Home Repairs
Chapter Four: The Wounded Surgeon
by L. Inman
Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceipt?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes.
—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Elisabeth stepped off
the train at the tiny station and glanced up and down the platform. She never quite got tired of the character of
small English train stations—no two she had seen were exactly alike—and this
particular station was not disappointing:
a short rank of weathered benches waited tucked out of foot traffic
against the side of a building that had once been painted butter yellow. The door to the ticket office had a curved
brick architrave, and the station sign—Little Sharpley—swung in its place on
the overhang by two links of rusty chain.
The place was deserted; it would be—there weren’t many commuters at this
time. The sun lanced down hot from
overhead.
Elisabeth hitched her backpack up on
her shoulder and went inside to accost the station agent. He looked up from his paperback, took in her unprepossessing
figure, and raised one eyebrow, conserving all possible words.
“Vandiver House?” Elisabeth
inquired.
The agent grunted. “Isn’t taking people in, not for tours or
nothin’.”
“I should think not,” Elisabeth said
irritably. “Which road do I take from
here?”
The agent had let his gaze drift
back to his place in the book, but looked back up at her question. “You’re not thinking of walking it, are you?”
he said. Elisabeth gave him back his own
raised eyebrow by way of answer. “Well,”
he continued, “it’s a bit of a step from here, you know—down the road to the
lane that starts by the white house with the chicken on the post-box, then to
the right down that lane and all the way back.”
“Thank you,” Elisabeth said.
“Do better to get a cab.”
“Thank you,” Elisabeth repeated
politely, and set off.
Her shoes were sturdy and she had
become inured to walking in
The lane wound on and on. The pale dust settled on her dark khaki
trousers and coated her shoes. She began
to wonder what stubborn streak of her nature had insisted she walk out here
herself rather than calling Rupert from the station and getting him to pick her
up. Before she’d learned to walk
distances, this walk would have left her prostrate, but it wasn’t like she
wasn’t sweating and heavy-footed with fatigue, and the straps of her pack were
cutting into her shoulders.
But the country was beautiful, and
she found plenty on which to feast her eyes as she walked. Wherever the trees cleared, she could see the
gentle undulation of land, full green even in high summer; Elisabeth was still
accustomed to seeing the tall grass turn pale and the trees shedding leaves in
protest by this time of year: probably some part of England was like her
Midwestern terrain, but this was not it.
After some time it occurred to her
that she would have no way of knowing exactly how the lane ended at the house;
she was going to have to go by trial and error, or ask someone, assuming that
the someones she was likely to meet in a deserted lane were friendly and not
serial killers or anything. Elisabeth
rolled her head as well as her eyes.
As she crested a rise on the lane,
she saw, unexpectedly, that there was someone within sight—a kid in a cap, from
the looks of it, sitting on a stone wall where the lane widened and kicked off
into another stand of trees. The figure
swung its feet, half-obscured by heavily rolled jeans, and turned its head
unerringly to look in Elisabeth’s direction.
Ten feet further, and Elisabeth recognized her.
“Hey,” she said, her voice parched
with the dust.
For answer
“It wasn’t too bad,” Elisabeth said,
privately thinking she ought to get her head examined, and wondering
incidentally if Willow could—or would—break into her mind.
“It’s not far to the house,”
“Useful in vending machines,” Willow
agreed. “There’s not much talking goes
on around here.”
“But there is food, I expect?” Elisabeth was the sort of thirsty that had
hungry right behind it. This provoked a
sidelong half-smile from the other woman;
The walk down the path to the house
was oddly comfortable; they were going slowly, and the sweat began to dry on
Elisabeth’s neck. She hitched up her
pack and wiped her hair out of her face for the umpteenth time; her glasses,
she noted, were quite dusty now. Willow,
meanwhile, was the picture of artless health: Elisabeth supposed that the power
she had gathered was enough to refresh the body, and then some; but her mouth
was small and pursed like an unhappy child’s, which suggested that even great
power was not enough to assuage grief.
She was wearing her own T-shirt, but the cap and the jeans had obviously
been Rupert’s; a belt cinched the waist tight around her middle and the cuffs
were rolled at least thrice. On
Elisabeth, they would have been rolled four times.
They rounded a curve, and suddenly
the house lay before them, a stately dark building that looked like it had
served several generations of comfortably tweedy Gileses; oddly, Elisabeth
thought, taking in with private astonishment the unconcerned opulence, not much
like Rupert at all.
She couldn’t smell much besides her
own hot dusty self at first, but as her eyes adjusted to the dim light she
caught the tang of leather and the immutable breath of stone. Letting her pack slide down to the floor of
the foyer, Elisabeth moved to the tall mirror on the wall and surveyed her
reflection with resigned dismay.
“You made it,” he said.
She turned: and he was there. For a moment she was overwhelmed by the
pressing silence and suppressed anguish that seemed to permeate the house and
the air around them; but there was pleasure in his face, though he was not
smiling, and she lifted her hands in a little plaint of joy and welcome.
“Yeah,” she said.
*
“Xander!” Elisabeth cried aloud.
The next moment she found herself breaking into a trot, then a run, up the pavement to her own front steps where he waited. At the top of the steps she flung herself at him in a fierce hug, which he returned in full. He smelled of travel and cheap coffee. “God, am I glad to see you!” she said as she released him. “I didn’t expect you. You look great.”
He did look well: despite the eyepatch and the weighted line to his shoulders that spelled both weariness and grief, an air of steady calm hung about him that was very becoming.
“So do you,” he said, grinning.
“Are you kidding,” Elisabeth said with a short laugh. “I’ve got exorcism-hair and everything.”
“Yeah, Will mentioned. So you took care of the ghost?”
“Yeah,” Elisabeth said, then grinned again and almost stamped her foot. “Gosh, but it’s good to see you. Let’s get inside and make some coffee.” She felt at her pockets. “I think Rupert’s got the keys.” She turned quickly to watch for Rupert’s far more stately progress up the pavement, to find a young man she recognized staring avidly at her. “And you are Andrew, I presume,” she said, though she knew perfectly well.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” Andrew said breathlessly, seizing her hand and pumping it. “About how you came here as a dimensional exile with forbidden knowledge, and fell in love with Mr. Giles, and had to go away to save everybody from—”
“He didn’t hear it from me,” Rupert said wearily as he reached the bottom of the steps. Elisabeth turned her stunned gaze to Xander, who just drew a long breath and looked at her helplessly.
“—and the Council was all like, whoa, with your book-fu, and—”
“Can we actually go inside and do this?” Rupert said. Elisabeth recognized the caustic tone and said immediately, “Key me.” She extricated her hand from Andrew’s grip and held it out; Rupert put the keys into it. “So when did you guys get here?”
“Dunno exactly when the plane landed at Gatwick,” Xander said as she unlocked the door and led the push inside. “Oh-dark-thirty, pretty much. But we haven’t been standing here long.”
“Oh, which reminds me,” Andrew said, “I need to set my watch to Greenwich Mean Time. Are your clocks set to—”
“Our clocks are set to eating time, sleeping time, and tripping over books time,” Elisabeth said. “Sorry about the mess. And speaking of eating and drinking—”
“We grabbed something on the way,” Xander said.
