“That every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.’”
It was a man in a dark coat. He was carrying his hat in his hand. His hair was reddish-brown. There were flakes of snow on his coat and in his hair. Anne was afraid to look at him for fear the others would see him. She bowed her head. Reverend Sprague bent and scooped up a handful of dirt from the edge of the grave. “Unto the mercy of Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we commend the soul of our brother departed and commit his body to the ground, earth to earth—” He stopped, still holding the handful of earth.
Anne looked up. The man was much closer, walking rapidly between the graves. Victoria’s father looked up. His face went gray
“Unto the mercy of Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed,” Reverend Sprague read, and stopped again, and stared.
Victoria’s father put his arm around Victoria. Victoria looked up. The man began to run toward them, waving his hat in the air.
“No,” Anne said. With the toe of her boot she kicked at the dirt heaped around the grave. The dislodged clumps of dirt clattered on the coffin. Reverend Sprague looked at her, his face red and angry. He thinks I murdered Elliott, Anne thought despairingly, but I didn’t. She clenched the useless key inside her muff and looked down at the forgotten coffin. I tried, Victoria. For your sake. For all our sakes. I tried to murder Elliott.
Victoria gave a strangled cry and began to run, her father close behind her. Reverend Sprague closed his book with an angry slap. “Roger!” Victoria cried, and threw her arms around his neck. Anne looked up.
Victoria’s father slapped him on the back again and again. Victoria kissed him and cried. She took his large hand in her small gloved one and led him over to meet Anne. “This is my brother!” she said happily. “Roger, this is Miss Lawrence, who has been so kind to me.”
He shook Anne’s hand.
“We heard your ship was lost,” she said.
“It was,” he said, and looked past her at the open grave.
Anne stood outside the door of the choir room with the key in her hand until her fingers became stiff with cold and she could hardly put the key in the lock.
There was no one in the church. Reverend Sprague had gone home with Victoria and her father and brother to tea. “Please come,” Victoria had said to Anne. “I do so want you and Roger to be friends.” She had squeezed Anne’s gloved hand and hurried off through the snow. It was nearly dusk. The snow had begun falling heavily by the time they finished burying Elliott’s body. Reverend Sprague had read the service for the burial of the dead straight through to the end, and then they had stood, heads bowed against the snow, while old Mr. Finn filled in the grave. Then they had gone to tea and Anne had come back here to the church.
She turned the key in the lock. The rattling sound of the key seemed to be followed by an echo of itself, and she thought for a fleeting second of Elliott on the other side of the door, his hand already on the knob, ready to hurtle past her. Then she opened the door.
There was no one there. She knew it before she lit the candle. There had been no one there all week except herself. Her small heeled footprints stood out clearly in the dust. The pew where Elliott had sat was thick with undisturbed dust, and in one corner of it lay the comforter she had brought him.
The toe of her foot hit against something on the floor, half under the pew. She bent to look. The packets of food, untouched in their brown paper wrappings, lay where Elliott had hidden them. A mouse had nibbled the string on one of them, and it lay spilled open, the piece of ham, the russet apple, the crumbling slice of cake she had brought him that first night. A schoolboy’s picnic, Anne thought, and left the parcels where they were for Reverend Sprague to find and think whatever it was he would think about the footprints, the candle, the scattered food.
Let him think the worst, Anne thought. After all, it’s true. I have murdered Elliott. It was getting very cold in the room. “I must go to tea at Victoria’s,” she said, and blew out the candle. By the dim light from the hall she picked up the comforter and folded it over her arm. She dropped the key on the floor and left the door open behind her.
“So there I was, all alone,” Roger said, “in the middle of a rough sea, my shirt frozen to my back, not one of my shipmates in sight, when what should I spy but the whaling boat.” He paused expectantly.
Anne pulled the comforter around her shoulders and leaned forward over the fire to warm her hands.
“Would you like some tea?” Victoria said kindly “Roger, we’re eager to hear your story, but we must get poor Anne warmed up. I’m afraid she got a dreadful chill at the cemetery.”
“I’m feeling much warmer now, thank you,” Anne said, but she didn’t refuse the tea. She wrapped her hands around the warmth of the thin china cup. Roger left his story to jab clumsily at the fire with the poker.
“Now then,” Victoria said when the coals had roared up into new flames, “you may tell us the rest of your story, Roger.”
Roger still squatted by the hearth, holding the poker loosely in his rough, windburned hands.
“There’s nothing else to tell,” he said, looking up at Anne. “The oars were still in the whaling boat. I rowed for shore.” He had gray eyes like Victoria’s. His hair in the firelight was darker than hers and with a reddish cast to it. Almost as dark as Elliott’s. “I walked to an inn and hired a horse. When I got here, they told me you were at the cemetery. I was afraid you’d given up hope and were burying me.”
His smile was more open than Elliott’s, and his eyes more kind. His windburned hands looked strong and full of life, but he held the poker clumsily, as if his hands were cold and he could not get a proper grip on it. Anne took the comforter from around her shoulders and put it across her knees.
“You haven’t eaten a thing since you got home,” Victoria said. “And after all that time in an open boat, I’d think you would be starving.”
Roger put the poker down on the hearth and took the cup of tea his sister gave him in both hands. He held it steadily enough, but he did not drink any. “I ate at the inn where I hired the horse,” he said.
“How did you say you found the horse?” Anne said, as if she had not heard them. She held out a slice of cake to him on a thin china plate.
“I borrowed it from the man at the inn. He gave me some clothes to wear, too. Mine were ruined, and I’d lost my boots in the water. I must have been a sorry sight, knocking at his door late at night. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost.” He smiled at Anne, and his eyes were kinder than Elliott’s had ever been. “So did all of you,” he said. “I felt for a moment as if I’d come to my own funeral.”
“No,” Anne said, and smiled back at him, but she watched him steadily as he took the slice of cake, and waited for him to eat it.
LOST AND FOUND
People quote The Revelation of St. John a lot these days. (They also call it Revelations, which should give you a clue as to how careful they are with their quotes.) They don’t quote everything, though. For some reason, busily predicting the day and hour of the Second Coming, they completely ignore, “For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
They also ignore what happened to their prophecies before. They all turned out exactly as predicted, but in a way no one expected, and most of them turned out to have meant something entirely different from what they had imagined. “The Son of Man is come to save that which is lost,” Matthew says, but what exactly does that mean?
“Is it the end of the world?” Megan asked. “Losing your cup, I mean?” Finney had come up to the Reverend Mr. Davidson’s study to see if he might have left it there and found Megan at her father’s desk, pasting bits of cotton wool to a sheet of blue paper.
“No, of course not,” Finney said. “Its only annoying. It’s the third time this week I’ve lost it.” He pulled the
