Fire Watch

  “It isn’t there,” one of the boys said, and Finney’s heart caught.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Your cup. This is where we hid it. This morning.”

  “You must be mistaken,” he said, and led them firmly down the stairs. Halfway down, Mrs. Andover’s girl burst in at them.

  “She says you are to come at once,” she said breathlessly.

  Finney released the boys. “You two can redeem yourselves by finding my cup,” and then as they escaped down the stairs to the crypt, he shouted, “and stay out of the study.”

  Mrs. Andover was standing by the End, watching the children and Megan wade knee-deep in the clear water. The sun had come out. Finney could see the flash of sunlight off Megan’s hair.

  “They’re playing a game,” Mrs. Andover said without looking at him. “It’s an old nursery rhyme about how bad King John lost his clothes in the Wash. The children stand in a circle, and when the rhyme’s done, they fall down in the water. Megan stepped on something when she went down. She cut her foot.”

  Water and blood and Davidson reaching out for Finney’s hand. “No!” Finney had cried, “not my hand, too!” Davidson had started to say something and Finney had flailed away from him like a landed fish, afraid it would be holy scripture. But he had said, “The cults did this to you, didn’t they?” in a voice that had no holiness in it at all, and Finney had collapsed gratefully into his arms.

  “Is she hurt?” he said, blinded by the sun and the memory.

  “It was just a scratch,” Mrs. Andover said. “King John did lose his clothes. In a battle in 1215. His army was fighting in a muddy estuary of the Wash when a tide came in and knocked everyone under. He lost his crown, too.”

  “And it was never found,” Finney said, knowing what was coming.

  “Not until now.”

  “Megan!” Finney shouted. “Come here right now!”

  She ran up out of the water, her bare legs dripping wet. On her head was a rusty circle that looked more like a tin lid than a crown, He did not have the slightest doubt that it was what Mrs. Andover said, the crown of a king dead eight hundred years.

  “Give me the crown, Megan,” Finney said.

  “Behold I come quickly. Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown,” she said, handing it to Finney.

  Finney scratched through the encrusted minerals to the definite scrape of metal. It was thinner in several spots. Finney poked his little finger into one of the indentations and through it, making a round hole.

  “Those are for the jewels,” Megan said.

  “What makes you think that?” Mrs. Andover said. “Have you seen any jewels?”

  “All crowns have jewels,” Megan said. Finney handed the crown back to her and she put it on. Finney looked at the sky behind Megan’s head. The clouds had pulled back from a little circlet of blue over the church. “Can I go back now?” Megan said. “The game’s almost done.”

  “This is the End,” Finney said, watching her walk fearlessly into the water. “Not the Wash.”

  “Nor is it Reading Railway Station,” Mrs. Andover said. “Nevertheless.”

  “The water’s perfectly clear. I would have seen it. Someone would have seen it. It can’t have lain there since 1215.”

  “It could have been put there,” Mrs. Andover said. “After the jewels had been removed.”

  “So could the colored paper,” he said without thinking, “after the book was taken out.”

  “What about the paper?” Mrs. Andover said.

  “It’s back in the drawer where Megan found the book. I saw it.”

  “You might have put it back.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully, “the pious Reverend Davidson has come back without telling us.”

  “For what purpose?” Finney said, losing his temper altogether. “To play some incredible game of hide-and-seek? To race about his church scattering priceless manuscripts and ancient crowns like prizes for us to find? What would we have to find to convince you he’s innocent? The Holy Grail?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Andover said coldly, and started back toward the church.

  “Where are you going?” Finney shouted.

  “To see for myself this miracle of the colored paper.”

  “King John was a pretty lost soul, too,” he shouted at her back. “Perhaps he’s the last on the list. Perhaps it’ll all go bang before you even get to the church.”

  But she made it safely to the vestry door and inside, and Finney hobbled after her, suddenly afraid of what his boys might have found now.

