Communion...

Here's the next installment of The Communion of the Saint:

Chapter 3

     

     

      Sunlight poured through floor to ceiling windows. White table linen, sharp crystal, and gleaming silver flung brilliance into my eyes.

      The dining room was busy, filled to the doors with the clatter of people eating. Glass and china clinked. Waiters and diners murmured offerings and orders. Silver rang like bells against plates. Tea and water sloshed down throats.

      All the sounds melted together. No one gave a look to my questioning presence.

      The clerk watched me again traverse the distance from the dining room to his desk. His predatory smile should have warned me.

      I introduced myself. “I have an appointment with a Lady Phelps, but she isn’t here yet. Would it be possible—”

      “It would not.”

      “You don’t know what I was going to ask,” I objected.

      “Lady Phelps is waiting for you.”

      I glanced back into the cavernous room. The clerk inclined his head toward a great, green wing back chair in the lobby. From its depths, the museum woman smiled in our direction.

      “You don’t mean—?”

      “Oh, but I do.” He turned and busied himself with some papers.

      I started away.

      “Dr. Griffin—” he called.

      I turned back.

      “Have a pleasant lunch,” the clerk said, so softly that only I could hear. “Chef says that the crow is rather good today.”

      I tried not to give him the satisfaction of reacting, but I know there was a wobble in my step. I hate ladylike shoes.

      The clerk wasn’t the only one with a good eye for what went on around him. Lady Phelps watched as I returned from the desk. I readied my apology as I approached her.

      “Don’t bother,” she said, her “received pronunciation” perfect and graceful. If I hadn’t heard her earlier slip, when I startled her, I would have sworn she was at least a baroness. “Why don’t we start over? I must have caught you at a bad moment in the museum.”

      The thing about English grace is that it works. Her statement acknowledged that we all have bad moments, that they come on us unawares, and that, from her position, she could not only afford to make allowances, but felt it her duty to help.

      “I’m so sorry about that, Lady Phelps,” I apologized. “I do hope you’ll forgive my rudeness at the museum. I was deep in thought, and when you spoke, it startled me.”

      We needed each other. The Communion was on the dicey side of historical research, and I was out of work. I only hoped I wasn’t laying it on too thick.

      Grace must have been in short supply in her life, because she accepted my apology.

      “Please, call me Leslie.”

      She led me to a private dining room. A waiter held her chair first, then mine. Leslie had already decided the menu.

      The private room might have seated eight, but there were only the two of us side by side at the round table. A wainscot of deep green surrounded us. Above it, a smooth, creamy wall stretched toward an ornate Victorian cornice. Paintings—originals, or at least very good copies—graced the walls. To one side, a door led off to a hall that must have communicated with the kitchen. Everything felt very indirect.

      “You come awfully well recommended,” Lady Phelps said, “but we couldn’t help but notice that you’re currently not employed.”

      I was ready for that one.

      “I left the college voluntarily. This opening gave me a chance to visit here and get some work done. If you offer the position, I’ll be ready to start; if not, I’ll still have the chance to do some research.”

      We paused as a waiter brought our meals. I wondered why the royals had stayed here. The food didn’t do a thing for my appetite, so I asked the question that had been nagging at me.

      “I can’t help but ask, Lady Phelps, why you’re considering an American for this work. Wouldn’t an English scholar lend your group more credibility?”

      “Leslie, please.”

      “Leslie, then.”

      “Clio.” Her smile came as an afterthought. This was a woman who wanted her way and wanted it now. She hadn’t been born to the status she held, but had climbed up the social ladder the hard way, on the shoulders of others. “You’re quite right. The Communion of the Saint is a group of people fascinated by our local history, which we wouldn’t have were it not for the existence of our patron, Alban. We have indeed approached some British scholars about working with us, but academics here form a closed society. No one is allowed to drift off the beaten track.”

      That was something I knew about. Lady Phelps—Leslie—kept talking. What I got out of the conversation was that they were pretty close to scraping the bottom of the barrel. When they offered me the job, I’d take it, if I could just figure out what it was.

      “Exactly what would my duties be?”

      “Dickensian.” Leslie lit a cigarette. The old familiar smell tickled my nostrils. A wave of longing swept through me, and I tried to put it away. I had quit a year before, and now spent entire days without thinking about cigarettes. Sometimes as many as two in a row.

      “I—we—want you to write a series of articles, initially to be published in the newspaper, then as a series of pamphlets, finally, if all goes well, collected into book form. We’ve even thought of posting it on the Internet. There is a local branch—the Chiltern Freenet or some such thing. We want nothing too scholarly, which, frankly, is one reason we chose you.”

      “Thanks.” I reined in my sarcasm, mostly.

      “Each article should be a story, really, about local history, which also has a bearing on why we chose you. You are a respectable historian. You’d be surprised how few there are available. You are to produce work which can be both entertaining and academically respectable. We want to put Saint ‑ back on the map.”

      I struggled to hide my glee.

      “Of course,” she went on, “you’ll be expected to share your results with the executive committee before publishing, but I shouldn’t worry about that. It’s just a safeguard. A formality, really. I’ve set up a meeting with the editor who will handle your material at the newspaper.”

      My own forum, my own voice—the temptation slipped sweetly into my imagination and found a spot to snuggle down in, warm and cuddly—but Leslie was still talking.

      “We’d like to see you spend the first bit developing a plan of attack,” she said. “Something you can bring to the committee to show us how you’ll proceed.”

      If I handled things right, I would get a book—a big one—out of this project. I’d made the right choice after all.

      There were others to meet, now that I had, in spite of my earlier gaffe, gotten over the first hurdle. We set a time for later in the day.

      I went back to Mrs. Fern’s to change. The unseasonable heat, the tension of the meeting, and all the walking made me want a bath. Saint Albans is a hilly town, perched on a steep rise above the river. Each time I went somewhere, I felt like a mountain climber.

      Everyone I’d met so far, even the hotel clerk, seemed to know more about my situation than I did, but it was a small sample. I wondered about the Communion of the Saint—were they a bunch of civic boosters, pious folks interested in propping up their patron, or worse, were they hearing the same voice I was? It felt as if we were being herded together.

      Mrs. Fern was out. I had the empty house to myself for a bath and fresh clothes. I gave thanks to whomever that the voice—the ghost—was silent for a while. Maybe he was taking the afternoon off. I scrubbed out the tub, as instructed. I still had some time before the afternoon’s interview with the Communion, and I had not yet been in the abbey cathedral.

      I entered through the western door. Spears of sunlight shot through the vast space. Stone arches, buttresses, and columns stood guard within the church, old Roman flint cut before Jesus was born. I felt safe. Even the gargoyles seemed beneficent, their grotesque grins smiles of welcome.

      The nave, which seemed large enough to generate its own weather, beckoned me in. I wandered through it, ticking off the items I’d read about. Finally, I reached the east end, past the choir, the presbytery, and even the empty shrine of the saint, to the Lady Chapel, named for the Virgin Mary. In front of the altar was a prie-dieu, a kneeler for those who wanted to pray. I sat on the low, deep sill of a window. The stone was hard and warm under me. The air smelled of beeswax candles. Red and yellow light streamed down on my neck.

      I fell in love with the small chapel. If I’d felt at home on entering the cathedral, now I was in my own room, in a window-seat.

      I took the brooch from my purse. My fingers picked at the crust of corroded metal while I tried to think things through.

      The brooch was like a message. Without it, the voice was nothing, a shadowy remnant of fatigue and psychological stress. But the voice, whatever it was, had shown me to the brooch. It had taken me to a specific place and put my hands on an ancient bronze artifact. There was no spot in my mind where that simple but undeniable fact could fit. None of the categories I was used to thinking in contained it, and the more I felt the fact’s sharp edges in my mind, the more my heart pounded, the more my head ached, the more I thought about Mama, and worried about myself.

