To Love and to Cherish (8 page)

Christy nodded and walked on, and presently the Hall’s crumbling brick chimneys appeared through the new leaves of ancient oaks bordering the east front of the house. The lane turned again and the building came into full view, three E-shaped stories of pocked and weathered granite, as rugged-looking as the moor from which it had been quarried. The archway of a battlemented gatehouse provided a cold, forbidding entry, but the grassy courtyard beyond was friendlier, if only because it was in disrepair. The house lay quiet except for the cawing of rooks on the gable over the unused chapel; Christy’s shoes echoed loudly on the lichened flagstones as he crossed the courtyard to the entrance, a studded oak portal with the legend “
A.D.
1490” chiseled in the hard granite block overhead.

Mrs. Fruit must have been passing through the entrance hall at the moment he knocked, for she opened the door almost immediately. Rather than shout it, he mimed “Good evening,” and handed her his hat. She took him into the green drawing room and said she’d go and fetch her lady. After she went away, he surveyed the room, trying to spy what was different about it. It was indefinably warmer, more lived in, and not just because of the bowls of fresh flowers on the mantel and the side tables. There were no new furnishings; if anything, there was less furniture now than the last time he’d been here. Ah, now he had it: the heavy velvet window coverings were gone, just
gone
, not replaced by anything. The bare glass should have looked naked and stark, but it didn’t. It was as if not only light but fresh air as well had been allowed back into the room after years of stifling darkness.

“Good evening.”

He turned. Anne Verlaine stood in the doorway with her hand on the post, her head cocked a little, studying him. He wondered how long she’d been there. She wasn’t in mourning tonight; she wore a dark green gown of some soft-looking material, cut in a simpler, more casual style than was the usual fashion for entertaining dinner guests in Wyckerley. The high waist and low neck drew his attention to her breasts, which were full and lovely, in perfect proportion to her height and slenderness. With her hair up, her cream-white neck was exposed, the graceful curve unadorned by jewelry. Her arm fell to her side and she moved farther into the room, and Christy remembered to say “Good evening” back to her.

“Geoffrey will be down soon.” There was a small note of doubt in her voice, though. He saw the strain in her face then, the faint but definite tension in her jaw. She gestured toward the sofa, but didn’t sit down herself. “I’m glad you could come with so little notice.”

He put his hands in his pockets, trying to make her relax by looking relaxed himself. “It’s my pleasure. You saved me from at least another hour with Mr. Nineways, my churchwarden. He’s a good, decent soul, but he’d have made some clergyman a better warden about two hundred years ago. Under Cromwell’s regime, I think.”

“Are you such a liberal, then?”

“Compared to Mr. Nineways, the Russian czar is a liberal.”

She smiled, studying him again. “Do you mind if I ask what made you decide to become a minister?”

He stared back at her, jingling the change in his pocket, considering how to answer. Just then the maid came in with a tray of drinks. “Hello, Susan,” he said, and Susan Hatch smiled back and curtsied to him. He’d forgotten she was a maid here; he knew her parents, sturdy Irish Protestants who never missed Sunday service.

“Thank you, Susan,” said her mistress, dismissing her. She moved to the table on which Susan had set the tray. “There’s wine and sherry,” she informed him, “and whiskey, I think,” she added, looking dubiously at a third decanter. She turned around to face him. “But perhaps you don’t drink, Reverend Morrell. I can ring for something else. A nice glass of barley water, perhaps.”

She was either testing him or making fun of him. He’d asked her once before to call him by his first name, but she seemed to enjoy the formal title. Whenever she said it, she made it sound ever so faintly ridiculous.

“I believe a little sherry wouldn’t hurt,” he said gravely. She lifted her elegant eyebrows. “The worst that can happen,” he added as she began to pour, “is that I’ll run amok and ride my horse into the house.”

She looked up, arrested. When she smiled, he realized he’d never seen her smile genuinely before. Her face was transformed; he couldn’t look away—even though part of him felt the familiar exasperation whenever someone was surprised to find out he was human after all, that he actually had a sense of humor.

