Shadow Though it Be:  An Excursus – Chapter 24

by L. Inman

 

In the morning Elisabeth’s quiet sleep was broken gently by a familiar hand stroking her arm.  She stirred and drew a deep breath without opening her eyes.  Her body was lost in a deep, warm languor which, so far, nobody was demanding she leave immediately.

            “Time to wake up,” a familiar voice said.

            She groaned, and moved to turn over and corner her face in the back of the couch; Giles would have a very difficult time digging her out of there.  She moved her left hand to meet the hard upholstery at her right, but it kept moving in empty space.  Come to think of it, the nest she’d made was strangely soft; her left hand touched down finally in plush fabric, far from her body in a delicious expanse of room.  Like a bed.

            She relaxed, without trying to complete the turn onto her side, and blinked her eyes open a fraction.  She saw, in the daylight streaming in at the window, her own arm and hand resting in the soft blankets of his bed.  She shut her eyes again and turned back onto her back, a little smile creeping up in her mouth.

            “You waking up?” he said.

            She smiled wider.  “I wasn’t dreaming,” she murmured.

            “No,” he agreed, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

            She opened her eyes, blinking slowly, and took him in:  he was sitting on the side of the bed, fully dressed in corduroys and a sweater (dark red this time), smiling quietly down at her, his hand still resting on the covers over her waist.

            “There’s tea,” he said.

            She drew in another luxurious breath.  “Tea?”

            He indicated the cup and saucer he had set down on the nightstand beside her.  He had removed the extra candles to make room for both it and the books, which had been pushed nearly off the nightstand during the previous night’s proceedings.  The small tower of books still leaned drunkenly toward the wall behind the nightstand.

            Elisabeth pushed herself up slowly into a sitting position and reached for the cup and saucer, pausing to nudge the books back into stability.  When she was satisfied they wouldn’t fall, she turned and found him holding the tea out to her.  She took both cup and saucer and settled back against the pillows to sip it, looking at him over the rim as she did so.

            The tea, of course, was perfect.  Elisabeth let the hand holding the saucer drop slowly to her lap as she took in both the taste and scent of the hot tea.  He watched her silently.  Minutes passed; and Elisabeth marveled to herself at the small miracle of the sunlight, the tea, and her friend sitting before her, watching her come awake as if he could think of nothing at all better to do.  She lifted her eyes to meet his, and smiled.

            “Good morning,” she said.

            His mobile face changed to an expression somewhere between pleasure and question.  “I hope you are well,” he said.

            She let her eyes go unfocused and took mental stock of herself.  “Pretty good,” she said finally, offering him a grin.

            “Your bruise is healing nicely,” he said, reaching out almost to touch her left cheek.

            She set the saucer down on the comforter to peer down the front of her borrowed T-shirt.  “This one looks worse,” she said, cheerfully.

            “Only to be expected,” he murmured.

            She let the neck of the shirt fall and picked up the saucer again, lifting it and the teacup for another sip.  “How are you?” she asked him.

            He smiled.  “Very well, thank you.”

            She made a rueful mouth at him.  “Well, Willow said I’d have to do something majorly drastic to get you to sleep in.  Looks like I wasn’t quite successful.”

            “You were,” he said.  “I’ve only been awake three-quarters of an hour.”

            “What time is it?” 

            He turned his watch over on his right wrist.  “It’s close to half-past eight.  I called Willow and she should be coming over in about half an hour to plan the spell.”

            Elisabeth nodded and downed the rest of her tea.  “I need to get dressed.”

            “That was the plan,” Giles said with a smile.  “I’ve brought you some of your clothing.”  He indicated a small pile of her clothes on the foot of the bed behind him.

            Elisabeth grunted; she handed the cup and saucer to him, and he rose, leaving her to pick through the pile of clothing and begin to dress.

            It was all there—olive-colored T-shirt, bra, underwear, and frayed khakis, all neatly folded.  She sniffed the fabric; he had not applied lavender water to her clothing, but he had used fabric softener—her clothes were agreeably soft.