      I clutched my relic until my hands hurt, and looked up to the cross, but the Figure on it didn’t answer. Not so much as a wink.

      “What are you doing?”

      The voice startled me. I startle easily, but it wasn’t the voice I had been half expecting now.

      “I’m sorry.” I turned in my seat. A man, dressed in jeans and a sweat-stained work shirt, stood in the aisle between the pews. I shoved the brooch into a pocket in my skirt.

      “It’s cleaning time. No one’s supposed to be here now. Evensong won’t be till dark.”

      “I didn’t know.”

      “Everyone knows. You sneaked in.” He held out a beefy hand. “Where’s your ticket?”

      Stupid, I thought. Nothing is free any more.

      “Ticket?” I temporized.

      “Yes, miss, your ticket. They shouldn’t have given you one, not on a Tuesday.”

      “Why not?”

      “I told you. You’ll have to leave. I’m to clean in here.”

      “The door was open.”

      “That was a mistake.” He strode toward me. I scooped up my purse and skittered around to put the prie-dieu between us.

      “I’m leaving.” But I didn’t want to get close enough to get around him. He threatened, without an overt word, but I didn’t know why. I hadn’t done anything to him or his precious chapel.

      “Tourist, are you—American?” He spat the word like a curse.

      I nodded.

      “Bloody wogs are everywhere,” he muttered. I wasn’t meant to hear the words, but I did. Years of living inside a dark skin make your hearing sharp.

      “You can get a ticket in the bookstall, during proper hours.” He pointed. “It’s only fifty pee.”

      He stood aside just enough to let me by. With the open area behind me, I turned to look back at the man.

      “Who are you?” I asked.

      “Sexton.”

      I didn’t know if it was his name or his job. His eyes narrowed. “Who’re you?”

      “Tourist.” I should have resisted the temptation, but didn’t. The momentary look of confusion on his face was small reward for the wisecrack. “Where is the bookstall? I’ll get my ticket. For tomorrow.”

      Sexton’s eyes narrowed more. Squinting made his cheeks bigger and hid his eyes almost completely. The last I saw of them, they were shifting to the south transept, where the book shop might be.

      “Are you havin’ me on?” he demanded.

      I shuddered. The bookstall indeed sounded like the best place in the world for me to be, second only to the outdoors. I tried not to run away, but my shoes clicked loud and quick on the stone floor.

      Once outside, I kept moving away from the church. Was everyone in Saint Albans a lunatic? I needed someone sane, but all I had was time to get to my meeting with the executive board of the Communion of the Saint, the group that would make the decision.

      Walking calmed me down. With every step away from the sexton, I walked back into a world that felt normal. The afternoon sun glowed in my face and warmed the chill inside me. I even forgot about the voice, because work was the perfect distraction, if only I got the job. If I didn’t—but that didn’t bear consideration.

      I wasn’t worried, exactly, because I didn’t think there were many candidates for the position—at least no British hopefuls. It was one of those academic side trails that could poison a respectable career. Once you went down that path, there was no track of bread crumbs that you could follow home. I was going to take it, anyway, if offered.

      I stopped at a stationer’s to buy a map and found the street. The walk to the society’s meeting house lifted me up and over three or four hills. I wanted a car if this kept up. Blisters stung my heels. I should have worn my tennies, appearances be damned.

      The trek took me into a neighborhood of once-stately Victorian homes. Many of them were now professional offices, some divided into flats. The small lawns were neatly tended. At several, roses grew. Some climbed up the walls, others arched with thorny, floral grace over open gateways.

      I don’t know what I had been expecting. There was no sign except for a small white rectangle, a business card, in the corner of a window in the door. Its proclamation was so muted, that I had to wonder whether the Communion of the Saint was so well-known that it didn’t need a sign, or so embarrassed that it didn’t want to advertise its whereabouts.

      There were no cars around. My watch showed three-twenty-eight, just in time for the interview. I pressed the door bell and waited, took in the sunshine, the quiet street, the stillness. Rang again. Waited. Knocked some. Checked the address and the map. I was in the right place, but no one answered.

      “Aw, Jeez,” I muttered. “Not another screwup—please.” In the instant after I spoke, I realized it was a prayer.

      Try the door.

      The voice was back.

      I took a deep breath, then another. Not now, not when I was just getting back in control.

      The doorknob was one of those bumpy pieces of Victorian glass. I turned it. The door opened.

     

      A proposition: Answered prayer, while suggestive, is insufficient to prove the existence, let alone the beneficence, of the super-natural. Coincidences happen, thank God.

     

      Hinges squealed. Where the hotel had been all light, the house was dark. The bare oak floor gleamed up at me, reflecting the foreign glow that came through the open door.

      “Is anyone here?” I called.

      I moved through the entry hall. A huge stairway curved up to the left. At the right, through open pocket doors, a formal dining room loomed. I stuck my head in, but no one was there.

      I pushed on, deeper into the house, through a parlor, sitting room, kitchen, pantry to the back of the Victorian building.

      The house felt lifeless. A home has clutter. Here, magazines lay perfectly fanned on a coffee table. A fine, nearly invisible coating of dust dulled the polished oak floor. Not even foot prints marred the deadness. The kitchen smelled faintly of cleanser, not of cooking, or of life.

      Finally, I reached the back door. They sat outside, in white wicker furniture, basking in the sun and sipping from tea cups. I watched as half a dozen people talked inaudibly, their mouths moving between liquid and speech, speech and liquid.

      The sun was behind Lady Phelps—Leslie—and fell on the glass between us, making me invisible. She had changed since lunch and was now wearing a soft, white cotton dress against the heat. There was something languid about her that I hadn’t seen before. She felt secure, here, where at the hotel she’d been slightly out of place.

      At her left, on a wicker chaise lounge, was, to my chagrin, Sexton—or the sexton—from the cathedral. He must have driven to get here before me. He was still dirty from his work. How he fit into the group, I didn’t know.

      At Leslie’s right perched an Anglican priest on the edge of his wicker chair. He balanced a cup of tea on one knee and a plate of cucumber sandwiches on the other. He was about thirty-five, just under six feet tall, with a bald spot that looked like a monk’s tonsure.

      The other three had their backs to me—two women and a man. I had as much information as I was going to get. I pushed the door open. Their mouths stopped moving. Everyone looked up at me.

      “She’s so young.” One of the women, a tall matron in her fifties, said to the woman next to her.

      “She’s so dark,” came the answer from the second. She stayed in her chair, twisted in what looked like an uncomfortable position. She was in her forties and dressed in that cool certainty that comes with old wealth.

      The priest rose and came toward me. “Doctor Griffin.” His smile would have melted ice. “Welcome to Saint Albans. I’m Tom Dorcas. You’ve met Lady Phelps.”

      “Leslie,” she reminded me, extending her hand. Somehow, I had drifted down from the back porch to their level. “We didn’t hear the bell.”

      I took her hand. Despite the warmth of the day, it was cool and clammy. I offered up a smile.

      Father Dorcas finished out the introductions.

      “We met,” Sexton said. It was his name, as well as his job. He did not offer his hand.

      “I’m so sorry, you must think me just awful,” said the woman who had mentioned the color of my skin. I forced a smile to avoid saying what I was thinking. Father Dorcas told me her name, and I promptly forgot it. Some people have that effect on me.

      “My mother came from Jamaica,” I told her. “Dad was from Philadelphia.”

