and sorrows—not quite a son-in-law, mind you, but a shirttail relative from America who nurtured some slim hope of gaining a permanent place within the clan.
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