Free Cousin Rosamund by Rebecca West Page B

sent from Mr Morpurgo’s garden that afternoon, had been left on a table in a disused saddle-room so that the cold air should keep it fresh; and we had surrounded the vase with heavy boxes so that it should not be blown over, though it was most unlikely that a tornado should spring up in a closed room with one high window. We were apprehensive too lest the river should rise and flood the church, in spite of our knowledge that that had happened only once in the last twenty years, and this had been a dry autumn. But all this was a game we were playing. We could mimic insecurity because of the security that let us fall asleep as soon as we got into bed.
    But in the early morning I woke suddenly because there was someone moving about in the house. For a moment I thought Papa might have come back. He had gone like a thief in the night, he might come back like a thief in the night. I cried out against the new robbery, the new cruelty he might commit, I asked nothing better than that he should commit it. Then I was fully awake, learned again of my father’s death from that strange sense which had told me of it when it had happened, and remembered Uncle Len had said he would get up in the middle of the night to stoke the church boiler; and I rose and kilted up my nightdress and put over it a sweater and a skirt, and tugged on my stockings and my shoes. Mary did not move. She had had a big concert in Edinburgh two nights before, and now lay limp and recipient, drop by drop the night was pouring its fullness into her. Downstairs Uncle Len was on his knees by the door into the garden, wheezing with bulkiness and trying to compel his thick arthritic fingers to free the bolts without noise. As I knelt and slid them back, he whispered, ‘You’ve a quick hand, Rose,’ gripped my shoulders, and heaved himself to his feet, the breath whistling up his chest. Featureless in the dark, he was age and weight and infirmity and nothing else. By day he was Uncle Len, and did not seem old or ill, and I felt a sudden fear at this news about him that had come in the dark.
    We stepped out into the fierce, silent, still riot of a winter night. The stars appeared not at all remote. It was as if, not far above us, the bare black branches of the tree-tops were locked in combat with the white and sparkling tree-tops of woods growing downwards through the frosty skies with their roots in outer space. But the moon was calm and private in a coign between these two contending forests, and was itself again in a broken road of light across the river. The grass was furred with moonlight and on it each object drew a picture of itself in soft and sooty shadow, but the ground was hard as steel under our feet, and the air was minerally hard with intense cold. We went into the churchyard through the wicket-gate, treading on its shadows as on a grid, and found the graves rehearsing a resurrection, the stones shining as risen bodies might some day. We halted among them and listened to the falling waters of a weir so far distant that we never heard it by day; and I found myself waiting for the cry that should have come from the open mouth of a cherub carved above an epitaph, now forced into high relief by the moonbeams. But if the stone had spoken it would not have been that which made the hour remarkable. The strong light and the December silence were like the sound of a trumpet blown with a single breath in the past, the present, and the future.
    Suddenly the church windows were bright. I stared, expecting again that a miracle had happened. It seemed possible that my father and my mother might be standing on the steps of the altar, come to give their blessing to take back to Nancy, who also was to be married. But of course Uncle Len had gone ahead of me and switched on the electric light. He was standing in the aisle, his eyes on the new white sanctuary that Mr Morpurgo’s gardeners had made with lilies and chrysanthemums. White flowers were wound round the pillars