Sacrament

  “I got lost.”

  “That’s terrible. Terrible,” she said, stroking his face. “How could any self-respecting mother let you stray out of sight? She should be ashamed, she should. Ashamed.” Will would have concurred, but the warmth seeping from the woman’s fingers into his face was curiously soporific.

  “Rosa?” somebody said.

  “Yes?” the woman replied, her voice suddenly flirty. “I’m down here, Jacob.”

  “Who’ve you found now?”

  “I was just thanking this lad,” Rosa said, removing her hand from Will’s face. He was suddenly freezing again. “He caught us our dinner.”

  “Did he indeed?” said Jacob. “Why don’t you step aside, Mrs. McGee, and give me sight of the boy?”

  “Sight you want, sight you’ll have,” Rosa replied, and getting to her feet she picked up the sack and moved a short way down the slope.

  In the two or three minutes since Will had caught hold of the hare, the sky had darkened considerably, and when Will looked in the direction of Jacob Steep it was hard to see the man clearly. He was tall, that much was clear, and was wearing a long coat with shiny buttons. His face was bearded, and his hair longer than Mrs. McGee’s. But his features were a blur to Will’s weary eyes.

  “You should be at home,” he said. Will shuddered, but this time the cause was not the cold but the warmth of Steep’s voice.

  “A boy like you, out here alone, could come to some harm or other.”

  “He’s lost,” Mrs. McGee chimed in.

  “On a night like this, we’re all a little lost,” Mr. Steep said.

  “There’s no blame there.”

  “Maybe he should come home with us,” Rosa suggested.

  “You could light one of your fires for him.”

  “Hush yourself,” Jacob snapped. “I will not have talk of fires when this boy is so bitter cold. Where are your wits?”

  “As you like,” the woman replied. “It’s no matter to me either way. But you should have seen him take the hare. He was on it like a tiger, he was.”

  “I was lucky,” Will said, “that’s all.” Mr. Steep drew a deep breath, and to Will’s great delight descended the slope a yard or two more. “Can you get up?” he asked Will.

  “Of course I can,” Will replied, and did so.

  Though Mr. Steep had halved the distance between them, the darkness had deepened a little further, and his features were just as hard to fathom. “I wonder, looking at you, if we weren’t meant to meet on this hill,” he said softly. “I wonder if that’s the luck of this night, for us all.” Will was still trying hard to get a better sense of what Steep looked like, to put a face to the voice that moved him so deeply, but his eyes weren’t equal to the challenge. “The hare, Mrs. McGee.”

  “What about it?”

  “We should set it free.”

  “After the chase it led me?” Rosa replied. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “We owe it that much, for leading us to Will.”

  “I’ll thank it as I skin it, Jacob, and that’s my final word on the thing. My God, you’re impractical. Throwing away good food. I’ll not have it.” Before Steep could protest further she snatched up the sack and was away down the slope.

  Only now, watching her descend, did Will realize that the worst of the storm had blown over. The rainfall had mellowed to a drizzle, the murk was melting away; he could even see lights glimmering in the valley. He was relieved, certainly, but not as much as he thought he’d be. There was comfort in the prospect of returning home, but that meant leaving the company of the dark man at his back, who even now lay a heavy, leather-gloved hand upon his shoulder.

  “Can you see your house from here?” he asked Will.

  “No . . . not yet.”

  “But it will come clear, by and by?”

  “Yes,” Will said, only now getting a sense of how the land lay. He had managed somehow to come halfway around the valley during his blind trek and was looking down on the village from a wholly unexpected angle. There was a dirt road not more than thirty yards down the ridge from where he stood; it would lead him, he suspected, back to the route he’d followed to get to the Courthouse. A left at that intersection would bring him back into Burnt Yarley, and then it was just a weary trudge home.

  “You should go, my boy,” Jacob said. “Doubtless a fellow as fine as you has loving guardians.” The gloved hand squeezed his shoulder. “I envy you that, having no parents that I can remember.”