“—I have to answer a serious call of nature,” Elisabeth finished. “Feel free to start the coffee maker.”
Xander grinned. “Sure thing.”
As she made for the bathroom, she saw Xander clap a hand gently on Rupert’s shoulder; Rupert touched the hand with a brief gesture and turned silently toward the kitchen. Elisabeth became aware of a sudden weightless relief: and she closed her mind to questioning where it came from.
The question of breakfast was quickly raised: Rupert undertook to cook up some eggs and sausages, mostly, Elisabeth suspected, as an excuse to hide in the small kitchen. Xander took up a position near the doorway (“no, I’ve been sitting down too long, really,” he insisted when Elisabeth offered to clear a chair of books and notes so he could sit), the best to converse with both Rupert and Elisabeth, who was duckwalking about the den, gathering books and collecting dirty cups and plates. And over it all Andrew talked—about the British names for household items, about Elisabeth’s new laptop, about the fabled occult collection she had put together last year, about Oxford and exorcisms and love partnerships and Greenwich Mean Time….Elisabeth let Andrew’s talk wash over the surface of her consciousness, and found that it really was not that difficult to deal with. Only once did she succumb to the temptation to mess with Andrew’s head, and that was mostly to get her own equilibrium back.
“So,” Andrew said to her as she cleared off the table for breakfast, “you’re like, having the ultimate sci-fi experience. Was it hard not messing up the timeline?”
Involuntarily Elisabeth glanced into the kitchen; Rupert didn’t look at her, but his expression in profile became quite drawn. “It wasn’t what I’d call a bed of roses,” she said briefly, ducking her head down to gather up a pile of papers from one of the chairs and uncomfortably aware of Xander’s dark eye.
“That would be soo hard,” Andrew said, sitting down in the chair she’d just cleared and looking up at her admiringly. “So back when you were in your home dimension, did you write any fic about Buffy and everybody?”
Elisabeth choked. Xander stirred and gave a warning cough, but Andrew went on. “Because, I would have loved to read some of that. Did you ship anybody?”
“Andrew—”
“Nah,” Elisabeth said, “I’m mostly a gen sort of person.”
Andrew nodded sagely. “Gen is so classic.”
“And I wasn’t really active in Buffy fandom,” she added, giving her head a little shake as if to clear it. It had been so long since she thought of her life in those terms that she felt quite topsy-turvy. “Had some plot-bunnies, though.”
Andrew nodded again. “But you’re like, a walking fic now.” Elisabeth paused to stare at him. “That must be so weird. Like, you crossed dimensional lines, and there are all these stories that you know and we don’t, and you already know everybody and can, like, anticipate their every move—and there’s this burden that you carry, like oh my God Jean Grey, and you have to win everybody’s trust ’cause you’re—”
Elisabeth was nodding. “—the ultimate Mary Sue,” she said, with mischievous gravity.
“Oh, no!” cried Andrew. “No, no no! I would never let anybody call you a Mary Sue, not even you. That’s just not right—”
“Andrew, for God’s sake,” Rupert said, brandishing his spatula. “Take a breath, would you? And whoever the hell this Mary Sue person is—”
Andrew turned around in his seat. “That term got started in Trek fandom because of an original character in a story by Paula Smith in 1974, and over the years it got applied to basically any original character that somebody doesn’t like. And fandom is so sexist, it’s like, it took years for them to invent the male term ‘Gary Stu’ but nobody really uses it—”
Rupert was squinting in querulous incomprehension. Xander said swiftly, “Nobody here thinks Elisabeth is a Mary Sue, Andrew. She’s just playing with you. Why don’t you help me get some plates out and we can set the table.”
Rupert shot Xander a look of pure gratitude; Elisabeth swallowed her smile and went to set the last pile of books next to the shelves.
Fortunately, breakfast put paid to Andrew’s spate for a little while, and then Elisabeth offered him the use of her laptop to check his email and catch up with his work while she got her shower and changed clothes. When she came out, she found Andrew happily giving the “lowdown on the sitch” to Dawn on his cell-phone. Rupert, meanwhile, was cleaning the kitchen.
“Where’s Xander?” she asked him, grabbing a glass and filling it at the tap.
“He volunteered to do the shopping,” he said, scrubbing at the range with a sponge. “We’re out of milk.”
“That was nice of him.”
“Nice, nothing,” Rupert muttered. “He wanted a quick getaway.”
“Can’t have been a very fun plane trip,” she reminded him.
“Why on earth did you egg him on, anyway?” Rupert said, scrubbing harder.
“I didn’t egg him on,” Elisabeth said, knowing which ‘him’ was meant. “He’s already got a full dozen in his carton.”
Rupert wasn’t having any of it. “What about that crack you made about Betty Lous?”
“Mary Sues,” Elisabeth said calmly, sipping her water and putting down the glass on the counter. “And the subject was bound to come up eventually. As it is, he’s got it out of his system now—”
“You don’t know Andrew.” Apparently the bit of dirt Rupert was scrubbing at was extremely stubborn, but Elisabeth couldn’t even see it. “He never gets anything out of his system. He’ll go on and on and on and on—”
With a convulsive gesture Elisabeth reached out and stopped his scrubbing hand. “Rupert. Would you just chill for a minute?”
He yanked his hand away from hers, but did not return to scrubbing. “So Andrew can go on at full spate if he likes, but I’m not entitled to a bit of—”
“—hysteria?” Elisabeth finished. “Well—”
Rupert reddened. “It’s not hysteria,” he hissed. “It’s perfectly justifiable homicidal rage.”
Elisabeth could not help a small eyeroll. Her reaction did not, of course, help matters.
“And I’m not at all impressed by your complacency,” Rupert said, in a low voice full of venom.
“Complacency?” Elisabeth repeated. She glared at him, knowing she had just taken the bait. “I don’t know what that means,” she said, “but I suspect you’re just trying to take your temper out on me. Unless you still resent my unearned familiarity with this dimension, you’ve got no reason to be upset with me for being friendly to him.”
He went white. “What do you mean, ‘still’?” he said; but Elisabeth, to save face and stave off tears, turned and exited the kitchen. She felt herself on the verge of a towering temper. Unwilling to lose her dignity in front of Andrew, she hid in their bedroom to put her shoes on, grabbed her satchel, and threw a few books in willy-nilly.
She had not been going to give him the courtesy of telling him where she was going, but he appeared in the kitchen doorway as she was putting on her jacket in the front entry. “Got to get some work done,” she said shortly, flipping her hair out from under her jacket collar and picking up her satchel. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”
He did not attempt to stop her, though she thought that his glare had more worry than resentment in it, and she swept out the door without another word. Andrew paused in his phone conversation to wave her goodbye.
And if he kills him, she thought as she shuffled quickly down the steps, I won’t put up bail.
