by Eric Reed
“Cold enough for frost overnight.” Hans paused at the door to Mavis’ backyard.
Grace looked up. The sky was clear and starry. “I didn’t think you could ever see the stars here.”
“It may be tonight is special,” Hans said, bending to kiss her.
Chapter Nine
What did the kiss mean? Grace had no time to reflect. The moment she and Hans came in through the scullery a frantic Mavis greeted them. She wore a dressing gown half pulled together over pajamas. “It’s a bloody pity the police aren’t keeping a better eye on their surroundings! We wouldn’t have been burgled!”
“But we’re right down the street from the police station,” Grace said.
“Didn’t stop me back door being redecorated, did it? Now someone’s been into me home. They’re a dozy lot over there. I suppose they think you living here is protection enough!” Mavis snapped.
“Is anything missing?” Grace asked.
“Nowt so far as I can see, except for one of them crisp bars Hans gave me.”
“Any vandalism?”
“No.”
Hans pulled out a chair for Mavis and got her to sit. She was shaking, but whether from rage or fear, Grace couldn’t tell.
The cold walk back from the church had not driven the warm feelings of the dance from Grace’s memory but Mavis’ outburst succeeded. Regretfully she assumed her policewoman’s role. “What happened, Mavis?”
Hans lit Mavis a cigarette. She took a long drag and tightened her dressing gown around her before speaking. “I’d barely got home. I didn’t stay long at the dance hall. I didn’t like the crowd. One of them West Indian seamen asked me to dance. Can you believe his nerve? Well, I’d just shut the back door when I heard a noise in the bedroom. A footstep. My heart just about stopped. I didn’t move, didn’t know what to do. I stood there like I was daft. I didn’t hear anything else but I had this feeling there was somebody in there.”
“It might have been Grace,” Hans suggested.
“That finally occurred to me. I’m not used to having a lodger yet. So I started down the hall to the bedroom, cursing myself for being a fond fool, and then there was this quiet squeak, like a chair being pushed across the floor. I told myself, ‘It’s only Grace. She’d could be back early, couldn’t she?’ But when I went into the room, she wasn’t there.”
“And nobody else?”
“No. I told myself I’d only imagined the sounds. But I couldn’t make me believe myself! I put the light on and looked under the bed before I got changed. Couldn’t stop shivering so I came out here and stirred the ashes up a bit and threw on a shovel of coal and to hell with the extravagance! That’s when the pounding on the front door started. Well…”
Hans’ face darkened. “You didn’t answer it, did you?”
Mavis took a nervous drag on her cigarette. “As a matter of fact, I did, after my night caller identified himself as an air raid warden. It was Charlie Gibson from down the street. He gave me a bollicking for showing a light. ‘Your window’s calling the Luftwaffe as loud as one them fat Valkyries at the opera,’ says he. Talk about a nerve!”
“I told him it was nonsense and not too politely either. I’m always careful about the blackout curtains. He insisted I went out and looked, and sure enough they was pushed a bit apart, enough to let a bit of light out. Then I realized why it was so cold in here. The window was up a crack. The squeak I heard was the sound of it being closed. Charlie says he’ll be on the lookout for people up to no good and advised me to get the sneck fixed as soon as I can.”
Anger made Hans’ blue eyes look icy. “It’s as well you returned when you did. If you’d been here when he broke in or went into your bedroom and surprised him…I will stay tonight in case he comes back. I will sleep in an armchair.”
To her consternation, Grace found herself resenting her dance partner’s solicitude for Mavis.
Mavis placed her hand on Hans’ arm. “No, Hans, really. You’re a dear, but we don’t want the old wives talking any more than they do already, do we?”
***
For the second night in a row Grace stayed up after Mavis went to bed. Sooner or later she was bound to collapse from exhaustion, but for the time being she was keyed up from her new job, the dance, and now the break-in.
Also the idea of trying to get to sleep in a tiny room where a semi-stranger was sleeping made her uneasy.
She sat by the dwindling fire, hoping there would be no further incidents. Last night, late, the swastika painter had paid a call. Could it have been same person who had entered the maisonette tonight? Quite possibly it was. Had her presence here triggered harassment, as Wallace suggested?
Tonight she had put aside her mystery. She had had too many mysteries and enough crime investigating for now. Instead she held a Bible. Her mother’s Bible. Or rather one of them, the one her mother kept on her dressing table to read privately in her bedroom.
The one she had left behind when she vanished from Grace’s life.
Grace had stored it in a box with the few belongings her mother left behind. Later, she had considered throwing them out, but had not been able to bring herself to do so. Packing to leave Noddweir, she took the Bible with her. Now she ran her fingers over its leather cover, softened from years of handling. A speck of remaining gilt flaked off the title. The pages were so thin as to be translucent.
A memory returned. Her mother showing her a Bible. Not this one but with the same insubstantial paper. She told Grace about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, which to the very young child made no sense at all. The word her mind fixed upon was “ghost.” The strange patterns on the pages meant nothing either. But she could see right through the paper, as if it, too, was a ghost.
