Fire Watch (11 page)

“Good girl,” Finney said, and lifted her up. “What’s an old cup? We’ll find it later.” He took her hand and led her into tea.

Mrs. Andover was already being mother, pouring out hot milk and tea into a styrofoam cup with a half circle bitten out of it. She handed it to Finney “Did you and Megan find your cup?” she asked.

“No,” Finney said. “But then we aren’t experts like you, are we.”

Mrs. Andover did not answer him. She poured Megan’s tea. “When is your father coming back, Megan?” she said.

“Not soon enough,” Finney snapped. “Are you that eager to arrest him? Or is it hanging you’re after, for treasonable offenses?” He thought of Davidson, crouched by a gate somewhere, waiting for the child to be bundled out to him. “If the cults don’t murder him, the government will, is that the game then? How can he possibly win a game like that?”

“The game’s not finished yet,” Megan said.

“What?” Finney slopped tea all over his trousers.

“Go and finish your game,” Mrs. Andover said. “Take the children with you. You needn’t come in till it’s ended.” Now that Finney was looking for it, he saw her nod to a tall girl with a large bosom. The girl nodded back and went out after the children. What else had he missed because he wasn’t looking for it?

“It’s a game of Megan’s,” Mrs. Andover said to Finney “One child’s the shepherd, and he must get all the sheep into the fold by putting them inside a ring drawn on the ground. When he’s got them all inside the ring, then it’s bang! the end, and all adjourn for tea and cake.”

“Bang! the end,” said Finney. “Tea and cakes for everyone. I wish it were as simple as that.”

“Perhaps you should join one of the cults,” Mrs. Andover said.

Finney looked up sharply from his tea.

“They are always preaching the end, aren’t they? When it is coming and to whom. Lists of who’s to be saved and who’s to be left to his own devices. Dates and places and timetables.”

“They’re wrong,” Finney said. “It’s supposed to come like a thief in the night so no one will see it coming.”

“I doubt there’s a thief could get past me without my knowing it.”

“Yes, I forgot,” said Finney “‘It takes a thief to catch a thief.’ Isn’t that one of Megan’s scriptures?”

She looked thoughtful. “Aren’t the lost supposed to be safely gathered into the fold before the end can come?”

“Ah, yes,” said Finney, “but the good shepherd never does specify just who those lost ones are he’s so bent on finding. Perhaps he has a list of his own, and when all the people on it are safely inside some circle he’s drawn on the ground—”

“Or perhaps we don’t understand at all,” Mrs. Andover said dreamily. “Perhaps the lost are not people at all, but things. Perhaps it’s they that are being gathered in before the end. T. E. Lawrence was a lost soul, wasn’t he?”

“I’d hardly call Lawrence of Arabia lost,” Finney said.
“He seemed to know his way round the Middle East rather well.”

“He hired a man to flog him, did you know that? He would have had to be well and truly lost to have done that.” She looked up suddenly at Finney. “If something else turned up, something valuable, that would prove the end was coming, wouldn’t it?”

“It would prove something,” Finney said. “I’m not certain what.”

“Where exactly is your Reverend Davidson?” she asked, almost offhand, as if she could catch him by changing the subject.

He is out rescuing the lost, dear lady, while you sit here seducing admissions out of me. A thief can’t sneak past me either. “In London, of course,” Finney said. “Pawning the crown jewels and hiding the money in Swiss bank accounts.”

“Quite possibly,” Mrs. Andover said. “Perhaps he should think about returning to St. John’s. He is in a good deal of trouble.”

Finney pulled his class in and sat them down in the crypt. “Tisn’t fair,” one of the taller boys said. “The game was still going. It wasn’t very nice of you to pull us in like that.” He kicked at the gilded toe of a fifteenth-century wool merchant.

“I quite agree,” Finney said, which remark caused all of them to sit up and look at him, even the kicker. “It was not fair. Neither was it fair for me to have had to drink my tea from a paper cup.”

“It isn’t our bloody fault you lost the cup,” the boy said sulkily.

