“Very well,” he said, and went on talking rapidly as he led me into the church and turned the lights back on. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you to it. I’m meeting with the church finance committee tonight, and the Lord knows we have a lot of business to get through.” He gestured to a narrow wooden table that stood along the wall beside the door. “Please feel free to take a pamphlet. I’ll lock up after my meeting.” He glanced once more at his watch before favoring me with a brief but friendly smile, then strode off at top speed through the doorway.
As his footfalls faded in the distance, my sense of isolation returned. I hadn’t wanted the company of strangers, but at that moment I’d have given anything to see Bill’s bearded face framed in the doorway. I felt a faint pang of regret followed closely by a mountainous wave of indignation. If Bill had kept his promise and come to England with me, as planned, Willis, Sr., wouldn’t be making arrangements to leave Boston, and I wouldn’t be standing in a deserted church, imagining how nice it’d be to have my husband close by.
It wasn’t fair, I thought, and the small voice in the back of my head murmured treacherously: He shouldn’t have chosen the Biddifords over you.
I told the voice to mind its own damned business, and roused myself to take a look around. Saint Bartholomew’s didn’t appear to be a very old church—the plaster walls were too neat and even, the stone pillars too smooth and plain—but I knew from recent experience how deceptive looks could be. There might be a twelfth-century crypt out of sight beneath my feet.
The bell-ringers’ chamber was at the foot of the square tower, opposite the altar, closed off from the rest of the church by a solid wooden screen with a door in the center. There was a large, open archway above the screen, and through it I could see the bell ropes gathered together like the spokes of an upside-down umbrella, but the door was locked, as bell-tower doors invariably were, for safety’s sake.
I followed the rector’s advice and thumbed through one of the pamphlets on the wooden table. It had been lovingly compiled by “M.B.”, and I dropped a handful of pound coins in the collection box as a tribute—and as a peace offering to the church finance committee, which was no doubt reprimanding the rector for wasting electricity on a solitary American tourist.
According to the pamphlet, the Parish Church of Saint Bartholomew had been built in 1871 on the site of an earlier church—the square tower in the back was a thirteenth-century survival. Among the church’s numerous features of interest were a pair of memorial windows, one dedicated to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose parents had lived in Haslemere, and the other to the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose home, Aldworth, was just south of town, on Blackdown Hill. Furthermore, M.B. informed me, the Tennyson window had ,been designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
Since I had a soft spot for Tennyson—not to mention the Pre-RaphaeIites—I returned the pamphlet to the table and crossed to the opposite wall to look at the poet laureate’s window first. The outer darkness obscured the stained-glass image, but not the words below it. They’d been taken from Idylls of the King:
... I, Galahad, saw the Grail,
The Holy Grail, descend upon the shrine ...
... And in the strength of this I rode,
Shattering all evil customs everywhere....
Galahad, whose pure heart had won him a glimpse of the Holy Grail, had always struck me as a melancholy figure. Tennyson had done his best to convey the virgin knight’s pious joy in battling earthly evil, but I’d detected a note of regret in Galahad’s confession: “I never felt the kiss of love, / Nor maiden’s hand in mine.”
He was probably bragging, I thought now, looking up at the window. Old Galahad knew a thing or two. The kiss of love wasn’t much of a bargain once you figured in all the heartache that came with it. I smiled sadly and was about to move on to the Hopkins window when I heard a noise behind me. Convinced that the finance committee had voted unilaterally to cut my visit short, I turned to leave, then stopped dead in my tracks.
Gerald Willis was standing in the doorway.
11.
He was dressed as he’d been dressed earlier, in a brown cotton shirt and faded jeans, but he’d pulled on a brown suede jacket as well, to ward off the evening chill. He greeted me with a smile before walking across the back of the church and down the side aisle to where I stood. He paused to admire the Tennyson window, then closed his eyes and recited from memory:
“ ‘My good blade carves the casques of men, My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.‘ “
Gerald’s eyes opened and his dimple appeared. “All very admirable, of course, but had he puffed himself up like that at my school, he‘d’ve been stoned to death.”
“What are you doing here?‘ I asked warily. Gerald’s face might be as handsome as Galahad’s, but his heart was far from pure.
“Your briefcase,” he replied. “You left it at my house. I dropped it off at the hotel, and asked Nicolette if she knew where I might find you. I didn’t want you to worry about the papers you brought for Cousin William to sign.”