  Mrs. Andover was staring bleakly into the open drawer as Finney had done, as if it held some answer. Finney felt a pang of pity for her, standing there in her sturdy shoes, believing in no one, alone in the enemy camp. He put his hand out to her shoulder, but she flinched away from his touch. There was a sudden clatter on the stairs, and the two boys exploded into the room with Finney’s cup.

  “Look what we found!” one of them said.

  “And you’ll never guess what else,” the other said, tumbling his words out. “After you said we shouldn’t look in here, we went down to the sanctuary, only it was too dark to see properly. So then we went into where we all have tea and there were no good hiding places at all, so we said to ourselves where would a cup logically be and the answer of course was in the kitchen.” He stopped to take a breath. “We pulled everything out of the cupboard, but it was just pots.”

  “And an iron skillet,” Finney said.

  “So we were putting them all back when we saw something else, a big old metal sort of thing rather like a cup, and your cup was inside it!” He handed the china cup triumphantly to Finney.

  “Where is it?” Mrs. Andover said, as if it were an effort to speak. “This big old metal cup?”

  “In the kitchen. We’ll fetch it if you like.”

  “Please do.”

  The boys dashed out. Finney turned to look at her. “It wasn’t there. Megan and I looked. You know what it is, don’t you?” Finney said, his heart beating sickeningly fast. It was the way he had felt before he lost his foot, when he saw the ax coming down.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It’s what you’ve been waiting for,” he said accusingly. “It’s the proof you said you wanted.”

  “Yes,” she said, her lip trembling. “Only I didn’t know what it would mean.”

  The boys were already racketing up the stairs. They burst in the door with it. For one awful endless moment, the steel blade falling against the sound of his own heart, louder than the drone of scripture, Finney prayed that it was an old metal cup.

  The boys set it on the desk. It was badly dented from endless hidings and secretings and journeys. Tarnished like an old spoon. It shone like the cup of the sky.

  “Is it a treasure?” the boy who had stolen Finney’s cup said, looking at their faces. “Do we get the fifty pence?”

  “It is the Holy Grail,” Mrs. Andover said, putting her hands on it like a benediction.

  “I thought it was lost forever.”

  “It was,” she said. “I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.’”

  Finney rubbed the back of his hand across his dry mouth. “I think we’d better get the children inside,” he said.

  He sent the boys downstairs to put the kettle on for tea. Mrs. Andover stood by the desk, holding onto the Grail as if she were afraid of what would happen if she let go.

  “It isn’t so bad once it’s over,” Finney said kindly. “What you think is the end isn’t always, and it turns out better than you dreamed.”

  She set the Grail down gently and turned to him.

  “It is only the last moment before the blade falls that is hard to bear,” he said.

  “I have never told you,” Mrs. Andover said, her eyes filling with tears, “how sorry I am about your foot.” She fumbled for a handkerchief.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Finney
said. “At any rate, the way things seem to be going, it might just turn up.”

  She smiled at that, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief, but when they went down the stairs, she clung to Finney’s arm as if she were the one who was lame. Finney sent her into the kitchen to set out the tea things and then went down to the edge of the End to bring the children in.

  “Is Daddy here?” Megan said, dancing along beside him with one hand on her crown to keep it from falling off. “Is that why we’re having tea again?”

  “No,” Finney said. “But he’s coming. He’ll be here soon.”

  “Surely I come quickly,” Megan said, and ran inside.

  Finney looked at the sky. Above the church the clouds peeled back from the blue like the edges of a scroll. Finney shut and barred the double doors to the sanctuary. He bolted the side door on the stairs and wedged a folding chair under the lock. Then he went into tea.

  When she was forty years old, Elizabeth Barrett sneaked out of her house on Wimpole Street to elope with Robert Browning. It was an astonishing thing for a Victorian woman to do, especially someone who had been an invalid for most of her life. The story has been so romanticized that it is easy to forget that she was running from as well as to something.

