Watchers of Time (2 page)

“Thank’ee, Vicar, and I’ll have you say a prayer for me after the priest goes!”

The Vicar looked up at Martin, then said, “Dr. Stephenson?”

“He’s been asking for a priest. Just now, before you came in. I don’t know why—”

Dick said, “Father James is the only priest in Osterley. He’s a
Catholic
—”

“That’s right—he’s the one!” Herbert Baker said with more will than strength. Something in the depths of his eyes flared with hope.

Martin said, “If that’s what he wants, humor him, then. Dick, go and see if Father James will come here.” His brother hesitated, glancing uneasily at the Vicar, as if he’d just been asked to commit heresy. But Mr. Sims nodded encouragement, and Dick went out the door.

Martin said, “You’ll stay?” to Sims.

From the bed came the single word “Stay.” The lined face was exhausted, as if speaking was a greater effort than he could manage.

Sims replied, “I’ll go to the kitchen, then. From the look of her, Ellen is more in need of that tea than I am!” Rising from the bed, he added gently, “I’ll be within call, Herbert. Never fear.” His smile was reassuring.

Herbert nodded; his eyes closed. The wind had dropped again and on the roof overhead the rain seemed to fall softly now, with a summer patter.

Dr. Stephenson said quietly to Sims, “He’s sound enough in his mind. But dying men often have whims like this. Best to humor him!”

“Yes. I knew a wounded man in the War who wanted to be buried with his little dog. Only he didn’t have a dog. But when they came to bury him, his arms were folded across his chest as if he’d held one as he died. Strange comfort, but who are we to question?”

The Vicar went out the door, shutting it quietly behind him. There were voices on the stairs. Sims speaking to Ellen. And then they went down again together.

The room was silent. Martin watched his father for a time, and then said anxiously to Stephenson, “It’ll be an easy passing?”

“As easy as any. His heart will stop. And his breathing will follow. He will be asleep long before that. I didn’t expect him to wake at all. I thought he’d reached the last stage.”

Herbert, roused by their voices, said, “Is the priest here, then?”

“Not yet, Papa,” Martin answered, lowering himself to sit on the bed. “Dick’s gone to fetch him.” He gripped his father’s hands, unable to say anything, a plain man with few graces. But the warmth of his fingers seemed to give a measure of peace to his dying father. Martin cleared his throat hoarsely, warmed in his turn.

The silence lengthened. After nearly a quarter of an hour, Dick came in, bringing a short and balding man of middle age in his wake. Father James greeted Stephenson with a nod and came to shake Martin’s outstretched hand. His fingers were cold from the night air. “I understand your father has been asking for a priest,” he said, his face showing only concern.

“I don’t know
why,
Father—”

“Nor does it matter. I’ll speak to him, then, shall I?” It was a question asked gracefully, setting Martin at his ease. The priest turned quietly to bend over the bed. After a moment he said, “Mr. Baker? Herbert? It’s Father James. What can I do to help you?”

Baker opened his eyes, seemed to have difficulty focusing them, then blinked as he looked up at the white clerical collar, clearly visible against the black cloth. “Father James, is it?”

“Yes.” As a thin, trembling hand came out from under the blanket, Father James reached for it and the claw seemed to lock onto his.

“Send them away!” Herbert Baker said. “Just you and me.”

Father James glanced across at the anxious faces of Baker’s two sons and then at Dr. Stephenson. The three men nodded briefly, walked to the door, and went out, their shoes loud on the wide boards of the passage, then moving together down the stairs.

Father James, waiting until they were well out of earshot, looked around to collect some impression of this man lying in the bed waiting for death to come. He knew who the Bakers were, but had seldom exchanged more than a word or two with any of them.

It was a big room set under the eaves, with simple but sturdy furnishings, and a worn carpet on the floor. Someone had painted watercolors of the sea and framed them for hanging. An amateur’s hand, the sunrises and ships vigorous, but showing an untrained eye. The family had taken pride in them, to frame them. The single window faced the street, the shade pulled against the night and the curtains drawn across it.

