Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (10 page)

T
om’s eyes opened to the shadowy underside of a canopy—a pagoda, his synapses crackled fuzzily—brushed by the grainy gleams of first light atop the curtains, which—he shifted his gaze—were now closed, billowing faintly in a breeze. Had he risen in the night to draw them? He pulled one hand from under the bedclothes and flicked grit from the corner of his eye. The moon! Yes, of course, the staring moon had pulled him from some gabble of dreams. He must have struggled from the bed to shut out the abrasive light and return to luscious sleep.

And then his memory fused: He had never left the bed nor been awakened by the moon. Soft footfalls had sounded through the darkness and at first, in consternation, he thought the source an anxious, troubled Miranda, because who else interrupted his monkish slumbers these days? But before he could reach out, whisper his child’s name, a silhouette slipped
into the window’s spill of silver light, no child’s, but a woman’s. A swift swishing tickled his ears; gossamer tissue floated past his straining eyes to pool on the floor; his heart drummed as, in a trance, he watched the figure glide towards him, moonlight limning the assembly of curves, suppressing a gasp as her hair and eyes and mouth resolved into familiarity. His nose drank in a heated perfume pouring off her as she curled the coverlet back; his skin tensed to a near-forgotten sensation as hers glanced his, pressed his, claimed his. Their lips met.

He was lost in an instant.

He looked now from the sealed curtains to the tangle of bedclothes beside him, grey lumps in the greyer gloom. The scent of Lucinda’s hair still clung to the pillow, but the sheets to his probing fingers felt cool. She had vanished as she had arrived, unbidden, as he slept, drawing the curtains on her journey back to her own room. They had exchanged no endearments as lovers would, only grunts and commands, the purest invocations of—he squirmed as the unholy word formed in his mind—lust, as they tangled and arched, united in an urgency of animal need until finally, spent, they had collapsed panting onto the dampened bedclothes, followed swiftly by sleep. Thoughts of those moments came now, willy-nilly, and he felt his body tightening, flouting his censorious superego, unable to deny the elation, the reminder, nearly four years from his wife’s death, that his body could be the cause of happiness, to himself, and to another. He felt affirmed: He had not lost
it
in the vale of widowhood. And yet, and yet, as the zopiclone cobwebs faded and his ankle throbbed anew, he felt the batterings of his conscience. Irrational the first thought—and it was irrational: It hit him that he had betrayed
Lisbeth, opening, brazenly, nakedly, as if he had been bent on punishing her in some fashion, for some inexplicable reason. He pressed his palm against his forehead.

What have I done?

“Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord.” St. Paul’s strong words from Corinthians came to him with all the authority of Scripture, and though he hated the selecting of random verses to distort larger truths and justify hurt and hate, still the words were piercing darts. He had not felt
quite
this way before. Before he had discerned a call to ministry, in college, in the days when he had entertained as a magician in clubs, on cruise ships, and such, he had been no tyro in the arts of love, refusing few opportunities to make a fool of himself in one fashion or another in that male eagerness to bed a woman no matter what the circumstance. There had been girlfriends, yes, one with whom he had vaguely entertained the notion of formal commitment, but he had been too restless, too searching, until he bumped into the Lord. As an ordinand, he had made a
volte-face
, priding himself on his continence, until he had bumped into Lisbeth or, rather, she had bumped into him, saving him from sinking like a bloody fool into the Cam in a punting mishap. His trip from a figure soaking wet on the lawn of the Cambridge Backs to her bed had been swift, ridiculously swift, should have been shamefully swift, if he hadn’t known deep within his heart that he would be with her all the days of his life—or, as was cruelly the case, all the days of
her
life, her sweet, short life.

And then, until this night, a dry spell. First poleaxed by grief, then hedged by the conventions and obligations of widowhood, single-fatherhood, priesthood, an outsider in a village
of a thousand curious eyes and clacking tongues, less interested in his churchmanship than in his personal affairs (for what is a presentable, unwed man of a certain age but someone’s project?), he fought shy of romantic entanglement. There were some attractive women in the village, and he could feel their eyes upon him in a speculative way in the pulpit, in the street, in the pub, but only one, Màiri White, the village bobby, held an allure, possibly because her flirtation was so bold, so cheerful, so nonchalant. She made him laugh. Once, last January, he had nearly succumbed to temptation—or at least the temptation to temptation—but he had been deflected by a hellish tragedy, and the moment passed. Màiri was too young anyway, on a career trajectory that would take her to who knew where, evincing little interest in becoming a wife, much less a vicar’s wife. Tom flexed his ankle and groaned. Perhaps, he thought, he underestimated the perspicacity of Thornford’s village pump: Màiri didn’t share his direction, his education, his faith. But, my, she was easy on the eyes.

