“Why? So I can go straight to heaven? Do you think I’m going to heaven, Vicar? Eh? Think I’m—” He ran out of breath; his parchment-colored face turned blue until he sucked in a wheezing gulp of air. By now he was too weak to cough; he kept swallowing until the spasm passed, then lay exhausted, hands limp on his sunken chest.
Christy sat down again in the high-backed chair he’d pulled as close to the bed as the old man would allow.
Dr. Hesselius ought to be here, he couldn’t help thinking. “Send for me if you need me, but I doubt that you will,” he’d told Christy two hours ago, in this room. “He’s not in any pain—they frequently aren’t at this late stage. I doubt he’ll live through the day. I’ve done all I can; old Edward’s in your hands now, Reverend.” Christy had nodded at that, gravely, calmly, as if the prospect didn’t demoralize him.
In his own estimation, at least on good days, he was a reasonably effective clergyman, considering he was new at his calling and his best qualities were still only earnestness and perseverance. But he had numerous failings, and they had a perverse way of multiplying and combining at extreme times like this, when his deepest wish was to give comfort and consolation to the needy. Edward Verlaine offered a special challenge, and Christy despaired that he wasn’t up to it.
Memories kept intruding on his best efforts to pray. In the sparsely furnished room, a dark, gilt-framed oil painting of Lord D’Aubrey’s grandfather loomed conspicuously over the mantelpiece; a peculiar grayish blur under the haughty-looking ancestor’s nose made Christy smile, albeit a bit grimly. He recalled the day, probably twenty years ago now, when he and Geoffrey, his best friend, had stolen into this room, giggling and shushing each other, giddy with nervous excitement. Christy hadn’t really believed Geoffrey would do it, but he had: he’d stood on a chair and drawn a charcoal mustache on the scowling face of his great-grandfather. Faint traces still lingered, the charcoal basing proven remarkably resistant to numerous efforts at removal. Christy wondered if Geoffrey still bore the marks from the thrashing his father had ordered for punishment—delivered by his steward, not himself, for even in his rages Edward Verlaine had kept his distance.
The words in Christy’s Book of Common Prayer began to run together. He rolled his stiff shoulders, fighting oil the sleepiness that kept dragging at him. He stood up and went to the window. Drawing back the curtain, he looked out past Lynton Great Hall’s derelict courtyard toward the tall black spire of All Saints Church, halt a mile away and all that could be seen from here of Wyckerley, the village where he’d grown up. It was April; the gentle, oak-covered hills were a brilliant yellow-green, and the Wyck, normally a placid little river within its steep-sided banks, churned down from Dartmoor with the force of a torrent. He and Geoffrey had fished in the Wyck year-round, ridden their ponies up and down every sunken red lane in the parish, left urgent messages for each other in a crevice of the gray stone monolith at the crossroads. They’d been all but inseparable for the first sixteen years of their lives—until Geoffrey had run away. In twelve years, Christy hadn’t heard a word from him.
Until six days ago, when a note had come to the rectory. “Just tell me when the bastard croaks,” Geoffrey had scribbled on the back of a tailor’s bill—and that only after Christy had written repeatedly to the London address he’d finally gotten from Lord D’Aubrey’s solicitor. “How the hell are you?” he’d scrawled in a postscript. “You’re joking, aren’t you? A minister? ?”
Christy wasn’t surprised that his new vocation seemed like a joke to Geoffrey, considering all the times that, as boys, they’d made fun of Christy’s gentle, pious father. “Old Vicar,” the villagers called Magnus Morrell now, although he’d been dead for four years; and Christy, inevitably, was “New Vicar.” Stories of Geoffrey’s wild, decadent life in London and other worldly flesh-pots were hard to reconcile with competing and almost equally incredible rumors that he was a mercenary soldier, ready to take up arms for any cause that paid enough money for his services. Christy had stopped missing him—even the deepest wound heals in time—but he’d never stopped wondering what had become of him.
