Mrs De Winter Read Free Page A

crows.
    The congregation stirred like standing corn as we passed on our way to the front pew, I felt their eyes burning into our backs, felt their curiosity and fascination with us, and all the unspoken questions, hanging in the air.
    The church was beautiful, and the beauty of it made me catch my breath. I had never let myself think very much of how I missed such places as this. It was an ordinary, unremarkable English country church and yet to me, as rare and precious as the greatest cathedral. Sometimes I had slipped into a church in some foreign village or town, and knelt in the darkness among the black-shawled old women mumbling over their beads, and the smell of incense and guttering candles had been as strange as everything else to me, they had seemed to belong to some exotic religion, far
     
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    removed from the austere stone church of home. I had needed to be there, and valued the quietness and the atmosphere of reverence, been half attracted, half repelled by the statues, the confessional boxes. I had never managed to put any prayer into words, never formed actual phrases, either on my lips or in my mind, of confession or petition. Only a sort of incoherent but immensely powerful emotion had sometimes surged up, as though forced by some pressure deep within me, and it had come close to the surface without ever erupting. It could never be properly expressed, and I supposed it was like a desperate touching of wood, for … For what? Our protection? Salvation? Or merely that we should continue to be left alone in our safe, dull haven for the rest of our lives, untroubled by ghosts.
    I dared not admit to myself how much I had missed and longed for an English church, but sometimes in reading and re-reading the newspapers, when they managed to reach us from home, I came upon the public notices for the services on the following Sunday, and reading slowly down them the words filled me with great longing. Sung Eucharist. Mattins, Choral Evensong. Stanford in C. Darke in E. Byrd. Boyce. Lead Kindly Light (Stainer). Thou wilt keep him … Like as the Hart…
    Preacher. The Dean … the Precentor… the Bishop.
    I had spoken the words silently to myself.
    Glancing surreptitiously to either side of us now, and then up to the altar ahead, I saw the grey stone arches and ledges and steps, and the austerely carved memorial tablets to local squires long dead, and the Biblical texts lettered in the clear windows.
     
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    Come to me all ye that are heavy laden.
    I am the vine, ye are the branches.
    Blessed are the peacemakers.
     
    I read the grave, measured words as our steps fell, like the steps of soldiers treading the dead march, down the stone flagged aisle to where the trestles stood. There were flowers, golden and white as the sun and stars, in great jugs and urns on the table beside the font. I had thought that we were shut in from the countryside beyond the church, but we were not. The sun came striking through the side windows, on to the wood of the pews and the pale stone, the beautiful, limpid English autumn sunlight that filled me with such joy and recollection and sense of homecoming, it fell on the backs of heads and of raised prayer books, set the silver cross momentarily on fire, fell softly, gently, on to the plain, good oak of Beatrice’s coffin as the men set it down.
     
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CHAPTER
    Two
     
    Maxim had brought out the letter. He had left me sitting at our usual table overlooking the little square of which we had grown so fond, and gone back to the hotel for cigarettes.
    It was not so warm, I remember, clouds kept slipping in front of the sun and a sudden gust of wind had rushed down one of the narrow side alleys between the high houses, swirling a few scraps of paper and leaves. I had pulled my jacket up round my shoulders. The summer was over. Perhaps, later this afternoon, we would have one of the storms which had begun to break up the weather in the past week. The clouds came again, and the square was in