The water in the big clay bowl was still warm. She saturated a soft flannel cloth and held it to Christy’s shoulder wound, bathing it as gently as possible. He flinched only once, the first time she touched him, and after that he endured it all with manly, tight-lipped stoicism. So different from Geoffrey, she couldn’t help thinking. “What happened?” she asked to divert him. “Geoffrey said he thought you were right behind him.”
“My horse shied and I fell,” he said, with no tone in his voice. He closed his mouth and tightened his lips. Why, he’s embarrassed, she thought. Geoffrey beat him and he doesn’t like it. How very interesting. The hair on his chest was lighter than the hair on his head. Compared to Geoffrey he was a giant, thick-muscled and broad-shouldered. Yet his skin was soft and finely textured. Like his hair. She entertained a swift, lascivious thought involving his bare skin against hers, then forced it out of her mind. She tried to laugh at herself, but she was shaken. Actually shocked.
He paled a little and seemed to stop breathing while she worked on the dirtiest part of his abrasion, over the hard, rigid muscle in the top of his shoulder. “Anne, are you . . . do you . . .” He closed his eyes and said with great nonchalance, “Geoffrey’s all right, isn’t he? Doesn’t . . . never would . . .” He cleared his throat. “You feel perfectly safe, don’t you? None of my business about your marriage and all, I’m not asking that, but you—you’re quite all right, aren’t you, Anne?”
Her hands had gone still in the middle of his extraordinary question. All at once the motive for it hit her, and she stepped back. “What happened?” she said sharply. He looked at her in surprise. “What did he do? Tell me!”
“Nothing. I don’t know what you mean.”
Before she could speak again, Violet appeared in the doorway, carrying the shirt she’d asked for. “Thank you,” she said tightly.
“Yes, ma’am. Will there be anything else?” Her small brown eyes narrowed avidly on the fascinating spectacle of her mistress attending to the wounds of her half-naked minister.
“No, nothing. Go and help Susan,” she snapped, and Violet sent her a poisonous glance before she whirled and left. Detestable girl.
She set the flannel down in the cooling water and fixed Christy with as steely a gaze as she could muster. “He did something, didn’t he? He hurt you. Why won’t you tell me?”
He had the most annoying patience. “Why would you think that?” he asked, deceptively mild. He stood up, towering over her, all naked torso and big, intelligent head. “Unless he’s hurt you. Has he?”
Checkmate. She said, “No,” through her teeth. The sensitive skin of his cheeks went pink. She was beginning to love his flushes, even though this one came from frustration instead of embarrassment.
“Geoffrey drinks too much,” he said combatively.
“Sometimes. Not today, though. Did he hurt you? Come, you might as well tell me.”
“Why do you think he did?” he countered cagily. He was trying to be shrewd and slippery, but he was so transparent she wanted to laugh.
Without answering, she turned away, busying herself with Geoffrey’s shirt while she got her face and her emotions in order. Neither of them was going to tell the other the truth, that was obvious. She would have liked to know what Geoffrey had done to him, but it wasn’t worth trading any information about her own private life. She was a woman without confidantes, and had been for so long that anything else was unthinkable.
When she turned back, she saw that he’d been engaged in the same effort to disguise his feelings. Ah, poor Reverend Morrell: he lacked her years of experience; compared to her, he was a hopeless amateur.
“Lady D’Aubrey—”
“Oh, for God’s sake—”
“Call me by my name, then!” he burst out, and his fine, irate righteousness set her back on her heels.
“All right,” she said, shakily placating. “I’ve meant to before. Christy.” There. It sounded completely natural, and she wondered why she hadn’t said it before now. General perverseness, no doubt. “Christy,” she said again, softer. An addictive name, that irrepressible voice in her brain murmured. She held the shirt out to him, for something to do.