      “I spent some time there, during the cold war. It’s mostly fallen to ruin now. Not much to see.” I must have stared at the older man who had had his back to the door. “A mid-eastern tour of duty,” he offered, but it only confused me further.

      “Jamaica?”

      “Philadelphia—in Asia Minor.”

      “No,” I said, “Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. In the States.”

      “Never been there. Sorry.”

      The older woman, Joan Elspeth, patted the wicker chair left empty by the ex-spy, Major Hewitt. The flood of names was giving me trouble.

      “Come, dear, have a seat by me.” She turned to face her companion, the racist. “Helen won’t mind, will you? She can’t help herself, and she really doesn’t mean anything by it. You took her by surprise, that’s all.”

      I sat. Helen sniffed at Joan. The bodies rearranged themselves, with the priest, Father Dorcas, standing by the refreshments, Leslie Phelps back in her original chair, Sexton across from me in the priest’s seat, and Major Hewitt in Sexton’s—all without speech, like a practiced routine. I listened in vain for the music.

      I hate job interviews. The questions are predictable, the tension unbearable, begging the approval of strangers distasteful. The woman whose name I refused to remember started off with rudeness.

      “We were expecting someone rather—different. Someone who would—how can I say this without sounding—”

      “You can’t, Helen,” Joan Elspeth countered.

      “I don’t like her.” Sexton’s words fell into the conversation like trash into a virgin stream. We all stared at him. “Mrs. Hardesty is right. She has no respect for the old things. She’s one of these modern women, and no good will come of her being here.”

      It was a relief, in some ways, to get the racism out in the open. The score was two against, the rest undecided. How the rest of the Communion handled this would decide whether I stayed or not.

      “Mr. Sexton and I met at the cathedral less than an hour ago,” I said. “Obviously, he already has his opinion. I believe that he referred to me as a wog, if I’m not mistaken. Is that correct, Mr. Sexton?” I wasn’t going to hide behind race—I never have, or I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did. But race matters, despite what people say, and I wouldn’t let this lie hidden. Sexton was just more open than most. I closed my mouth and let the committee stew. How they worked this out wasn’t my problem, but I could leave tomorrow if necessary.

      There was a long, expectant silence.

      “Well, Sexton?” Leslie Phelps took control of the meeting back. The others had the grace to look ashamed.

      “I were angry.” Sexton growled the archaic usage out. He looked down at this hands, which were wringing his cap, but his eyes peeked sidelong in my direction.

      “That’s not an adequate excuse for rudeness.” Leslie waited for an answer; none came. The awkwardness ratcheted up several notches when Sexton stood. Lady Phelps had the good sense not to patronize him. He towered over the rest of us, who were still seated in our proper wicker chairs. Only the priest, who was already standing, seemed his equal.

      “She’ll not be what you want,” Sexton said. “She’s not one of us.”

      “You’ve said more than enough.” Father Dorcas put himself in front of Sexton. “Go away. You have no place here.”

      The two males glared at each other. Major Hewitt harrumphed softly. We women waited, as always, to see what would happen. Leslie Phelps looked stricken. Joan Elspeth had a face full of expectancy. The Hardesty woman blushed.

      “She’s a bloody wog, you’ll see.” Sexton twisted away from Father Dorcas and trod out of the garden. The priest followed him as far as the gate and caught it before it slammed. He walked back to the group. No one spoke, until he took Sexton’s seat, directly across from me.

      “Doctor Griffin, you’ve seen us at our worst. I’d like to be able to say that that’s the worst you’ll see, but England is no better than the States on race, and there are those who will never see beyond the color of your skin. I beg your forgiveness.”

      That he made no excuse intrigued me. Most preachers, most liberals, would have been all over themselves trying to prove that they weren’t prejudiced. Shrinks call that projection.

      “It’s better to know,” I said, “than to wonder.” I couldn’t help but look towards Helen Hardesty. The others looked toward her, too. It took a long moment before she realized that we were all staring at her. She avoided our eyes.

      “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just didn’t think—”

      “Precisely, Helen. You never do.” Joan Elspeth turned from her sister to me. “Doctor Griffin, your grace under difficult circumstances gives me confidence in you. I came here hoping to find a scholar. I find that, and a woman who has strength of character and honesty, who can speak her mind without giving in to anger and resentment.”

      Was this me she was talking about?

      “I’ve read some of your work, Doctor Griffin, and I’m impressed. You’ve gone further than a lot of your peers, and frankly, you’re the best we can find. We don’t have anyone else on our short list. And then your prospects, apart from us, are not precisely glowing, as I understand the situation. Tell us your credentials.”

      I launched into a quick oral curriculum vitae. Honors at Girl’s High in Philadelphia, B.A. in history at Fisk cum laude, master’s and Ph.D. from Penn, and four years’ teaching at Schuylkill College in Philly.

      “You’ll do for us,” Joan said. “Will we do for you—that is, if you’ll have the job after meeting us?” She rolled her eyes at Helen.

      Major Hewitt harrumphed softly. Helen looked down her patrician nose at Joan. The priest blushed. Lady Phelps smiled; it made me nervous. “How direct of you, Joan.”

      “It’s the truth. Why waste Dr. Griffin’s time and ours?”

      Not all of the leadership was vested the hands of Lady Phelps. Joan Elspeth understood things better than anyone else on the board.

      I had small questions—matters of officing, salary, allowances, length of service—and we disposed of those quickly. As Joan had said, it was a fit.

      “Now that that’s out of the way,” Joan said, “I wonder if you’d say how you plan to proceed. All of the old chronicles have been mined for centuries. I doubt that there’s much left to find. How will you start?”

      So we began.

The Communion of the Saint - Chapter 2

Here's the next installment of The Communion of the Saint:

Chapter 2

     

      The knocking seemed to last forever. I struggled toward wakefulness and grunted an incoherent acknowledgment.

      “Breakfast is in fifteen minutes.” Mrs. Fern’s daylight sprightliness irritated me, but the sound of her voice brought back her night time kindness. It was going to be a morning, then, of contradictions, of opposites, and it began in me.

      English bacon is not remotely like what Americans eat. Oh, it comes in strips of alternating fat and meat, and it’s fried in a skillet, but there all resemblance ends. I managed to get it down, but the fried, ripe tomatoes were too much to stomach. Still, the coffee was hot and the effort put into the meal carried a lot of weight. I felt fortified.

      “I haven’t cooked for anyone since Henry died,” Mrs. Fern told me. “He always liked a big breakfast, but he was a big man.”

      I eyed the remains on the table. “How big?” I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud.

      “Oh, eighteen stone, easily.”

      A stone is fourteen pounds. I did the math—Henry had been just over twice my weight. No wonder I felt stuffed.

      “I rang up Lady Phelps,” Mrs. Fern said. She was smiling, again. “If you can be at the hotel at noon, you’ll be met.”

      “Thank you,” I managed.

      “Saint Albans is really quite the small town.” My hostess busied herself with the dishes. “You’ll get used to it, I daresay.”

      Mrs. Fern’s attentions, as well intentioned as they obviously were, left me feeling a little boxed in. Traffic rumbled outside. It was still early in the day. I decided to play tourist before the meeting.

      The Abbey towered high above the street. It is less, now, than it was four hundred years ago—most of the out-buildings are long gone—so I could only wonder how the spire had seemed to a medieval villager in a town a tenth the size of the present Saint Albans.

      Once the stables had held stalls for three hundred horses. There had been a dormitory with room for a hundred monks, who had owned property the length and breadth of England that raised crops and animals to support them. Even the town mill had been the abbey’s property. In every way, the abbey had been the center of the life of the town.

      Now, it was just a church, something on the periphery of these people’s lives, a relic of the past.

