I LOOKED AT the calendar and sighed. Not only a Monday,
but December eighth. Exactly seventeen days till Christmas
and I had done almost nothing. No cookies had been baked,
no cards sent, no presents bought, let alone wrapped.
It's true that I'm a chronic procrastinator, but this time
I had a good excuse. Recent events, including a fairly
narrow escape from being murdered, had taken up a good
deal of my time and every bit of my energy.
However, excuses notwithstanding, Christmas was going to
be here in a little over two weeks, and I wasn't going to
be ready, not unless I got my act together immediately. I
poured myself the last cup of coffee in the pot, checked
to make sure that my husband was happily occupied with his
memoirs, and sat down to make a list.
Half an hour later I kissed Alan on the top of his head as
he sat absorbed in front of the computer. "I'm going
shopping. I may not be home for lunch. There's soup in the
fridge."
He muttered something. I knew he'd really heard me and
would remember what I'd said when he got hungry and I
wasn't there. I patted his shoulder fondly and went out
the back door, clapping an old plaid tam on my head.
It was an incredibly beautiful day for December. The
temperature was at least fifty, the sun was shining
brightly, and the jasmine on the south wall of my house
was in full, fragrant bloom. Perverse creature that I am,
I resented the weather. My soul, nourished by more than
sixty years of life in the Midwestern United States,
insisted that there should be snow. It was a foolish
longing. We seldom got much snow here in the part of
southeastern England I'd adopted as my home.
Never mind. By the time I got back home I'd be glad enough
of dry feet and warm hands and would, I hoped, be imbued
with the somewhat frenetic Christmas cheer forced upon me
by the merchants.
I knocked on my neighbor's back door. Jane Langland, my
best friend, was often willing to accompany me on my
jaunts, and I find shopping much less tiring with company.
I was greeted by Jane's bulldogs. I'm never sure how many
she has. Soft touch that she is, she's forever bringing
home a new one from the animal shelter and then placing it
in a good home, so the population varies. They are all
invariably good-humored, gregarious, and extremely
interested in the way I smell (perhaps because I have two
cats). I patted the nearest ones, shoved away the too-
curious ones, and waited until Jane herded them all out of
the way and motioned me into her pleasant kitchen.
"Sorry. Miserable beasts," she said in fond tones that
belied her words. "Coffee?"
"Thanks, but I don't have time to stay. I'm off to do my
extremely belated Christmas shopping, and hoped you'd come
with me."
"Well." She considered. "Laundry folded, washing-up done,
no committees today — right. Why not? Want to stop at the
museum in any case."
She looked at her feet as she muttered the last remark,
and I tried hard not to smile. "Do you have a present for
Bill?"
"No. Need to talk to him." She spoke gruffly and stumped
out into the vestibule. She pulled a sweater off a
peg. "Coming, then?"
"How has Bill been?" I pursued as we walked past my house.
It's at the end of the street, which is a dead end
terminating with a gate into the Cathedral Close. The
quickest route to the High Street and most of the shops is
through the Cathedral. "I haven't visited the museum
lately."
"Hmph! Blinking fool!"
I took this to refer to Bill, not me. And I was pretty
sure I knew why she was upset. "So he still won't come to
live with you?"
"Hah! Sensible thing to do, with both of us lonely, and
nearly eighty, and him an old crock who can barely walk.
Not taking proper care of himself."
"Well, I've said before and I say again, I think there's a
reason. Don't look at me that way! I don't think he's
suddenly lost his fondness for you, so it must be
something else. Maybe he doesn't like your house. Maybe he
doesn't care for dogs. Maybe he hates the idea of living
so close to the church bells. Maybe he's just afraid of
losing his independence."
"Hmph!" said Jane again. I thought she was going to say
something else, but she shook her head and closed her
mouth firmly.
I was thoughtful as we took the shortcut through the
Cathedral and out again and turned onto the High Street.
Jane had told me, in bits and pieces, about her decades-
old romance, and I found the story infinitely pathetic.
She and Bill Fanshawe, neighbors in Sherebury long ago,
had known each other from infancy, but love had blossomed
when they were just eighteen, in 1943. They desperately
wanted to marry, but that was a bad time for romance.
Their families insisted they were both too young and times
too uncertain. Bill had enlisted in the RAF as soon as he
was old enough, promising he would marry her as soon as
the war was over and he came home.
But he hadn't come home when the war was over. His plane
had been shot down over Germany and Bill taken prisoner.
His prison camp was liberated in due time, of course, but
under the harsh conditions his injuries had never healed
properly. A broken leg, badly set, left him crippled and
unable to work at his previous factory job. Even after
English doctors did the best they could, he was unfit for
factory work and untrained for any other job that could
support a wife. Jane had begun her teaching career by that
time, so she was earning a little. Bill doggedly worked at
whatever menial jobs he could find while he studied
history at Sherebury University. They both lived with
their parents and tried to save, but the post-war
austerity programs made life hard and saving almost
impossible.
Then, in the early fifties, Bill's father was offered a
better job in Norwich. The family moved, and Bill, unable
to support himself, had little choice but to go with them.
