Communion, Chapter 13

We alleluia-ed, and it was true.

Chapter 13

     

      It took weeks to write it down, to make the words come out right, especially within the length limit that Simon Bluetooth had set for me. I didn’t want to give away the farm, to tell too much of the truth—that my informant, my source on the past, was a long-dead girl-soldier-nun. I’d started calling the pieces “imaginative reconstructions” to avoid awkwardness.

      While I was still working on it, I went into my office to find Leslie Phelps seated at the Ergonodesque, scrolling through screen after screen of what I had written.

      “Oh, there you are.” She looked up from the computer.

      I was speechless with anger. Just what was it she had been reading? I reached around her and hit the computer’s switch on the power strip. The screen snapped to black.

      “That can’t be good for the equipment,” she complained.

      My capacity for speech returned, but I was afraid of what I might say. I managed a tight “Please, Lady Phel—“

      “Leslie,” she interrupted.

      “Please respect my privacy.”

      “Privacy?” She had not the least idea of why I might be offended. “This computer is not your property, Clio. Nor is your work product. I was merely looking to see what progress you’ve made. It’s been some time since you wrote anything new for the Advertiser. You weren’t here. Rather than wait, I investigated.”

      This is my boss, I reminded myself. Don’t piss her off so badly that I have to leave town.

      “Leslie, some of what I write I don’t want to share with people until I’ve finished with it.” I didn’t have anything embarrassing on the Communion’s machine (I saved that stuff for my laptop), but there was a lot of first draft stuff and raw notes that I didn’t want anyone snooping through. “It’s unfinished.”

      She’d just gone down about twenty notches in my estimation. I was one of the servants, sure enough, just like William or Ted.

      “I don’t plan to justify myself to you, Clio. I thought we trusted each other.”

      Fat chance.

      “I don’t mistrust you, Leslie.” Liar liar pants on fire. I felt exposed. I decided to say so.

      “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said. And truth to tell, I didn’t. But I wanted to set sure and certain boundaries between us. “And if I was, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention.”

      “Very well.” The words just barely escaped her thin-lipped face. She wasn’t used to backtalk, as Mama would have called it.

      “Maybe,” I went on, “I’m just being temperamental, but what you want from me is the finished product, right?”

      She managed a stiff nod.

      “First drafts are often rough. Like a painter’s first sketches. I need to feel safe enough to take risks that may not work out.”

      “I’m not ignorant, Clio. I take your point.” Leslie stood. “If you’re quite through, I have business to attend to.”

      She walked out as if she owned the place, which she did. I stayed, feeling resentful and definitely outdone. Of course, I didn’t have generations of experience at lording it over people.

      We Americans call something an antique if it’s a hundred years old. Europeans live in a past more than twenty times as deep. It takes some getting used to. If my eyes were not bound by time, I could see.

      I took my hard-wrought pages to Simon. He’d been after me for more output, too.

      “It sells papers, my dear one, which sells advertising, which puts gold in the pockets of my publishers. They have an affection for profit. So, they have an affection for you.”

      He was at his huge partners’ desk again.

      “I don’t suppose you can arrange to write these little stories any more rapidly,” he asked, after plying me with tea. This time, I had provided him with disk and hardcopy—unstapled. Again, though, he put me through the torture of reading it while I waited.

      “It would help if you spelled things properly.” He marked a spot on the manuscript. “I know how you Americans are, but you’re in Britain.”

      “Sorry.”

      “No you’re not—not a bit.” His looked up from the papers, his eyes twinkling. “But it’s good of you to pretend. How are you getting on with her ladyship?”

      I told him about my run-in with her.

      “It’s a hazard of working for the aristocracy. Or the rich, though they haven’t been the same for some time now.” He made another mark on my story, and I strained to see what it was, but he kept it from me. “Leslie Phelps has money and a title. It can be a savage combination. I always thought she managed rather well.”

      “Snooping through my things is doing well?” I asked.

      “You’re not one of us, Clio. Or as a Texan once said to me while I was visiting Dallas, ‘You’re not from around here, are yew?’”

      “OK, I’m not. So?”

      “So our ways are not your ways. You are an American, and not only that, a black American. You’re an independent woman. You have no living family. You’re very new here and don’t know our ways. And yet you can tell us things about ourselves that we can not see.”

      I was nearly flattered, and said so. I was blushing, too. “I can?”

      “You have no idea how relieved I was when you showed up, instead of some down-on-his-luck Cambridge don. You actually care, and you have no reputation to protect, so you have the ability to be completely honest. All you want is the freedom to work. I’ll talk to Leslie and remind her of just what she’s got as opposed to what she might have had to settle for.”

      I was beyond flattered now. For the second time in the day, I was speechless. I don’t think I’d ever known what Mama meant by the word flabbergasted until this instant, but I sure knew now. I could only look down at my shoes. No one had ever said such things to me, and I could only blush some more. “Thank you.”

      “If you want to thank me, go home and write some more.”

      I stumbled out of his office and took his advice.

