Tidings of Comfort and Joy Read online

  The woman brightened immensely. "Ah, you must be the American lady. I heard they let you out of the clinic today."

  I felt my cheeks grow bright red, but I was determined not to be put off. "As soon as possible, please."

  "I'm afraid that won't be easy, my dear. All passages to and from the British Isles are restricted to a 'need-only' basis." She gave me a cheery smile. "Which is their way of saying that we need not apply, as we'd only be wasting our time."

  I was in no mood for polite jokes. "But there must be something."

  "There isn't, I'm afraid. You only need read the papers to understand." Clearly she was delighted with the company, and in no hurry to send me on my way. "Over thirty thousand children were sent to Canada and America when the Jerries started bombing our cities. The families are clamoring for them to come home."

  "But I'm going the other way."

  "Even worse, I'm afraid. There've been protests in Washington, I saw it on the Movietone News just the other day. Went to see the new Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. I say, can all American gents dance like him?"

  "Not all." I leaned back. I, too, had heard about the protests. Mothers from all over America had gathered in Washington, carrying signs and shouting for the government to "Bring Our Boys Home." "So all the berths are going to troops?"

  "Afraid so. Unless you've got some connection, there's almost nothing I can do."

  Which left me with just one choice, one that I dreaded. "But you will try."

  "Well, if you insist, naturally, but there's really—"

  I rose before she could finish her protest. "I'll check back next week, hopefully by then you'll have some good news for me."

  I closed the door on her halfhearted wishes for the new year, and made my way back home. Home. It was a strange word to use for a place that mocked me with its emptiness. I had been such a fool.

  After another rest, I awoke to falling dusk. I turned on the lights around the house, trying to dispel the forlorn shadows. But they seemed to follow me as I went into the kitchen and made dinner. They made unwelcome company throughout the evening, so that when Rachel came by to collect me for church, I was down the stairs in a flash.

  "You can't possibly imagine what it means to have you come along, my dear," she said, carefully making her way over the snow-covered cobblestones. "I am in your debt."

  Those were not exactly the words I would have expected to hear from my landlady. It seemed as good a time as any to relate my troubles. "I went by the travel agent to see about a ticket home."

  "Yes, Mabel told me." At the end of the lane, she used her cane to point us across the main road and into a narrow path between two aged buildings. "Through there, my dear."

  "Mabel is the travel agent?"

  "A rather glorious title for someone who sits there day in and day out only because she has no one to go home to, wouldn't you say?" The lane opened into the church graveyard. "Her husband is retired navy, and they put him to work overseeing something down at the Portsmouth docks. Both her boys are in Singapore awaiting berths home. But at least they survived."

  The churchyard was wrapped in a stillness that seemed utterly beyond time and worldly care. Most of the snowcapped gravestones were so ancient their engravings had long since washed away. Ringing the tiny yard were almshouses, low stone homes given by the church to needy parishioners. A placard in the wall we passed declared they had been built in 1510 and renovated four hundred years later.

  Rachel went on, "There are a lot of such people about these days, I'm afraid. I read recently that less than a fifth of our boys have been brought home from the fronts. There isn't transport, you see, nor enough resources to fit them out for civvy street. And that's speaking of just the lucky ones, of course."

  The gaslights fronting the church illuminated quiet clusters of people. I slowed, held by the image of faces turning our way. "Does everybody know about me and my troubles?"

  Rachel halted and leaned heavily on her cane. She faced me, so I could see her smile. "Oh, I would imagine there is a poor bedridden soul somewhere in the village, one with failing eyesight and worse hearing, who has not been kept abreast of your arrival."

  "Great," I muttered. "Just great."

  "There's no getting around it, I'm afraid. At present you are Arden-on-Thames's favorite mystery." The smile broadened. "Just having you under my roof has elevated my social status considerably."

  "Glad I could be of assistance to someone," I said, turning back toward the empty house.