*
Elisabeth stayed away long enough to indulge all the resentful, furious thoughts that felt like surfacing. She turned pages without reading them and scowled at the words, thinking up scathing words of her own. In the last few days, not only had he indulged an insulting worry that she had a death wish and/or wanted to run away from him (again), and rounded on her with fury for “snivelling,” as he called it, he’d now also attacked her for not letting him snivel. Clearly, some unspoken resentment of her was at work. Elisabeth asked herself, in an attempt to be fair, whether she was upset that it was unspoken or upset that he had a beef with her at all, justified or not: she concluded that there was no way to know if it was justified if he wouldn’t tell her what it was. Frustrated, she shoved the matter away and tried to focus her attention on her books.
Concentrating
on the books, however, only emphasized how poorly she had packed for this
outing: the only work she really needed to be doing was her review of
literature, the notes and books for which were back at home. Elisabeth gave up after a while, tossed the
book she’d been not-reading into her satchel, and went to take a brisk turn in
The sound of bells on the air reminded her, with a pang, that she had missed church that week. She really ought to see Anne and let her know that she was still in the land of the living; and the fact that she had neglected to seek any spiritual direction in a while also made her uneasy. It was, if she wanted to be perfectly honest, the reason she’d been avoiding Anne recently—as if the deficit in attention to her spiritual health could be rectified by hiding in shame from it. But she knew what Anne would say if they got down to it. She knew Anne would ask if she was still having the dreams.
“It isn’t running away,” she muttered out loud, as if debating it with the priest. “I can’t tell him what the dreams are really about. And it’s not as if I’m lying to him—the dreams are about the First, they aren’t really about him. It would only hurt him needlessly.”
Just a few short minutes ago she’d been fantasizing about doing just that—hurting him needlessly, in revenge for…what? For succumbing to temper after a week’s worth of meager sleep?
Elisabeth grew rather ashamed of herself. “I’m not going to hold Andrew over his head,” she told herself. “And I really ought to go and see Anne.”
She had the
perfect opportunity to turn her steps toward
She arrived at her doorstep just as the drops began pelting down in earnest. Pausing in the doorway to shake the rain off her jacket and wipe back the tendrils of her hair, she left her satchel in the foyer and went to the bedroom to change.
It was as she was turning from the open closet to toss her glasses onto the bed that she caught sight of him in the doorway. She turned away, unwilling to show him what she knew was on her face: the First had mirrored that look of despairing worry back to her often enough.
“I am sorry, you know,” he said quietly.
She stopped in the act of hanging up her shirt. Then she turned to face him. “I don’t know if I’m coming or going,” she said, frustration thick in her voice. “The other night you thought I was desperate enough to entertain a death wish to get away from—God knows what. Then today you accuse me of complacency. And I can’t for the life of me figure out what one sin I’m committing that looks like both of them.” She turned again and hung up the shirt, then reached for a T-shirt to pull over her head.
He had come into the room, to sit on the foot of the bed; when she turned, he was picking up her glasses to fold in his nimble fingers. “You’re not committing any sins,” he said, softly. Out in the kitchen, she could hear Andrew’s voice interspersed with Xander’s, and the clatter of crockery; the smell of frying food reached her, and her stomach contracted hungrily. “I,” he said, “on the other hand….”
“You’re not committing any sins either,” Elisabeth said sharply, untying one boot and tossing it into the closet willy-nilly. “You haven’t had any sleep in a week. I could have remembered that sooner.” She couldn’t look at him; instead she concentrated on unknotting her other boot lace.
“It may be a reason, but it’s not an excuse,” he said.
A suffocating impatience made Elisabeth look up. “Rupert,” she began—
“Elisabeth, —is there something—”
“Are you just trying to take this all on yourself, or are you really wanting to make it better?” she said.
“—is there something really wrong?” he persisted.
She lost patience altogether. “I don’t know, Rupert. Is there?”
He looked at her helplessly.
“Something’s upsetting you,” she said. “I haven’t got a clue what it is.” This was slightly disingenuous; her dreams were certainly a clue, but to what—it was far too diffuse to articulate.
Apparently it was the same for him, because his response was a frustrated stutter. “It isn’t—” he said— “it’s not—” He stopped, then began again. “It isn’t…really to do with you.”
She breathed slowly in, then out. “Is this you saying you don’t have anything to accuse me of? Because the fact that we live together and share our burdens pretty much means that it has to do with me.”
“I solved the problem of the house,” he said. “I mean, we solved the problem of the house.”
She waited for him to go on.
His eyes were on his hands turning over her glasses in a delicate gesture. “There isn’t—there isn’t anything else to tackle.”
She waited still, but he said nothing more. Finally she ventured, “Except feeling diffusely crappy?”
He raised his eyes to hers and sat silent. She gave a very soft snort and let one shoulder fall. “How I spent my summer vacation, by Rupert Giles, age 49,” she said. “I went away to PTSD camp, and they sent me home with extra homework. The best that can be said is I didn’t wind up with a concussion this last time around.” She watched his face: his lips twitched unwillingly.
“He was messing with my head,” Elisabeth said. “I obeyed the instinct to mess with his. I wasn’t making a slap at you.”
He cleared his throat and nodded. “I did figure that out. Eventually.”
She tossed the other boot into the closet and went to him. “Unless my nose deceives me,” she said, “dinner is served.” She took her glasses from his hands, dropped a kiss on his forehead, and padded out to greet Xander and Andrew in the kitchen.
*
After a protracted dance of etiquette, Elisabeth persuaded Andrew that it was perfectly all right for him to take over the internet connection for the evening while she spread out at the dining table with her books and notes. With Andrew thus preoccupied and Rupert doing the washing up, Xander took a chair at the table with her.
“So what is this you’re working on?” he asked, toying with the cover of one of the books.
“It’s a review of literature. Basically, I’m taking all the books I’m going to talk about in my thesis and writing up notes on why they’re going to be important.”
“And how many books are you going to talk about in your thesis?”
“Eighty-six, last count.” Off Xander’s incredulous look, she added, “Primary and secondary sources.”
“Talk about your book-fu,” Xander said.
Elisabeth snorted. “Believe me, there’s not much fu about it. Getting this done is like pulling teeth.” She let out a heavy sigh, flipped open Phantastes to her first sticky-flag, and began to copy the relevant passage onto a large index card. “I had half of this done by January, but I ended up throwing the whole spring’s work out and starting over. It was good to start afresh, but—you know.” Xander said nothing, and she started again, though she hadn’t meant to. “Couldn’t read my own writing in places. In others, my writing was scarily legible. And I couldn’t look at the Dadd prints at all.”
“Your dad?”
“Richard Dadd, D-a-d-d. Did his most famous paintings from Bedlam Asylum. Every detail is so exact that it’s like there’s no cohesion, no navigable meaning, no mental frame—it’s all foreground, no background. Still gives me the creeps.”
“Then why not leave him out?”
She paused to give him a brief look. “That would be copping out. The thesis needs him.”
Rupert passed them on his way to the den, a tumbler of scotch in one hand and the decanter in the other. Elisabeth’s gaze marked him briefly, but she turned her eyes back to her book with only the briefest of sighs.