“I’ll be careful not to give you too much,” she said as she handed him his glass and poured another for herself. If he’d known nothing else about her, that one unconventional gesture would have told him a great deal, for no proper English lady would serve a drink to a gentleman in her own drawing room; she would let the maid or the butler do it, or failing that, the male guest himself.

Anne looked restless, keyed up, but it must have finally occurred to her that he wasn’t going to sit down until she did, because she took a seat on the edge of a damask wingback chair, and Christy sat down on the sofa across from her. “You haven’t answered my question,” she said. “Or perhaps it’s too personal. By all means—”

“No, not at all,” he assured her, at the same time feeling reluctant to go into it. She would judge him, he knew; fairly or not, he didn’t know. Nor did he understand why her good opinion of him mattered. But it did. “My father was the rector of All Saints Church before me,” he began. “For twenty-eight years. He—”

“Ah,” she said softly, knowingly, as if that explained everything. He looked at her without speaking until she blinked and glanced away. “Sorry,” she murmured. “You hadn’t finished.”

“My father was a good man,” he went on mildly. “Deeply, genuinely religious. Something of a saint, in fact.”

“How . . . trying for you.”

“It was,” he agreed, smiling. “When I was a boy, I found his piety embarrassing. Geoffrey and I—well, you can imagine how we made him into a bit of a joke.”

She looked as if she could imagine it easily.

“After Geoffrey went away, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Here I was in dull, provincial Wyckerley, with nothing but my sixteen-year-old frustrations and half-baked ambitions.”

“What did you want to be?”

“Either a horse jockey or an artist.”

She laughed—another first.

“Since I was too big to be a jockey, I decided to be a painter. I forgot to take into account the fact that I had very little talent.”

“Oh, dear,” she said ruefully. “What did your saintly father think of that?”

“He never said a word about wanting me to become a minister, never in my whole life. But my mother was another story. If he was a saint, she was a soldier. If he was an angel, she was very much a woman of this world. Not to say she wasn’t good,” he hastened to assure her. “But living a Christian life was harder for her, because she didn’t suffer fools gladly—whereas my father saw no harm in anyone—and yet she was truly kind. Anyway, she wanted me to be a preacher from the time I was eight. She spoke of it as a given—‘when you’re a minister,’ ‘when you have a flock of your own,’ ‘when you have to be an example to the whole village.’”

Anne shook her head in sympathy. “It must have been a burden.”

“Like a sack full of stones.” Still, he thought, it hadn’t been as heavy as his father’s angelic example; the lightness of that airy image had weighted him down to the ground.

“And so—?” she prompted. She had her elbow on the chair arm, her chin in her hand, and she was watching him with what seemed to be complete attention.

“When I was eighteen, I left. My plan was to find work at anything, save money, then go to school to learn how to paint pictures. I’m not familiar with your father’s work, I’m afraid,” he digressed. “I imagine he was better known in Europe than here.”

“Marginally,” she said dryly. “Go on. Where did you study?”

“Nowhere you’ve heard of, I’m sure. I’d had no formal training, no training at all, so none of the better schools would have me. I lived in Paris for three years, two in Amsterdam. I almost starved to death. I’m not exaggerating,” he said, laughing. “It was touch and go more than once.”

She nodded as if she understood that, too. “And then?”

“Then . . . my mother passed away. I came home, and for the first time I saw my father falter. It was shattering to me. I’d run away at least partly to escape their power over me, and now one was gone and the other seemed helpless with despair. I felt like a child, but I was being called upon to be the strong one, to take control.”

He paused, and took a sip of the drink he hadn’t touched until now. She was looking at him with veiled surprise and fascination, and also as if she was getting a great deal more than she’d bargained for when she asked her simple question. But it didn’t occur to him to hold back or to tell her anything except the truth, as well as he knew it.

“My father’s health began to fail,” he resumed. “I was his right hand. With my mother gone, I became the one he confided in, and that was a revelation.” He smiled deprecatingly. “Maybe—a Revelation. From God, I mean, of my calling. I saw my likeness to my father for the first time, not just our differences. With nothing between us but love and gentleness, not resentment or immature embarrassment or superiority, I could let myself share his enthusiasms and—rejoice in our blood tie. And the things he told me then, in this new spirit of freedom and openness, were suddenly so meaningful, they couldn’t be ignored.”