He got it on unassisted, but afterward she decided to button it for him—because his right arm was still stiff, she rationalized. Halfway down, he said to her very quietly, “Listen to me.” If he’d followed then with something suggestive or seductive, she wouldn’t have been surprised—which summed up everything about her frame of mind just then, didn’t it? But he fixed her with a burning blue stare and said soberly, “If you ever need help. If you ever need anything. You know that you can come to me, don’t you? I can help. I can do something. Anne, I will help you.”
She nodded matter-of-factly, but inside she felt breathless. The possibility . . . the possibility. . . . Against everything, all her experience, she found herself almost believing him. To have a friend, someone she could trust, someone who might really help her. . . . It was a heady sensation, like contemplating a dive from a great height. “Thank you,” she whispered, ambivalent. Oh, but the possibility . . .
“Stay for dinner,” she said with more force. Returning to normal, he’d think; he couldn’t possibly guess at her urgency. “You can meet Geoffrey’s friends,” she added—as if that were an inducement.
“Thank you, but I’d better go. I’m riot fit for company.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No, not at all, I’m—”
“Then please stay.” Too urgent. She forced her clasped hands to relax. “I wish you would.”
“I think I must go.”
She made her voice light, made it a joke. “Ah, so you’re taking back your offer of help so quickly? Please, it’s just that—I’ve met Geoffrey’s friends before. And I’d be very grateful if you would stay.” She almost said his name again. Christy. He’d have stayed if she’d said it.
“Then I’ll stay,” he said.
7 May, midnight
Impossible to sleep. The rain beating against the window and gurgling in the leaky gutters isn’t the culprit; it’s my scattered thoughts, flying around in my head like circling rooks, repeating and repeating. And my guilty conscience.
I made an awful mistake tonight. How could I have forgotten how detestable Claude Sully and the others are, Geoffrey’s so-called friends? But I hadn’t forgotten; it was cowardly and selfish of me to ask Christy Morrell to stay, to help me get through an evening with those men. But I never could have foreseen how they would treat him. If I’d had any idea, I would never have imposed on his apparently limitless good nature. I’m ashamed of myself, I’m angry with him, disgusted with Geoffrey—
No, no, I’m not angry with Christy any longer—how could I be? But I was. Oh, I was. I wanted to shake him and shout in his face, “Do something! Hit somebody!” Even now, when I remember the things they said to him, my fury comes seething back and I want to beat my fists against someone’s unguarded face. Sully’s, preferably.
There were three of them: Sully, Brooke, and Bingham, all rotters, hangers-on, the sort of men Geoffrey is attracted to because he’s smarter than they are but they have more energy (and money); they egg each other on in mob fashion and get up to loathsome “pranks” together that would shame a beastly adolescent schoolboy. Claude Sully is the worst of the lot. Because I never tell Geoffrey anything, I’ve never told him about the time, while he was away in Africa, I think it was, that Sully paid a call and made the slimiest, most boorish attempt to seduce me. It came to blows—I actually struck him across the face—and the worst is that I think he liked it. At least he’d got something out of me for his trouble, and he could leave knowing I would despise him and myself for a long time. And so I did.
The bloody beast.
And I set Reverend Morrell down in the midst of them, like a Christian among the lions. A cheap, easy analogy, and yet it’s exactl
y right. He didn’t understand at first what they were about. (This is what kills me; there’s a pain in my chest, a real, true ache when I remember the surprise in his face as the truth gradually dawned on him. Why didn’t he see it sooner? What kind of a minister doesn’t know evil exists?) When the taunting stopped being subtle and became blatantly cruel, he didn’t get up and walk out, as it seemed to me any sensible man would have done—that or start throwing the furniture. And after that, his bewilderment over their treatment of him changed to a truly infuriating patience. He literally turned the other cheek. The only good thing about it was that Sully grew baffled and enraged, but he couldn’t show it. I loved watching his smooth, oily, insinuating facade crack and the tantrum-throwing little boy peek out. By then I was ready to give them all a good, hard smack, Christy included. There’s not an ounce of Christian saintliness in me, and I’m not sorry. No, not sorry. I’m glad. I feel such contempt for Geoffrey, I don’t even want to speak to him. But I probably will, because I want him to know that I found his passive complicity despicable. Christy, he says, is his best friend. Pity his enemies, if that’s true.
