by Jane Langton
But this year it wasn’t enough. Tom Cobb was alarmed. What if they had to cancel the whole thing? If the program fell apart, there would be no Revels this year, no celebration of Christmas or the solstice or brown ale or the hunting of the deer, no Morris dancing. The death of Henry Shady had upset the entire schedule of dances, carols, choruses, children’s songs and games, and the whole cluster of episodes centering around the story of Saint George.
Tom looked sideways at Sarah, his codirector. After Shady’s death, how was she holding up? Sarah had been a sort of foster mother to Shady; in fact, you couldn’t help wondering if she had been something even warmer and closer. And Henry had worshipped her, anybody could have seen that.
She seemed all right. But, poor Sarah, she must be walking an emotional tightrope. On the one hand she needed to grieve for Shady, but at the same time she had to comfort her fool of a husband, who had run over the poor kid from West Virginia. Her eyes were red, as though she had wept her share of tears, but otherwise she seemed like herself. Thank God, because there was nobody else who could fill her shoes.
Tom assessed the matter shrewdly. It was true, no one else in the entire Revels company could manage the annual production of the Christmas Revels with anything like Sarah’s high-spirited competence and good judgment, certainly not Tom Cobb, her codirector. Of course, there was always Walter Shattuck, the Old Master, but Walt was no longer interested in running things. He was called the Old Master because he had founded the Revels in the first place, but he wasn’t really old at all, and he had long since stopped acting as general manager. Now his only contribution to the annual celebration was his captivating voice—but that was a great contribution indeed. No one, not even the charismatic young folk singer from West Virginia, could sing like Walt. Now that Henry Shady was dead, they would surely have to fall back on Walt’s spellbinding baritone to fatten their diminished program.
They had to decide. They had to choose something, and choose it right now—a whole chunk of guaranteed surefire Revels sorcery.
“We could always do ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ again,” said Sarah.
“Oh, God, Sarah, we’ve done it so often before.” Tom broke a chocolate bar in two and offered her a piece.
Sarah took it hungrily. “But everybody loves ‘The Cherry Tree Carol.’ We’ve got the costumes. We’ve got that girl who took the part of Mary last year, and the guy who does the tree with the cherries growing out of his fingers, and we’ve got Walt to sing the song. And what about you? The way you took the part of Joseph was so perfect.”
“You mean the way I stamped my feet in jealous rage?”
Sarah laughed. “Well, yes, I guess so. Mmmm, this is delicious. What do you call these things?”
“Tastychox. My favorite. Want some more? Well, listen, it’s all right with me if we do ‘The Cherry Tree’ again. I’d forgotten about the jealous rage. That’s why people like it so much. Everybody’s jealous now and then, rights?”
Sarah got up and stared at one of the east windows above the rows of mezzanine seats. It was glimmering faintly in the vanishing twilight, flashing now and then with the headlights of cars moving slowly along Cambridge Street. That way lay Inman Square and her apartment on Maple Avenue, where Morgan was waiting for her, getting supper, still suffering from what had happened yesterday. “You’re right. Everybody’s jealous now and then.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Martin Luther King quotations on pages 50, 201, 219, 382, and 398 are from Luther, His Life and Times by Richard Friedenthal and are used by permission of Weidenfeld and Nicholson, Ltd. Other Luther quotations are from The Table Talk of Martin Luther, translated and edited by William Hazlitt, H. G. Bohn, 1857; Martin Luther, the Man and His Work, by Arthur C. McGiffert, Century, 1912; and The Hymns of Martin Luther, edited by Leonard Woolsey Bacon and Nathan H. Allen, Scribner’s, 1883. The words to Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress” were translated by Frederick Hedge. Luther’s hymn texts on page 370, 384, and 391 were translated by Jane Langton, whose translation of one verse of a chorus from Bach’s St. John’s Passion appears on page 227. A few passages from Martin Luther and J. S. Bach are from Albert Schweitzer’s J. S. Bach, Breitkopf&Härtel, 1911.
Five measures from J. S. Bach’s “Magnificat” are used by permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. The music for eight of Bach’s chorales is from 371 VierstimmigeChoralgesänge von Johann Sebastian Bach, Breitkopf&Härtel, 1845. The two measures from the choral prelude “In diristFreude” from Bach’s Little Organ Book are used by permission of Edwin F. Kalmus.
copyright © 1993 by Jane Langton
978-1-4532-4758-7
This edition published in 2012 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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