            She pulled the borrowed T-shirt over her head and slipped off the bed to stand, shivering slightly, in the silence of the bedroom.  It had been a while since she had stood quietly naked in daylight, without hurrying to cover herself.  Feeling slightly silly, she nevertheless indulged the impulse to examine her own body as if with another’s eyes:  pink, healthy palms, uncallused; tapering fingers, small and strong; narrow childlike wrists—and downward, over the pale skin of her arms, breasts (that bruise had turned a frightening blackberry color), belly, and thighs—down at last to her bony feet.  It all looked the same, except of course for the bruise.  A sedentary body, somehow curvy and scrawny at once, like a stray kitten.  And still, oddly, all hers.  Funny.  Elisabeth would have thought otherwise.

            She reached for her clothing and got dressed, her lips in a meditative pout, and thumped slowly down the stairs, still thinking it over.  She went to the chair that had become hers at the table and plopped down in it, swinging her bare feet a few times over the rug.  Without discourse Giles came out of the kitchen with a skillet and unloaded a mass of scrambled eggs onto her plate, then moved to his own.  The next time he came out he set down a plate of buttered toast and the salt and pepper shakers.  He came out a final time with two glasses and a pitcher of orange juice; Elisabeth had already got to work loading a piece of toast with eggs and dusting it with salt and pepper.  She had dug in hungrily by the time Giles had poured them each a glass of juice and sat down to his own plate.

            For a long while there was silence in the flat, except for the sound of their forks and cups and quiet chewing.

            Elisabeth was still thinking.  They were still each their own, then.  This was all to the good.  Her eyes flicked over to the erstwhile-forbidden book, which was now open to the marked page, the bookmark curled limply on the desk next to it.  If all went as planned, that book would send her home by midnight tonight.  She would go home, and live through whatever had happened to her home-self in that earthquake.  She suspected her home-self had been knocked out à la Watcher-off-his-guard: her shadow had been awfully quiet lately since the disastrous meditation experiment, had surfaced only in dreams—in fact, hadn’t even seen fit to make itself felt during the lovemaking last night, a time when surely her two selves would have made some contact across dimensional lines if ever. 

            Unless they had made contact, and she hadn’t noticed.  Would that be a good sign?  It might mean that the integration would be easier come time they did the spell.  But then again, it might mean that her Sunnydale-self was growing too strong.  Bother these split-self things! Elisabeth thought.  It’s as bad as interpreting prophecies made about Angel.

            A voice threaded into her consciousness, and she realized with a start that Giles was speaking to her.

            “Oh! I’m fine,” she said.

            “I asked if the eggs were to your liking,” Giles said gently.

            “Oh.  Yes, they’re very good.”  Elisabeth looked down at her plate and realized that she’d been holding up her piece of toast without eating it so long that it was threatening to droop out of her fingers altogether.  She took another bite.  “Quite good,” she said around the mouthful.

            He nodded, with no other reply except a speculative look, and Elisabeth’s eyes drifted past him again to the open book.  This time, however, she took care to keep eating.

            If her Sunnydale-self was the strong one, what would it do in her home world?  Would it wither up and let the home-self take over?  Or would it make her more competent in the dimension of her birth?  Would what she had learned here make any difference there?  Would—Elisabeth swallowed a glut of egg with difficulty—would a meditation back home result in a howling nothingness, now that she had learned something?  It occurred to Elisabeth that she may after all have had mixed motives for sleeping with Giles.  Or—to get down to the bottom of it—not mixed motives, but mixed understandings of who she was.  Surely she wasn’t just a garden-variety undine, unable to have a mortal soul unless she—what was it—slept with, or bore a child to, a mortal man?  She shuddered inwardly.  Bad thought.  These patriarchal fairy-tales tended to have the last laugh.  There was a reason they were called the dominant fiction.  And fiction, Elisabeth had known almost since the cradle, was truer than the empirical fact.

            But fiction, she reminded herself, was a synthesis of imagination and experience, and even if her imagination ran away with her, her experience was telling her that the difference in her between last night and this morning was not at all the same sort one would expect in an undine.  She had no more great assurance, one way or the other, of having a whole self this morning than she had yesterday morning.  And didn’t other humans talk of the same uneasiness, the same suspicion of unwholeness—Pascal’s God-shaped hole, reduced in these times of agnosticism to the hole shaped only like Angst—?

            A knock at the door scattered Elisabeth’s rabbit-chasing thoughts; the last bit of egg plopped off her toast to the plate with a small, dull smack.  Giles got up to answer the door.