  She referred to her life with her father, a possessive and autocratic man who would allow none of his children to marry, as “my peculiar situation,” and tried to make it sound amusing. Browning, frantic to get her away from the man who encouraged his daughter’s invalidism, called it slavery and wrote her angrily, “I think I understand what a father may expect, and a child should comply with.”

  When Edward Moulton Barrett found out what his daughter had done, he ruthlessly tried to destroy every trace of her, including her precious cocker spaniel, Flush. He didn’t succeed. She had taken Flush with her. But she had left her sisters Arabel and Henrietta behind.

  All My Darling Daughters

  BARRETT: I’ll have her dog … Octavius.

  OCTAVIUS: Sir?

  BARRETT: Her dog must be destroyed. At once.

  OCTAVIUS: I really d-don’t see what the p-poor little beast has d-done to …

  —The Barretts of Wimpole Street

  The first thing my new roommate did was tell me her life story. Then she tossed up all over my bunk. Welcome to Hell. I know, I know. It was my own fucked fault that I was stuck with the stupid little scut in the first place. Daddy’s darling had let her grades slip till she was back in the freshman dorm and she would stay there until the admin reported she was being a good little girl again. But he didn’t have to put me in the charity ward, with all the little scholarship freshmen from the front colonies-frightened virgies one and all. The richies had usually had their share of jig-jig in boarding school, even if they were mostly edge. And they were willing to learn.

  Not this one. She wouldn’t know a bone from a vaj, and wouldn’t know what went into which either. Ugly, too. Her hair was chopped off in an old-fashioned bob I thought nobody not even front kids, wore anymore. Her name was Zibet and she was from some godspit colony called Marylebone Weep and her mother was dead and she had three sisters and her father hadn’t wanted her to come. She told me all this in a rush of what she probably thought was friendliness before she tossed her supper all over me and my nice new slickspin sheets.

  The sheets were the sum total of good things about the vacation Daddy Dear had sent me on over summer break. Being stranded in a forest of slimy slicksa trees and noble natives was supposed to build my character and teach me the hazards of bad grades. But the noble natives were good at more than weaving their precious product with its near frictionless surface. Jig-jig on slickspin is something entirely different, and I was close to being an expert on the subject. I’d bet even Brown didn’t know about this one. I’d be more than glad to teach him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she kept saying in a kind of hiccup while her face turned red and then white and then red again like a fucked alert bell, and big tears seeped down her face and dripped on the mess. “I guess I got a little sick on the shuttle.”

  “I guess. Don’t bawl, for jig’s sake, it’s no big deal. Don’t they have laundries in Mary Boning It?”

  “Marylebone Weep. It’s a natural spring.”

  “So are you, kid. So are you.” I scooped up the wad, with the muck inside. “No big deal. The dorm mother will take care of it.”

  She was in no shape to take the sheets down herself, and I figured Mumsy would take one look at those big fat tears and assign me a new roommate. This one was not exactly perfect. I could see right now I couldn’t expect her to do her homework and not bawl giant tears while Brown and I jig-jigged on the new sheets. But she didn’t have leprosy, she didn’t weigh eight hundred pounds, and she hadn’t gone for my vaj when I bent over to pick up the sheets. I could do a lot worse.

  I could also be doing some better. Seeing Mumsy on my first day back was not my idea of a good start. But I trotted downstairs with the scutty wad and knocked on the dorm mother’s door.

  She is no dumb lady. You have to stand in a little box of an entryway waiting for her to answer your knock. The box works on the same principle as a rat cage, except that she’s added her own little touch. Three big mirrors that probably cost her a year’s salary to cart up from earth. Never mind—as a weapon, they were a real bargain. Because, Jesus jiggin’ Mary, you stand there and sweat and the mirrors tell you your skirt isn’t straight and your hair looks scutty and that bead of sweat on your upper lip is going to give it away immediately that you are scared scutless. By the time she answers the door—five minutes if she’s feeling kindly—you’re either edge or you’re not there. No dumb lady.

