The Book of Hours

by Davis Bunn

  “Shut your gob.” There was a squeal of genuine pain, followed by the sound of the door rumbling closed. Brian heard a clanking clatter from somewhere outside, then nothing.

  He sat there for a long moment, feeling the stone walls begin to close in about them. The fear in Cecilia’s face stabbed him hard. Then there was a gasping little sob from down below, and another muffled groan. Brian slid back over the edge. “Gladys, you’ll be more comfortable up here.”

  “I’m frightened,” she sniffled. “That horrid man.”

  “Stay there. I’ll come down and help you.”

  But when Brian was halfway down the winding steps, he was halted by more clanking clatter from outside. Gladys whimpered in alarm and began scrambling up toward him. Then the door slid back, and Arthur called up, “It’s all right, everyone. You can come down now.”

  Forty-one

  BY THE TIME BRIAN CLAMBERED DOWN, ARTHUR WAS USING the cord from the steam iron to bind Joe Eaves’s hands behind his back. The man lay sprawled unconscious on the kitchen floor, his legs wrapped tight with Gladys’s laundry line. The revolver was jammed into Arthur’s belt.

  Gladys hurried in, a lamp in her hands. “Here you are, dear.”

  “Good show.” He commanded Brian, “Help me draw his hands and legs together.”

  As Brian tugged the legs up and the arms down, Joe groaned softly. Arthur used the lamp’s cord to bind Joe’s ankles and wrists together. When he was finished, he stuffed a kitchen towel in the man’s mouth, nodded a cheerful greeting to where Cecilia and Molly emerged from the fireplace, then said to Brian, “I would say Joe is trussed like the turkey he is.”

  Trevor rose from the fireplace, straightened slowly, and demanded, “How did you stop him?”

  “Quite simple, really. You’d be surprised how much leverage you can get with a skillet.” He gave a fierce two-handed swing. “Made quite a nice bong.”

  “No,” Cecilia asserted. “How did you keep from being captured?”

  “Oh, that.” Arthur glanced sheepishly at his wife. “I hid.”

  “One moment he was here beside me, the next he had vanished,” Gladys agreed.

  Trevor demanded, “But where?”

  The old man actually blushed. “There’s a secret compartment behind the old cupboard, with a hatchway leading outside.” He pointed to where the corner cabinet was pulled slightly away from the wall. “Discovered it the year we moved in. Used it several times when I wanted to escape notice. The only hinges I never forgot to grease. Quite handy, really.”

  “All these years and you never told me?” Gladys looked horrified. “You shameless old goat!”

  “On the contrary,” Trevor corrected. “Arthur’s secret just saved our lives.”

  Molly walked over and patted Gladys’s arm. “Thank your husband for saving us, that’s a dear.”

  Gladys worked her mouth a few times, then managed a weak, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it, my love.” Arthur cast Brian a pleased look, then turned to where the strongbox’s contents lay scattered beside the bound man. “I say, it’s like the past has come alive tonight.”

  Brian watched as Cecilia knelt and began scooping the coins back into the strongbox. “Past and future both.”

  Forty-two

  THE CENTRAL CHURCH OF KNIGHTSBRIDGE WAS FILLED TO overflowing. Trevor led the entire service from the upper dais, for it was the only place from which all could see him. He wore his traditional white Sabbath robe, but draped about his shoulders was a brilliant Christmas collar of scarlet with an interlocking design of golden fishes falling to his ankles. He looked out over the throng, his eyes resting longest upon the row where Brian sat alongside Cecilia and Gladys and Arthur. Farther along sat a sallow-faced woman Cecilia had introduced as Angeline Townsend, and beside her a small child who had clung limpetlike to Cecilia outside the church. Both the woman and her husband had embraced Cecilia with the force of deep emotional debts.

  Brian had watched with the sense of more dramas to learn of, more lives to entwine with his own. Brian’s gaze returned to those closer at hand—Arthur, Gladys, Trevor, Molly, Cecilia. He could never tell them what they had come to mean to him. He had arrived in England a broken man. Their friendship and the lessons they had helped him learn granted him a future he had never expected for himself. All the words to describe his tomorrows had meaning again—hope and thanksgiving and joy and planning and purpose.

  Cecilia chose that moment to reach over and take his hand, and Brian added one more word to his list. Yes, to love as well.

  “We gather here this day to give thanks and to rededicate our village bells to the service of our Lord,” Trevor began. “You may ask, how can bells serve such a divine purpose? The answer, my friends and neighbors, is not in the bells themselves, but in us. No place or possession is holy unless we make it so. But if we so choose, we can make every action a holy deed. Every moment can become a moment lived in God’s light. Everything we own, everything we touch, can be found to contain the divine presence. But only if we so choose.”