  "Oh, you mustn't leave me now, my dear. Please." Rachel grasped my arm with desperate fingers. "I would be placed at the mercy of the Grim Brigade."

  "The what?"

  "That's my name for them, of course." She gave me a tug and a pleading look. "Come along, I'll show you what I mean."

  Despairing over the prospect of being stared at for hours by the entire village, I allowed Rachel to pull me forward.

  Gray shadows took on form and substance, becoming a steady stream of people walking toward the church entrance. It was a grand old structure, built of stones five feet across, with a square Norman tower and scarred oak doors a full thirty feet high.

  Rachel released my arm to point at a cluster of women standing by the doors. "Now Claire, she's a neighbor of ours. She lost her son to Rommel in Africa. And Fiona, she's the short dumpy one, all three of her daughters have run off with American airmen. Can't say I blame them. Her husband is too busy propping up the corner of his favorite pub to have noticed their going."

  We emerged from the shadows. I steeled myself at the fear of having all faces turned toward me. But it did not happen. There were a few glances, yes, and perhaps some recognition and whispers. But most people seemed lost in their own thoughts and quiet conversations. There was none of the cheer I would have expected for a New Year's service, especially one coming at the end of a long, hard war. All was quiet and somber.

  "Christine, now, there's a sad case for you. Three sons lost in the space of three months, and her husband by a heart attack two weeks after they buried the last one."

  "That's awful," I murmured.

  "It is indeed." Rachel drew herself up until she was almost a full head taller than I, and gave the group a solemn, "Good evening, ladies."

  A scattering of murmurs came our way, no real words I could hear. But their expressions seared my heart. Such bitterness, such pinched hardness, such scathing gazes. I was very glad when Rachel did not stop, but rather led me through the doors and into the church. Once inside, she continued in a whisper, "Ever since Samuel's plane went down, they've been trying to claim me. Hmph. As though I were now theirs by right."

  She guided me into a pew, nodded to our neighbors, then thumped her cane on the ancient slate floor as she said, "I will not give in to the temptations of bitterness and hatred. I will not indulge myself in useless anger. I will not."

  I heard almost nothing of the service. I stood and sat with the others, following Rachel's lead. I stared at the prayer book and the hymnal, but I could not make out the words. My thoughts remained locked upon what Rachel had said as we seated ourselves. The temptations of bitterness and hatred and useless anger. They loomed before me like towering idols, lures to draw me into a darkness I had not even noticed.

  The candlelit church became a huge stone mirror. I had blamed the shadows filling the empty house on Grant, when in truth they were there in my own heart. I sat in the ancient church and felt the stains of my own mistakes, filling my forlorn heart, whispering their vulture cries, seeking to draw me in and away.

  It would be so easy to give in, I knew that with utter certainty. I had every reason to follow the lead of those ladies outside the church. And if I did, in time my own face would come to look like theirs, pinched and bitter and defeated by my own acrid spirit.

  It was only with difficulty that I rose and followed Rachel down the aisle at the service's close. The night and the surroundings did not come back into focus until I recognized the robed m
an standing at the church doors. It was the assistant vicar, the one who had delivered Grant's letter.He looked dignified and wise beyond his years, standing there in his flowing robes, greeting each person in turn.

  When it came my turn to stand before him, he gave me a little bow, "Miss Robbins, do I have that correct?"

  Suddenly the anger I had felt in the clinic was there with me again. Despite all that I had just realized about myself, I could not keep the acid from my voice."Amazing that a man as busy as you can remember something so unimportant."

  My words drove him a half-step back. In doing so, he moved beneath the nave's single light. It illuminated the finely drawn cast to his features, the deep circles under his eyes. He did not look tired. He looked exhausted.

  Reverend Albright recovered and gave me a stiff little nod. "I am glad to see you up and about," he murmured."Thank you for joining us." Then he turned to the next person in line.

  Rachel waited until we were picking our way down the churchyard path. "I say, you were rather rough on young Colin back there, weren't you?"