For a long time afterward her mother’s Bible frightened her.
After her mother fled, the volume served as a bitter reminder of her inexplicable desertion. Now Grace could see her mother through the narrow gap where the door to her closed-off memories had been left ajar. Her mother was sitting up in bed reading and making notations by candlelight. The sight had always comforted Grace. Her mother must have been very wise to understand and add her own comments to the ancient words.
She opened the book to where the red ribbon sewn to the spine had been placed years before and saw it marked Chapter Nine in the book of Luke. Verses were scratchily underlined.
“And John answered and said, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and we forbade him, because he followeth not with us.
“And Jesus said unto him, Forbid him not: for he that is not against us, is for us.”
The phrase “Forbid him not” was underlined several times. In the margin her mother, Mae, had neatly written:
Cast out devils. Not invite them in.
What a peculiar comment to write in a Bible! At the bottom of the page was a scrawl in her grandmother’s familiar hand.
What is the difference between a persuasion and a miracle if they are for the same ends?
“Oh, Grandma!” The words spilled out, so audibly she hoped she hadn’t awakened Mavis.
She turned to the front. Inside the cover her grandmother had written:
To Mae. Read this book if you will but never forget who your mother is, and your grandmother, and all those whose blood flows in your veins.
She leafed through the almost weightless pages. In places she recognized her grandmother’s handwriting, all spikes and weirdly shaped letters. Elsewhere her mother’s neat writing stood perfectly upright as it marched along the margins. Often mother and daughter had annotated the same page. The ink bled through the pages. obscuring whatever words were on the reverse.
The story of the witch of Endor had inspired Martha enough to run her comments onto the next page. Grace didn’t read them all. Quite apart from philosophical observations, the book was filled with the kind of
wise woman’s lore in which Martha had done her best to interest Grace. Next to the description of Jesus healing a blind man by spitting on the ground and placing the resulting mud over the man’s eyes Martha advised:
“If holy saliva for mud not available a poultice of rotten apples will also do.”
To which Grace’s mother had riposted:
It is not the mud that heals but the belief.
Grace put the Bible down and closed her eyes. So this was what her mother was doing, not peacefully reflecting on the Word as Grace had imagined, but dueling with Martha, the two women ducking and dodging through chapters and verses, firing salvos, searching for cover, seeking the high ground. Had Martha laid fresh ambushes when her daughter was out? Grace didn’t doubt it.
What had possessed her mother? Why hadn’t she simply tossed the vandalized book away?
The embers in the grate glowed feebly now. But a few crumpled pages, a good stir with the poker, and Grace could relegate her grandmother’s wisdom to the flames.
But, like her mother, she didn’t.
The wisdom was part of Grace’s heritage.
Chapter Ten
Had Grace slept very long before the sirens woke her?
She had forced herself to go to bed and lay uncomfortably on her back, hearing Mavis’ regular breathing. Eyes open, she watched scenes of Noddweir projected onto the smooth, unbroken darkness. Her grandmother, her mother. Then the woman who had died at the Roman temple, whom Grace had not actually seen there. The woman was lying in the middle of the ancient stone circle in Noddweir.
“See who it is,” her grandmother urged her.
When in her imagination she approached the awkwardly sprawled body, Grace recognized the face of her mother.
She came awake, heart pounding. Why should she be haunted by a dead woman she didn’t know?
What did a single death mean when millions were dying, so many anonymously? Refugees fleeing never to be heard from again. Servicemen unaccounted for, presumed dead. Airplanes and ships lost. Unrecognizable victims of bombings buried in mass graves.
Yet somewhere in the world there must be someone who would want to know what had become of this particular young woman with no name.
Mavis stirred. “Bloody hell!”
Grace reached for her uniform, the first clothes to hand.
Mavis flicked on a torch. She fought her way groggily into her dance hall outfit.
They grabbed their jackets, gas masks, and handbags and ran out.
The sudden cold in the street took Grace’s breath away. She trotted through the darkness more quickly than was prudent, hoping not to trip on uneven pavement or slip on a frozen patch. Others were also moving down the street. Murmurs and footsteps, all but invisible. Grace felt swept up in a rushing crowd of phantoms.
The vicar stood at St Martha’s side door, he and several boys ready to assist older parishioners down into the crypt which served as a shelter.
Fingers of light swept a starry sky, seeking enemy planes to snag in their deadly rays. A baby cried faintly below.
“Trying to trap a German plane with searchlights always reminds me of trying to catch flies, they’re so quick and nimble,” the vicar observed to Grace.
“The devil’s flies,” she replied. “That’s what we called them at home.”
“Could you wait here with me?” the vicar asked. “It will reassure people knowing we have a policewoman with us.”
Grace agreed, unhappily blowing on her hands to warm them. Mavis had already gone inside.
Those seeking shelter streamed past, jackets buttoned wrongly, long dressing gowns showing under heavy coats, more than one pair of feet shod in bedroom slippers. The woman Grace had interrupted whitening her doorstep arrived, still in her tartan headsquare and curlers. She avoided meeting Grace’s eyes.