Xander gave Rupert a furtive glance over his shoulder, as he settled himself on the couch with a newspaper and took a pursed sip of his drink. “Is he doing that a lot?” he asked Elisabeth, in a low voice.
She had no definite answer to give him: she looked up and gave him a mere twitch of expression, then looked down again. A small misery pooled in her chest.
“You want I should say something?” Xander persisted quietly.
Elisabeth shook her head. “He has to work it out on his own. Best just leave him to it.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
She said doggedly, “He will. Eventually.”
Xander’s voice went even quieter. “Has he hurt you?”
Elisabeth gave her head a tentative shake, unwilling to characterize her worry that way. “It isn’t—” She stopped as Xander’s full meaning sank in, and looked up at him wide-eyed. “No. No. It’s not like that.”
Xander’s dark eye held hers.
She wondered if she ought to be feeling piqued on Rupert’s behalf. “Do you—do you think he’s like that?”
“No,”
Xander said steadily. “It’s just that
I’ve been wondering what’s going on.” Across the room Andrew laughed loudly at
something that came up in his IM window, and Rupert winced and took a long sip
of scotch. “
“Oh,” was all Elisabeth could think to say.
“’Course, Giles didn’t give her much in the way of details—she just said he told her that he tried to force you to tell him—”
“—how the First would be defeated,” Elisabeth said dully. Her dinner was sitting in a lump in her stomach. “That was kinda different, though, you know.”
“But it’s still on the table, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” Elisabeth said. She picked up her pencil again with a frown, but did not for a moment think that that would end the conversation.
“Buffy says your best friend hit him in the face over it. She asked him why, and all he said was that he hurt you.”
“That was before she found out the extent of my knowledge, I presume,” Elisabeth said tartly. Her stomach was really starting to hurt.
“Yeah,
well, Buffy was a little slow on the uptake on that one.” She looked up at him in surprise. “Will was in denial,
“And you?” Elisabeth said.
“It was pretty obvious from the beginning,” Xander said. “One of those sci-fi conundrums, like Andrew said. Anya says—” He stopped, and his gaze fell to the books. Elisabeth resisted the urge to touch him.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if I was still persona non grata,” Elisabeth said quietly, after a long silence.
“It’s not that simple,” Xander said. “It’s never that simple,” he repeated, quieter.
“You get why I kept silent, though?”
Xander’s eye lifted to meet hers again. “Yes,” he said.
“And Rupert got it too,” she said. “He just—”
“Cracked,” Xander said softly.
Elisabeth nodded slowly, her gaze downcast.
“He saw a lot of horrible things,” she whispered. “Not that he’s mentioned word one about it, but I know that he did. I’m willing to give him a long anchor chain.”
There was a silence, then Xander said: “Do you want me to stay here for a little while?”
She looked up. “That’s not in the plan. You’re supposed to be headed to Capetown. You’ve already been delayed.”
Xander repeated, with emphasis: “Do you want me to stay here for a little while?”
She gave him a look. “I would love for you to stay here a little while, but it’s not a good idea.” She drew a deep breath and sat up straight, looking down at her books as if they’d become alien missives. “You’re going to be here for a couple days, right? That’ll be good. I think he’d like to show you the house.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing it,” Xander said, and there was real relief in his face. “I like that Giles found something here.”
She gave him a small pursed smile.
“You think he’s going to be able to take having Andrew around here?”
“Andrew,”
Elisabeth said, “is going to live in Rupert’s flat in
“That’s the plan?”
“If it wasn’t before, it certainly is now.”
*
Elisabeth gave herself the goal of two books completed before bedtime, but before she did that she shooed Rupert off the couch to make Xander a bed for the night. For Andrew she got out an inflatable mattress and pushed aside three different stacks of books to lay it out. “When did you get that thing?” Rupert asked, frowning at her myopically from his new nest in the armchair.
“Oh, I got it a couple of weeks ago,” Elisabeth said, “when it first became apparent that we might be getting impromptu visits.” She stepped back as the inflator fan kicked on and dusted off her hands.
Xander was shaking his head. “I should have booked us a hotel room.”
“Well, there’s always tomorrow,” Rupert said, taking a delicate sip of his drink.
Elisabeth ignored him and went to kick Andrew off her computer so that she could convert her notes to written sections.
Xander sat down on the sheet-draped couch and attempted to relax. “Would you care for any?” Rupert asked him, nudging the decanter at him politely. Xander shook his head.
Elisabeth said, without looking up from her efforts to disentangle her computer from its wires: “There’s tea, coffee, and hot chocolate if either of you want some.” She did not bother to turn around and catch Rupert’s hooded look in her direction: she knew it was there.
“Ooh, hot chocolate,” Andrew said, and made for the kitchen.
While Andrew and Xander and Rupert relaxed in the den with their drinks of choice, conversing idly (Andrew had, despite Rupert’s dire pronouncements, quieted as the day wore on), Elisabeth set to her work. It was no more pleasant than it had been the last few days: every sentence came at a staggering cost, every paragraph shaped and reshaped itself as she wrote it, each form more awkward than the last. At one point she paused, hands quiet on the keyboard, and wondered fretfully if she ought to go on some kind of antidepressant again. I’m not doing very well lately, she thought.
The voices of the men half a room away ought to have been comforting, but they weren’t. The air of the place reminded her of numerous social engagements she’d gone to six months before, dreadfully attended by her own mocking mirror image—
She shook her head, to clear it. Across the room, Rupert was nodding into his glass at something Xander was saying about language barriers; his eyes were getting that look of clement unfocus that they had when he was far enough into his cups. Must be nice, Elisabeth thought; she wasn’t much of a drinker, as her mind tended to interpret the diffuseness of being drunk as the burgeoning fuzziness of one of her attacks. And, of course, given a choice between her sense of control and mental abandon, control usually won. It was a wonder she’d ever let herself have sex, really.
Though they had never discussed it, she suspected Rupert thought she wanted him to have the same attitude toward mind-altering substances that she did. Nothing could be further from the truth: she believed that his native generosity of spirit was at the back of all his doings. Which wasn’t to say that his inclinations to drink under stress were altogether wholesome; Xander was right to feel concerned. Perhaps he was also right that just letting Rupert go was a dicey plan. But Elisabeth didn’t fancy weathering the quarrel that would surely result if she said something. She didn’t, if it came to that, fancy weathering any quarrels at all. She and Rupert were too much alike in that respect: they fought silence with silence and swallowed offenses whole, like Chronos eating his children to stop himself being overthrown. If she was ever blunt with him, it was in desperation against her own nature.
Back when she’d been traveling, it had become her custom to assume a confidence she didn’t have, and this had been made easier by the transient nature of her contact with people. Now, she was as much at home as she was ever likely to be, and she was tired of always being ready for what was coming at her, in the same place always. Your works will end, she had told Charles Bowen, and mine shall extend.
Just great, she thought sourly.
Elisabeth gave up after only one book, saved her work, and shut down everything for the night. “I’m going to bed,” she told the others. “Goodnight.”