            “Hi guys,” Willow said cheerfully, heaving a heavy backpack into the flat with her.  Giles shut the door on the dazzling sunlight.  “Here I am with books and herbs and candles galore.”

            “Have you had breakfast?” Giles inquired.  “I can make you an egg too.”

            Willow shook her head.  “I ate already.”

            “All right.  In that case,” Giles said, “I’ll do the washing-up while you and Elisabeth set up the table.”

            “Okey-dokey.”  Willow waited till Giles had removed his own place-setting before hauling the backpack off her shoulder and thumping it onto the table.  Elisabeth made a move to rise with her own plate, but he had come back in for it before she could take it to him.  “Thank you,” she said, handing it over to him with a little mischievous smile.  He curbed a grin in response and disappeared with her plate and juice-glass. 

            Willow began taking books and candles and packs of herbs out of her backpack, glancing furtively at Elisabeth; but she waited to speak until Giles had started the dishes.  She sat down next to Elisabeth at the table and said quietly, under the cover of the running water:

            “So...how’s everything going?  You guys...okay?”  She waved a hand back and forth, as if to indicate communication.

            Elisabeth regarded her with an amused smile.  She wondered how aloof it was polite to be in such situations.  “We’re fine,” she said.

            “So—” Willow pressed on, with the fine and transparent nonchalance of a young cat stealing a tidbit from the table— “did everything...go okay last night?  I mean—”  She waved her hand again and gave Elisabeth a wide-eyed significant look.  “I mean...between the two of you.”

            Elisabeth sucked in her growing smile and looked back through the bar window, at Giles’s back.  He was humming casually, a tune that eluded Elisabeth’s recognition, occasionally murmuring a few of the words under his breath as he splashed in the sink, scrubbing the frying-pan.  She looked back at Willow dryly, without saying a word.

            Willow’s mouth twitched into a smile.  “Well, obviously,” she said, and lowered her voice even more for the next words, “he’s happy.  But—”

            Elisabeth raised her eyebrows and waited.  Giles’s voice, behind her, broke into full song for a few bars as he applied a rough sponge to the skillet.

            “I mean,” Willow said in a whisper, “are you okay?  Tara said—” she broke off and snatched a look at Giles’s back— “Tara said you hadn’t, you know—”

            Elisabeth stared at her; then she leaned her head back and rolled her eyes.  “Of course; Tara got a full reading from me.  I must have been screaming it.”  She returned her eyes to Willow’s face.  “I’m fine,” she said.  “I’m even...” she smiled— “pretty good.”

            Giles had gone back to humming: his voice grew even thinner and more pleasant, like Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web, Elisabeth thought; and altogether too casual, though not so much as to belie the real cheer beneath his tone.

            Willow was looking at him suspiciously too, but when she turned to Elisabeth again it seemed she had other thoughts on her mind.  “Does he—does he know?”

            “Oh—you mean—about me?  Yes,” Elisabeth said, flushing, “I told him...beforehand.  He didn’t like it.”  Her mouth twisted ruefully.  “But it proved not to be an insuperable obstacle.”

            Willow shook her head smilingly at Elisabeth’s heightened diction.  Then her look grew serious.  “You don’t think it’ll make—complications?”

            “What,” Elisabeth said, conscious that she had gone very pink, “that I might be lovestruck by the new experience?  I think we’re safe.  It was purely a friendly thing.”

            “Well, no...I meant complications in the spell.  But while we’re on the subject—” Willow pointed a mock-serious finger at Elisabeth’s face— “you’d better not break his heart, or you’ll have me to answer to.”

            Elisabeth laughed appropriately, but checked herself after a moment; she knew Willow wasn’t kidding.

            The water in the kitchen shut off; after a few moments Giles returned to them, wiping his hands on a dishcloth, which he hung on the back of his chair before going to retrieve the book on his desk.  “So,” he said, “where are we?”

            “We’re at the pulling-books-out-of-my-backpack stage,” Willow said, brightly.

            “Har, har,” Giles said, with a little smile as he sat down and made room on the table for the big book.  Willow finished the task she had abandoned to speak to Elisabeth, and Elisabeth helped shunt the candles and herbs to one side to make room for Willow to open her books to the places she’d marked.  “I’ve got three sources for transdimensional spells,” she said, “two of which are specific to the dimension.  What’ve you got?”