     

* * *

     

      There came a tapping at my door. I opened it to find Mrs. Fern, bearing the manuscript of my last vision—or next installment in the ongoing newspaper saga of Saint Alban. She’d asked to see what I was working on, and I couldn’t think of a reason to refuse. It would be in the paper within the week.

      “I’m going up to Dunstable to see my cousin,” she said, “since it’s so fine today. I wondered if you’d care to come along.”

      Go, said my voice, before I could think of a polite excuse. It was really quite a sweet offer.

      Mrs. Fern’s cousin turned out unexpectedly. She was Joan Elspeth, one of the members of my board of directors. I worried that I might be the only person in town who wasn’t directly related to everyone else.

      Joan Elspeth presided over an estate outside Dunstable, on the northern edge of the Chiltern hills.

      “Most of it is no good for farming,” she explained. “Much too much up-and-down for the plough. I keep some of it in woodlot, some of it in sheep, and some I just let run wild. As far as I know, parts of this land have never been cultivated.”

      Mrs. Elspeth dressed in worn tweeds. She’d “kept up” with me through Lady Phelps (Leslie) and her cousin, Mrs. Fern.

      “You might enjoy—we’re quite off the beaten track, you know—you might enjoy the little valley where I go walking some of the time. It’s quite peaceful, actually.”

      I thanked her and wondered what she needed to get away from. Leslie, for one, I guessed. The Elspeth estate, like its owner, was far from that beaten track she had spoken of. I did not know that such wildness could exist on this heavily and long-populated island.

      “You must call me ‘El,’ my dear. We’ll all go tramping through the wood together. It leaves precious little time for honorifics.”

      It was a splendid day. The sun shone down on a landscape ruffled by October winds. The autumn rains were suspended, for the time being, having left behind them a last haze of dark green before winter’s browns and grays.

      El and Mrs. Fern—Jane, now—changed into clothing suited for hiking through the woods. Since I seldom wear anything else, except when forced by circumstance, we were all three soon ready. El had packed a hamper with food. Off we went.

      El was right about her land; there was far too much up-and-down. After an hour’s trek, we topped a hill and looked back across the valley toward our starting point. My panting must have signaled my dismay, for El said, “You ought to get out of the library and see the real world more. It’s worth the effort.”

      El had an authority about her that Jane lacked, as did Lady Phelps. Maybe it came from her apparent wealth. Or perhaps the huge Dane who must have figured in her bloodline, but not in Jane’s, contributed something, a thousand years after the fact. El was easily fifty, easily six feet tall, and easily could have turned out shy, horsey, and ungainly. Instead, she manifested as sure and stately.

      Sweating heartily in spite of the autumn breeze, we moved down the hill, along a narrow path, El in the lead, me in the middle, and Jane bringing up the rear.

      El held up a hand. “Wait here.” She took the basket from Jane and disappeared ahead.

      “What’s going on?”

      “El’s a bit of a show-woman,” Jane said, smiling. “I told her what part of the legend you were working on, and she’s cooked up a treat. So many people ask me about you and what you’re doing. They don’t mean to pry—and I don’t say anything; I’m not a gossip—but El is special, and, after all, a member of your committee. I hope you won’t be angry with me.”

      It all poured out in a rush. Jane was actually blushing. I was flattered, in an odd sort of way. Back in Philly, I would have been offended at the breach of privacy. Here, in this wood or back in Saint Albans, it felt natural. How could people not be curious, maybe even fearful, of what I might say about their patron?

      El reappeared. Her face was flushed with excitement; all her authority was gone. She smiled and shifted from foot to foot as I walked past her and followed the path around a couple of turnings.

      When I made the third turn, there it was. El came up behind me.

      “The locals say—”

      “I know.” The brush and trees could not be the same. The whole place could not be—but there, in front of me, backed by a stand of oaks bright with a red and orange fringe of leaves, was the flat rock I had seen Germanus using as his altar. Across it, like an altar cloth, lay a white linen, its edge ruffling in the breeze. Atop it were bread, wine, fruit, and cheese from the hamper El had packed.

      We ate and drank. What else was there to do?

      One more thing: we alleluia-ed, and it was true.

     

* * *

     

      Joan Elspeth, while Jane was off to the loo, put it this way. “You’ve had quite a time of it.”

      I nodded, wary of giving away too much even to the woman who had shown me the extraordinary glade. There were layers upon layers of ancient loyalties, ancient competitions, among the people among whom I was working. The ties that bound them together were like the strata in an archeological dig. On the surface, there might be an overlay of grass and trees, hiding the old stone, metal, wood and bone that made up their history, but the old bones were still there, their presence felt like a badly healed fracture.

      “Jane and I go back a long way,” El said. “I could say the same about Leslie.”

      We sat in El’s Victorian solarium, in one wing of her country home. Unlike the great hall, just beyond the carved oaken door, her sun room enfolded us in a cozy, sunlit warmth.

      The hall was spectacular, full of ancestral portraits and even a suit of fifteenth-century armor that still bore the dents earned during one of the battles in the War of the Roses. The ancestor who owned it had survived just long enough to get home from the second battle of Saint Albans. He had been too young to participate in the first.

