Missing Joseph

“She knows you have the keys?”

“Yes.”

“As a security precaution?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you use them often? As part of your evening patrol?”

“Not generally, no.”

Lynley saw that St. James was looking thoughtfully at the constable, his brows drawn together as he pulled at his chin. He said: “It was a bit risky, that, wouldn’t you say, letting yourself into her cottage at night? What if she had been in bed with Mr. Sage?”

Shepherd’s jaw tightened but he answered easily. “I suppose I would have killed him myself.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

DEBORAH SPENT THE FIRST quarter of an hour inside St. John the Baptist Church. Beneath the hammer- beam ceiling, she wandered down the central aisle towards the chancel, tracing a mittened finger along the scrollwork that edged each pew. On the far side of the pulpit, one of them was boxed, separated from the rest by a gate of barley-sugar columns on the top of which a small bronze plaque bore blackened letters reading Townley-Young. Deborah lifted its latch and stepped inside, wondering what sort of people would want to maintain the unpleasant, centuries-old custom of segregating themselves from those they considered their social inferiors.

She sat on the narrow bench and looked about. The air in the church was musty and frigid, and when she exhaled, her breath hung whitely before her face for a moment, then dissipated like a cirrus in the wind. On a pillar nearby, the hymnboard hung, listing a selection for some previous service. Number 388 was at the top, and idly she opened one of the hymnals to it, reading

Lord Christ, who on thy heart didst bear the burden of our shame and sin, and now on high dost stoop to share the fight without, the fear within,

after which she dropped her eyes to

that we may care, as thou hast cared, for sick and lame, for deaf and blind, and freely share, as thou hast shared, in all the sorrows of mankind

and then stared at the words with her throat aching-tight, as if they had been written precisely for her.Which they had not.Which they had not.

She slapped the book closed. To the left of the pulpit a banner hung limply from a metal rod, and she scrutinised this. Winslough was stitched across a faded blue background in letters of yellow. Below them St. John the Baptist Church was rendered in quilted patchwork from which several tufts of stuffing leaked like snow against the bell tower and on the face of the clock. She wondered what the banner was used for, when it had been hung, if it had ever seen the light of day, how old it was, who had made it and why. She pictured an elderly woman of the parish at work on the design, stitching her way into the good graces of the Lord by making an offering for His place of worship. How long had it taken her? What sort of thread had she used for the quilting? Did anyone help? Did anyone know? Was there anyone who kept that sort of history of a church?

Such games, Deborah thought. What an effort she made to keep her mind in check. How important it was to feel the tranquillity suggested by a visit to a church and communion with the Lord.

She hadn’t come here for that. She had come because a walk down the Clitheroe Road in the late afternoon with her husband and the man who was his closest friend, who was her own former lover, who was the father of the child she might have had — would never have — seemed the best way to escape the feeling of having been betrayed.

Dragged up to Lancashire on false pretences, she thought and gave a weak chuckle at the idea, she who had been the ultimate betrayer.

She had found the sheaf of adoption papers tucked between his pyjamas and his socks, and she’d felt indignation pinch at her spine at the thought of his deception and at this intrusion into their time away from their real life in London. He wanted to talk about it, he explained when she flung the papers on the chest of drawers. He felt it was time that they sorted things out.

There was nothing to sort. To talk about it was to engage in the kind of conversation that spun like a cyclone, gathering speed and energy from misunderstanding, wreaking destruction from words hurled in anger and self-defence. A family isn’t blood, he would say so reasonably because God knew that Simon Allcourt-St. James was scientist, scholar, and reason incarnate. A family is people. People bond to one another out of time, exposure, and experience, Deborah. We form our connections from the give and take of emotion, from the growing sensitivity to another’s needs, from mutual support. A child’s attachment to his parents has nothing to do with who gave him birth. It comes from living day to day, from being nurtured, from being guided, from having someone there— someone consistent — that he can trust. You know this. You do.

It isn’t that, it isn’t that, she would want to say, even as she felt the tears which she so much despised cutting off her ability to speak.

Then what is it? Tell me. Help me understand.

Mine…it wouldn’t be…yours. It wouldn’t be us. Can’t you see that? Why won’t you see?

He would look at her without speaking for a moment, not to punish her with withdrawal as she’d once thought his silences meant, but to think and to problem-solve. He would be considering a recommendation on a course of action for them to take when all she wanted was that he too would weep and display through his tears that he understood her grief.

Because he’d never do that, she couldn’t say the final unsayable to him. She hadn’t even yet said it to herself. She didn’t want to feel the sorrow that would accompany the words. So she fought against their encroachment on her consciousness and she fended them off by railing against what she knew very well was his greatest strength: that he never allowed a single circumstance to defeat him, that he took life as he found it and bent it to his will.

You don’t even care, would be the words she chose. This means nothing to you. You don’t want to understand me.

What a convenience a cyclone-argument was.

She’d gone walking that morning to avoid confrontation. Out on the moors with the wind in her face, hiking across the uneven ground, dodging the occasional spines of furze and tramping through heather gone brown with winter, she’d kept everything at bay but the exercise itself.

Now, however, the quiet church admitted no such means of avoidance. She could examine the memorials, watch the dying light darken the colours in the windows, read the bronze Ten Commandments that formed the reredos and decide how many she’d broken so far. She could scrape her feet across the age-warped fl oor of the Townley-Young pew and count the moth holes dotting the red mantle on the pulpit. She could admire the woodwork of the rood screen and the tester. She could wonder about the tonal quality of the bells. But she could not avoid the voice of her conscience that spoke the truth and forced her to hear it:

Filling out those papers means I’m giving up. It’s admitting defeat. It tells me I’m a failure, not a woman at all. It says the ache will fade but it’ll never end. And it isn’t fair. This is the one thing that I want…this single, simple, unattainable thing.

Deborah stood and pushed open the boxpew’s gate. With the sound of its creaking came Simon’s words:

Are you punishing yourself, Deborah? Does your conscience say you’ve sinned and the only expiation is to replace one life with another which you yourself create? Is that what you’re doing? And are you doing it for me? Do you think you owe me that?

Perhaps, in part. For he was, if anything, forgiveness itself. If he had been some other kind of man — railing occasionally or throwing into her face the fact that she was at fault in this failure — she might have been able to bear it more easily. It was because he did nothing save look for solutions and express his growing alarm about her health that she found it so difficult to forgive herself.