In the bigger city, Bill, too, was able to find a better
job, his knowledge of history leading to work in the
city's museum. The two lovers tried to keep up a
correspondence, but since neither had the time or the
money to travel to see the other, the letters became
unsatisfactory and eventually lapsed. Jane lost touch with
Bill except for the occasional Christmas card. Neither
married. Time went by.
It was in the mid-nineties, as I recalled, that Bill
retired and decided to return to Sherebury. He found a
comfortable little flat in what had been a wool merchant's
grand house in the seventeenth century. He had finished
his degree and become a curator of some note by that time,
so when the small Museum of Sherebury moved into the
splendid old Town Hall and lost wispy little Mr. Pym, its
old curator, Bill was a logical successor. He settled in
happily and began to see Jane now and then.
The trouble was, they'd both become set in their ways. If
they'd hoped (as the gossipy little town, eagerly awaiting
developments, certainly hoped) to take up where they'd
left off, they were disappointed. A late-life romance did
not develop. But they still shared many of the same
interests and enjoyed each other's company. The town held
its collective breath and kept hoping, until a major rift
developed.
The trouble arose when Bill fell on the stairs getting to
his flat, which was on the top floor of the old house. He
wasn't hurt, only shaken up, but Jane was extremely upset.
Being Jane, she tried to take charge. Bill, with the old
weakness in his leg, had no business climbing all those
stairs, she insisted. In fact, he had no business living
alone at his age.
When she had recounted the conversation to me, I had
refrained from saying that she lived alone, in a house
with many stairs, and that she was the same age as Bill. I
wasted my tact. It seemed that Bill had pointed out that
very fact. Jane had then changed tactics and said there
was no sense in both of them living alone. She would be
more than happy to have him move in with her, as a paying
guest if he liked, and they'd be there for each other in
case of illness or other disaster.
Well, that put the fat in the fire. Bill backed off like a
scalded cat. I thought, personally, that he took the
suggestion as a backhanded sort of marriage proposal, and
was scared to death of the idea. I didn't say so to Jane,
of course. She was mortally offended, and became even more
upset when Bill up and moved to Heatherwood House, a
retirement home in a beautiful old manor house on the edge
of town. At one blow he had rejected her, dealt with all
her objections about his unsafe living conditions, and
distanced himself from her physically as well.
Jane Langland is one of the kindest people I know. She's
also one of the stubbornest, and I'm well equipped to
recognize the trait. She didn't give up. She called on him
at the museum every chance she got, raising some new
argument. I suspected that they secretly enjoyed the
quarrels a good deal, and I was looking forward to
watching them spar today.
Not yet, though. Shopping came first. List clutched in my
hand, I steered Jane firmly in the direction opposite the
Town Hall.
Two hours later, only halfway through my list, I was more
than ready to stop for lunch. My feet hurt, my arms were
weighed down with packages, I had a headache, and I was
starving. So much for Christmas spirit. "Jane, let's go to
Alderney's. It's about halfway home, and even with your
help, I can't carry all this stuff much farther. Besides,
they have wonderful food and I don't have much at home."
"Better idea. Town Hall's just across the street. Pop in
there and leave your parcels."
"That is a good idea! And maybe Bill will come to lunch
with us, if his assistant is there today." I glanced slyly
at Jane, but she refused to meet my eye.
We staggered across the street. Jane opened the heavy old
oak door and I negotiated the half flight of stairs to the
level where the museum occupied the space vacated some
years before by the city offices. The architects, with
Bill to advise them, had done a lovely job with it. The
building retained its Elizabethan dignity, and the
artifacts of centuries of Shere-bury history were
displayed attractively.
The desk he usually occupied in the corner was vacant, and
there was no sign of his assistant.
"Jane, he must be upstairs looking something up, and I
positively cannot climb any more stairs." Bill, I knew,
had been doing a lot of work lately in the storerooms,
pulling out odd bits and pieces that had been donated to
the museum years ago and trying to make some sense of them.
"HELLO-O!" Jane's stentorian bellow raised some dust motes
that eddied in the sunlight coming through a leaded-glass
window. There was no other response.
"Old fool's fallen asleep up there. Suppose I'd best wake
him."
Jane made for the stairs while I sank gratefully into a
chair. Jane's older than I, but better able to climb
stairs, especially when my arthritic knees are acting up.
I often think it's unfair that I feel about thirty-five on
the inside, but the outer shell sometimes seems to be
approaching a hundred. I leaned back as far as the rather
hard chair would allow and closed my eyes. I'd have time
for forty winks before Jane persuaded Bill to leave his
work and come to lunch with us.
She came back before I'd reached even the edge of
sleep. "He's not there," she announced.
Her tone of voice roused me. "But — he'd surely never
leave the place unattended. He must have gone to the loo."
"Knocked. Then peeked in. No one."
This was unexpected. Bill Fanshawe was fanatically
reliable. He viewed the museum's collection as virtually
his own property, and guarded it jealously. He would never
have walked off with the doors unlocked. I tried to make
my weary brain function properly. "Maybe he isn't here at
all today, and his assistant has done something foolish —
gone off for a sandwich or whatever, and left the museum
open."
Jane, prowling restlessly, reached Bill's desk and did
some rummaging. "No," she said, holding up one of the
papers. "Schedule for the week. Bill's here alone today."
I looked at her blankly. "Well, then, where is he?"