He leaned toward her. “Sometimes I wonder now if my vulnerability, the—the tenderness in my heart during that fragile time before he died, might’ve tricked me, trapped me into an unwise choice. And other times, I see it as the direct intercession of the Holy Spirit. I wonder if I’ll ever know which is the truth.”

She didn’t speak. She had her lightly fisted hand over her mouth, so he had nothing to gauge her reaction by except her eyes. Silver-green in the lamplight, they stared back at him owlishly, a trifle worriedly. At least she wasn’t laughing at him.

Now he was the one who felt restless. He set his glass down and stood up. “You might be asking yourself where God is in all of that—my motives and so forth. I’m not sure myself, but most of the time I have faith that he’s in there somewhere.”

More silence.

“Well, I guess I’ve finished answering the question.” She nodded slowly. He locked his hands behind his back and asked her straight out, “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking,” she said, and stopped. She looked into the middle distance, frowning a little, choosing her words. “I was thinking that you and I have something in common.” She smiled at his expression, appreciating his amazement. Of all the things she could have said, that was the one he was least expecting. It struck him then that his obvious skepticism was a not-very-subtle affront. But before he could form an apology, she said, “You see, I wanted to be an artist, too. And like you, I found I had no talent for it. It was . . . one of the tragedies of my youth.” She said “tragedies” with a little laugh, mocking herself, but he didn’t smile. He moved closer, drawn to the sadness in her that he could see clearly for once, all the mystery gone. She lifted her head, meeting his gaze levelly. Something passed between them. Then her fine brows drew together and she said with quick temper, “Don’t you
dare
feel sorry for me.”

“Never.”

She searched his face. She must have found what she wanted, because she looked down, a little embarrassed. “I beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

“All right.”

She smiled, on safe ground again behind her shield of irony. “Do you know, on the whole, I believe you’ve turned out better than I have, Reverend Morrell.”

“Maybe you haven’t finished turning out, Lady D’Aubrey,” he said gently.

“I have, though. Quite finished. Will you please call me Anne?”

“Anne.” The honor wasn’t lost on him.

“Well, now, isn’t this cozy. Anne and Christy, friends together. I’ve waited years for this.” Without stopping, Geoffrey headed straight for the drinks tray and poured out a glass of wine.

“Geoffrey, it’s good to see you.”

“Wonderful to see you!” He tossed off one drink and immediately poured another. “Missed you. Been thinking about you.” He looked at him for the first time. “Are you allowed out like that? Christ, man, you’re not in your full holy blacks!”

Christy smiled, remembering that was what he and Geoffrey used to call his father’s clerical garb. “I only wear my ‘full holy blacks’ on grand occasions. Meaning no offense,” he said for a joke, turning to Anne.

Her face shocked him. Gone were the humor and tentative friendliness, replaced by a careful blank mask, which nevertheless failed to hide a tension that verged on desperation. From that moment, the evening became hellish for Christy. Geoffrey’s jokes grated on his nerves like fingers on a chalkboard, because he’d begun to hear them through Anne’s ears. The forced bonhomie grew increasingly grotesque, and he found himself counting, like a temperance fanatic, the drinks Geoffrey consumed. Anne said almost nothing during the long, uncomfortable meal, during which she and Geoffrey never looked at each other. What was happening here? What was the source of this terrible unspoken strain? As green as he was, Christy had already been called upon to offer counsel to any number of troubled couples—but this went beyond any unsatisfactory marriage he’d ever encountered. There was a secret between the Verlaines, and he was beginning to be afraid that he was the last person who could help them. Because he had a stake, a favorite. His neutrality had been compromised.

When dinner was finally over, he was afraid Anne would leave. “Will you join the gentlemen for their masculine brandy and tobacco?” Geoffrey asked her, with the drawling sarcasm Christy hated. “Or do you prefer your own company, my love?”

She was ready to bolt, a polite exit line on the tip of her tongue. “Please join us,” Christy said quickly, seriously. Geoffrey glanced between them and laughed. She sent her husband a look that held such contempt, Christy shivered. “Very well,” she murmured, and they all three adjourned to the drawing room.