第74章 Saint Andrew's Day

Saint Andrew's Day itself came in fair and hard, the air like a struck flint, and Blackmore kept it as it had kept it for two hundred years: with a feast. Rosalind had inherited the custom along with everything else, and had learned from Graves that the feast was older than the will, older than the fire, older perhaps than the tower — the one day in the calendar when the house fed everyone who could see its light. Tenants came up from the valley with sledges and lanterns; the shepherd from the Portuguese hill would have found his counterpart here in any century, and did, arriving pink-faced with two of his grandchildren; even the village of Blackmore St Andrew's below the hill sent its churchwardens, its midwife, and its three most disapproving widows, who ate heartily and disapproved of nothing aloud, which among northern widows amounted to applause. Into this company, by Rosalind's express invitation, walked the enemy. She had thought about it half the night, and had risen certain: if Lord Vane spent Saint Andrew's Day anywhere but at this table, he would spend it constructing the household into something out of a lawyer's fantasy — a cult, a conspiracy of lamp-worshippers, a family too strange to be believed. Let him see it instead for what it was. A valley feeding itself. Children underfoot, a boar's head that Thomas carved with more enthusiasm than skill, Violet presiding over the puddings with white gloves traded for flour to the wrists, Ines commanding the kitchen with a wooden spoon and three languages of abuse, all of it warm, all of it ordinary, none of it concealable theater because theater cannot sweat. Selby declined the invitation with courtesy and spent the day in his room with his papers, which told Rosalind something about how he read houses: as territory, never as weather. But Vane came down in his plainest coat, and was seated between Gabriel and the oldest churchwarden, and for three hours the claimant of Blackmore passed vegetables and answered questions about Scotland and was asked by a child of six whether he was the gentleman from the chaise and whether the horses might be visited. He said they might. The whole table heard him say it. Rosalind saw Julian mark the moment — a man agrees to be visited by children at your table or he is not staying for dessert — and raise his glass slightly, one keeper to an undecided thing. Afterward, at dusk, came the part of the day that no lawyer could be permitted to mistake for evidence, and so nobody invited Mr. Selby down from his papers: the walking of the lights. It was simple, as the oldest things are simple. At dark the household climbed — tenants, widows, children, keepers, claimant — first to the beacon on the headland, where the wick was trimmed and renewed before them all so that even a stranger could see there was no machinery in the miracle, only hands and oil and attention; then down and around by the valley lamps, each unshuttered and wiped while its small congregation waited; and last, as full dark settled, up the tower stairs, by twos and threes, the whole procession winding upward inside the stone like a slow spark in a fuse, until the round room held as many souls as it safely could and the great lamp burned at the center of them with the winter country spread out below on every side. Here Isobel had stood, first keeper of the sisters' cove, and every keeper after her whose names wore out with telling; here Eleanor had relit what the vault darkness had taught her to relight; here Rosalind herself had carried fire on the night of her wedding eve when the flame went out to teach her why it burned. She performed the trimming now with her sleeves rolled, conscious of Vane at the edge of the company, very still beside the eastern window, watching her hands. When the wick was dressed and the glass brightened, she stepped back, and Ines began the tune. It went through the round room the way warmth goes through a cold bed: phrase by phrase, taken up voice by voice — tower, window, shrine, door — Gabriel's light tenor finding the descant, Thomas rumbling underneath like the cellar, children piping where they knew the words, valley voices carrying verses they had swallowed with their mothers' milk, and last, folding all four phrases into their answer, the fifth, the sea-phrase, six notes rising and turning back like water over shingle. The company sang it twice through. On the second ending, Rosalind — watching the flame as a captain watches weather — saw the great lamp lean. Not gutter; not bow to any draught the packed bodies could have made. It leaned seaward, deliberate, held itself there the space of a full breath with every soul in the room gone silent around it, then leaned east — toward the cove, toward the wreck — and returned upright, and burned on as though nothing had been said. Beside the window, Philip Vane made a sound like a man who has taken a blow in a place armor was never made for, and turned his face fully away from the company, and was not ashamed of it, and Rosalind looked at Julian across the crowded round room and found him already looking at her, and between them passed the whole argument in a glance: *he saw; it was meant for him; God help us all, the story has chosen its own counsel.* They came down by candlelight into the hall, where mulled wine steamed and Selby had descended at last, refreshed, combed, and armed, to inquire whether the festivities had concluded to everyone's satisfaction. And Vane, taking his cup, said to the room in general and to Rosalind in particular: "Tomorrow morning I ride for Penryn. There are papers I must open, and a question I must answer." He drank, set the cup down, and finished, quietly enough that only their end of the table heard: "I find I am no longer certain whose."