A noise from the bed made him start. The viscount’s face, yellow with jaundice, had turned on the pillow; he was glaring at him. “You.” It came out an accusing croak. “Don’t want you. Where’s your father?”
“My father’s dead, sir,” he reminded him gently, leaning over the bed.
Recollection took the anger out of the old man’s hard black eyes, but a truly ghastly smile curled at the corners of his mouth. “Then I’ll see him soon enough, won’t I?”
Christy fumbled with his prayer book, reconsidered, and laid it aside. He hated the pain he felt at this moment, and the inadequacy, and the trivial sound of all the things that came into his mind to say. He felt like a child again—like the boy who had grown up terrified of this dying wreck of a man, hating him on principle because Geoffrey, his best friend, had hated him.
He bent closer, into the old man’s line of vision. “Would you like to pray?”
Out of habit, the viscount’s eyes narrowed with contempt. A moment passed. He turned his face away. “You pray,” he exhaled on a feeble sigh.
Christy opened his book to the Psalms. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he began, prosaically enough; “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul—’”
“Not that one. Before that.”
“The—”
“The twenty-second.” His eyes closed in exhaustion, but the bloodless lips curved again, sardonic. “Read it, Parson,” he rasped when Christy hesitated.
He scanned the seldom-read psalm in dismay. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’” He read the prayer in a low voice, but it wasn’t possible to soften the desperate message. “They cried unto thee, and were delivered; they trusted in thee, and were not confounded. But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn . . . ‘”
A sound silenced him; he looked up. Edwards eyes were closed, his jaws clamped in a grimace; but, for all his efforts, tears trickled through his papery lids. Christy reached for one of his hands and held it tightly, while the viscount’s weeping turned into weak, desolate cursing. The words became garbled as he grew more agitated. He gave Christy’s wrist a feeble yank. “Do it,” he muttered. “Do it, damn you.”
He stared at him, baffled. “I don’t—”
“Absolve me.”
Christy looked down at the fierce, spidery grip the old man had on his hand. “Almighty God,” he prayed quickly, “who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live, hath given power to his ministers to declare and pronounce to his people the absolution of their sins. Edward, do you truly and earnestly repent of your sins?”
“I do,” he grated through his teeth, eyes closed.
“Are you in love and charity with your neighbors—”
“Yes, yes.”
“And—will you lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking from henceforth in his holy ways?”
“Yes!”
“Go in peace, then. Your sins are forgiven.”
The viscount peered up at him in panicky disbelief.
“They’re forgiven,” Christy repeated, insistent. “The God who made you loves you. Believe it.”
“If I could . . .”
“You can. Take it inside your heart and be at peace.”
“Peace.” His hand loosened and fell away, but he continued to gaze up with pleading eyes. All the hopes of his life had narrowed and tunneled into this one hope; that he was loved, and that he was forgiven. Christy was learning that at the end it was all anyone wanted.
“My lord,” he asked, “will you take the sacraments?”
A minute went by, and then the old man nodded.
Christy prepared the bread and the wine quickly, using the bedside table for an altar, reciting the words of the ritual in a voice loud enough for Edward to hear. He was to ill to swallow more than a tiny morsel of the Host, and he could only wet his lips on the edge of the chalice. Afterward, he lay utterly still, the flutter of the wilted lace on his nightshirt the only indication that he still breathed.
Time ticked past in the dim box of a room; the lamp wick began to sputter, and Christy rose to turn it higher. A choking sound from the bed made him turn back quickly.
Edward was trying to sit up on his elbows. “Help me . . . help . . . oh, God, I hate it . . . I’m afraid of the dark . . .” Christy put his arm around his thin shoulders, propping him up. “Geoffrey?” He stared straight ahead, unblinking. “Geoffrey?”
“Yes,” Christy lied without hesitation. “Yes, Father, it’s Geoffrey.”
“My boy.” His smile was rapturous, a little smug. “I knew you’d come.” His head bobbed once and fell on his left shoulder; a long, ragged sigh rattled up from his chest, but he was already dead.