      Cars zipped along the road. Citroens and Vauxhalls, Mercedes and an incongruous American minivan. The street shuddered with the passing of a truck—a lorry, I remembered.

      When a break in the rush hour traffic came, I scooted across the sun-shot street.

      I glanced back at Mrs. Fern’s house; the corner of a curtain twitched discreetly. I turned down the hill, pretending to survey the ground that dropped gently away below me.

      A low hum grew out of the traffic noise, rhythmic and mechan-ical. It swelled to a clattering roar. Shadows darkened the earth. A flight of three military helicopters, one bloated transport and two vicious gunships, split the heavens. Their rotor blades beat the sky, the earth, and the space between. I felt an instant of sharp panic before I realized that it must be the remnants of the royal family leaving Saint Albans. As the sound diminished and the helicopters flew off to the south, I finally released the breath I had been holding.

      The curtain twitched again. The abbey could wait until I didn’t feel the pressure of prying eyes.

      I walked down the hill. I had spent so much time imagining the place, it was as if I’d been here before. The maps I had studied unfolded on the land before me. I turned left at Abbey Mill Lane and went through the ancient gate house, passing the almonry on my left, where the monks had distributed alms to the poor of the town. Even then, charity had been bureaucratic.

      On the right, as I went further, parallel to the long-fallen wall, lay the foundations of the old stables. Ahead, at the bottom of the hill, the River Ver flowed, and beyond it were the ruins of the original Roman town, Verulamium. Further lay the suburbs, where there had once been woodland.

      Stop here.

      I whirled, but no one was near me. The last of the morning’s dew sparkled on the mown lawn. I don’t need a nervous breakdown now, I thought. I walked on, determined to maintain my self control.

      Clio.

      “Stop it, whoever you are,” I said, my voice as firm as I could make it. “It’s a lousy joke.”

      Silence was the only answer.

      I had things to do. The town library awaited me, with its collection of old books, records of times past. Lady Phelps was preparing for the meeting that would determine my future. I was nervous about what I might be getting myself into. I was impatient to get on with my tasks, whatever they were. I very much did not want to hear any more from an inexplicable voice.

      So of course, I did.

      Clio, he said.

      The voice came from behind me. I turned. The lawn was empty.

      If this was a hallucination, I didn’t have to respond.

      Don’t you want proof?

      If this was really happening—and it couldn’t be—the owner of a voice that could speak inside my head would know what I was thinking. It didn’t need my verbalized answer. Proof of what—that I had snapped under the strain of travel?

      Come this way. Something tugged at me. I shivered and backtracked in the direction the pull came from, as if the voice were a magnet and all the iron in my blood longed for it.

      Here.

      The tug turned into a push. A weight on my shoulders, a weakness in my knees.

      I knelt on the grass. Dew soaked cold and wet through my hose. I felt through the grass until my hand, chilled with the morning’s moisture, closed on a small, hard object.

      The thing filled my hand, heavy for its size. A hint of coppery blue-green glowed through the whitish crust that covered it. The encrustation, pitted and brittle, gave way as I picked at it. Finally, a use for the long nails I’d worked so hard to maintain. Underneath, corroded by God knows how long an immersion in the soil, was a brooch. The long pin, the thinnest part, was missing, dissolved by centuries of seepage.

      I thought it might be bronze. The body of the brooch was intact, the abstract outline of a fish.

      I turned it over, still picking at the crust, until my nail broke.

      The brooch scared me. It was a talisman, a juju. I didn’t know what to make of my find, but I knew where to go to discover how old it was.

      When frightened, I seek knowledge; it’s how I keep the goblins away. If this thing was real, was ancient, was put into my hands by a voice I didn’t want to admit the existence of, I didn’t know what I would do.

      The Verulamium museum lay within walking distance to the northwest. I stuffed the brooch, if that’s what it was, into my purse and continued down the hill. Abbey Mill Lane ended near an old Roman wall. A paved path led between the river and a small lake. Somewhere nearby was a burial ground that dated back to before even the Romans.

      The museum came into view at my left, at one end of a neatly tended park. As I reached for the door, it swung open. A volunteer, gray-headed and petite, jumped back. I flinched, as well.

      “Oaow!” Her voice slithered through a nasal swamp of vowels before she regained control.

      “I’m so sorry,” she apologized. Then she gave me that “Can I help you?” routine, in a tone that means you’re not to be trusted alone with the goods. Finally, she looked past me and managed a smile. “You’re alone, then. People aren’t usually waiting at the door.” Her accent improved with every word and her face mirrored the transition. “Two pounds fifty, please.”

      I apologized for frightening her and paid the entry fee.

      The jewelry display cases were in the middle of the large room. I bent over a collection of brooches, under glass like tiny, ancient pheasants.

      It was there. The card denoted the pin as fourth century C.E., Romano-British.

      It was ancient.

      My hand went into my purse. I didn’t want to take my find out for comparison, for fear of being accused of making off with a national treasure, but I let my fingers trace the rough shape while my eyes did the same with the brooch under the glass—a simple icon of a fish, pointed on one end, with the hint of an eye, the tail formed where the two bronze curves met and crossed.

      They were identical. So it was real, or a perfect fake.

      Satisfied?

      The voice, insistent, intruding, startled me. In the next instant, the docent spoke at my side.

      “Is there something I can help you with?”

      “Leave me alone!”

      I thought she was the ghost. I didn’t mean to be rude. The words just popped out.

      “I’m sorry.” I stuttered through an apology. “I thought‑‑”

      “It’s quite all right, I’m sure.” She eyed me as if she thought I carried a bomb in my purse.

      The thought of explaining that I had believed her a disembodied voice who’d been bothering me drove me outside. I was off to a great start. By tomorrow, the whole museum staff would be on the lookout for a crazy, rude American woman. Thanks a lot, I muttered to my subconscious. It was blessedly silent.

      I didn’t want to go back to my room; Mrs. Fern would ask questions to which I had no answers. I was already persona non grata at the museum. I had my meeting with the mysterious Lady Phelps, but not until noon.

      So I walked. The pull, the voice, and the brooch tantalized me with a pattern that I might understand with only a little more knowledge. I turned a corner into the park and, out of sight of the museum, pulled the brooch from my purse and slipped it into my skirt pocket. I willed myself into invisibility, afraid of being caught with contraband. Britain, after stealing God knows how many archeological objects from Egypt, Greece, and every other land its empire had reached, no doubt had a national treasures act of its own, and I was in violation of it.

      I don’t know how long I walked. Verulamium was a ghost town, so in some sort of way, I suppose I belonged there. It was part of the pattern.

      I tried to come to grips with what had happened to me. All of it could be explained. Archeologists had been pulling similar Romano-Celtic jewelry from the dirt around here for decades; the proof was in the museum. I just happened on the latest piece to work itself up out of the earth, like the stones in a New England farm field.

      And it wasn’t really a voice; it was just my intuition. “You have a wonderful imagination, Clio.” That’s what my teachers had always said. “Don’t trust it,” Mama had warned. “It’ll turn on you, the way it turned against me.” So she never put my crayoned pictures on the refrigerator. And she didn’t let me make up stories. Only the real and the solid and the agreed-upon was allowed into her house. So whatever it was, there was a rational explanation.

      But still, as I walked among the buried ruins of the old city, I half-expected to hear the voice again. I passed the old Roman theatre, then turned back into the park proper. A couple of insulae—city blocks, literally, “islands”—had been excavated decades before. A second dig had been made in the last few years and publication of the results scheduled, but then canceled without explanation. The book had even made it into the publisher’s catalogue before being pulled.

      The sun climbed as I walked. I lost track of time and had to hurry back to the living city.