  “I’m . . . sorry,” Will said, hesitating because he was by no means sure a man as fine as Jacob Steep was ever in need of sympathy. He received it, however, in good part.

  “Thank you, Will. It’s important that a man be compassionate. It’s a quality that our sex so often neglects, I think.” Will heard the soft cadence of Steep’s breathing and tried to fall in rhythm with it. “You should go,” Jacob said. “Your parents will be concerned for you.”

  “No they won’t,” Will replied.

  “Surely—”

  “They won’t. They don’t care.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Then you must be a loving son in spite of them,” Steep said. “Be grateful that you have their faces in your mind’s eye.

  And their voices to answer when you call. Better that than emptiness, believe me. Better than silence.” He lifted his hand from Will’s shoulder and now touched the middle of his back, gently pushing him away. “Go on,” he said softly. “You’ll be dead of cold if you don’t go soon. Then how would we get to meet again?”

  Will’s spirits rose at this. “We might do that?”

  “Oh certainly, if you’re hardy enough to come and find me.

  But Will, understand me, I’m not looking for a dog to perch on my lap. I need a wolf.”

  “I could be a wolf,” Will said. He wanted to look back over his shoulder at Steep, but that was not, he thought, the most appropriate thing for an aspirant wolf to do.

  “Then as I say: Come find me,” Steep said. “I won’t be far away.” And with that he gave Will a final nudge, setting him off on his way down the slope.

  Will did not look back until he reached the track, and when he did he saw nothing. At least nothing alive. The hill he saw, black against the clearing sky. And the stars, appearing between the clouds. But their splendor was nothing compared to the face of Jacob Steep; a face he had not yet really seen, but which his mind had already conjured a hundred different ways by the time he reached home, each finer than the one before. Steep the noble-man, fine-boned and fancy; Steep the soldier, scarred from a dozen wars; Steep the magician, his gaze bearing power: Perhaps he was all of these. Perhaps none. Will didn’t care. What mattered was to be beside him again, soon, and know him better.

  Meanwhile, there was a warm light from the window of his home and a fire in the hearth. Even a wolf might seek the comfort of the hearth now and then, Will reasoned and, knocking on the front door, was let back in.

  VI

  i

  He did not go up the hill the following day to look for Jacob, nor indeed the day following that. He came home to such a firestorm of accusations—his mother in wracking tears, certain he was dead; his father, white with fury, just as certain he wasn’t—that he dared not step over the threshold. Hugo wasn’t a violent man.

  He prided himself on his reasonableness. But he made an exception in this case, and beat his son so hard—with a book, of all things—that he reduced them both to tears: Will’s of pain, his father’s of anguish that he’d lost so much control.

  He wasn’t interested in Will’s explanations. He simply told his son that while he, Hugo, didn’t care if Will went wandering for the rest of his damn life, Eleanor did, and hadn’t she suffered enough for one lifetime?

  So Will stayed at home and nursed his bruises and his rage.

  After forty-eight hours his mother tried to make some kind of peace, telling him how frightened she’d been that som
e harm had befallen him.

  “Why?” he said to her sullenly.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “I mean why should you worry if something happens to me? You never cared before—”

  “Oh, William, . . .” she said softly. There was only a trace of accusation in her voice. It was mostly sorrow.

  “You don’t,” he said flatly. “You know you don’t. All you ever think about is him.” He didn’t need to name the missing member of this equation. “I’m not important to you. You said so.” This was not strictly the case. She’d never used those precise words. But the lie sounded true enough.

  “I’m sure I didn’t mean it,” she said. “It’s just been so hard for me since Nathaniel died—” Her fingers went to his face as she spoke, and gently stroked his cheek. “He was so . . . so . . .” He was barely listening to her. He was thinking of Rosa McGee, and how she had touched his face and spoken to him softly. Only she’d not been talking about how fine some other boy was while she did so. She’d been telling him what a treasure he was, how nimble, how useful. This woman who had barely known his name had found in him qualities his own mother could not see. It made him sad and angry at the same time.