I won’t write the things they said to Christy, they’re too hateful. It was as if his very existence infuriated them. He didn’t look like a minister in his buckskin riding breeches and Geoffrey’s shirt, stretched tight across his chest. He looked like . . . well, I don’t know what. Not anyone’s idea of a country parson, anyway. But that’s what he is, and Sully and the others could hardly wait to let him know that he is a joke to them, a walking relic from the prehistoric past. They asked him about his “calling,” snickering behind his back when he answered them seriously. They made me feel ashamed for the times I’ve tweaked him a little myself, comfortable and obnoxious in my relative worldliness. He tried to engage them in an actual discussion—the fool, the fool!—but of course it was hopeless. Men like that can’t debate, they can only wound and run away.
And never once did he lose his temper. That galled them to the end, and I think they were glad when he finally went away. God knows I was.
But I couldn’t let him go like that, with all my anger still bottled up inside! And I wanted to know how he really felt, what was going on behind all that exasperating tolerance and forbearance. So I went after him. Told Geoffrey I was retiring, and went out the kitchen door and ran all the way around the house. I caught him on the bridge; I was out of breath, hardly able to speak at first. He thought something was wrong, he was worried for me—which, of course, made it hard to keep the edge on my anger. But I managed. I’m ashamed to say I berated him, but I couldn’t help it. “Why did you let them do it? What kind of man are you?” Yes, I said that, and much more, as if I had the right, as if what kind of man he is has anything whatever to do with me. But I was wrought up. “Didn’t you hear them? Don’t you know what they were doing? They laughed at you!” Nothing; I had no better luck than Sully at trying to make him angry. “I despise humility,” I said scathingly. “It’s no virtue to me, it’s weakness.”
He said, “Do you think I’m weak?” and I thought, Well, at least I’ve gotten frostiness out of him—something! I don’t remember how I answered; haughtily, though. (He’s not weak, of course; I’d said it to goad him.) He said, “Do you think I don’t know what they thought of me, Anne? That I sat there and didn’t understand the depth of their contempt?”
“Then why didn’t you react? Even Jesus got mad at the money changers!” As if I knew that story well, as if the Bible were a familiar volume to me, kept at my bedside for easy reference. It was misty on the bridge, or he’d have seen me blush. He laughed a little when I said that, and I deserved it. “The money lenders,” he corrected.
By now I was beginning to cool down. We walked to the end of the bridge and went a little way along the bank. Everything was quiet and still except for the sound of the rushing water—such a relief after the smoke and brandy and nastiness inside the house. We stopped under the alder trees, and he said, “I’ve found that one of the hardest things about the ministry is the isolation. You don’t know how relieved I would be if my parishioners would speak frankly about their doubts, the times when their faith fails them and they can’t believe. I wouldn’t be shocked; I would love to talk these things over. I’m smothering in politeness. Faith in God isn’t a debate I have to win, it’s a way we can understand each other.”
No one talks like this, no one in my experience. I don’t know what to say to him when he says these things to me. His simplicity confounds me. I fear for him.
He said, “It makes me sad when people can’t see me as a human being. They usually come around eventually, and then it’s annoying to have my humanity made into some minor revelation. Do you understand what I’m saying? I hate being a symbol instead of a person. I’m the minister, I’m Reverend Morrell; and so, depending on what your hopes and prejudices are, that makes me either a saint or a hypocrite. And I can tell you it’s even harder to be adored than it is to be judged a fool.”
I think he was saying he didn’t mind what he’d just gone through as much as I did, because at least Sully and the others were confronting him head-on as something, and they certainly weren’t couching it in politeness. Extraordinary. I think he’s lonely.