Tonight was not a night for the graces of darkness. Elisabeth left her bedside light on as she settled down, but still it was hard to sleep, with the rise and fall of male voices plucking at the edge of her hearing.
She must have fallen asleep, however, because when the old nightmare took her and she struggled out of sleep, the light was off and Rupert was beside her in the bed, firmly asleep. She sat up, panting and disoriented; Rupert did not stir, thanks to the scotch.
In the darkness, pained, alone, and frustrated, Elisabeth choked back hot tears. She couldn’t tell whether she was angry at herself for dreaming and Rupert for staying asleep, or angry at Rupert for giving her the dream and herself for wishing he’d wake up and comfort her. And at the very least, she thought, she ought to be able to figure that one out.
She fumbled for the water on the night-stand and took a long drink, then put the glass to her hot forehead, breathing herself back into equilibrium.
It’s just a damn dream, she told herself as she took another sip. And there’s plenty of reasons for your subconscious to be upset. Didn’t you just kill off practically your entire paternal line? A little freakage is called for, methinks.
Not that she had particularly wanted to be reminded of that last. Because now she was mad at Rupert for being asleep. She glared over at his softly-breathing hulk in the darkness. What business did he have, drinking himself to sleep while she was the one needing comfort?...Oh, that was unworthy of her. It needn’t be either/or, she reminded herself. They were both in a bad place.
She put the water back on the night-stand and burrowed under the covers.
It wasn’t going to be easy to send Xander on to Capetown.
*
In an unusual reversal, Rupert woke to find Elisabeth already out of bed. He turned over, breathing in deeply, and tried to place the residual discomfort he was feeling; but he was distracted by a distant clattering in the kitchen. He got up and pulled on his robe to investigate.
Andrew was sprawled and slumbering on the air mattress, but Xander shuffled out of the kitchen, tousle-headed, patchless, and carrying a cup of coffee.
“Where’s Elisabeth?” Rupert asked, clearing his throat.
Xander sat down at the dining table, shuffled up a note lying there, and held it toward him. Rupert took it.
R—gone to run some
errands and hit the library. Probably
gone all day. Took the car. —E.
P.S. Careful, there’s only one roll of t.p. left.
Rupert let out a long, heavy sigh. Could you read between the lines if there was only one of them? Unless you counted the line about the toilet paper (and if she was running errands, did that mean she was going to pick up some?), which he did not. Of course, Elisabeth’s notes were consistent in their brevity no matter what mood she was in. But Rupert had a feeling that his vaguely guilty conscience was not merely internal weather.
“Did you see her?” he asked Xander.
“Not really,” Xander said. “I woke up as she was leaving.”
It was no use. Rupert couldn’t get hold of the correct perspective.
“Would you,” he said, “mind very much if I ran an errand or two of my own this morning?”
Xander shrugged. “I think I’m going to play victim to jet lag this a.m. So you might as well. You gonna go out for toilet paper?”
Until last spring’s foxhole familiarity at the house on Revello, Rupert had not been able to countenance such a conversation with Xander Harris; but now he merely sighed and rolled his eyes. “Might as well.”
He turned, and was about to make his way back to the bathroom for a shower, but Xander’s next query stopped him.
“D’you think she’s all right?”
Rupert turned. “Who? Elisabeth?” he said, to gain time.
“Yeah.”
“Why wouldn’t she be?”
Xander shrugged and quirked his head noncommittally, but his one dark eye was eloquently steady.
Rupert paused for a long moment, looking at him and thinking it over. Then he turned and continued on his way to the bathroom, without reply.
*
The tea was cold in his cup by the time he’d finished relating the details of the haunting and exorcism. He sat back and found a spot on Anne’s desk to deposit the cup and saucer.
“Well, you’ve had rather an eventful few days. And you’re quite sure the house is clear now?” Anne asked calmly.
“I think so. There are a few tests I’ll need to perform.” Rupert laced and unlaced his fingers in his lap.
“You don’t seem happy about it. Still tired from the effort?”
“I wish I knew,” Rupert said, letting his shoulders fall in a weary sigh.
“But nothing went wrong?” Anne prodded him gently.
“I don’t think so….” But she left the silence to draw it out of him. “…I wasn’t particularly pleasant to Elisabeth yesterday. I hadn’t had any sleep, but that is no excuse. But she didn’t really want me to apologize.”
Anne raised an eyebrow. “She said she didn’t want you to apologize?”
“She said she didn’t want me…taking it all on myself. I don’t know what that means, I’m sure.”
“Could you hazard a guess?” Anne said.
Warned by her dry tone, he swallowed and made the attempt. “I suppose she doesn’t want me to avoid talking about it by claiming full responsibility.”
“Talking about what?”
“The problem.”
“What problem?”
He tossed his head aside impatiently. “The reason we had the fight in the first place.”
“So there was an actual fight.”
He heaved a sigh, and explained about Andrew.
Anne didn’t say anything at first. He glanced at the priest’s face and saw that the characteristic dent had appeared between her brows, and she looked briefly over at her pen. But instead of reaching for it, she said: “So, if I understand it, Andrew’s cavalier reference to last spring’s troubles set you off, and since your strength was at a low ebb, you lost your temper and took it out on Elisabeth. Is that correct?”
He let his chin and his gaze fall. “Yes.”
“But an apology doesn’t make it better. Why not?”
He couldn’t get an answer past his thickened throat.
“You say Elisabeth doesn’t want you to smooth it over by simply claiming to have perpetrated some monstrosity. What is that about?”
He raised his eyes to the ceiling and gave a great sigh.
Anne sat back in her chair. “When was the last time you discussed what happened last spring?”
“Discussed it,” Rupert repeated dully, eyes still on the ceiling.
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said reluctantly, “—probably, I would say, right when I returned from the States.”
“And that,” Anne said, with a deadly gentleness, “would have been prior to your first conversation with me. Correct?”
Rupert gave her no answer, which was answer enough.
“So—” her voice was light— “you and I have been having these conversations for what? four months now?—but you haven’t yet discussed the central problem with Elisabeth. I’m curious, Rupert, what do you and Elisabeth say to one another about your visits to me?”
He shot a hunted look at her, and snatched his gaze away.
When Anne next spoke, it was in a tone he’d never heard before. “Elisabeth…does know you’ve been coming to see me. Does she?”
Rupert stammered out, “I-I’m not sure.”
“You haven’t told her,” Anne said flatly.
He dared not answer that.
There was a long silence: at last Rupert glanced over at her, and received an unpleasant shock. Her face was turned away, but he could see that she was very pale. As he watched, she pressed her lips hard together, recovering from some great emotion; then she turned and looked him direct in the eye. He lowered his gaze.
It took a few moments for the shock of catastrophe to clear through the silence. Then Anne spoke, in a voice hardly above a whisper.
“That was very badly done of you.”
He winced under the words as under a lash, wondering how he’d managed to be so foolish as to imagine she could accept what he’d done.
She went on. “Are you laboring under the mistaken impression that I am a free agent in this matter? That there is no conflict of interest? I was willing to offer some direction to the conjugal partner of my friend only because I thought she knew and approved of it.”
