modest weight to grip the carpet and hold itself in place. Handkerchief in hand, she ascended to the second step. The seldom-disturbed books on the top shelf must be dusty, given the succession of part-time maids who had lately been in charge of cleaning.
Clarissa whisked with the handkerchief, and pocketed it again. Then her hand went out to the book she wanted, one she had not opened in more than thirty years.
* * *
November, 1946. Clarissa, widowed early in the war, had been two years remarried to a Yank, John Southerland, lately a brigadier in the US Eighth Air Force. She was preparing to leave her native England for her husband’s home in far-off Illinois; one step in that preparation was to bid farewell, for what had seemed would quite possibly be the last time, to her grandmother Wilhelmina Harker.
The old lady had been in her seventies then, though she looked no more than a well-preserved sixty, and another two decades were to pass before she breathed her last. Eight years widowed herself in 1946, Grandmother Harker was still living then in her turn-of-the-century home in Exeter. The house, like the rest of England, had been left almost servantless by World War II, and was in a gloomy, neglected state, with some of last year’s blackout curtains still in place.
Grandmother Harker had begun the interview by looking keenly at little Andrew, who had accompanied his mother. “Will he be changing his name to Southerland?” she demanded of Clarissa.
“I think he will.” Clarissa’s chin lifted, and her tone balanced between defiance and toleration. She had never spent much time with her grandmother and did not know her very well.
“Just as well,” the old lady answered shortly, to Clarissa’s surprise. Then Grandmother Harker had given the child his farewell present, a book of adventure stories, had wished him well among all the Red Indians of America, and then had sent him off to play with some neighbor’s offspring. It turned out that the old woman had, or thought she had, some very private business with Clarissa.
“When you come right down to it,” Grandmother Harker said, waving at the younger woman a fat, dark-bound book that Clarissa had not noticed until that moment, “jewels and money and such things are trivialities. At least they are once one has enough of them to get along in comfort. I understand your new husband is quite well off?”
“Quite.”
“Then I hope you won’t be disappointed that I’m not giving you anything of that sort.”
Clarissa murmured a truthful denial, and at the same time wondered: A book? What in the world? She herself was not much of a reader, and certainly no collector; nor would she have guessed her grandmother, who in her youth had been rather adventuresome in a physical way, to have any particular leaning in that direction.
The book was being extended steadily toward Clarissa, in a slender hand that evidently still retained surprising strength. The old lady said to her: “But this is something valuable, my dear, as such a parting gift ought to be. You know, you were always my favorite among your generation of the family. And now, why shouldn’t I say so, and do something to show I mean it? Truthfulness is one of the few luxuries whose enjoyment becomes more practical as we grow older.”
“A book.” When the sound of her own voice registered in Clarissa’s ears she was afraid that she had said it much too flatly. The book hadn’t been dusty on that day, though certainly it was already very old. “How lovely!”
“You don’t mean that, though you say it well. Listen to me now. On the pages where I’ve put in the marker, you’ll find something much more useful than mere loveliness, should there ever come a day of extraordinary trouble for you and your new family.”
Clarissa had accepted the book, and was making some remark appreciative of the old binding, when Grandmother Harker cut her off with a headshake and a sharp sigh. “I do hope I can make you understand me, girl. I’ve had this from the Continent at great—well, at great expense, though I don’t mean of money but of effort. It wouldn’t do for it to be forgotten, or ignored, or used with frivolity. No, that especially wouldn’t do at all.”
As far back as Clarissa was able to remember, her grandmother had somehow, from time to time, obtained impressive things “from the Continent.” Lace, jewelry, at least once a fifteenth-century painting, later attested as a genuine Jan van Eyck by a surprised appraiser called in by the old lady herself, who must have had her own reasons to be suspicious of the acquisition. And Clarissa could recall, as a child, being introduced by Grandmother to a dark, romantic-looking Continental gentleman of indeterminate age, come from that mysterious cross-Channel realm to visit Grandmother, though Grandmother even then, as even little Clarissa had been able to see, was rather ridiculously overage for such . . .
* * *
“Are you
Grandmother Harker leaned forward in her chair, and something in her eyes came so to life that Clarissa, a sensible woman of thirty-four who had come bravely through the Blitz and her first widowhood, involuntarily leaned away. The old woman went on: “I mean a day when the powers of hell seem well and truly to have you in their grip . . . use it then, and not before. And in God’s name, I say again, never in frivolity. I should never dare to give it, if I thought it might be so abused.”
“Use it?”
“Oh, don’t be addle-pated! I can’t abide that in a girl with brains, of which you have a few, though perhaps you don’t like to use them. And while I think of it, mind you go to church when you’re in America. There won’t be Church of England, I suppose, but go.” Then, observing Clarissa’s troubled face, Grandmother Harker at last showed pity. “Simply open the book to the marked page, and do what it says. You remember your Latin, don’t you? Most of the ninnies who might open it up by accident will not, I’m sure, which is a blessing.”
“Thank you, Grandmother.” In her own mind, Clarissa lighted suddenly on the explanation—though she was not entirely able to believe it—that the old lady must have developed some senile religious mania.
When she got home from the visit Clarissa opened the old, old book and read the page marked by a ribbon. She looked at the lock of hair secured to the page by an incongruous strip of cellophane tape, and tried to laugh. And then she shut up the book for more than thirty years.
* * *
With the momentary feeling that those thirty years had never been, she spread the thick book open now, on a small library table of dark wood. `You remember your Latin, don’t you?’
Nothing was said about using a particular kind of candle, and Clarissa went out of the library again, past a detective using the telephone in the hall, to extract a cherry-red taper from the Christmas centerpiece in the great empty dining room. Some matches from a holder near the elbow of the man still busy on the phone. Then back into her sanctuary. Candle in hand but still unlighted, she scanned the ancient print with the aid of bifocals and Tensor lamp.
As the door opened softly behind her, Clarissa started as if caught in a kidnapping herself.
It was Judy. Like the rest of the surviving household she was face-swollen and dazed. But she took one look at her grandmother and shut the door behind her.
“What are you doing, Granny?” The words were hushed; despite the open book the question was not, `what are you reading?’
It crossed Clarissa’s own dazed mind that in an earlier century Judy, in adolescence, would have been just ripe for witchery and hysteria. Perhaps that thought was what made Clarissa want her help. Or perhaps it was only a sudden fear of being left alone again that made the older woman beckon and put on a smile. “Come here, Judy. Help me read these words. I know you’ve had your schoolroom Latin, just as I did once.”
Judy came to stand beside her. The old head and the young one, almost blond, bent over the old paper. A page cracked when it turned.
“What is it, Gran, an old prayer book?”
“About the closest thing to a prayer left in my life.”
Each read in silence for a little while.
“It says to use a mirror, Grandmother.” Not Gran or Granny; not just now.
Clarissa did what passed for thinking in her present state of shock. “Go fetch that small one from the wall,