            “A binding spell,” Giles said, “with which to bring together Elisabeth’s two selves in the presence of a dimensional portal.”  He explained his idea to Willow in more detail, some of which lost Elisabeth.  She tried to pay close attention anyway. 

            “But,” Willow said, running her finger down the page of the big book, “what words are we going to use for this?”

            “The words that make up Elisabeth’s identity,” Giles explained.  “Her name, and if necessary, whatever she can remember from her missing possessions.”

            Elisabeth got up and retrieved her notebook from her backpack.  She sat back down at the table flipping through it.  Giles and Willow, making notes, looked at her only once each.  They were discussing the order in which to do the two spells: it seemed the logical thing was to do the binding spell first, so that when they prayed to open a portal, the portal would (they hoped) by default be the one between Elisabeth’s home dimension and theirs.

            “I think,” Willow said, “that if that works, then we can use this generic portal spell, plus a chant modified from one of these for the circle.  And cross our fingers.”

            “So,” Elisabeth said, looking up in amusement from her nearly-empty notebook, “you just change the Collect for the service?”

            Willow gave her a quizzical look. 

            Giles snorted.

            “O God, the King of glory,” he intoned, “who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven:  We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless, but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Savior Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.”

            “Amen,” Elisabeth said.

            “Elisabeth,” Giles said to Willow, “is making an obscure joke.”

            “Obscure?” Elisabeth grinned.  “I’m not the one making mischievous quotes from the Book of Common Prayer from memory, to the detriment of my apostate soul.”

            Giles ducked his head and laughed.

            “Hello, tangent police,” Willow said.  “We still need to make the diagram.”

            Giles cleared his throat; Elisabeth dropped her eyes to the empty pages of her notebook, and work was resumed.

            Elisabeth had forgotten how much writing she had done in this notebook; now that she had lost all of it except for her abortive sonnet, she could see how much volume of blank expanse she had actually filled day to day in the past year.  She wished she could remember some of her work in manuscript, but the image of her own handwriting was obliterated in her mind’s eye; she could manage to discern a whisper of coherence here and there, but not so much as a word presented itself in a definite form.  She sighed, and turned to the lonely page of her messy bus-joggled lines, covered with her own editor’s marks.

            Harriet Vane, in Gaudy Night, had written half a sonnet, and Lord Peter her love had written the other half.  Elisabeth didn’t see a Lord Peter surfacing to finish this one for her; if she was going to make anything of it she would have to work it out herself.  Unless, of course, Giles—

            Elisabeth studied Giles thoughtfully: head bent with Willow’s over a sheet of scratch paper, he didn’t look at all like the sort to finish sonnets.  His creative force was not writerly, but—Elisabeth put her head on one side, trying to think what his creative force was.  Nurturing, perhaps; the obverse of guardianship.  And of course there was the singing.  But none of these seemed to get to the bottom of him.  Elisabeth was unaccountably pleased to find him so complex, though she knew that the deeper shades of his character were likely of a far more somber hue than he usually presented to the world.  She resolved to put The Art of War on her immediate reading list.  The if-she-survived-past-midnight reading list, that is.

            Meanwhile she had a sonnet to write.  She turned to a fresh page in the notebook and copied out the first few lines, the ones she liked the best.  They had come with a stray image, a sense-memory of winter: a Midwestern winter, not a SoCal winter, complete with long, low slate-grey skies, the middays nearly as saturnian as the evenings.  This was where she had come from; but where she was going was anyone’s guess.

 

Footstep, footstep, one before the next;

Walls to walls, and walls to walls again;

A glimpse of sky, a glimpse of honest text—

 

Honest text.  Elisabeth remembered the first time she had tried to write a sonnet, clumsily chanting rhythms under her breath and laboriously working out abab bcbc cdcd ee—not, as she recalled, entirely successful, but workmanlike, like something made in shop class.  She had not known then the meaning of octave and sestet, stress-shift and enjambment: it had taken Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, and Donne to teach her those.  And Wyatt...Whoso list to hunt I know where is an hinde—

            She was getting off track again.  The sonnet before her was not an apostrophe to the vagaries of courtly love, it was winter, and Saturn, and if love had any place in it, it would be as a passing mention, an optical illusion that made you think the surface was closer to hand—

 

A glimpse of love, glasses speckled with rain.