      Winded from the uphill climb, I finally reached the hotel. At night, the building was unprepossessing. During the day, it reeked of Georgian solidity and price. It was the only place in town that might house the royals for a night. The Communion impressed me more.

      I passed the registration desk. The same clerk was on duty. We ignored each other gleefully. I marched into the dining room to meet Lady Phelps and to see what was what with the Communion of the Saint.

The Communion of the Saint - Chapter 1

It seemed presumptuous to presuppose that anyone would want to pay to read a book without some idea of whether the author could write his way out of a paper bag. Therefore, here is Chapter 1 of my sort-of-historical-sort-of-mystical novel, The Communion of the Saint, which can be listened to (free) on podiobooks.com, read for $19.95 in a DTB, or downloaded (cheap) to read on a Kindle ($0.99).

Chapter 1

     

I have to admit: I was not at my best.

      After the discount airline lost my luggage; after British immigration decided that, without my bags, I looked like a potential terrorist; after being groped by an officious matron who enjoyed her job far too much, and sniffed by a drooling German shepherd (ditto); after recovering my bags from a later flight with only a snarl from a pasty-faced skinhead to show for it; after taking the wrong train from among the dozens on offer at Kings Cross because I was too stubborn to ask for help; and long, long after dark, I finally staggered into the hotel in Saint Albans, only to be told that the hotel was full and my reservation void.

      “You seem to be without the proper form, Ms. Griffin.” The pale, balding clerk leafed through a sheaf of papers. “We require a deposit to hold your reservation beyond six o’clock. It should have been noted on the form, but there is no form. Evidently a mistake has been made.”

      A line of even later arrivals stretched behind me.

      Jeans wrinkled from hours of transatlantic inactivity, blouse spattered from a confrontation between airline coffee and “mild” turbulence, and feeling as crumpled inside as out, I asked, if royalty appeared, whether the management could find room for them. I had always wanted to try that line.

      “Why yes, madam. Of course.” The clerk’s expression told me what he thought of American manners—mine in particular.

      “Then give me their room,” I demanded, a tired, hungry, thoroughly frazzled American bereft of manners of any kind. “They’re not coming.”

      He gave me a thin, mocking smile. His eyes filled with satisfaction.

      “Actually, they’re here. That’s why we’re full up, you see. If you had only rung us up, we could have held your room, but as it is—”

      “Can you recommend another place?” I interrupted.

      My irritation must have shown, for the clerk looked past me to the growing line of people, all pale and European, all of whom I was holding up. “Perhaps a B-and-B. That would be a bed-and-breakfast.”

      It was hard to stomp out of the carpeted lobby while wearing tennis shoes, but I tried. The best I managed was a farewell squeak where the carpet ended and tile began at the entrance.

      I dragged my luggage along the empty street. The tourist board at the town center was closed for the night. I slumped against a trash can by the door, wondering what to do. I hadn’t intended to be difficult in the hotel; it just came naturally.

      A breeze blew up out of nowhere, strong and strange; the night was clear, the air dry, with no hint of weather. A scrap of paper detached itself from the kiosk in front of the tourist board, not ten feet away from where I stood. The paper whirled in the wind, yet the dirt on the street below it lay undisturbed.

      The scrap of white spun through the night air and grazed my face. I brushed at it and let it fly off on the wind. It circled me, twice, within arms’ reach. I shooed it away, as if it were a moth. It fluttered off, circled, then dived at me like a kamikaze. I batted it out of the air and stuffed it into the trash can.

      The wind sighed and paused, gathering itself, then lifted the paper out of the dustbin—only that single white sheet. I grabbed, but a gust took it just out of reach. The paper hung in the air, trembling.

      Read it. The voice came from behind, in my right ear.

      I whirled, awkward and off balance with all the bags hanging from me, to see who had spoken, but I was still alone.

      It wasn’t a voice, I realized. I was tired, angry, frustrated, jet-lagged. My subconscious had noticed the sign and my conscious mind just hadn’t registered it yet. The rest was just coincidence.

      The wind fell silent. The paper drifted to the concrete, face up.

      Pick it up. Read it.

      I don’t talk to myself—well, not much—and when I do, I sound like me, not like whatever it was I heard. My heart thudded against my ribcage. I spun full circle. Luggage centrifuged out from me.

      No one was there. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that no one had seen my panic or scared by the sound of the voice.

      I picked up the sheet.

      At the top, large hand-drawn letters proclaimed “B & B” in black magic marker. A fringe of inch-long tabs, each marked with a precise, hand-printed telephone number, marched across the bottom. None had been torn off, which meant that—I peered at the flyer in the evening dark—Mrs. Fern was likely to have room.

     

      A proposition: God’s not there. Everything is accident, happenstance. How you can live your life without hope is beyond me.

     

      Mrs. Fern’s bed and breakfast faced the abbey gate house on Romeland Hill. I neared the old Gothic buildings, not afraid, exactly, but cautious. I had studied the abbey and town from afar. I felt like a private eye who’d gotten too close to someone she was shadowing, in over my head before I’d even begun.

      Mrs. Fern’s was one in a row of nineteenth-century red brick houses that lined the lane. The abbey loomed, a great gray shadow on my left. Only the church itself and the two-storied gate house still stood. The rest had vanished with the zeal and the greed of the Protestant reformers during the sixteenth century.

      This one. The voice again.

      “Nothing’s happening.” I spoke aloud. “It’s fatigue, stress.” The dark sidewalk was empty. There was no one to hear me. This whole voice business was just some intuition, welling up from my unconscious because I was too frazzled to censor it.

      The paper flew out of my grasp and stuck to the door of the house where, it seemed, I was to go. An enormous mulberry bush hid the house number. I hauled my bags up the short flight of steps and rang the bell.

      “Can I help you, dear?” A woman in late middle age held the door open a scant inch.

      I held out the flyer. “Do you have a room to rent?”

      “You were only to tear off one of the tabs, not take the whole thing.”

      “I’m sorry.” I forced the apology. Hearing voices makes me nervous. When I’m scared, I get sarcastic. It was long after dark; I had little patience left. “The wind blew it in my face.”

      “Did it, now?”

      “Do you have a room?”

      “They told me, at the tourist board, that no one would see it where I put it up, you know, but it was the only place left. You’re quite the lucky one. Come in.”

      I hoisted my bags over the threshold and into the foyer.

      “Do you have any references?” Her voice sweetened, but I heard a hint of iron, too.

      “I didn’t think I’d need—”

      “You can’t expect me to take a stranger into my home without references. Not in this day and age.” She folded her arms. The lamp in the sitting room behind gave her frizzy gray hair a golden halo; shadow hid her face.

      I delved into my purse for a letter of introduction from  Father Harry—his Towhomit. He had given it to me only two days before. It seemed longer.

      “I’m worried about you, Clio.” He had taken me unawares.

      It was a week after my father’s funeral. Father Harry was an old friend of Papa’s. He had baptized me, thirty-odd years before, and I think he felt that, since all my family was gone now, he owed it to Papa to look out for me.

      “I’m all right. It’s been a rough couple of weeks,” I told him.

      I wasn’t all right, but at least I had something to do. The ticket to England was safe in my jacket pocket. I had carried it with me since it arrived, pre-paid, from the travel agency.

      We were at the grave that held both my parents. Mama had died the year before, and we all breathed a sigh of relief that it had not been by her own hand even as we grieved her going. Papa held on, as long as he could, longer than he had wanted to.

      A pelting June rain had pounded the raw dirt of Papa’s grave. The mound was lower than it had been. Soon, grass would grow green and strong with the spring.