      The solarium looked out over the back lawn. The grass sloped down to where the woods began. We sipped reconstitutive brandy after our trek in the forest. The wind had grown blustery as we returned; the spirits’ heat drove the chill from my skin, working from the inside out.

      “It hasn’t been dull, I assure you,” I answered. “A friend who had been here told me that Saint Albans would bore me to tears, but he was wrong. I haven’t had the chance.”

      It was El’s turn to nod. I decided I had to chance her refusal while Jane was out of the room.

      “Tell me, if you don’t mind—”

      “Which means you think I will.”

      “Maybe.” I tried to think of an easy way to say it, and failed. “What’s between Jane and Lady Phelps?”

      El slumped in her wing back chair. The afternoon sun fell on her short blond hair and lighted her face. Her smile turned to a frown of puzzlement.

      “I’m part of it, too, you know, so I can’t say that my opinion will do much good.”

      “Part of what?”

      “The intrigue.”

      I waited.

      “It’s silly, really. Tragic, in its outcome. Jane and Leslie are cousins, somewhat removed, but cousins still.”

      I put things together mentally. “You’re a cousin, too.”

      “Too right,” El sighed. “I’m the middle one, who still can talk to each of the others. When Jane married Henry, Leslie, whose purpose in life is to judge everything she encounters, found him wanting in social standing. Jane didn’t care. In 1960, she was twenty-four, and a rebel. She smoked pot and fell in love with the drummer of a rock and roll band. The story is simply pitiful. He threw her over and she met Henry on the rebound. He was her age and cared for her through the whole time—got her off the drugs she’d gotten involved with, gave her a sense of self-worth. Leslie couldn’t stand him. He had no education to speak of; he was just a good soul who rescued Jane when she’d needed it. I think she married him out of gratitude, but, as time went on, a real love grew between them. Of course, when Leslie opposed the marriage, Jane grew only more stubborn. You’ve seen how she can be.”

      “How who can be?” Jane spoke from the door. It had opened without El’s noticing.

      “You, dear,” El said, not missing a beat. “I was giving Clio your history. She’s rather caught in the middle of the muddle between you and the unspeakable one.”

      Jane laughed and picked up the thread of the story herself. “She offered me money, you know, after Henry died. I couldn’t take it, of course, because paying me would have released her from responsibility. She pretended she was only trying to help, but it was wergild, as sure as could be.”

      The sky dropped toward the roof of the solarium. The undersides of the clouds hung down like teats on a nursing bitch. Under glass, we watched the sky darken from pale gray to near black. Wind swirled around the glass room and whistled at the joints.

      “I guess we ought to get back, before it breaks on us.” I started to gather up my empty snifter.

      “Too late,” El answered, gauging the sky. “Besides, this is much the best place to watch a storm.”

      Jane waved the decanter of brandy in the general direction of my glass. “I rather feel like letting my hair down, Clio. Do let’s stay the night.”

      A gust rattled the panes. The first spatters of rain, large, heavy and cold gobbets of water, fell on the glass. Swirls of dust, invisible until now, appeared, floating in the rain drops over our heads.

      “This will be a good one!” Jane’s face was turned upward to the storm, her eyes wide with excitement, her lips parted. El still sat in her chair, but her eyes, too, were wide, her face open to the sky. She glanced at me.

      “It’s quite safe. We’ve never lost a pane to a storm in over a hundred years.”

      The warmth of the sun had long since deserted us. I shivered in the chill coming through the glass and around the joints of the old solarium. Maybe it had stood the test of time, but time would win eventually. The fact that it had endured so far didn’t reassure me in the least; it just brought the inevitable closer. Time always won. It was the single lesson of history I was sure I had learned.

      Lightning exploded. The thunderclap went straight through me. Surely the lightning must have struck the house, but the two cousins only grinned fiercely at each other, while I struggled not to cower like a frightened dog.

      The rain fell in earnest now, beating against the glass while the heavens roiled with lightning flashes and bursts of thunder rattled the panes.

      “There’s a new one!” Jane cried, pointing to a spot in the glass ceiling where drops of water pushed through a joint to fall on the flagstones below.

      “No, you missed the last storm,” El shouted back. “It started then.”

      “You knew this was coming?” I asked Jane.

      “I always come out for storms,” she shouted against the roar of the rain, face still turned to the sky. “I thought you’d like it. We hardly ever get one like this.”

      Truth to tell, it excited me, in a way I didn’t recognize, maybe because the two cousins took such open pleasure in the violence of the elements, their faces unguarded. For the first time I saw someone here without the mask of that British combination of reserve and politeness—what Chaucer called politesse—completely absorbed in something, aware of my presence, but not careful of my reaction.

      I moved toward the storm and pressed my face against the glass. Its texture came as a surprise, smooth but rippled from the furnace of a hundred years before, and cold against my skin with the chill of the heavens. Through it came the pounding of the rain, the pressure of the wind, the spasms of thunder. Jane and El couldn’t see my own fierce grin, but it was there. Right on my face.

      My hand slipped into my pocket to grip the ancient brooch. It glowed hot in its secret darkness, smooth and new once again, and I caressed it, longing for the vision this time, for the instant when everything changed.