Hot shame flooded over his face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to the floor. And he thought he couldn’t possibly feel worse, but then he looked up at her and saw that she was fighting back tears. She looked away from him and pressed a fist firmly to her lips.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, his voice breaking on it.
She said, her fist still against her lips: “You can’t come back here.”
His throat ached. “I—I understand that. I should have seen….Please. I don’t want—want you to think ill of me.”
Anne rounded on him. “Think ill of you! I made a friend of you, and you—Am I to understand that you’ve been confessing your soul to me while saying nothing to Elisabeth at all? Do you understand how abysmally foolish and wrong that is?”
Rupert cowered in his chair and nodded miserably.
She snapped her gaze to her desk and began to straighten the piles of papers, her nose and eyes very pink. “You have some work to do,” she said shortly. “I don’t want you in my sight until Elisabeth knows you’ve been coming here.” She turned her head and pinned him to the wall with her eyes. “Do you understand?”
He gave her many small nods, unable to break eye contact. “Yes.”
“Right.” Anne turned away. “You may go.”
Quietly, Rupert got up and crept from the room, pulling the door to behind him. But he could not resist glancing through the beveled-glass pane in the office door as he shut it: he saw Anne drop her face into her elegant hands.
Rupert could bear no more. He decamped from the church as quickly as he could, without greeting any of the staff.
*
Elisabeth pulled up at Pyke’s Lea with her inner restlessness unabated. She set the handbrake and got out of the car.
She hadn’t
really lied to Rupert in the note. Well,
the part about the library was a lie, but didn’t count because he’d see through
it; after all, there was no use driving the car into
“Oh, what bullshit, Elisabeth,” she muttered aloud, and got out her housekey.
Without the curse, Pyke’s Lea was quiet. Not preternaturally quiet, just quiet with the occasional sigh or groan of ancient wood. She stood in the foyer and took in the dignified slant of light through the corridors ahead. This was now as much her house as Rupert’s; it contained the line of space-time that separated her and her lost lineage, and it felt like something that belonged to her—the sort of place that irritated her superego to no end but still satisfied a deep part of her.
She took her time exploring room by room, measuring with her eyes the length of sunbeams streaming through uncurtained, dusty windows, tracing chipped layers of paint on baseboards, triangulating water-stains on ceilings with her mental compass. Some surfaces she touched: some she left alone, preferring the touch of sight.
The rooms had an uncanny breadth of dimension, so that she didn’t feel cramped anywhere, even in the downstairs bathroom, which had been shoehorned in at the back of the main staircase. Of course, in order to maintain that sense of space, they’d have to maintain simplicity in furnishing. She’d have to discuss that with Rupert, though she felt sure he’d agree—in fact, their only danger in that area was the books. Elisabeth knew all too well how deceptively easy it was to overflow shelving space, and she’d learned from packing up the Greenbill library how many volumes it would take to clutter the house.
The conservatory looked dreadfully bare and forlorn. Elisabeth hoped Rupert had a green thumb, because she certainly didn’t.
The study, without its whirl of anguish and discord, was noble and comfortable; the detritus of their spells still lay on the ragged carpet. Elisabeth paused in the doorway to refresh her intimacy with the room before moving on, seeking still.
Upstairs, the rooms spoke of a long, empty wait for—what? Lives should be lived here, she felt, but what that would look like she couldn’t project. It should be simple up here, too—gentle colors, and warmth without overproliferation.
At the head of the corridor she found the staircase hatch to the attic. She had no idea if Rupert had been up there, and no idea what she might find, other than more nothing; but she hesitated only a moment before jumping up to catch the handle. It took three tries, but she finally got hold of it and hung on it till it screeched and began to lower, showering her with dust and flakes of paint.
With a rusty groan the staircase touched down to the floor, and Elisabeth paused to sneeze twice before putting her foot on the first broad wooden step. She ascended carefully and slowly, eyes out for spiders or vermin. She jumped and yelped at the sixth step, but it was only the husk of a dead spider confronting her at the head of the steps.
As she rose up into the room, she understood that she had come to the place she’d been unconsciously looking for. The attic covered the length and breadth of the house and was roofed over with arched struts—crucks, she believed the term was, if her memory of Rupert’s ramblings served—and was almost chapel-like in its quiet and space.
No safe places, she’d told Rupert; but she’d ached for one. Or at least for a place not soaked with the harmonic overtones of her personal holocaust, that she could also call her own.
She walked down the center of the empty space, taking in the light from the three dormer windows and raising her arms into a wide prayer, daring a free breath as she disturbed the dust motes with her passing. Oh, she had forgotten what it was to be alone with herself; had forgotten the presence of silence and the nameless quiet of her pulses in that presence. Elisabeth sank down to the wide boards of the floor and put her head in crossed arms upon her knees.
*
In the pub, Rupert poked miserably at a basket of fish and chips. He was anything but hungry. It had been a while since he had so indubitably fucked up, and he wished he weren’t so damned familiar with the feeling.
He drew a long breath and let it out in a sigh. If he’d understood Anne correctly, she didn’t want to lay eyes on him till he’d made a clean breast of it to Elisabeth; but even then, he couldn’t apply to her for direction again. Thinking it over, he believed there had been signs that Anne was moving toward weaning him off her advice anyway, but the naked truth of his—oh, might as well call it a deception and be done with it—had hurt her personally. He hadn’t meant to do that. Oh, if only he could trade the past twenty-four hours in for something in which he hadn’t been such a pillock.
He lifted his pint glass for several long swallows. Be nice to get pissed, but that would only lead to more idiocy. He put down the glass and let his gaze get lost in the nutty depths of ale.
Someone slid into the booth seat across from him, without any diffidence or hesitation. Rupert jerked his head up, ready for indignant defense.
“Hallo, Giles.”
It was Robson.
*
Brian Whitaker mounted the steps of Elisabeth’s flat, whistling softly through his teeth. A good sleep and a reality-affirming call to his parents later, he was his own man again. Rupert’s car was gone, so possibly he had a chance of hanging out with Elisabeth alone; at any rate, he had in mind to invite her out for tea or something frivolous. He reached out and knocked on the door: shave and a haircut, six bits.
It was answered by a pirate: a stocky young man with dark hair and one very direct dark eye.
Brian reared back, blinking. Had he got the wrong house?
Before he could get over staring at the eyepatch and start talking, the man’s mouth twitched into a smile.
“Arrr,” he growled. “I be Xander Harris. Who be you?”
Brian blinked again. “I be—” he shook himself, blushing— “I am Brian Whitaker. I’m looking for—”
“Arrr, me mateys Giles and Elisabeth are not at home.” Xander Harris dropped the pirate accent and said politely, “Can I take a message?”
“You don’t know where they’ve gone?” Brian’s lips were quirking into a smile. Hell, he dished it out often enough; fair enough to take it.
Xander shrugged. “‘Errands’ covers a lot of ground. They left separately.”
“I see,”
Brian said. He fixed Harris with a
speculative look. “You’re one of
Rupert’s friends from
“That’s right,” Xander said calmly.