      The wind whistled, preternaturally cold for June in Philadelphia. Father Harry kept a watch out for me from his office in the old rectory of St. Stephen’s. He had served here until his retirement, and a grateful congregation had given the aging widower the use of the old rectory for the rest of his life. He helped out occasionally with the odd service, and the new priest much preferred his own condo in a nicer neighborhood.

      Father Harry’s window looked out over the old church’s graveyard. Papa was the last one who would be buried there. He filled it up, and the church had to give in and close it to new interments. The plot was surrounded by city, and there was no room left. I pulled my jacket tight.

      Father Harry watched for me because every day I’d been coming out to talk to Papa. He—Father Harry—had seen me one morning, and after Mama’s illness and Papa’s death, he took over worrying about me.

      “I’m all right,” I repeated. Somehow, I had to tell him I was leaving. The house was in the hands of another of Papa’s old friends, a lawyer-cum-realtor who would sell it and send me the proceeds. He was handling Papa’s estate, too.

      “I got this, a few days ago.”

      “What?”

      I handed him the much-read letter. It was my notification that my teaching contract would not be renewed, the second blow of the week.

      Father Harry read through it slowly. He squinted in the sunlight. The paper fluttered in the wind.

      “I can’t say much for their timing.” He handed me the letter. “What will you do?”

      I refolded it and stuck it back in the envelope. The creases were beginning to show dirt from too much handling.

      “If I want, I can stay through another year. It’s kind of a warning—they give you a year to find another job.”

      “That’s something, then.” He squinted at me again. The clouds reflected from his spectacles. “You’re thinking of not staying?”

      “There’s a job, in England, that I might get. It starts right away. And I don’t want to stay at the college if they don’t want me.”

      Father Harry strolled, and I followed. I knew he wanted to get me away from the graves.

      “The teaching—it went badly, then?”

      I shook my head. “The teaching went fine. It was the publishing. I could never get the knack of writing what everyone thought I should.”

      We reached a bench, in the lee of the stone wall. A miniature bronze St. Francis waved to animals that only he could see.

      Father Harry sat. The cold gave his coffee-colored skin a bluish tinge. I sat on his windward side to shield him from the worst of the wind. I liked him, because Papa liked him, and because he had been kind me. I couldn’t manage to believe what he wanted me to, but he was all right. He had paid attention to me as a little girl, and helped when the neighbor kids, both white and black, teased me for not being one way or the other. Red hair and cafe-au-lait skin made an odd combination. They teased me a lot.

      “I don’t suppose I can get you back into church, then.” He brushed at an imaginary wisp of hair. Father Harry’s scalp was as smooth as the stones in the floor of his early nineteenth century inner city church.

      “Maybe later.” The ache of Papa’s absence, never itself absent, swelled until I thought I would choke. I sat by Father Harry, and he put his skinny arm around my shoulders.

      It was years since I cried. I hadn’t cried for Mama. I hadn’t cried when my boyfriend dumped me, months before, complaining that I was too “intense.” I hadn’t cried for Papa. I sat through his funeral, my teeth clamped together like the steel jaws of a vise, the last of my family, alone in the front pew. I hadn’t cried when I got the letter that told me I wasn’t needed any longer at Schuylkill College.

      So I needed to cry, and Father Harry held me while I did it.

      “He’s really gone,” I sniffed.

      “Yes, Clio, he is. I miss him.”

      “Me, too.” I straightened. Father Harry’s eyes were wet, but he handed me his handkerchief. I dabbed and handed it back. “I don’t want to stay. Even if this job doesn’t work out, at least it’ll be a vacation, a change of scene. I don’t want to live in that house any more. It’s too empty. I always expect to see one of them when I go through a doorway, but they’re not there.”

      The tears came again, gentler this time, like rain after the thunder has passed. Father Harry patted my hand. I wouldn’t have taken it from anybody else; no one else had the right.

      “When do you go?”

      “Tonight. This was to tell Papa good-bye.” I pushed one  of his imaginary wisps of hair back into place. “And you.”

      “I’ll miss you, Clio. God go with you.” He raised his hand in blessing, and, like the moment earlier when he patted my hand, I allowed it, even though I didn’t think it would do me any good. Sometimes it’s just the thought that counts, and he was doing what he believed in. I wished I did.

      We sat still for a moment, at loose ends, not quite knowing what to do, before he rose.

      “Where in England is this job?”

      “Saint Albans. Outside London.”

      “You’ll want to tell your father, then.” His voice was gentle. He smiled, as if he had a secret, then tottered off.

      I returned to the grave.

      Every day for a week I’d come here. Every day for a week he’d stayed dead, silent, so I talked to him, but only when we were alone.

      In a way, I was glad he didn’t answer. As long as the dead stay silent, we’re safe. The divide is not bridged.

      The earth on his grave was raw, moist with the rains of late spring, dark and muddy. Wind tore at the dying storm and opened a rift in the heavens. My corner of the cemetery glowed for a long moment, before the gray clouds again roofed the world.

      Go.

      It was only one word. The sound, if it was a sound, must have welled up from my subconscious. I replayed it in my head—Go. It was all right to leave him now.

      I stood at the foot of his grave and missed him. Part of me wondered what he was doing now. Part of me insisted he was lying in a box under hundreds of pounds of dirt.

      After a while, I couldn’t take it any more. I wrapped my jacket tight and walked toward the gate.

      Father Harry met me by the rectory.

      “I know we already said our good-byes, Clio, but I wanted you to have this.” He held out a white envelope. “It’s a Towhomit.”

      “A what?” Towhomit sounded like a birdcall.

      Father Harry smiled. “My little joke. It’s a letter of reference, which begins ‘To Whom It May Concern.’ You might find it useful. I’ve been to Saint Albans, although it’s been some years. The letter merely asks that the reader give you any assistance he might.”

      I accepted the envelope and hugged Father Harry. He was all bones, as fragile as china. “Thank you.”

      “Go with God, child.”

      I nodded, unable to speak. It was part emotion—I might never see him again—and part unwillingness to argue the point. It was no time for theology. Instead, I got into my car and drove away. Father Harry stood at the graveyard’s gate and waved good-bye.

      I held out his Towhomit to Mrs. Fern.

      She studied the letter until, satisfied with my respectability, she handed it back.

      “I suppose you’re safe enough. At least you have enough baggage you won’t be sneaking out.” She told me the rate. It was two orders of magnitude cheaper than the hotel. “That includes breakfast. Other meals are extra.”

      Mrs. Fern pointed at the thinnest bag where I kept my laptop. “Is that a computer?”

      “Um, yes, it is,” I stammered.

      “The power is a little iffy. Do you have an adapter?”

      She was more savvy to high tech than I expected. I nodded.

      “Come ahead, then. You’ll want to see the room, I expect.”

      She led me into the parlor.

      “No telly. I don’t hold with it.”

      I explained that I didn’t plan to spend my time in front of the idiot box, then we were on the narrow stair that led to the second floor, except that she called it the first. England seems like the States on the surface, but it’s not.

      She led me through a wide hall, lit only by a single sconce. Mrs. Fern’s sensible shoes clacked on the polished wood.

      “I’m very particular,” she told me, “about neatness. How long will you stay?”

      Then we were in the spare room. A narrow bed ran along the right-hand wall, covered with a flowered spread. A small student desk lay opposite the door, next to a dresser, both of antique pine. The room’s single window penetrated the roof through a gable; its curtains matched the bed spread. A braided oval rug lay on the floor by the bed.

      “The dresser was the one my Henry first bought when we were married. It’s old, but it’s still serviceable.”

      I opened a drawer. The scent of cedar filled the tiny room.

      “The lav is down the hall. I take my bath in the evening, just before bed, so I’ll thank you to use it another time, and clean the tub when you’re finished. There’s a cloth for the purpose in the bath closet. Breakfast is at half seven. Will you take it?”