  Bitterly I recounted how the only person who had visited me in the hospital had been too busy to do more than drop off Grant's letter, and had never returned. But Rachel did not respond with the sympathy I expected. At least, not to me. Instead, when I finished she said thoughtfully, "Colin is less at fault than you might think."

  "I don't see how."

  "No, of course not." The lane was transformed by the snow and the night into a fairyland of houses sleeping beyond the reach of time or woes. "It occurs to me, my dear, that you might like to join me tomorrow for a little excursion."

  "Thanks, Rachel, but I've got an excursion of my own to make."

  "Well, never mind. If you change your mind, though, I'm up there most mornings."

  "Up where?"

  "Ah, that would be telling." Rachel stopped in front of her house and graced me with another of her smiles."Thank you so much for accompanying me this evening, my dear."

  "It was nice," I replied. "Happy New Year, Rachel."

  "And to you the same, my dear. To you the same." Her eyes held a keen note, a searching reminder of all I had faced within the church. "May you be blessed with eternal riches and God's infinite peace." She gave me a quick one-arm hug. "That was what my dear mum used to say to us each year. Never have I felt the need for her blessing more than now."

  "I know what you mean," I said, and turned away so she could not see the sudden rush of tears. "Good night."

  Once upstairs, I searched through my cases until I found my writing pad and a pen. I took them into the kitchen, which was the house's central room. It had no windows, as these row houses were long and narrow, fronting the river on one end and the lane on the other. There was a skylight, and I could hear the snow flick delicately upon the glass. I felt comforted, being enclosed by the house and the walls.I was as far from the threatening night as I could be. I sat at the little kitchen table, and began to write the two most difficult letters of my entire life.

  The first one was to my parents. I had to stop often, because the lines would blur and I needed to see what I was saying. I felt it important to accept fully what I knew now was the truth. I wrote that they had been right all along, that Grant was everything they had thought he was. I asked their forgiveness for all the pain I had caused. I had no excuse for my actions, I said, except for the fact that I had been head over heels in love.

  The second letter was to my former boss at the shipping company. I was brutal in my honesty. I felt I was writing the letter as much to myself as to him and everyone else who would sooner or later hear the news. I said I had been abandoned. I was trapped in a little English village, where I knew no one. And I could not book a passage to America.

  I begged him for help in finding a berth, and I asked for a job. I explained that I had not wanted to send a telegram, because my parents needed to hear the news from me first.But I was desperate to get out of England, and pleaded with him to help me find a way home.

  By the time I finished the second letter, it was after two in the morning. I felt drained and weak. But that was not altogether bad. Hopefully I would be able to sleep and not dream. I was not looking forward to my first night alone in this house.

  Wearily I prepared for bed. As I pulled the covers up and over me, I reflected that this was the worst year of my life. And it was only two hours old.

  NINE

  Marissa had never felt like this before. Never imagined an awakening could be so strange. As she lay there, it seemed as though the dark was coming to take her away. It was a struggle to find the breath just to say, "Gran?"

  The shadow in the foldaway bed rolled over. A sleepy voice said, "Honey?"

  "Gran, I'm scared."

  She rose from the bed, turned on the lamp, slipped on her bedroom slippers, and padded over. "What is it, child?"

  "I don't know." Icy fingers seemed to be reaching through her skin, tracing their way up inside her limbs. "Am I dying?"

  "No." Gran was fully awake now. "No, you're going to make it through this just fine. Do you hurt?"

  "Not exactly. I can't move."

  "I'm right here beside you. Do you feel my hand?"

  "Yes. It's never been this bad before."

  "The illness has to run its course. From this point onward, you'll probably begin to feel better."

  But Marissa did not feel as though she would ever recover. Her invisible chains were so strong she could not fight against them. She did not need to sleep, which made it worse in a way. Now the fatigue spilled over from her sleepy times to conquer the moments when she was awake as well. "How do you know so much about this?"