  Brian had spent the last few days talking and planning. The Bible he had decided to keep. Christie’s had agreed to help with the restoration and framing of the illuminated pages. Brian had decided to bring Alex’s dream to life—to transform the stables and underground chapel into a village museum. And it would be named the Heather Harding Museum. That was the most fitting tribute he could think to give her, besides his desire to continue the quest she had set before him. Brian turned his attention outward and focused on Trevor’s words.

  “Jesus is always available to us, as an encourager and protector and helper and teacher and healer. We must open ourselves to the divine presence, not just during this holy season, but constantly. The bells do not say, ‘You must take yourself out of the world.’ No! The bells say, ‘Bring Jesus into your day. Into your hour. Into your life.’”

  In the distance came the sound of a single bell being rung, over and over. Brian felt Cecilia’s slender hand squeeze his own, as from the opposite side of the village another set of bells began to peal. Then a third set joined in.

  Trevor waited for the congregation’s murmuring to quiet, then continued, “The message of our village bells is this: ‘Live in the continuous blessing of the living God.’ How? By learning the discipline of regular prayer.”

  A fourth set of bells began to ring, closer now. Then a fifth. Brian sensed a pressure growing in his heart as the air became crowded with a new presence, a resounding power that invited his being to ring in time with the bells.

  “The bells are a way to remind each and every one of us that the kingdom of God is hourly, constantly near. It calls us to a perpetual holy walk along the straight and narrow way. It reminds us in our daily life that God is the God of now.” Trevor paused as a sixth set of bells began to chime, the air filled with the song of centuries. “Heed their call, and seek the Lord. Time is fleeting, life is passing. Seek Him now.”

  The seventh and final set of bells began pealing from directly overhead. Brian felt the air filled with such a power that the past, present, and future seemed melded together, compressed into a single united force. All the world was filled with the sound of bells, and something more. The power of their music rose to where he could almost hear voices singing praises of a tomorrow he now shared, chanting in a divine and heavenly tongue.

  “Let us pray.” The vicar raised his arms toward heaven and said in a voice that rang above the bells, “May these bells sound as the spiritual heartbeat of our beloved village. May all who hear their music as they go about their daily walk hear also Your voice, Lord. May You speak to them, and may they hear Your call. May also those who are sick or aged or steeped in sorrow, all those who are unable to draw nigh in body, may they hear these bells and know that we who are gathered here pray for their peace, their healing, their restoration to the community of the saints. We pray for them, we pray for ourselves. May we walk inYour light forevermore.”

&nbs
p; The Book of Hours

  Reading Group Guide

  Brian arrives at Castle Keep a broken man. He is recovering both physically and emotionally from trauma created by circumstances that were beyond his control. Castle Keep, like Brian, is in its own state of disrepair, suffering from years of neglect. After spending only a night or two in the house, Brian discovers, between fits of intense physical pain, that his will to live has returned. What do you think changed his heart?

  The beginning of the novel has many characters meeting each other for the first time. Before Cecilia meets Brian, she assumes she has “an arrogant landlord who waited two years to show up and then left his valises on the front portico expecting others to step and fetch at his command.” When Lavinia Winniskill meets Cecilia, she calls her an American interloper who won’t be accepted until she understands that “certain issues and certain people require special consideration.” And when Brian gets to town, two onlookers have a discussion about Brian’s clothing and how he doesn’t look like a “posh gent.” Each character is judged based on rumor or expectation, and in each case, the assumptions about them are incorrect. Do you think that making assumptions about people you don’t know is human nature?

  Mazes and puzzles play a large role in the book. The act of solving the puzzle creates a bond among several characters and it is through this bond that Brian begins to feel a part of the community. Do you think there is any correlation between Brian’s sense of belonging and his renewal of faith?

  Cecilia has a young patient, Tommy Townsend, who she is unable to diagnose. She gets some advice from the senior physician, Dr. Riles, to examine “where her provenance ends, and God’s begins.” Were you satisfied with the way Cecilia finally handled treating Tommy’s disease?

  Heather writes in one of her letters to Brian that her ultimate hope for him is that “this lovely village and this marvelous house will bestow upon you the most precious treasure of all, that of knowing God.” She tells him that he must pray fervently to strengthen his connection to God. The hourly ringing of church bells is one way to enrich that relationship. If your town were to try and institute the hourly ringing of church bells, what do you think the response would be?

  Brian is able to have one last moment with Sarah through a dream where she encourages him to move on with his life. Have there been times in your life when you felt like God gave you guidance through dreams?

  Hollywood is in

  for a change of heart.