      I caught on to her abrupt shifts of subject. For the second time she had asked if I wanted the room.

      “Yes.”

      “How long?”

      “I don’t know how long I’ll be here. A week?”

      “Not big on plans, are you? I imagine I can stand anyone for a week. Payment in advance.” She named a figure. I counted out the oversized bills. Another difference.

      “Let’s get your bags. You certainly brought enough.” She led me back through the hall and down the stairs. “I like my privacy, I’ll warn you. Some think I’m a little dotty, but I’ll leave you alone, and thank you to do the same unless invited. What brings you to Saint Albans? I wouldn’t think an American tourist would find enough to do to spend a week here.”

      I grabbed the computer first.

      “A writer, are you?” Mrs. Fern took two suitcases by herself. I picked up the third. We staggered back upstairs. “My Henry hated to read, but I love it.”

      The assault of conversation finally ceased after we deposited the bags in my room. Mrs. Fern’s retreating footsteps echoed down the hall. I dropped on the bed.

     

      A counter-proposition: God is there; the universe has purpose and direction. How you can live your life without being terrified of judgment is beyond me.

     

      When I awoke, it was still dark outside. Light glared from the ceiling. My watch showed two-fifteen. I walked softly down the hall to the bathroom. When I pulled the chain that flushed the overhead tank, water thumped through the pipes and gurgled down the bowl. I cringed at the racket and readied my apology, but Mrs. Fern did not appear.

      I relish the stealthy hours when all around me sleep. Secrets pile up in the day. At night, I take them out of hiding, turn them over, get to know them.

      This voice in my ear had me worried—afraid, if truth be told—but if nothing more happened, I could repress the whole business. I would have to make sure, though, to get enough rest, eat properly, and exercise.

      I worried because Mama had heard voices, and I was always scared that what she had was hereditary. It’s one thing to be eccentric; I can’t help that I see the world from off-center. It’s quite another to have to be locked up and physically restrained so that you don’t obey the voices in your head.

      Mama knew she was crazy, at least part of the time. I saw in her eyes the desperation, the fear. She let herself into the hospital, to protect me and Papa, but nothing we or the doctors or the nurses could do helped. Drugs that didn’t sedate her made her manic.

      This train of thought wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to relax, not get myself all wired up. Doing something was better than lying there obsessing; I unpacked, with exaggerated care, so as not to disturb my hostess. The computer was first.

      I found my music next. Headphones on, I listened to the serene voices of chanting Benedictine monks. Their measured voices, rising and falling in ancient unison, calmed me better than Mama’s medications had ever done for her. My clothes went into the old dresser.

      The room still looked untenanted. I stuffed my bags inside each other and hid them in the closet. My watch showed three—too early to do anything, but I knew that sleep wouldn’t come now. With medieval plainsong ringing in my ears—I always keep the volume too loud—I found myself with nothing to do but listen.

      At first, the voice was one among the many chanting in my ears.

      “No,” I pleaded, “go away.”

      I shook my head. The headphones dropped to encircle my neck, their touch a tickling hand around my throat. Tinny voices still droned, but far away—except for one.

      I switched off the CD player. Still, the voice spoke softly, a resonant whisper at the edge of hearing.

      I threw the headset across the room. The portable CD player clattered to the wooden floor.

      Muffled footsteps approached. A rapid series of knocks shattered the momentary silence.

      “Are you all right?”

      My heart was pounding, my breathing ragged. I couldn’t let my landlady see me like this. I took a few seconds to gain control, then opened the door. Mrs. Fern, in her dressing gown, her hair in blue plastic rollers, cocked her fist to knock again.

      “Are you all right?” A frown creased her forehead.

      “I’m sorry. I dropped something.” That was true, if incomplete. “I couldn’t sleep.”

      “It’s the time change, I expect—jet lag.” Mrs. Fern’s expression relaxed. “Come downstairs. I’ll make us a cup of tea. I don’t sleep as much as I used to, anyway.”

      “I don’t want to be any trouble.” But she had already started down. I followed. At that point, I didn’t want to be alone.

      “It’s no trouble. I get up in the night. It’s so quiet and peaceful—like stolen time.” Mrs. Fern busied herself at the sink and stove while I sat at the kitchen table. She stared out the window, blessedly silent, while we waited for the water to boil and steep.

      Mrs. Fern snapped her fingers. The noise jarred me out of my funk. “Gracious, you’re still dressed. Don’t you have a dressing gown?”

      She left me alone and dashed up the stairs. I followed her progress overhead.

      The voice sounded again, in recognizable English, just below the threshold of understanding. Male.

      “No,” I whispered, pleading. “Leave me alone.”

      To keep from listening, I examined the kitchen. The fixtures—stove, refrigerator, sink, cabinets—were relics of the nineteen-forties. Everything was white and silver, tinted by the yellow glow of the ceiling light. The floor was a black and white chess board. The table was all chrome and marbled formica. I sat at one of four metal chairs with cushions of gray vinyl. The window hulked over the kitchen sink, a black hole looking out on the deeper black of a back yard, flanked by red and white checkered curtains.

      Footsteps thudded again overhead, then down the stairs. No one could call my hostess dainty.

      “Here—try this on.” Mrs. Fern held a white terry housecoat.

      “I couldn’t—”

      “I bought it for my guests to use. You’re the first.”

      I stood and let her wrap me in the thick robe. The soft weight slid deliciously around my shoulders and I pulled it close.

      “I should have gotten it out right away,” Mrs. Fern said. “I just didn’t expect anyone so soon. They’re such a bother to pack—so bulky. When I decided I had to let the room, I thought about the problems of traveling and the robe was one of the first things I bought. Tea?”

      I held out my cup.

      I always suspect compassion. As Mrs. Fern filled the cup, I looked into her face. Her hazel eyes, flecked with bits of brown and green, watched my cup. Steam and the moist scent of tea rose between us. Her skin was that milky color I would have killed for as a child, before I knew I could never have it. Age lines showed around her mouth and eyes, and her chin had a smaller, looser neighbor underneath.

      Her eyes met mine. I shifted my gaze, caught watching in an unprotected moment.

      “Your hand is trembling, dear.”

      I set my cup down, harder than I intended. Tea sloshed onto the table.

      “I’m sorry—you’ve been so kind, and—” Before I could finish my apology, Mrs. Fern had mopped up the mess and refilled my cup.

      “It’s quite all right. No harm done.” In spite of her disclaimer, her brows wrinkled. I lifted the cup with both hands and let the steaming tea fill my nostrils; it smelled of distant sunshine. I sipped, carefully.

      “Have you met the ghost yet?”

      I spluttered. Tea sprayed in all directions.

      Mrs. Fern handed me the tea towel after using it on herself. “I see you have.”

      This time I mopped up after myself.

      “He doesn’t usually manifest to strangers. You’re quite fortunate, actually. And don’t worry,” she added, anticipating me, “he’s quite harmless. It’s just that here, next to the abbey, he seems to be especially present. I think he’s beneficent, actually. He’s certainly never harmed me.” I couldn’t think of an answer. Mrs. Fern changed the subject. Again. “What kinds of things do you write?”

      “History,” I managed. “I’m an assistant professor of history.” Or was, I added mentally.

      “Oh, splendid!”

      Her enthusiasm, so soon after her revelation about the ghost, disconcerted me, if I had ever been concerted, since getting here. Nothing was the way I had planned it.

      “Does he talk to you?”

      I couldn’t answer. Maybe my silence was confirmation enough, but I was not about to trade paranormal experiences, or whatever I was suffering from, with an old woman I’d just met, no matter how kind she was.