The searchlights continued to dance after the blaring sirens went quiet. There was no sign of enemy planes. No sound of engines or anti-aircraft guns. No tracer bullets stitching across the night sky.
“We get false alarms,” the vicar told her. “But you never know. We were hit pretty hard toward the beginning of the month. I hear in London half the population doesn’t bother to take shelter any longer, they’ve grown so accustomed to living through massive bombings. Here, we’re still waiting for the worst. One almost wishes it would finally begin and be done with it.”
For a few minutes there were no new arrivals. The vicar sent his helpers into the church, went out into the street, looked up and down. “Street’s deserted,” he said returning to her side.
Grace didn’t know how he could see to tell.
“Everyone’s under cover safely then,” he went on. “We’ll join our unexpected guests below, shall we?” He shut the door, offered her his arm, and led her to a stairway. “Oh, yes, the crypt has proved most useful as a shelter. Not its usual line of work, but then what is usual these days?”
The smell of dampness and cold struck up through the stone flagged floor. A single bulb descending from the vaulted ceiling served for illumination.
“Well, vicar, if we get hit we’re in the right place!” called out a man with steel grey hair and the worn face of one who had spent his life at hard labor.
“Charlie, there, would rather be caught in the local pub with a pint in one hand and a good hand of cards in the other when he’s called to glory,” claimed a voice from the shadows.
“Pint of broon’s what he calls holy water,” added another voice.
“Tut!” the vicar replied. “I’m sure our friend, Constable Baxter, would have something to say about keeping the licensing hours.”
The bulb flickered.
“They’re here!” a woman cried in panic.
“Now, now, we would have heard the planes,” the vicar chided her.
The bulb went out.
There were gasps. A child whimpered. The baby shrieked louder.
“They hit the power station!”
“Bleeding Germans are here, all right!”
“Can’t be. We would’ve heard explosions.”
“The floor’s shaking!”
“That’s your legs, Jack.”
One or two of those gathered together turned on their torches. The vicar reached up toward the light fixture, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief. The light came back on.
“Loose bulb,” he announced.
A general shuffling about followed the collective murmur of relief as people made themselves as comfortable as they could, draping themselves in blankets and lying down. Someone played a harmonica. Before long the baby stopped crying and went to sleep.
Grace walked around looking for Rutherford. Noticing she was treading on grave markers set in the floor, she shuddered. People had placed mats and rugs on them and were seated or stretched out, apparently unconcerned. A featureless form in a far corner proved to be a couple cuddling, taking advantage of the darkness. Well, it wasn’t a crime and none of Grace’s business. One man sat rigidly, back to the wall, his face turned straight ahead, obscured by his gas mask. He didn’t move as Grace went by. Mavis sat chatting with an unfamiliar young man. Grace didn’t find Rutherford and was relieved to see no one from the station either.
“How about a sing-song?” the man named Charlie asked the company at large. He was with a woman who was calmly knitting, and a little girl with a solemn expression.
“Good idea, Mr. Gibson!” the vicar replied. “What do you suggest? I think in the circumstances it isn’t likely to be hymns!”
Laughter rippled in the dimness. A man with a baritone voice started singing about a little lad getting fish when the boat came in, and the words were taken up by the others.
The words reminded Grace of former fisherman Hans, and she offered a fervent silent prayer for his safety that night.
“Very good,” the vicar said
with a smile. “You’re all in fine voice tonight, I can see. Since we’re entertaining each other, I will be happy to perform a couple of tricks that may amuse you.”
Not only children moved to stand in a semi-circle in front of the vicar.
“That’s right,” he went on. “Magicians always say the quickness of the hand deceives the eye, but since I only have one of them I shall do a couple of tricks where sleight of hand is not needed. First, no doubt someone has a pack of cards with them?”
“Aye, vicar, here y’are. I’m about sick of playing Patience during these raids. I’m not too patient with Patience, you might say.” Charlie Gibson handed him a well-thumbed pack of cards.
The vicar nodded his thanks. “In this time of crisis, we are all pulling our weight. Even those naughty knaves volunteered for the duty of defending the king and all the other cards. So the king called a meeting….” He laid the king of clubs on the floor and continued. “The knave of clubs was accepted as a recruit and so was the knave of diamonds, so I shall place them on the king’s right hand. But although they also volunteered, the knaves of hearts and spades were rejected, so I must place them on the other side of the king. Can anyone tell me why the king did not accept those two cards for his army?”
Several suggestions were offered and after a few moments the vicar held up his hand. “Very well, I shall tell you. It was because although they were as willing to fight as the other knaves, they were judged medically unfit for service.”
“How do you work that one out, vicar?” someone asked in a puzzled voice.
“Because the rejected knaves only have one eye apiece.”
Laughter mixed with applause broke out.
The vicar gave a slight bow and began rummaging in his pockets.
“My final trick tonight fittingly involves a cross. As you see, I now have seven coins in my hand. I shall lay them on the floor thus.” He arranged the handful as a row of five with one above and one below the middle coin. “Who can move only two coins and make a cross whose arms have the same number of coins?”