“You’re angry with me because I was so dense”—No, no, I started to protest—“and you’re right.” (That surprised me; I thought he would maintain that he’d done it all deliberately.) “I kept wanting to engage them, force them into a real conversation. I was naive.” Here I almost nodded, then remembered to disagree politely. He said, “No, Anne, I was a blockhead.”
This was true humility. I could hardly believe it when we both laughed, freely and—affectionately; after all that had happened, laughter seemed highly uncalled for. But it refreshed us, and that’s why I told him the truth about myself: that I’m an atheist. Only I didn’t like to shock him, so I cushioned the blow and said I was an “agnostic.”
I don’t know if he was surprised or not. But he was quiet for a minute, and then he said he would pray for me. Well, what had I expected? I didn’t laugh, but I made some sound. I felt bitterness inside, and some strange disappointment in him—altogether inappropriate, of course. He put his hand on me, just a small, comforting touch on my arm. And I thought, what would he do if I made an advance? He finds me attractive, I’ve known that for some time. Last night, when he spoke so openly of his father and mother and his decision to become a priest, I knew I was attracted to him, too. And so, while we stood there with his hand lightly touching my elbow, I wondered what would happen if I said or did something to him—something of a seductive nature. Touched him back or—
But I didn’t touch him and I didn’t say anything to him. Because if I had, it would have been to test him. And then I would’ve been no better than Geoffrey and his wretched friends.
Then I was afraid he would try to convert me, so I said good night rather curtly. Now I can’t sleep. And I wish I had told him that I admire him—for his patience with Sully, I mean. He was right not to react to their taunts; it would have served no purpose, except possibly to vent my anger, which is no reason at all. He’s better than I am, is Reverend Morrell. But it’s not because of “God”; it’s because he was born that way.
VIII
“SO, CHRISTY.” Teapot in hand, Mrs. Ludd stood behind the vicar’s right shoulder, until he had no choice but to stop reading about war in the Crimea and look up at her. “What time did you finally come home last night?”
“Not too late. Something after midnight, I think.”
“Hah! ’Twas half past two, I heard the church clock go not five minutes after you stabled your horse.”
He held up his cup, and she filled it for him with steaming tea. “Why did you ask me if you already knew?”
“To see what you’d say, o’ course.”
Christy shook his head and tried to go back to his newspaper.
“I told Arthur, I sai
d, ‘Wake up, there’s Vicar back from Bonesteels’ this late, the old lady must’ve died after all.’”
“Arthur appreciated that, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Ludd set the teapot down and moved a basket of muffins closer to his plate. “Well? Did she or didn’t she?”
He sighed, laying his newspaper aside. “Mrs. Bonesteel started feeling better about one o’clock this morning. Apparently it wasn’t her heart after all; it was the pickled pilchards she ate yesterday for supper.”
“Well, I must say. After all that. Tsk.” Mrs. Ludd folded her arms across her wide middle and clucked some more.
“Yes, I wish she’d died, too; then my evening wouldn’t have been completely wasted.”
Her mouth fell open. A second later she got the joke, and retaliated by thunking the vicar on the shoulder with a teaspoon. A crafty look narrowed her eyes. “How do you like your raisin muffins this morning, Reverend?”
He bit into one warily. “Fine. Why?”
“I’ll be sure to tell Miss Margaret Mareton you think they’re delicious.” Christy groaned, and his housekeeper snickered. “‘Tis a very special recipe she learned from her grandmother, she said to be sure to tell you. Since you like ’em so much, I’ll tell her to bring over a great cartload next time.”
“You know, this isn’t nearly as funny as you think it is.”
That only made her laugh outright. “Oh, but it is.” Still chortling, she started for the kitchen, but stopped when she saw, through the dining room window, a figure coming through the front gate. “My blessed saints, Christy, ’tis his new lordship, walkin’ up the walk and fixing to knock on the door.”
“Geoffrey?” He set his cup down and stood up.