 

She had gone AWOL from her glasses again.  Never mind.

            “Don’t complete that circle,” Giles warned Willow, anxiously.

            Willow gave him a look:  How dumb do you think I am? and went back to filling in symbols on their diagram of the spell.

            She knew where she’d come from; where was she going?

 

From room to room, from word to word abstain

From solitude—

 

She had worked hard to follow Giles’s tacit advice, to let go of her desire to remain a shadow, but it was hard not to want to skulk.

 

From solitude and from all others’ eyes;

To pages, as though pages could attain

The hard world’s labyrinthine qualities;

 

(Five candles and bad poetry.  Or six, and John Donne.)  From where to where? Elisabeth asked herself. 

 

To confrontation with legion demands,

To reveries, and strange unpleasant dreams—

 

She was losing the winter.

 

To fumbling keys in cold, wind-battered hands,

To shaping and reshaping former schemes.

 

The question was the answer.  The question was always the answer.  Dammit.  Elisabeth recopied the lines afresh on a clean sheet, and added a rueful couplet, turning the whole thing into a toast.

 

Footstep, footstep, one before the next;

Walls to walls, and walls to walls again;

A glimpse of sky, a glimpse of honest text;

A glimpse of love, glasses speckled with rain.

From room to room, from word to word abstain

From solitude and from all others’ eyes;

To pages, as though pages could attain

The hard world’s labyrinthine qualities;

To confrontation with legion demands,

To reveries, and strange unpleasant dreams,

To fumbling keys in cold, wind-battered hands,

To shaping and reshaping former schemes.

One lifts a glass in toast to living—losing—

One drinks, knowing the complexity of choosing.

 

Elisabeth wasn’t really satisfied with it, but she knew it was done, as one senses the moment at which a sketch is about to become a fully-fledged bad drawing.  The line about love was terribly cheesy, she thought, and the meter had a trace of unbecoming cant.  She stuck a title over the top of it—“Not Getting the Memo”—to announce her verdict of the sonnet below, and shut the notebook on it.

            Giles looked up.  “Have you managed to tease any more words out of the ether?” he asked her.

            Elisabeth shook her head.

            “You know?” Willow said, a germ of fresh excitement in her voice, “I don’t think she’d need to.  Once the spell starts, her other self could bring them.”  She scribbled on the page.  “We set the terms of progression, and ask it to finish itself.”

            “If we can get my home-self to cooperate,” Elisabeth said.  She had not meant it to sound that skeptical.  “I mean,” she amended, “seeing how she’s gone quiet for the most part.”

            Willow exchanged a look with Giles; when she turned to Elisabeth again her expression was that of the bearer of bad news.  Elisabeth decided to spare her.

            “Well, if the spell works, there are two major possibilities, right?” she said blandly.  “One is, I come out of the spell integrated and alive, either here or there.  The other is, I come out integrated but dead, here or there.  Or—” a new thought occurred to her— “integrated in some other dimension entirely.  Let’s hope it’s not one where humans are cattle and slaves.”  She had meant that last as a joke, but neither of the others laughed.

            There was a silence.  Elisabeth broke it impatiently:  “I have thought this out, you know.  I’m going into this with a philosophy two parts Julian of Norwich and one part chaos theory.  Don’t worry about me.”

            Willow pressed her lips together, her gaze still searching Elisabeth’s face.

            Giles was the first to come to himself.  “Right,” he said to Elisabeth.  To Willow, he said:  “If you’ll show this diagram to Tara, the two of you can begin putting together what we’ll need.  Get Anya to let you into the back of the shop and start setting up before it’s time.  We will meet you all there tonight after dark.”

            Willow nodded and began putting books back into her backpack.  “One good thing,” she said, with an attempt at cheer, “we’re learning a lot about transdimensional spells.  That ought to come in handy.”

            “I would think,” Elisabeth said.  Giles’s eyes flashed to hers over Willow’s bent red head.

 

*

 

Once Willow had gone, Giles and Elisabeth each chose a task for their hands:  Giles got out his crossbow and set himself to clean it of last night’s mud, and Elisabeth carefully repacked her backpack with the pile of folded clothes Giles had left on the couch for her.  She retrieved her notebook from the table where Giles had shunted it aside to make room for his work and laid it on the top flap of her backpack.  She would put it inside when it was time to leave.