Tom shunted the coverlet and sheets aside, exposing his naked self, feeling the cool air on his flesh, forcing his attention to his ankle, the bruising a darker shade of shadow in the dark room. However, even the injury returned his mind to Lucinda, as it had proved such little impediment to their love-making, and astonishingly so. But he had been eager, she had been adept, wordlessly, tenderly conscious of his deficiency. He could feel his face burn as images of their entwined limbs rioted through his head. An unwelcome twitch turned to arousal. Hastily, he pulled the bedclothes to his neck.

Why had Lady Lucinda come to his bed? What secret trove of need drove her to seek comfort from a virtual stranger?
Or had it all been but some nocturnal amusement, as you might find in a novel of manners about the English upper classes disporting themselves carelessly at a country house weekend party? Had Eggescombe witnessed other nocturnal peregrinations upstairs and down? He groaned again.

A remembered image slipped into his mind. The milky, silky underside of her forearms, stretching forth as she steadied herself on his hips, caught the moonlight, revealing random striae like threads of white ribbed silk. What affliction, he wondered, had driven her to cutting, that strange, awful release of troubled teenage girls? He knew almost nothing of the woman he had a short time earlier had in his embrace. He felt suddenly like doing a flit, snatching Miranda, finding the car, and tearing back to Thornford, left foot on the pedal, if necessary. It was all very thoughtful of Lady Fairhaven—both Ladies Fairhaven—to have him to stay, to convalesce, but he felt more than ever out of his depth, landed in something treacherous. Suddenly the breakfast table loomed. Conversation over the Weetabix seemed an impossible embarrassment. Flight was the fix.

But it wasn’t. It was the Sunday-morning impulse of a thousand craven blokes who had bedded a girl on a Saturday night. He was no better than his own self in his own spotty youth.

He struggled with pillows behind his head and pushed himself up against the headboard. Though it was August and avian courting season well over, a few birds outside his window heralded the coming dawn, a little more light crept over the tops of the curtains. He had an idea. He would do the decent thing, join the other guests for breakfast, then depart
by noon with many thanks for their kindness. Madrun could drive Miranda and him to the train station at Totnes—it wasn’t far—then in London they could get a cab from Paddington to Charing Cross to catch the Gravesend train. He could return the crutches to Lady Fairhaven at some later time. If Lady Lucy chose to speak of their midnight dalliance, it would be well out of his earshot. With any luck he would never see these people again!

But breakfast was some little time off, and vacating this sweating, swinking, fusty, musty chamber of sin and corruption took on a certain urgency. He shifted to the edge of the bed and gingerly tested his bandaged foot on the floor. Pain bloomed, but did not explode. He would dress and hobble outdoors. There was a feature of Eggescombe Park he very much wanted to see before he made a hasty exit. It would be a good place to say his Morning Office. And it would be at a good time, at dawn, when the world was renewed. The hymn came to mind:

Access to the Labyrinth began with a pitch-roofed, wood-and-red-brick porch. Tom glanced at the benches on either side, each fit to seat ten pilgrims or more, while framed posters
on the walls explained the provenance of labyrinths and the history and construction of the Eggescombe version, the largest hedge labyrinth in England. He hobbled past the sign-age with little regard. He knew something of labyrinths and mazes, their origins and their meaning, the more outlandish New Age spiritual claims to which he was immune. He had visited the ur-labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral on a trip to France with Dosh and Kate when he was eight and had, his mothers reminded him (though he had forgotten), raced impiously around its sinuous trail until stopped by a kindly priest. Though he was getting the hang of walking aided by his little crutchy friend, there would be no racing this morning, he considered, as he passed through the unlatched gate and on to the pebble apron heralding the single opening in the topiary hedge, the Labyrinth’s true starting point.

He lifted his eyes to the vast arrangement of bushes, a grey silhouette against the dawn’s vague paling. Only a god’s-eye view, he realised—his view from the heavens yesterday—made sense of the Labyrinth’s cunning geometry. Here, on the ground, at the entrance, the curving seams of foliage, chest-high, appeared baffling, vaguely threatening. The arrangement was reminiscent of some mythical animal, alive but slumbering. He had a moment’s irrational panic, a throb along his veins (had Theseus felt thus on his venture to the heart of Daedalus’s labyrinth?), which he quickly suppressed. Bowing his head, he awkwardly clasped his hands through the crutch’s frame.

(Well, at least for a goodly interval, he amended.)

Raising his head, he began his journey, shuffling along a straight path for a few feet. The first bend was a veering left, and he was about to turn when some quick movement, a blur at the corner of his eye, drew his attention to the heart of the Labyrinth. “Hello?” he called out unthinkingly, realising at once that he was violating the Labyrinth’s norms of quiet and contemplation, but too surprised that someone else would share his notion for a pilgrimage so early in the morning. And yet he could see nothing, no movement. A head, perhaps? A woman’s head, peeking above the hedge wall? But no. As he strained his eyes farther into the thin rays of the new sun, he did indeed discern a shadowy shape, rounded, head-like, and he remembered the previous evening’s discussion of a new artwork for the Labyrinth.