“That would be quite true, if indeed the cup were lost. The Holy Grail has been lost for centuries and never found, and that is certainly no one’s bloody fault. But my cup is not lost forever, and you are going to find it.” He tried to sound angry so they would look and not play. “I want you to search every nook and cranny of this church, and if you find the cup”—here was the tricky bit, just the right casual tone—“or anything else interesting, bring it straightaway to
me.” He paused and then said, as if he had just thought of it, “I’ll give fifty pence for every treasure.”

The children scattered like players in a game. Finney hobbled up the stairs after them and stood in the side door. The younger children were down by the water and Mrs. Andover was standing near them.

Two of the boys plummeted past Finney and up the stairs to the study “Don’t …” Finney said, but they were already past him. By the time he had managed the stairs, the boys had strewn open every drawer of the desk. They were tumbling colored paper out of the bottom drawer, trying to see what was under it.

“It isn’t there,” one of the boys said, and Finney’s heart caught.

“What isn’t?”

“Your cup. This is where we hid it. This morning.”

“You must be mistaken,” he said, and led them firmly down the stairs. Halfway down, Mrs. Andover’s girl burst in at them.

“She says you are to come at once,” she said breathlessly.

Finney released the boys. “You two can redeem yourselves by finding my cup,” and then as they escaped down the stairs to the crypt, he shouted, “and stay out of the study.”

Mrs. Andover was standing by the End, watching the children and Megan wade knee-deep in the clear water. The sun had come out. Finney could see the flash of sunlight off Megan’s hair.

“They’re playing a game,” Mrs. Andover said without looking at him. “It’s an old nursery rhyme about how bad King John lost his clothes in the Wash. The children stand in a circle, and when the rhyme’s done, they fall down in the water. Megan stepped on something when she went down. She cut her foot.”

Water and blood and Davidson reaching out for Finney’s hand. “No!” Finney had cried, “not my hand, too!” Davidson had started to say something and Finney had flailed away from him like a landed fish, afraid it would be
holy scripture. But he had said, “The cults did this to you, didn’t they?” in a voice that had no holiness in it at all, and Finney had collapsed gratefully into his arms.

“Is she hurt?” he said, blinded by the sun and the memory.

“It was just a scratch,” Mrs. Andover said. “King John did lose his clothes. In a battle in 1215. His army was fighting in a muddy estuary of the Wash when a tide came in and knocked everyone under. He lost his crown, too.”

“And it was never found,” Finney said, knowing what was coming.

“Not until now.”

“Megan!” Finney shouted. “Come here right now!”

She ran up out of the water, her bare legs dripping wet. On her head was a rusty circle that looked more like a tin lid than a crown, He did not have the slightest doubt that it was what Mrs. Andover said, the crown of a king dead eight hundred years.

“Give me the crown, Megan,” Finney said.

“Behold I come quickly. Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown,” she said, handing it to Finney.

Finney scratched through the encrusted minerals to the definite scrape of metal. It was thinner in several spots. Finney poked his little finger into one of the indentations and through it, making a round hole.

“Those are for the jewels,” Megan said.

“What makes you think that?” Mrs. Andover said. “Have you seen any jewels?”

“All crowns have jewels,” Megan said. Finney handed the crown back to her and she put it on. Finney looked at the sky behind Megan’s head. The clouds had pulled back from a little circlet of blue over the church. “Can I go back now?” Megan said. “The game’s almost done.”

“This is the End,” Finney said, watching her walk fearlessly into the water. “Not the Wash.”

“Nor is it Reading Railway Station,” Mrs. Andover said. “Nevertheless.”

“The water’s perfectly clear. I would have seen it.
Someone would have seen it. It can’t have lain there since 1215.”

“It could have been put there,” Mrs. Andover said. “After the jewels had been removed.”

“So could the colored paper,” he said without thinking, “after the book was taken out.”

“What about the paper?” Mrs. Andover said.

“It’s back in the drawer where Megan found the book. I saw it.”

“You might have put it back.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully, “the pious Reverend Davidson has come back without telling us.”