  I was not on the defensive, and my skirts are never straight, so the mirrors didn’t have any effect on me, but the five minutes took their toll. That box didn’t have any ventilation and I was way too close to those sheets. But I had my speech all ready. No need to remind her who I was. The admin had probably filled her in but good. And I’d get nowhere telling her they were my sheets. Let her think they were the virgies.

  When she opened the door I gave her a brilliant smile and said, “My roommate’s had a little problem. She’s a new freshman, and I think she got a little excited coming up on the shuttle and—”

  I expected her to launch into the “supplies are precious, everything must be recycled, cleanliness is next to godliness” speech you get for everything you do on this godspit campus. Instead she said, “What did you do to her?”

  “What did I—look, she’s the one who tossed up. What do you think I did, stuck my fingers down her throat?”

  “Did you give her something? Samurai? Float? Alcohol?”

  “Jiggin’ Jesus, she just got here. She walked in, she said she was from Mary’s Prick or something, she tossed up.”

  “And?”

  “And what? I may look depraved, but I don’t think freshmen vomit at the sight of me.”

  From her expression, I figured Mumsy might. I stuck the smelly wad of sheets at her. “Look,” I said, “I don’t care what you do. It’s not my problem. The kid needs clean sheets.”

  Her expression for the mucky mess was kinder than the one she had for me. “Recycling is not until Wednesday. She will have to sleep on her mattress until then.”

  Mary Masting, she could knit a sheet by Wednesday, especially with all the cotton flying around this fucked campus. I grabbed the sheets back.

  “Jig you, scut,” I said.

  I got two months’ dorm restricks and a date with the admin.

  I went down to third level and did the sheets myself. It cost a fortune. They want you to have an awareness of the harm you are doing the delicate environment by failing to abide, etc. Total scut. The environment’s about as delicate as a senior’s vaj. When Old Man Moulton bought this third hand Hell-Five, he had some edge dream of turning it into the college he went to as a boy. Whatever possessed him to even buy the old castoff is something nobody’s ever figured out. There must have b
een a Lagrangian point on the top of his head.

  The realtor must have talked hard and fast to make him think Hell could ever look like Ames, Iowa. At least there’d been some technical advances since it was first built or we’d all be floating around the godspit place. But he couldn’t stop at simply gravitizing the place, fixing the plumbing, and hiring a few good teachers. Oh, no, he had to build a sandstone campus, put in a football field, and plant trees! This all cost a fortune, of course, which put it out of the reach of everybody but richies and trust kids, except for Moulton’s charity scholarship cases. But you couldn’t jig-jig in a plastic bag to fulfill your fatherly instincts back then, so Moulton had to build himself a college. And here we sit, stuck out in space with a bunch of fucked cottonwood trees that are trying to take over.

  Jesus Bonin’ Mary; cottonwoods! I mean, so what if we’re a hundred years out of date. I can take the freshman beanies and the pep rallies. Dorm curfews didn’t stop anybody a hundred years ago either. And face it, pleated skirts and cardigans make for easy access. But those godspit trees!

  At first they tried the nature-dupe stuff. Freeze your vaj in winter, suffocate in summer, just like good old Iowa. The trees were at least bearable then. Everybody choked in cotton for a month, they baled the stuff up like Mississippi slaves and shipped it down to earth and that was it. But finally something was too expensive even for Daddy Moulton and we went on even-clime like all the other Hell-Fives. Nobody bothered to tell the trees, of course, so now they just spit and drop leaves whenever they feel like it, which is all the time. You can hardly make it to class without choking to death.

  The trees do their dirty work down under, too, rooting happily away through the plumbing and the buried cables so that nothing works. Ever. I think the whole outer shell could blow away and nobody would ever know. The fucked root system would hold us together. And the admin wonders why we call it Hell. I’d like to upset this delicate balance once and for all.

  I ran the sheets through on disinfect and put them in the spin. While I was sitting there, thinking evil thoughts about freshmen and figuring how to get off restricks, Arabel came wandering in.