            When it was time to leave.  Elisabeth stared down at her packed bag, swallowing the urge in her throat to close.  Had she really done everything to prepare?  Bring your intent to it, he had said.  Elisabeth wanted to make a good end, if this was her end.  Her eyes on her backpack, she waited until it came to her.  She looked up.

            He was still diligently cleaning his crossbow and arrows; but he seemed to sense her gaze, because he looked up briefly to catch her eye before returning his attention to his work.

            Elisabeth sat down with a clean pair of socks and her shoes; then, properly shod, she went to retrieve her glasses from the bar window before approaching him where he sat.  She laid her glasses down among the arrows; he looked up, and she lifted his glasses like a lid on his face, bent down and kissed him.

            He reached up and took his glasses off altogether, kissing her back.  Elisabeth took her time reacquainting herself with his taste before she pulled back to look him in the face.

            He drew a breath and swallowed.  “What was that for?”

            She smiled.  “I just wanted to see if it still worked.”

            His glasses were threaded in his fingers, over the back of his warm hand cupping her shoulder.  “I think it does,” he said, smiling back.

            So she kissed him again.  A minute passed; under their closed eyelids it gathered time up into itself.  Another last thing.

            She pulled back again, her face warm, a small nervous tremor in her insides.  “I’m going out for a bit,” she said.  “There’s something I have to do.”

            He blinked, momentarily surprised; then his lips firmed knowingly, and he gave her a short nod.

            “I’ll be back in under two hours, I think,” Elisabeth said.  She donned her glasses, letting his hand slip from her shoulder, and went to get her jacket.

            He made no move to stop her or ask questions as she shrugged into her jacket (which was still a little damp in front).  Feeling privately thankful for his acquiescence, Elisabeth gave him a last wave and slipped out the door, shutting it firmly behind her.

            She didn’t know where she was going, but she thought it ought to be easy to find what she was looking for.

 

*

 

Giles took his time getting up after she had left, giving her a head start.  He had an idea of what she was planning to do, and he wanted to keep an eye on her without interfering, if it was possible.  He put away his crossbow and its accoutrements, got his own jacket and let himself quietly out the door.

            From the front gate of his flat, he had a good long view of the street in either direction.  He could just see Elisabeth disappearing around the corner to his right without a backward glance.  Good.  He followed quietly.

            When he reached the same corner, he found that she had disappeared completely, but this was not to worry.  He knew the neighborhood, and if he was right, she would find her way eventually in the direction he now took.  The only question was whether he’d wind up ahead of her and in her line of sight, destroying her privacy.  He went slowly, looking behind him as well as ahead.

            The sun was shining, as it always did in this part of the country, carelessly and brightly, and only the faintest of nips in the air suggested that this was indeed autumn.  There was nothing, in the ordinary slant of light, or in the scent of the air, to mark this day as the day of Elisabeth’s personal apocalypse.  Unthinking, Giles hurried his feet.

            Houses were giving way slowly to businesses, and as he reached another corner Giles saw what he was looking for down the side street to his left: a row of three churches, two of them separated by less than a block.  And Elisabeth, standing on the sidewalk, studying the front sign of one of them.

            She had not seen him.  Slowly he moved back from the exposed intersection and crossed the street to take up a less visible position behind a bush, though he did not stoop so low as to crouch like a criminal.  His luck held; Elisabeth did not look round as she disappeared into the front doors of the old adobe building.  He waited a few minutes to see if she would come back out; then, when nothing happened, tentatively approached the church.

            He saw why she had chosen it almost immediately.  The sanctuary was open for prayer on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and the church itself looked comfortably ancient—something, no doubt, Elisabeth would find reassuring.  Giles himself had misgivings; quite apart from the tendencies of ancient Sunnydale edifices to harbor evil, he hadn’t set foot in a church (for purposes of worship, that is) in years.  Which seemed odd considering how glibly he could still quote the Prayer Book.  Not for the first time Giles wished he could clean out the attic of his brain; his memory would surely turn against him with advancing age.

