Free A Convergence Of Birds by Jonathon Safran Foer Page A

upsets him, so he retires again and writes a report to Cecil, waffling away about the devious ways of Catholics, hosts, country gentlemen, ladies of the house, and just about everybody not on his side. He will not sleep this night, nor will he hit on the truth, he is so eager to present himself in a good light as the finder, the exposer. Restrained enough in speech, he tends to hyperbole at the merest touch of self-esteem, informing Cecil that “of all the various scheming and truculent priests, those Jesu-wits, I have two of the vilest in hand, for prompt sending to you, sir, and your diligent punitations. I have one or two misgivings about who these people are, for they will not say, but truth told they have, without any airs or graces as of high-born gentlemen, that bloated humbleness we all recognize as bombast in reverse. We, who have not been educated for nothing, need yield no quarter to the Roman-suckled rabble of high priests. At your service always, with intaminate pride.” He can go on in this vein for hours, sufficiently launched with writing materials, like someone taking to water for the first time and hitting on the correct stroke, even were he swimming in pitch. He calls off the search, explores his conscience, wishes he had not been so swift in sending them up to London, then renews the ransacking of the house into Friday, Saturday and Sunday, deeply conscious of interrupting a religious timetable that no one dares mention. From memory, in her diary, Anne Vaux writes as follows:
    We have here again, for the seventh day, the same behaviours as before at Baddesley-Clinton, which I fiercely complained of, though this house be none of mine and therefore not a subject for mine own remonstrances. Suffice to say, these poursuivants behave like a pack of bad boys playing blindman’s buff, who in their wild rush bang into tables and chairs and walls and yet have not the slightest suspicion that their playfellows, God save them, are right on top of them and almost touching them.
    She reads this through, crosses it all out as dangerous, then tears it loose, looking exasperatedly at the diary, flicks through some pages, wraps the volume in a fold of wallpaper she picks from a minty-smelling closet, and bears the whole thing downstairs to the roaring fire, into which she sets her life: unseen in the whole endeavor, for one glimpse of her ferrying something perilous to read would have them snapping at her heels. She realizes she is not living prudently: The constant hammering has unnerved her, given her a headache that reaches down the back of her neck into her shoulders, and the egg-and-ham breakfast is sitting none too well—days old, it seems to lie there and haunt her still, and she now agonizes at having put Fathers Garnet and Oldcorne through the miseries of its aroma. Indeed, nothing she does helps them. They are not in the lower chamber that sits below the dining room, where it would be possible to pass food down to them, as if they were plaintive dogs behaving well at their masters’ feet. They do not even have an apple between them. She stews about Little John and Ralph Ashley, seized and sent away incognito, and knows there has come an end to hideaway-building. Further torture inflicted on John Owen will kill him certainly, and the whole recusant scheme will perish. It would be one thing if the searchers, having found the two, had gone, satisfied with their prey; but here they are still, racketing about, so much so that she twitches at every tap or rattle, every creak of the house as it settles down into winter repose. She recalls having noticed in herself and others a curious habit of completing a watched motion: when someone, bracing to move an arm or a leg, curtails the movement and the intent watcher goes through with it, for the moment identified into union with the person watched. This is how she feels about the two priests in their hole, sensing all the movements they dare not make and accomplishing