“You seem to have fared worse in the battle than Rupert,” Brian said. It was the easiest way he could conjure to let the man know he was safe with their confidences, but he wasn’t sure it didn’t just sound condescending.
“I don’t know about that,” was Xander Harris’s cryptic answer. And he stepped back in the unmistakable silent invitation of the vampire-conscious.
*
Despite her desire for quiet and solitude, Elisabeth had not particularly wanted to be confronted with silence. It was in silence that her own demons had found voice, in silence that her desperate narratives had unraveled.
But that fear had become increasingly irrelevant.
Under the arches of the attic, Elisabeth closed her eyes and accepted the authority of the silence. And knocking at the door of her heart came those things she had lost: her family, her friends, and the promise of a truncated history.
I miss you, she said into the silence of her heart. And I’m so damn sorry.
Noiselessly, she wept.
*
“And what is this now?” Rupert inquired sourly. “The scene with the prodigal son or the scene with the thirty silver pieces?”
“It needn’t be either,” Robson said, unruffled.
“Then you want me to sell Buffy out for free,” Rupert said.
At this Robson did roll his eyes. “Nobody wants you to sell Miss Summers out. You persist in having this regrettable us-versus-them mentality, Giles….”
“Hmm, wonder why that is?” Rupert said, taking another long sip of ale.
True to Watcherly form, Robson did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, but merely gave him a long look. “I’m not here to persuade you away from your Slayer,” he said quietly. “I’m here to make contact with you.”
“On behalf of the Council. Or what’s left of it.”
“There are some of us who are regrouping, yes,” Robson said. “There are some who say that it is you who are calling yourselves the Council.”
Rupert snorted. “A network of practical communications for the purpose of guiding those who are Chosen is hardly a Council of any type.”
“But, thanks to your resident witch, it’s you who’s got most of Council fund reserves.”
“Money does not a Council make, either, as you know perfectly well.”
“Well, our own aims are by necessity fairly modest,” Robson said, with an aridity that was not meant to conceal his pique. “We are regathering as much knowledge as we can.”
“Knowledge, as in research resources—or knowledge, as in surveillance?”
At this, Robson gave a heavy sigh. “Giles, for heaven’s sake. We are not mounting a military operation against your girls.”
“They’re not my girls, and she’s not my Slayer,” Rupert said. “The old ways are done.”
“Then you’re…perfectly—what’s the word—copacetic with the new ways? No disagreements, all harmony?”
Rupert narrowed his eyes at the man. Damn him.
“What do you want from me?” Rupert said.
“Nothing very much. A little information.”
“Such as?”
“The most recent estimate of the number of new Slayers, for example. Also, results of your reconnoitering in various hot spots round the world. Things of that nature.”
Rupert popped a chip into his mouth and chewed. “No.”
Robson was beginning to show his impatience on his face. Rupert had learned to look for the little crease over one eye to deepen, the chin to sharpen. “Giles…in case you have forgotten, we are all on the same side.”
“The same side?” Rupert said mildly. “Then I presume things have changed since Buffy called the Council looking for ‘a little information’ about a small matter we informally called ‘the Harrowing.’ If I recall correctly, she was deemed unworthy of a single iota of ‘information’ and told to bugger off.”
“Giles—”
“And who was it who defeated, practically single-handed, the First Evil? Certainly none of the weapons you had at your disposal were put into her hands. No: I’ll be damned if I give you information. I’m shocked you have the face to ask for it, though I ought to know better.” Swift, revivifying indignation was coursing through his veins. He raised his head and gave Robson the full force of his glare.
There was a silence. Then Robson said quietly, “We could work together. Forces for good shouldn’t fight one another.”
“Why not? They do it all the time,” Rupert said bitterly, and lifted his glass to drain it.
Robson got up from the booth. “Think about it, anyway. One colleague to another.”
It was on Rupert’s tongue to say that they were colleagues only because each of them had cheated death several times; but he kept silence, and Robson disappeared quietly from the pub, leaving him alone with his frustration.
*
After his unsatisfactory lunch, Rupert trailed home to find
Xander folding up his bedding to give Brian Whitaker a place to sit. Andrew was washing their lunch dishes and
chattering about
“Rupert,” Brian said, with his usual cool nod.
“Brian.” Rupert turned toward the bathroom, murmuring, “This day just gets better and better.”
When he returned, Xander said, “Elisabeth’s not back yet. But what do you think about going out to the house? I’d like to see it.”
“We could take my car,” Brian said. “It’s parked out on the street. Except there’s a big pile of papers and books in the back; we’d need to move them to the boot to accommodate all four of us.”
“I can do that,” Xander said. He moved toward the door.
“It’s the black VW a few spaces that way,” Brian said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the street. “Harris—” Xander paused long enough for Brian to dig out his keys and toss them over. He reached out and caught them easily, as if he hadn’t spent a month relearning how.
“Thanks,” Xander said, and disappeared with a jingle of the keys.
Rupert found himself frowning helplessly over these new developments, not least of which was Brian’s and Xander’s instant rapport, not to mention the fact that none of them had waited to find out if he wanted to go to the house at all.
“Oh, God, that reminds me,” Andrew said. “I’m going to have to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. Oh my God. Is it hard?”
Brian shot Rupert a look of bewilderment—who is this person?—which made Rupert nip a smile in the bud.
*
The four men arrived at Pyke’s Lea to find Rupert’s car parked there. “So this is where she’s got to,” Brian said.
Rupert was staring at the house with a faint frown that could have meant apprehension or mere thoughtfulness. Slowly, he started toward the front walk, and the others followed.
“Is that timbering a façade, or the real wall?” Xander asked.
“It’s the real wall,” Rupert answered, absently, and Xander gave an impressed grunt.
The door was unlocked.
“Wow,” Andrew was saying. “Wow. This is so cool. Are we going to see where you did that exorcism spell? I did this exorcism once, where we took a pin and—”
“Hush,” Rupert said; Brian raised his eyes to the ceiling and drew breath. “Elisabeth?” Rupert called.
They moved further into the house, past the foyer. “Elisabeth?” Brian called. “Rupert, d’you think she’s—”
“I’m upstairs,” Elisabeth called faintly from above. “I’ll be down in a minute. Hang on.”
Rupert stared up the main staircase for a moment, then began, deliberately, to climb it. Andrew followed, but Xander caught him deftly by the collar and drew him back.
“Let’s have a look around,” he said significantly to Brian, who gave a resigned nod.
“Study’s this way,” Brian said, tipping his head in that direction. “The remains of the spell should be there, if Elisabeth hasn’t cleared it up.”
“Awesome,” Andrew said.
*
Elisabeth had fallen asleep. She woke to a changed light in the attic and raised her head blearily from her arm, then pushed herself to a sitting position and rubbed at her face. It felt slightly puffy after the crying and the unaccustomed nap.
Below, outdoors, she heard the dull sound of a car door slam, then another. Then multiple voices coming into the house. They’d come looking for her.
She didn’t really want them up here, so she crawled to the staircase opening and shouted down, to let them know she was all right, and coming soon. Then she sat back on the dusty attic floor, trying to collect her sleepy wits.