Christy held him in his arms a little longer before laying his slack torso back on the bed and gently closing his eyes. “Go in peace,” he murmured, “for the Lord has put away all your sins.” The unmistakable aspect of death had already seeped into the viscount’s corpse; his soul was gone. Christy administered the last sacrament, the anointing of the body with oil, taking a melancholy comfort in the solemn rite. When he finished, he sank to his knees by the bed to pray, hands folded, his forehead pressed against the side of the mattress.
That was how Geoffrey found him.
***
Christy hadn’t heard footsteps but something, maybe a change in the air, made him lift his head and look toward the doorway to the hall. A tall, dark-haired man stood in the threshold. Sallow skin, sunken cheeks, black, burning eyes in hollow sockets—for one grotesque moment, Christy thought it was Edward, returned from the dead in the semblance of his youth. But a second later, a flesh-and-blood woman materialized behind the man’s shoulder, and Christy realized he wasn’t seeing ghosts. He got to his feet in haste.
He met Geoffrey in the middle of the room. He would have embraced him, but Geoffrey held out his hand and they shook instead, clapping each other on the back. “My God, it’s true,” Geoffrey cried, his voice sounding shockingly loud after the long silence. “You’ve gone and become a priest!”
“As you see.” His gladness gave way to concern as he took in his oldest friend’s profoundly altered appearance. At sixteen, Geoffrey had been a strapping, muscular youth; when they’d wrestled together, they’d almost always fought to a draw, and on the rare occasions when Christy had won, it was only because he was taller. Now Geoffrey looked as if a well-placed blow from a child could knock him down. But his charming, wolfish grin hadn’t changed, and Christy found himself smiling back, wanting to laugh with him in spite or the somber circumstances of this meeting. “Geoffrey, thank God you’ve come. Your father—”
“Is he dead?” He moved around him to the bedside without waiting for an answer. “Oh, my, yes,” he said softly, staring down at the still corpse. “He’s dead, all right, no question about that.”
Christy stayed where he was, to give Geoffrey a little time to himself. The woman in the doorway hadn’t moved. She was slim, tall, dressed sedately in a dark brown traveling costume; the veiled brim of her hat cast a shadow over her face. He glanced at her curiously, but she didn’t speak.
Geoffrey had his back to the room; Christy tried to read his emotion from the set of his shoulders, but the rigid posture was unrevealing. After another minute, he crossed to the bed to stand beside him, and together they gazed down at Edward’s lifeless face. “He didn’t suffer at the end,” Christy said quietly. “It was a peaceful death.”
“Was it? He looks ghastly, doesn’t he? What was wrong with him, anyway?”
“A disease of the liver.”
“Liver, eh?” There was no hint of sorrow in his frowning, narrow-eyed countenance; rather, Christy had the unnerving impression that he was scrutinizing the body to assure himself it was really dead.
“He asked for you before he died.”
Geoffrey looked up at that, incredulous, then burst into high, hearty laughter. “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good!”
Dismayed, Christy looked away. The woman had come farther into the room; in the shadowy lamplight, her eyes glowed an odd silver-gray color. He couldn’t read the expression in them, but the set of her wide, straight mouth was ironic.
“I think he was sorry at he end,” he tried again. “For everything. I believe he felt remorse in his heart for—” This time Geoffrey cut him off with a crude, appallingly vulgar oath that made Christy blush. The woman arched one dark brow at him; he’d have said she was mocking him, but there was no playfulness in her face.
Then Geoffrey flashed his charming smile, and the anger in his eyes disappeared as if it had never been. He spun away from the bed and draped his arm across Christy’s shoulders, giving him a rough, affectionate squeeze. “How’ve you been, you ruddy old sod? You look . . .” He stood back and made a show of examining him, head to toe. “Christ, you still look like an archangel!” He ruffled Christy’s blond hair, laughing, and under his breath Christy caught the unmistakable odor of alcohol. He stiffened involuntarily. All the things he could have said about Geoffrey’s appearance seemed either tactless or hurtful, so he didn’t answer.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Geoffrey urged, guiding him toward the door. Christy resisted, and Geoffrey stopped short, adjacent to the silent, motionless woman. “Oh—sorry, darling, forgot about you there. This is Christian Morrell, an old chum from my halcyon youth. Christy, meet my wife, Anne. Anne, Christy. Christy, Anne. Shake hands, why don’t you? That’s it! Now let’s all go have a drink.”