  “Why do you keep talking about him?” Will said. “He’s dead.”

  Eleanor’s fingers fell from Will’s face, and she looked at him with tear-filled eyes. “No,” she said, “he’ll never be dead. Not to me. I don’t expect you to understand. How could you? But your brother was very special to me. Very precious. So he’ll never be dead as far as I’m concerned.”

  Something happened in Will at that moment. A scrap of hope that had stayed green in the months since the accident withered and went to dust. He didn’t say anything. He just got up and left her to her tears.

  ii

  After two days of homebound penance he went to school. It was a smaller place than St. Margaret’s, which he liked, its buildings older, its playground lined with trees instead of railings. He kept to himself for the first week, barely speaking to anyone. At the beginning of the second week, however, minding his own business at lunchtime, a familiar face appeared in front of him. It was Frannie.

  “Here you are,” she said, as though she’d been looking for him.

  “Hello,” he said, glancing around to see if Sherwood the Brat was also in evidence. He wasn’t.

  “I thought you’d be gone on your trip by now.”

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  “I know,” Frannie said, quite sincerely. “After we met I kept thinking maybe I’d go too. Not with you,” she hastened to add, “but one day I’d just leave.”

  “Go as far away as possible,” Will said.

  “As far away as possible,” Frannie replied, her echoing of his words a kind of pact. “There’s not much worth seeing around here,” she went on, “unless you go into you know—”

  “You can talk about Manchester,” Will said. “Just cause my brother was killed there . . . it’s no big deal to me. I mean, he wasn’t really my brother.” Will felt a delicious lie being born. “I’m adopted, you see.”

  “You are?”

  “Nobody knows who my real mom and dad are.”

  “Oh wow. Is this a secret?” Will nodded. “So I can’t even tell Sherwood.”

  “Better not,” Will replied, with a fine show of seriousness.

  “He might spread it around.”

  The bell was ringing, calling them back to their classes. The fierce Miss Hartley, a big-bosomed woman whose merest whisper intimidated her charges, was eyeing Will and Frannie.

  “Frances Cunningham!” she boomed, “will you get a move on?” Frannie pulled a face and ran, leaving Miss Hartley to focus her attention on Will. “You are—?”

  “William Rabjohns.”

  “Oh yes,” she said darkly, as though she’d heard news of him and it wasn’t good.

  He stood his ground, feeling quite calm. This was strange for him. At St. Margaret’s he had been intimidated by several of the staff, feeling remotely that they were part of his father’s clan.

  But this woman seemed to him absurd, with her sickly sweet perfume and her fat neck there was nothing to be afraid of here.

  Perhaps she saw how unmoved he was, because she stared at him with a well-practiced curl in her lip.

  “What are you smiling at?” she said.

  He wasn’t aware that he was, until she remarked upon it.

  He felt his stomach churn with a strange exhilaration; then he said, “You.”

  “What?”

  He made the smile a grin. “You,” he said again. “I’m smiling at you.”

  She frowned at him. He kept grinning, thinking as he did so that he was baring his teeth to her, like a wolf.

  “Where are you . . . supposed to be?” she said to him.

  “In the gym,” he replied. He kept looking straight at her; kept grinning. And at last it was she who looked away.

  “You’d better . . . get along then, hadn’t you?” she said to him.

  “If we’ve finished talking,” he said, hoping to goad her into further response.

  But no. “We’ve finished,” she said.

  He was reluctant to take his eyes off her. If he kept staring, he thought, he could surely bore a hole in her, the way a magnifying glass held to the sunlight burned a hole in a piece of paper.

  “I won’t have insolence from anyone,” she said. “Least of all a new boy. Now get to your class.”