So many houses in the town had this same air of working-class austerity, Father James found himself thinking. Osterley’s years of prosperity lay in the past—well before Herbert Baker’s time. No one starved, but people here worked hard for their bread.

As the priest turned back to the bed, he saw the woman’s photograph on the table beside it. The soft whisper of the rain faded, then revived as a squall, the wind sending a gust of drafts into the house and making the lamp dance to its fitful tune. Baker’s wife? She had died before the War, as he recalled, and this must have been taken some ten years before that. The daughter—Ellen?—looked much like her. The same dark hair and sweet face, staring at the camera with trusting and expectant eyes.

He sat down carefully on the bed’s edge, where Ellen and the Vicar had sat before him, and said in the voice that was his greatest gift as a priest, deep and steadfast, “I’m here. We are alone in the sight of God. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, tell me how I may serve you?”

Nearly half an hour later, Father James walked down the stairs of the Baker house, and found the family, the doctor, and the Vicar waiting for him in the small, very Victorian parlor. Tea had been brought and poured, but the cups were still more than half full, sitting forgotten. Wind rattled the shutters, a theatrical announcement of his appearance, like a drumroll.

Every face had turned toward the priest, all eyes pinning him in the doorway, concern mixed with weariness and not a little curiosity in their expressions. Father James cleared his throat and said into the expectant silence, “Your father is resting quietly now. He has asked me to reassure you that he wishes to be buried in accordance with his own beliefs, with Mr. Sims officiating. I have served him by giving him a little comfort. If he should require me again, you’ve only to let me know. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I must go. It is late—”

He was offered refreshment, he was offered the gratitude of the grieving family. Prevailed upon by Mr. Sims, he sat and drank a cup of lukewarm tea, out of kindness. Dr. Stephenson, watching him, was struck by the tension around his eyes, putting it down to the awkwardness of being in an unfamiliar household among strangers not of his faith. The two of them, doctor and priest, had shared many long watches together over the years, and Stephenson had always found him a strong and dependable ally in the business of offering peace to the dying and solace to the survivors. Even so, the face of death was never commonplace. One learned to accept, that was all.

Father James behaved with sympathetic courtesy toward Herbert Baker’s children, that deep voice bringing a measure of comfort to Ellen, as it had to her father. Dick and Martin, both slack-faced with exhaustion, appeared to find a renewal of strength in his assurance that Herbert Baker had made his peace with his God and had not changed his faith. Simple men, they couldn’t fathom their father’s odd behavior, and were half embarrassed by it. Father James, understanding that, said only, “Your father was not frivolous. At the end, we are all in need of God’s grace, like a child before his father. I’m some years older than the Vicar. Perhaps to a man of Herbert Baker’s age, it mattered.” He smiled across the tea table at Sims.

The Vicar looked up. Tansy, the liver-and-white spaniel sitting by his chair, patiently waited for Sims’s fingers to resume scratching behind the curly ears. He said, almost diffidently, “In the War it was the same. They were so young, most of them. But old in experience that I couldn’t match. I sent more than a few of them along to the Methodist chaplain, who was closer to their fathers’ age than I was. That seemed to be the best thing to do for them.” Then he turned the conversation, adding to Father James, “You must be thanking God that this weather held until after your Autumn Fete at St. Anne’s. It was a blessing. . . .”

Ellen said, “Martin went with Hetty to the bazaar. He brought me a brush for Tansy, and a new lead.” A smile lit her pale face, and then faltered. “Papa was well enough to go last year.”

“So he was,” the Vicar answered, returning her smile. “He has been a rock of strength each spring at Holy Trinity, too. I always took pleasure in working with him.”

As soon as it was decently possible, Father James rose and took his leave. Martin Baker escorted him to the door and thanked him again. The priest stepped out into the night. The rain had dropped off once more, and there was only the wind to keep him company on his long walk home.

Dr. Stephenson, climbing the stairs once more, found that the priest was right: Herbert Baker seemed to be resting quietly, slowly losing his grip on life.