            He went up the steps to the front doors, opened one as quietly as he could, and peered in, letting his eyes adjust to the incense-scented dimness within.

            He saw two ranks of wooden pews, polished and darkened with age; a worn red carpet leading up the center aisle to the chancel, and, further up, Elisabeth’s small form, kneeling at the altar rail.  She had removed her jacket.  The faint brass shine of the altar cross winked at him from the very back.

            Giles withdrew without going inside.  Instead he made his way around the side of the church, to the parish hall entrance, and went in, looking quietly around him at every step.  The place seemed deserted, but he found, and followed, a thread of noise further down the main hall to a set of offices.  The secretary’s desk was empty (Giles looked at his watch; it was still conceivably lunchtime); but there were signs of life in the vicar’s office.  He went to the open door and peered in.

            The vicar was indeed in; he was reclining at his desk with a book forked in his right hand and a styrofoam cup of coffee in his left.  A rolled-up McDonald’s bag perched on the edge of a stack of papers, a fresh grease stain spreading mildly on the crumpled paper.  The vicar looked up, and sat up in his chair with a bump.

            “Oh, I’m sorry!  I didn’t know anyone was there.  Can I help you?”

            Giles cleared his throat self-consciously.

            “Well, it’s not for myself,” he said, watching the vicar mark his place in the book, his mind making an absent note of the title, something about John of the Cross.  “It’s just—I have a friend—”

            The vicar looked up, the faint beginnings of an amused smile on his face.  “Yes?”

            Giles sized him up.  His eyes were intelligent, which would be a good thing if he proved trustworthy.  “My friend,” Giles explained, “is in the sanctuary, kneeling at the altar.  She doesn’t know I’m here.  I think—” he paused, trying to gather his words economically— “I think she might appreciate some priestly assistance.”

            Well, he had certainly burned his bridges now.  Even if the priest didn’t blow the gaff on him, she would doubtless figure out that he had meddled.  Well.  He would take his medicine when it came to the point.

            The vicar nodded and rose.  Leaving his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair, he came toward the door.  Giles moved aside, but the vicar paused to lift a stole from a hook behind the door before coming out.  “Thanks,” Giles said, his eyes on the stole as the priest folded it carefully over his arm.  His grey clerical shirt was slightly frayed at the cuff; it had clearly seen better days.  It seemed to be all of a piece with the air of passed grandeur, of shoestring neatness, that hung about the place.  Giles didn’t know whether to find this reassuring or not; but he was committed now, so he moved quietly back down the hall, without another word to the vicar, and left the church.

            The obvious thing would be to go back home; but instead he found himself going back to the front doors and opening one to slip inside.  He found himself in a small, cramped narthex crowded with pamphlets and orders of service.  In one corner of the visitors’ table was an old wooden offering box, with a flimsy lock on the front.

            Giles looked up the aisle, and saw that the priest had come out from the sacristy, wearing his stole and carrying fire for the altar candles.  Giles watched him light the candles, saw Elisabeth look up, saw the priest nod kindly to her.

            It was that piece of diplomacy that had decided him.  He took out his wallet and pulled out a few bills to stuff into the offering box.  Then he went on silent feet to a pew near the back, and sat down to wait.

            He had chosen the back, so as not to hear what passed between the priest and Elisabeth, but he soon found that even watching her kneeling with her hands between his hands was too much; he dropped his eyes to his lap.  He waited this way, in the quiet of the sanctuary, under the light slanting in through stained glass, glancing up only once, to confirm what the faint murmur of the priest told him, that he was serving her communion.  His own heartbeat was quiet, his hands still, nested together in his lap.

            After some time Elisabeth stood; he heard the sound and looked up to see her coming back down from the chancel.  She paused to pick up her jacket from the front pew, her eyes flicking up to the back of the church but not quite to where he sat.  Nevertheless Giles knew without mistake that she had seen him.  Sure enough, she came down the aisle purposefully and stopped deliberately before him, her jacket over her arm, waiting.

            He dared a glance up at her face, and was relieved to see no anger there, only a mixture of humor and strain in the lines of her mouth.  He stood and moved out of the pew (long-forgotten habit made him jerk his head in a little bow toward the altar), and went with her out the front doors without a word; and they turned for home.

            On the way back, as they walked silently along, she took his hand.

 

*

 

Chapter 25

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