“How do you do, Reverend Morrell,” murmured Anne Verlaine, unsmiling, ignoring her husband’s facetiousness.
Christy struggled to hide his surprise. Rumors about Geoffrey were always rife in Wyckerley, had been since he’d run away at sixteen and never returned. About four years ago Christy had heard that he’d married the daughter of an artist, a painter; but the next rumor had him off fighting the Burmese in Pegu, and there was no more talk of a wife. As a consequence, Christy had assumed that the marriage was just another in the colorful catalog of stories about the village’s prodigal son that might not be true but never failed to entertain the natives.
“Mrs. Verlaine,” he greeted her, taking the cool, firm hand she held out to him. She was younger than he’d thought at first, probably not even twenty-five. Her accent was English, but there was something distinctly foreign about her; something in her dress, he thought, or the penetrating directness of her gaze.
“No, no, it’s not Mrs. Verlaine anymore, is it? It’s Lady D’Aubrey! How does it feel to be a viscountess, darling? Frankly I can’t wait for someone to call me ‘my lord.’ Come on, we must go and drink to Father’s demise. It took him long enough, but better late than never, what?” Geoffrey’s arm around his wife’s waist looked steely; she resisted for only a moment, then let him lead her out of the room. Christy had no choice but to follow.
Forever and Ever
THE TOWER CLOCK on All Saints’ Church struck the quarter hour with a loud, tiny thud. Connor Pendarvis, who had been leaning against the stone ledge of a bridge and staring down at the River Wyck, straightened impatiently. Jack was late. Again. He ought to be used to it by now—and he was, but that didn’t make his brother’s habitual tardiness any less aggravating.
At least he didn’t have to wait for Jack in the rain. In typical South Devon fashion, the afternoon had gone from gray to fair in a matter of minutes, and now the glitter of sunlight on the little river’s sturdy current was almost blinding. It was June,
and the clean air smelled of honeysuckle. Birds sang, bees buzzed, irises in brilliant yellow clumps bloomed along the riverbank. The cottages lining the High Street sported fresh coats of daub in whimsical pastel shades, and every garden was a riot of summer flowers.
The Rhadamanthus Society’s report on Wyckerley had said it was a poky, undistinguished hamlet in a poor parish, but Connor disagreed. He thought the authors of the report must have a novel idea of what constituted poverty—either that or they’d never been to Trewithiel, the village in Cornwall where he’d grown up. Wyckerley was friendly, pretty, neat as a pin—Trewithiel’s opposite in every way. Connor had been born there, and one by one he’d watched his family die there. Before he was twenty, he’d buried all of them.
All except Jack. Here he came, speak of the devil, the folded, one-page letter. “Enough to coyer the note of deposit I’ve just signed for our new lodgings.”
“Well, that’s a relief for you, counselor. Now you won’t get pinched for false misrepresentation o’ personal fiduciary stature.” Jack chortled at his own humor; he never got tired of making up names for laws and statutes, the sillier sounding the better.
Connor said, “I had to pay the agent for the lease of six months. Thirty-six shillings.” It wasn’t his money, but it still seemed a waste, since they wouldn’t be in Wyckerley past two months at the most.
“What’s our new place like, then?”
“Better than the last. We’ve half of a workingmen’s cottage only a mile from the mine. We’ll share a kitchen with two other men, both miners, and there’s a girl who comes in the afternoons to cook a meal. And praise the Lord, we’ve each got a room this time, so I won’t have to listen to you snore the glazing out of the windows.”