  He had little choice. Off he went. But as he walked past her he said: “Thank you, Miss Hartley,” in a soft voice, and he was sure he saw her shudder.

  VII

  Something was happening to him. There were little signs of it every day. He would look up at the sky and feel a strange surge of exhilaration, as though some part of him were taking flight, rising up out of his own head. He would wake long after midnight and even though it was bitterly cold, open the window and listen to the world going on in darkness, imagining how it was on the heights. Twice he ventured out in the middle of the night, up the slope behind the house, hoping he might meet Jacob up there somewhere, star watching; or Mrs. McGee, chasing hares.

  But he saw no sign of them, and though he listened intently to every gossipy conversation when he was in the village—picking up pork chops for Adele Bottrall to cook with apples for Papa or a sheaf of magazines for his mother to flick through—he never heard anybody mention Jacob or Rosa. They lived in some secret place, he concluded, where they could not be troubled by the workaday world. Other than himself, he doubted anybody in the valley even knew they existed.

  He didn’t pine, for them. He would find them again, or they him, when the time was right. He was certain of that.

  Meanwhile, the strange epiphanies continued. Everywhere around him, the world was making miraculous signs for him to read: in the curlicues of frost on his window when he rose; in the patterns that the sheep made, straggling the hill; in the din of the river, swelled to its full measure by a fall that brought more than its share of rain.

  At last, he had to share these mysteries with somebody. He chose Frannie, not because he was certain she’d understand, but because she was the only one he trusted enough.

  They were sitting in the living room of the Cunningham house, which was adjacent to the junkyard owned by Frannie’s father. The house was small, but cozy, as ordered and neat as the yard outside was chaotic: a framed needlepoint prayer above the mantlepiece, blessing the hearth and all who gathered there, a teak china cabinet with an heirloom elegant tea service but not boastfully displayed, a plain brass clock on the table, and beside it a cut-glass bowl heaped with pears and oranges. Here, in this womb of certainties, Will told Frannie of the feelings that had risen in him of late, and how they had begun the day the two of them met. He didn’t mention Jacob and Rosa at first—they were the secret he was most loath to share, and he was by no means certain he would do so—but he did talk about venturing into the Courthouse.

  “Oh, I
asked my mom about that,” Frannie said. “And she told me the story.”

  “What is it?” Will said.

  “There was this man called Bartholomeus,” she said. “He lived in the valley, when there were still lead mines everywhere.”

  “I didn’t know there were mines.”

  “Well there were. And he made a lot of money from them.

  But he wasn’t quite right in the head, that’s what mom said, because he had this idea that people didn’t treat animals properly, and the only way to stop people being cruel was to have a court, which would only be for animals.”

  “Who was the judge?”

  “He was. And the jury probably.” She shrugged. “I don’t know the whole story, just those bits—”

  “So he built the Courthouse.”

  “He built it, but he didn’t finish it.”

  “Did he run out of money?”

  “My mom says he was probably put in a loony bin, because of what he was doing. I mean, nobody wanted him bringing animals into his Courthouse and making laws about how people had to treat them better.”

  “That was what he was doing?” Will said, with a little smile.

  “Something like that. I don’t know if anybody’s really sure. He’s been dead for a hundred and fifty years.”

  “It’s a sad story,” said Will, thinking of the strange magnificence of Bartholomew’s folly.

  “He was better put away. Safer for everybody.”

  “Safer?”

  “I mean if he was going to try and accuse people of doing things to animals. We all do things to animals. It’s natural.” She sounded like her mother when she spoke like this.

  Genial enough, but unmovable. This was her stated opinion and nothing would sway her from it. Listening to her, his enthusiasm for sharing what he’d seen began to wane. Perhaps after all she was not the person to understand his feelings. Perhaps she’d think he was like Mr. Bartholomeus, and better put away.

  But now, her story of the Courthouse finished, she said, “What were you telling me about?”