“For what purpose?” Finney said, losing his temper altogether. “To play some incredible game of hide-and-seek? To race about his church scattering priceless manuscripts and ancient crowns like prizes for us to find? What would we have to find to convince you he’s innocent? The Holy Grail?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Andover said coldly, and started back toward the church.

“Where are you going?” Finney shouted.

“To see for myself this miracle of the colored paper.”

“King John was a pretty lost soul, too,” he shouted at her back. “Perhaps he’s the last on the list. Perhaps it’ll all go bang before you even get to the church.”

But she made it safely to the vestry door and inside, and Finney hobbled after her, suddenly afraid of what his boys might have found now.

Mrs. Andover was staring bleakly into the open drawer as Finney had done, as if it held some answer. Finney felt a pang of pity for her, standing there in her sturdy shoes, believing in no one, alone in the enemy camp. He put his hand out to her shoulder, but she flinched away from his touch. There was a sudden clatter on the stairs, and the two boys exploded into the room with Finney’s cup.

“Look what we found!” one of them said.

“And you’ll never guess what else,” the other said, tumbling his words out. “After you said we shouldn’t look in
here, we went down to the sanctuary, only it was too dark to see properly. So then we went into where we all have tea and there were no good hiding places at all, so we said to ourselves where would a cup logically be and the answer of course was in the kitchen.” He stopped to take a breath. “We pulled everything out of the cupboard, but it was just pots.”

“And an iron skillet,” Finney said.

“So we were putting them all back when we saw something else, a big old metal sort of thing rather like a cup, and your cup was inside it!” He handed the china cup triumphantly to Finney.

“Where is it?” Mrs. Andover said, as if it were an effort to speak. “This big old metal cup?”

“In the kitchen. We’ll fetch it if you like.”

“Please do.”

The boys dashed out. Finney turned to look at her. “It wasn’t there. Megan and I looked. You know what it is, don’t you?” Finney said, his heart beating sickeningly fast. It was the way he had felt before he lost his foot, when he saw the ax coming down.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s what you’ve been waiting for,” he said accusingly. “It’s the proof you said you wanted.”

“Yes,” she said, her lip trembling. “Only I didn’t know what it would mean.”

The boys were already racketing up the stairs. They burst in the door with it. For one awful endless moment, the steel blade falling against the sound of his own heart, louder than the drone of scripture, Finney prayed that it was an old metal cup.

The boys set it on the desk. It was badly dented from endless hidings and secretings and journeys. Tarnished like an old spoon. It shone like the cup of the sky.

“Is it a treasure?” the boy who had stolen Finney’s cup said, looking at their faces. “Do we get the fifty pence?”

“It is the Holy Grail,” Mrs. Andover said, putting her hands on it like a benediction.

“I thought it was lost forever.”

“It was,” she said. “I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.’”

Finney rubbed the back of his hand across his dry mouth. “I think we’d better get the children inside,” he said.

He sent the boys downstairs to put the kettle on for tea. Mrs. Andover stood by the desk, holding onto the Grail as if she were afraid of what would happen if she let go.

“It isn’t so bad once it’s over,” Finney said kindly. “What you think is the end isn’t always, and it turns out better than you dreamed.”

She set the Grail down gently and turned to him.

“It is only the last moment before the blade falls that is hard to bear,” he said.

“I have never told you,” Mrs. Andover said, her eyes filling with tears, “how sorry I am about your foot.” She fumbled for a handkerchief.

“It doesn’t matter,” Finney said. “At any rate, the way things seem to be going, it might just turn up.”

She smiled at that, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief, but when they went down the stairs, she clung to Finney’s arm as if she were the one who was lame. Finney sent her into the kitchen to set out the tea things and then went down to the edge of the End to bring the children in.

“Is Daddy here?” Megan said, dancing along beside him with one hand on her crown to keep it from falling off. “Is that why we’re having tea again?”

“No,” Finney said. “But he’s coming. He’ll be here soon.”

“Surely I come quickly,” Megan said, and ran inside.

Finney looked at the sky. Above the church the clouds peeled back from the blue like the edges of a scroll. Finney shut and barred the double doors to the sanctuary. He bolted the side door on the stairs and wedged a folding chair under the lock. Then he went into tea.