  "Ah." Gran's face looked as though she was glad for a reason to smile. "That is part of my story."

  "Will you talk to me?"

  "You're sure you don't want to sleep, honey?"

  "No." Pleading now. "I'm afraid if I slept right now I'dnever wake up."

  "You mustn't worry about that, sweetheart."

  "I'm not sleepy. Really."

  "Well." Gran gave her face a light rub. "It seems that our midnight chocolate is going to become a habit."

  "You'll have to hold mine. I don't think I can."

  "Don't you worry about that for a moment. I'll be right back." As she turned toward the door, she smiled down at her granddaughter and said, "Do you think we deserve an extra marshmallow tonight?"

  GRAN'S STORY

  The next morning, I knocked on Rachel's door. She opened it so swiftly I stepped back in surprise, only to find she was slipping on her coat and gloves. Her face showed fleeting disappointment when she recognized me, then she gave her already familiar smile. "Oh, good morning, my dear. I thought you were Fred."

  "The taxi driver? That's why I came over, I needed to ask him to take me somewhere."

  "Come in, come in. There's no telling how long Fred will be. He was leaving for another job when I rang, and with all this snow the roads must be simply dreadful.Would you care for a tea?"

  "That would be nice, thank you." I followed her back inside. "But you're all ready to go."

  She set the cane down in the corner by the door, and started up the stairs, leaning heavily upon the railing."Yes, well, I am impatient to get about my work."

  Rachel's house was a mirror image of my own, with a central kitchen and a long hallway connecting to the front room and a balcony overlooking the river. "What work is that?"

  "Oh, I'm volunteering up at the War College. Do you know, I believe I'll join you for a cup. How do you take your tea, my dear?"

  "A little sugar, please. I'm sorry, where did you say—"

  "Oh, just listen to me." Rachel's laugh had a gay ring, and she bustled about the kitchen in an excited manner. "The War College is what it's been called for the past five years, and such names die hard. The Ministry of Defense took over a large manor just outside of town and turned it into an academy for senior officers. They came in for courses on everything from strategy to language
to map reading." She poured steaming water into the old teapot. "We had one of these officers stay in your place for a time. Charming fellow.Didn't make it back, I'm afraid. I still talk to his wife from time to time. She came down and joined him while he was here. Took the loss rather hard, poor dear."

  I accepted my cup. "It sounds like you can't mention anybody without talking about them losing someone."

  "Yes, I suppose it does. There are so many." She sipped at her cup. "Mind you, it hasn't been a bed of roses for those left behind. There are quite a number of grieving ghosts wandering our streets."

  I started to ask what she did at the former War College, when the doorbell rang. Her face lit up with renewed excitement. "Oh, that must be Fred!"

  I followed her back downstairs, and watched as she flung back the door and said in mock severity. "Shame on you, Fred. I thought for certain you had forgotten me."

  Fred doffed his cap and held open the cab door. "Not you, Miss Rachel. Just held up a bit by the snow, is all."

  Rachel started to enter, then straightened. "Oh, wait, Emily wanted to ask you something."

  I stepped up beside her. "I was wondering if you could take me over to the airfield."

  Rachel's face fell. "Oh, my dear. Are you sure that's such a good idea?"

  Fred clearly misunderstood, for he said, "Not a hope, Miss Emily. Not today."

  To Rachel, I said, "I need to see about a way back to America, and there's no berth available on a ship." To Fred, "Why not?"

  "Because the hills are chock full of snow, is why." Fred turned and pointed toward the hills rising behind us. "The airfield's only five miles away, but it's straight up and straight down. All roads over the Chilterns are closed up tight."

  I had not thought of that. "What about this afternoon?"

  "Not likely. They do all the roads around town first. Leave it till tomorrow, I say." He glanced up at the heavily laden clouds. "That is, unless we get more snow, which by the look of things could well happen."