She heard Rupert’s footsteps on the main staircase; heard him pause at the sight of the opened trapdoor. She waited, and presently his head appeared in the attic, then the rest of him. He paused to brush away the dead spider and settled himself on the second step down.
“Hi,” she said.
A faint, sad smile came to his face as he took in the attic with his gaze, then looked at her. “Hi,” he said.
“Giving them the tour?” she inquired. “Or were you worried about me?”
He gave a little shrug and looked away, the corners of his mouth taut.
“What’s the matter?” she said softly. “You look sad.”
He opened his mouth, but it was a few moments before he finally spoke. “Anne’s very angry with me,” he said quietly.
Elisabeth sat up, blinking at this unexpected development. “Really? Why?”
He didn’t look at her. “Because she realized I hadn’t told you I’ve been going to her for direction.”
Elisabeth sat still, absorbing the full implications of the statement. “So,” she said finally, “that’s where you’ve been going lately? To the church?”
Rupert nodded and shot a miserable glance into the corner. “She’s very angry with me,” he repeated.
“Hmm. I’m not surprised.”
“Are you? Angry with me, I mean.” He still did not dare to look at her.
Her heart went out to him. She got up and went to sit next to him on the second step down, and slipped her hand into his. “No,” she said. “You probably should have told me. But I get why you didn’t. And I’m glad you went looking for good advice. Anne’s a good spiritual director.”
“Well, she’s not my spiritual director anymore, now that I’ve made a balls-up of it,” Rupert said bitterly.
Elisabeth leaned in and kissed the side of his head consolingly. He let out a little sigh and let his head rest against hers.
They sat like that for a little bit, then he raised his head and glanced around the attic with more interest, taking in the arch of the roof and the darkened rafters. He glanced down at her; she let him look in her eyes for a moment before laying her head against his shoulder.
Downstairs, they could hear Andrew’s voice carrying up, describing some spell or other that he’d done in the past. When his voice hit a lull, Elisabeth stirred, and rose with his hand still in hers.
“Shall we give them the tour now?” she said, with a small smile.
*
Elisabeth let Rupert gravitate toward Xander during the tour, choosing instead to hang back with Brian and show him the things she knew he’d find interesting. Brian proved somewhat knowledgeable about floor plans from the era, as he had briefly considered studying to be an architect. “I thought you considered studying to be a thespian.”
“Well, that, too,” Brian grinned. “But it’s a don’s life for me, at the end of the day.”
Andrew turned from his rapt attention to Rupert’s and Xander’s conversation about detecting wall studs to say confusedly, “You were going to study to be a lesbian?”
“Thespian, Andrew,” Elisabeth grinned, as Brian choked. “A theatre major. But I reckon there haven’t been any flying monkey incidents in the O.U.D.S., eh?”
“Certainly not,” Brian said, plying his handkerchief to his watering eyes. Andrew grinned back at Elisabeth.
They rambled over the house and grounds, pointing out beauties or problem spots, until at last they found themselves in the gravel parking area. A trip to the local Indian restaurant for takeaway was mooted, and plans made to reconvene at Elisabeth’s flat.
“I’ll follow you,” Elisabeth agreed. “But first,” she added in a low tone to Rupert, “I’d probably better go and see Anne.”
He sighed. “Yes, you probably better had.”
She went up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “See you later, then.”
The four men all waved at her as she got into the car.
*
Elisabeth parked at the flat and walked briskly across the
Bridge and over to
Anne answered her knock—shave and a haircut, six bits—carrying a teacup and wearing her fuzzy green wrapper over a jumper and yoga pants. Elisabeth shot her a wry, self-deprecating smile. “Hey.”
She was relieved to see a faint light of humor in Anne’s face, as she stepped back to let her in.
*
“Well, I knew he was going somewhere,” Elisabeth said, blowing on the surface of her cup of tea. “I’m glad he wasn’t just going down the pub, you know. It means he’s at least trying to cope, which with Rupert you never can tell if he’ll bother.”
Anne sighed. “Well, I’m as angry at myself as I was at him. I ought to have seen that coming. Really, if I had a quid for every time a directee dissembled, I’d retire in style. It’s more that…well, he’s a good man and it was easy to befriend him. And I knew better than to try to give direction to a friend under circumstances such as these.”
Elisabeth nodded, commiserating. “Anyway, you sure put the fear of God into him. He didn’t waste time telling me as soon as he saw me again.”
A faint smile came to the priest’s mouth, then dissolved into pensive unhappiness once more.
“And,” Elisabeth added, shifting in her chair, “it probably didn’t help that I’ve been staying away.”
Anne looked up at her and nodded; Elisabeth dropped her gaze to her teacup. “I mean,” she went on, “I don’t think I’ve been doing well lately. Stressed; discouraged; ashamed of the fact.” She lifted her head. “Rupert tell you I just killed off half my paternal ancestry?” she said, with a little laugh.
“Yes,” Anne said. “That’s quite a feat, you know.”
“It hasn’t been a particularly good month overall. But the house is cleansed, anyway, and it’s as much mine as his now, in the ways that matter. Poor Rupert.” Elisabeth mingled a sigh and a smile, and took another sip of tea. “He did want that so much. But probably not in the way we got it.”
“No, indeed.”
“You should come to see the house sometime, now that it’s clear of ghosts.”
“I’d like that.” Anne smiled a little.
“We could have tea in the study. Wait till you see it; there are paintings on the ceiling we haven’t deciphered yet.” Elisabeth drew a long breath and settled her teacup in its saucer. “Well, I can’t stay—Xander and Andrew are staying with us for a few days and there’s a plan for Indian takeaway. But I’ll come back soon.”
She put down the tea, and Anne rose to walk her to the door. “Perhaps you’ll come next Saturday?” Anne said. “It’s a blank spot in my diary at the moment.”
The two women paused in the foyer to look at one another. “I’ll come,” Elisabeth said, clearing her throat huskily. She reached impulsively and hugged Anne with a strong grip. “I’ve missed you.”
“And I you. And—tell Rupert—it will be all right; he needn’t be afraid to visit—only, not in my office for tea and advice.”
“I’ll tell him,” Elisabeth said.
*
When Elisabeth got home it was twilight. Pink-cheeked from the walk, she pushed into the flat bringing crisp air with her. “Hallo,” she said, stilling the male voices around the coffee table.
“We saved some chicken tikka masala for you,” Andrew said.
“Thanks.” She shrugged out of her jacket. “Gotta go to the bathroom first.”
Her men were lounging comfortably with the food spread out and mostly-eaten over the coffee table; Xander had pulled up one of the dining-table chairs and was straddling it. He, Rupert, and Brian were nursing beers; Andrew had a strawberry soda.
Rupert looked over at her, heart beating: she gave him a small, grave smile, and he relaxed as she hurried down the hall.
They had returned to the anecdote Brian was telling when a sharp cry of dismay reached them from the bathroom.
“Damn!” Rupert said, upsetting the cat from his lap.
They’d forgotten to get toilet paper.
*