In the small hours of the night, the man died peacefully, his family gathered about him. His daughter, Ellen, sobbed quietly and his two sons watched in anguish as he drew several short, uncertain breaths, then stopped breathing altogether, only a thin sigh passing his lips. The Vicar, by his side, prayed for Herbert Baker’s soul as the sigh faded.

The funeral was well attended, and Herbert Baker, coachman by trade, was sent to his eternal rest with the goodwill of a village that had known him to be an honest and plainspoken man with no vices and no outstanding talents, except perhaps for loyalty.

A week after the funeral, Dr. Stephenson returned to his surgery late one afternoon to find Father James just walking out the door.

“Well met!” Stephenson exclaimed, with pleasure. “Come in, let me pour myself a drink, and I shall be at your service. First babies are not to be hurried! This one kept his mother and me awake all of the night and well into the afternoon, and I’ve missed my breakfast, my lunch, and my usual hours.” He led the way back through the doorway, down the passage, and into his private office. The room smelled of wax and disinfectant, a blend that Father James found to be a sneeze-maker. He dragged out his handkerchief, sneezed heartily three times, and grinned crookedly at Stephenson.

“You should hear me when they’ve waxed the pews and the confessional at St. Anne’s! The blessing is, I’m not bothered by incense.”

The office was small, painted a pleasing shade of blue, and offered three chairs for visitors as well as the more comfortable old leather one behind the doctor’s broad wooden desk. Dr. Stephenson settled into that, and Father James took his accustomed place in the ancient wingback. As Stephenson lifted the bottle of sherry and offered it to him, the priest said, “No, thank you. I’ve another call to make, and she’s temperance-mad. I’ll lose my reputation if I reek of good sherry.”

Stephenson grinned. “How does she manage communion wine, then?”

“It’s consecrated, and the evil of the grape has been taken out.”

The doctor chuckled, then poured his own glass. “Yes, well, the mind is a wonderful thing, wonderful.”

“It’s about the mind I’ve come,” Father James said slowly.

“Oh, yes?” Stephenson sipped his sherry with relish, letting it warm him.

“I’d like to ask you if Herbert Baker was in full control of his faculties when he called me to him on his deathbed.”

“Baker? Yes, well, that was an odd business, I daresay. But he was dying of congestive heart failure, and his mind was, as far as I could tell, clear to the end of consciousness. Any reason why you feel it might not have been?” His voice lifted on a query. Stephenson was a man who liked his own life and that of his patients as tidy as possible.

“No,” the priest replied. “On the other hand, I’m seldom asked to second-guess Mr. Sims’s parishioners. Or he mine, for that matter. It was curious, and I found myself wondering about it afterward. Baker most certainly
appeared
in full control, though understandably weak. Still, you never know.”

“Which reminds me,” Stephenson said, turning the subject to something on his own mind. “There’s one of your flock I do want to talk about. Mrs. Witherspoon. She’s been refusing to take her pills again, and I’m—er—hanged if I can understand it.”

The priest smiled. “There’s a challenge for you. At a guess, I’d say that when she feels a little stronger, she’s convinced she doesn’t need them. Then she feels unwell again and quickly takes two to make up for it. A good-hearted woman, but not overly blessed with common sense. If I were you, I’d have a talk with her husband. She pays more heed to what he says than to anyone else. The sun shines out of Mr. Witherspoon, in her view.”

The ironmonger was the most lugubrious man in Osterley.

Stephenson laughed. “The eye of the beholder. Well, there’s a thought. That woman will make herself seriously ill if she doesn’t heed someone!” He looked at his wine, golden in the little glass. “I had a patient once who swore that sherry was Spanish sunlight caught in a bottle. Never been to Spain myself; I’m hard-pressed to escape for a few hours in Yarmouth. But there’s most certainly medicinal magic in it.” He finished the wine, then said, “How are those triplets of yours?”

Father James beamed. The triplets were his younger sister’s children and lived some distance away. “Thriving. Sarah is coping, with the help of two nuns I found for her, and every member of the family we can dragoon into service. I’ve done my own turn walking the floor at night. I expect those boys will be holy terrors by the time they’re eight. Their father was something of a devil himself at twelve!”