  Available Now

  Excerpt from Heartland

  JAYJAY AIMED ON SETTING THE RANCH IN HIS REARVIEW mirror two hours earlier, only his sister followed him from room to room while he packed his meager belongings. Clara, who had raised him after the floods swept their parents off in his tenth winter, had never been one for quarreling. But she did her best. “Think of everything we’ve been through to keep this ranch! Evil bankers, greedy oil barons, locusts, tornadoes, typhoid, hail, snakes, and now you’re going to just walk away?”

  JayJay’s only response was to slip into his boots and stomp down on the heels to make them set right.

  Clara pointed through the living room window, past the shed holding the pickup, back to where the cottonwoods tracked the creek leading off the stream. To the tombstones by the meadow’s border.

  Clara’s voice rose an octave and a half. “You mean to tell me you can just walk away and leave all that behind?”

  JayJay shouldered his canvas duffel and said, “I reckon so.”

  He couldn’t take their lone truck and leave Clara without a way to get to market, and his horse, Skye, was still lame. So JayJay hoofed it down to the highway and thumbed a ride to Simmons Gulch. There he waved down the bus for Los Angeles, the only city serviced by the only bus that still called on the only town he had ever known.

  JayJay hesitated there on the first step of the bus and took a last look around. He was about to enter a world he’d never had any interest in before. Which of course was why his fiancée had dumped him for that feller who traveled the rodeo circuit riding wild bulls.

  That recollection was painful enough to drive him into the bus.

  Soon as he took a seat, the bus rumbled to life and pulled away. He tilted his hat down over his eyes and dozed off, dreaming of better days. The grinding sound of the accident almost woke him. The bus jolted hard, and there was a flashing pain, and it was almost natural to stay asleep and let everything go . . .

  “Peter?”

  “Upstairs.”

  Cynthia clambered up the steps to his attic office. It was a tough climb, as she was eight months pregnant with twins. “Why aren’t you getting dressed?”

  “The script is due tomorrow and I’m still stuck on the same scene.”

  “Poor Peter.” His wife had changed out of her current favorite T-shirt, which read “frontloader.” Instead she wore a frock that billowed like a navy-blue sail. “How long have you been working on it?”

  Peter stared at the computer screen. “Three weeks and one day.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Normally Peter responded to such questions with a look. The one that said, I’ll talk about it when I’m done. This time, however, Peter replied, “I’ve got JayJay leaving the valley. The bus has an accident. Then nothing. JayJay Parsons has been napping on the LA bus for twenty-two days. He’s as good as petrified.”

  Cynthia walked over and hugged him from behind, pulling his hands from the keyboard. “I thought you told me you had the sense in your prayer time of everything being okay.”

  “That was then. This is now.” He had come upstairs on a whim, hoping he could finally make some headway. What he felt right now was power. Despite his dissatisfaction over the lack of progress, the room felt electrified. “We both know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

  “It’s just more rumors.”

  “No, Cynthia. Not this time.” He touched the edge of the laptop. The force hummed so powerfully he could feel his entire body vibrate. Yet he still could not write a single word. Which was ridiculous. “I feel so alone.”

  “That’s the one thing you’re not. The church has been spreading word all over. People are writing from places we’ve never heard of promising to pray—how many e-mails did you get just today?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The show is doomed.”

  “This is not the way you’re going to start our anniversary evening.” Cynthia reached over him and turned off his laptop. “For six years, people all over the world have found a hint of goodness and light in Heartland. I’m as sorry as you the show’s in trouble. But this is—”

  “No you’re not.” Peter swallowed hard. “Nobody’s that sorry. Not even you.”

  Cynthia did not argue. “Don’t do this, Peter. Keep the fire alight where it matters most. In your creative heart.”

  Peter kept his fingers on the keyboard. Even turned off, the computer seemed to hum with a barely repressed force. He wondered idly if there was a short in the connection. “Tomorrow I’m meeting with the studio chief. And he’s going to tell me what everybody on the set has been saying for weeks. That Heartland is finished.”

  Cynthia ran the fingers of one hand through the hair at the base of his neck. Rubbing him like she would a cat. Saying nothing.

  Peter caught her expression reflected in the plate-glass window beyond his desk. The emotion etched into her features brought a lump to his own throat. He swallowed hard and asked, “What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to come downstairs and get dressed. Tonight we’re going to do our best to put all this aside and give thanks for the blessings we still have.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow we’ll pray that you have the strength and wisdom to face whatever happens.” She pulled him from the chair. “Now you come with me.”

  As he started down the stairs behind his wife, Peter cast one final look back at his desk.

  He could almost hear the computer humming.

 

 

  Davis Bunn, The Book of Hours