      Mrs. Fern took the cups to the sink. I followed with the silver and the wet towel. Side by side, we stood motionless before the dark window.

      “Clio—may I call you Clio?—you seem quite at sixes and sevens. Surely it can’t all be jet lag.”

      I twisted the tap. Water splashed noisily into the sink. I hadn’t planned on explaining anything to anyone, especially a woman I had just met.

      My hands seemed to move of their own accord. I washed, Mrs. Fern dried. I didn’t want her to think me crazy; I did quite enough of that on my own.

      “Just too many things have happened lately,” I answered. But she deserved some sort of explanation; she’d taken me into her house and now probably wondered whether she’d been foolish to do so.

      I explained about Daddy’s death, holding to the barest detail.

      The soap made the tea things slippery. I washed her cups and silver carefully, aware of her attention.

      Washing dishes can be a road to contemplation. My job had faded away in a denial of tenure. The small college where I had taught expected me back for only one more year. I couldn’t see the point of hanging on. The chairman’s lies still stung.

      “It’s not the kind of thing we had hoped for from you.” Assistant professors have no rights. Only tenure gives an academic job security.

      It was a small school, but had an influential bunch of scholars. If they rejected me, I’d have trouble finding work. I couldn’t just look in the want ads under “Historian.”

      “I fought for you,” the chairman said, needing, for his conscience, a final lie.

      I know, in my heart of hearts, that white men are not the enemy. My father was a white man, and he loved me and my mother even when she grew strange and crazy, before the end. I know white men are not evil, but I have to keep reminding myself. It keeps me confused most of the time. I’d just avoid thinking about it, if I could.

      “I fought for you, but it just didn’t work out.” The chairman could hardly wait to see me gone.

      We finished the washing. I stayed at the sink, peering into the dark window, and told Mrs. Fern the story of losing my job.

     

* * *

      Schuylkill College perched on a hill above its namesake river. The stream bounded Philadelphia west of City Line Avenue. From the campus, the view stretched from the sheds of the rowing clubs in the northwest to the Art Museum in the opposite direction. I parked the car and headed for the history building. One chore left.

      The secretary, Diane, was sympathetic. “He’s got your check, Dr. Griffin.” She pointed at the door to the chairman’s office. The semester was over, and Schuylkill didn’t have a summer term. “He said something about an exit interview.”

      “Thanks for the warning.”

      My tennies squeaked on the tiled floor of the hallway. Doctor Pflugerman would hear me coming, and know who it was. Only students and his maverick assistant professor, now retired, dressed so informally. The high gloss of wax on the tile didn’t help at all.

      Maybe he hadn’t heard, though. I got past his door and ducked into my office.

      The bookshelves were empty, except for a patina of dust. My books were in storage. I sat at the desk and opened one drawer after another, a final check before finishing this forever. A few stray pencils and pens, the odd paper clip, rattled.

      “You’re too prickly, Griffin.”

      This was from the man who—I had it on Diane’s authority—cast the deciding vote against me at the tenure meeting.

      “Me, Pflugerman?” I returned him exactly the amount of respect he offered me.

      He held a white window envelope between thumb and forefinger. I halfheartedly reached for it before he snatched it away. It was an accustomed game between us. He played it when he wanted me to pay attention to him, as if he believed he wasn’t worthy of notice unless he had something I wanted. Maybe I was a too-willing accomplice in the game.

      “I don’t want to play.” It was just too much effort. “What do you want?”

      He dropped the last paycheck on my desk.

      “I’m sorry about your father.”

      I nodded. If I bit my lip hard enough, maybe I wouldn’t cry.

      Pflugerman waited until I gained control.

      “I like you, Griffin.”

      That was a surprise. I looked up.

      Pflugerman was a small man, in his late fifties, pudgy and soft around the middle. He had been chairman of the history department for a dozen years. He had spent the last decade trying to leverage it up into national prominence, no easy task in a small, private college in an eastern city. I’d been a part of that effort, for a while.

      “You could have voted for me, then.”

      “There was no point. I fought for you, as much as I could. The truth is, Griffin, you make people uncomfortable. And you didn’t publish in the right journals. Your work, frankly, isn’t what we’d hoped for from you—too impressionistic, too subjective.”

      We’d been over this ground before. “And not black enough for you.”

      Pflugerman harrumphed. Discussions of race put him on the defensive. He pretended to be color-blind, but no one is.

      “Your background made us hope for a more—”

      “I’m leaving tonight.” There was no point in rehashing old arguments.

      “So soon?”

      “Why stay?”

      “Most people would take some time, give it some thought.”

      The trouble was that Pflugerman did care, but voted against me anyway. Professional sports didn’t invent the salary cap. Without me, he could afford a hotshot urban historian who already wanted to do the kind of work that I hadn’t. I’d tried, God knew, but the thing that drew me was my papa’s heritage. I was black, but I was white, too—English, by at least half, maybe more.

      And if the truth be told, I felt a great relief at becoming free of academia. Public politics are nothing compared to academic infighting. The meanest, roughest, and toughest of politicians could learn a thing or two from an associate professor up for promotion. And there would be no endless pile of blue books to wade through, no slack-jawed suppliant begging at the last possible instant for a way to improve a grade that was etched in stone from the first missed exam.

     

* * *

     

      Mrs. Fern busied herself wiping up the table and putting things away. The dark window held my eyes.

      “What are you working on now?”

      That was the question.

      “I had an offer,” I said, “from some local people.”

      “You don’t mean the Communion, do you?” The surprise in Mrs. Fern’s voice turned me around. Her eyebrows rose, her eyes widened. Her lips compressed in a vain attempt to hide a smile. The tiniest fragment of a snicker escaped her efforts at control, before she turned away.

      Once, I wrote in a grant proposal that I wanted to “explore certain aspects of religious behavior and its impact on the historical chroniclers of medieval England, focused on the work of the chroniclers of Saint Albans abbey.” That’s academese for I didn’t understand why things came out the way they did and I’d like someone else to pay me to make the attempt.

      Pflugerman had sent a copy to the Communion of the Saint. I had a mental image of him chuckling as he addressed the envelope, over sending me off to confront a group of dotty English antiquarians. As nearly as I could tell from the States, they were a group of wealthy locals who felt that the church was giving their patron short shrift. They didn’t appreciate demythologizing, and weren’t shy about saying so. My faculty chairman, anxious to be rid of me, had written them a glowing recommendation; I owed him something for that. Whether it was revenge or thanks I didn’t yet know. When I lost my hope for tenure, the next thing in my mailbox was their offer. I responded, partly because they could pay, partly because it meant a free trip, partly because I didn’t know what else to do.

      Working for the Communion would be a comedown, but it was better than not working at all.

      “I haven’t taken the job yet. So far, it’s only a scouting trip. I’m to meet a Lady Phelps from the society tomorrow. They’re expecting me to be at the hotel.” I explained how I had missed my room. “I’ll have to make contact, somehow.”

      “Leave that to me,” Mrs. Fern said. She had an inward look. A small smile played across her lips. “You’ll need your rest.”

      “I think I could sleep a little, now.” I stood, still wrapped in the heavy white robe. “Thank you for the tea and sympathy. And the dressing gown.”

      “I’ll wake you. If you sleep late, you won’t be worth anything tomorrow.”

      “I don’t want to be a bother,” I protested. Not, I’ll admit, very convincingly.

      “Dear heart, why do you think I’ve opened a bed and breakfast? It’s good to have someone to look after.”

      The voice didn’t bother me this time. I managed to get out of my clothes and wrap myself back up in the bath robe. I fell into sleep like Alice going down the rabbit hole.

Chapter 2 will follow shortly.

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