A Christmas Letter: Snowbound in the Earl's Castle

He shook his head. ‘But I know a place nearby where we can lay hands on one.’

Faith stopped to look at the window in the chapel while Marcus rummaged in the tiny cluttered vestry for a Bible. Even with her knees and lower legs missing, and the bottom section of the window boarded up, the woman captured in stained glass was exquisite.

The expression on her upturned face was pure rapture. All around her flowers bloomed—daisies in the grass, roses beside her in the bushes, climbing ivy above her head, reaching for the stars in the night sky. Faith could see why Crowbridge hadn’t been able to give up on the idea of making his vision come to life, no matter what the medium.

Marcus returned from the vestry with a worn black leather Bible and began to hunt through it. While he was occupied leafing through the tissue-thin pages, Faith allowed herself to do what she normally resisted—let her eyes rove over him. How was it fair for a man to be so beautiful?

Finally he placed a long finger in the centre of a page and smiled before looking up at her.

This time when their eyes met she didn’t get that earth-shifting-on-its-axis sensation. No, this was much more subtle, and probably much more dangerous. She felt a slow slipping, like the motion of a sled at the top of a snow-covered hill as gravity got hold and it started to move. Once it gathered momentum there’d be no stopping it.

He read out a verse, and the old-fashioned language of the King James Version sat well on his tongue. ‘“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”’

Faith’s heart skipped a beat in the pause before he moved on to the next verse.

Know even as also I am known …

She felt as if those words had been waiting all those centuries for here and now—for her and the man reading them to her. Because that was how she felt with him: she knew him, even though they’d only met just over a fortnight ago. How was that possible?

Everyone else, even her family—especially her family—looked at her through tinted glass, only getting glimpses, never seeing or understanding the whole. Somehow this man managed to do what no one else could. But she liked her tinted glass, liked her separateness. At least she had up until now. ‘It’s the next one,’ she said. ‘Read the next one.’

He looked down again. ‘“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”’

She blew out a breath. These three will abide. ‘That reference makes it even more sure. He was finishing his trio of pictures. The other two weren’t complete without this one.’

A sharp pang deep inside her chest cavity caused her to fall silent. That was how she and Hope and Grace had been once upon a time—the terrible trio, Gram had used to call them, with a glimmer in her eyes that was reserved only for grandparents. But they hadn’t been that way for a long time, and Faith suddenly missed them terribly, even though she hadn’t let herself feel that way in years.

If only she could believe that, just like Crowbridge’s pictures, her sisters weren’t complete without her. But the truth was that they and Mom and Dad were fully related to each other, were a complete family unit on their own; she only had one foot in and one foot out. A cuckoo. One who didn’t fit in, who shouldn’t even try.

‘That’s good, then,’ Marcus said beside her.

He was closer now, within touching distance. He could reach for her if he wanted to. And she sensed he did. She closed her eyes and walked away, saw the open door of the vestry and headed towards it. She needed distance, space. Because letting Marcus take care of her, look out for her, even for just a few moments, was almost as dumb as going to the ball that evening. She couldn’t let herself get sucked into this vision of a fairy tale—this place, this man. The ball always ended badly for Cinderella, so she’d much rather be Rapunzel, safe in her turret …

No, she meant tower. Safe in her tower.

She entered and discovered where most of the debris from the tidy chapel had ended up. It was like the cellar all over again.

Bad idea. She didn’t need reminders of the cellar right now. Or, to be more precise, of what had happened in the cellar.

She turned to go, but Marcus was already blocking the door, watching her. She glanced around frantically, looking for something to distract her, to start a conversation. There was a pile of old papers on the desk. She picked them up. On top was a note from the clean-up crew leader.

Found these in a trunk up in the tower. Thought someone might want to look through them.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she muttered. ‘Clear up one dusty dumping ground and then someone finds another one to be dealt with.’ She handed him the papers. ‘Sorry, Your Lordship, but this bunch is all yours.’

He took it from her after giving her a small salute. That made her smile. While he leafed through the papers, many of them torn or mildewed, Faith wandered out to look at the window once again. He followed, still flicking through the stack.

‘Look …’ He pulled a faded and yellowing piece out of the pile. ‘Someone else has done a sketch of the window.’

She walked over and took the piece from his hands, mildly interested. Even folded into quarters Faith recognised the pattern of lines. She’d been working with them all week. But when she unfolded it her hand flew to cover her mouth. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

She shook her head, an expression of total disbelief on her face. Her mouth moved once or twice but no sound came out.

‘Faith?’

She held up a hand and took a deep breath. ‘Marcus, this is the cartoon!’

He frowned, and she knew he was thinking of comic books and kids’ TV shows.

‘The original drawing that the glaziers worked from!’ she explained as she turned it round in her hands and checked the corners and edges. ‘Yes! Look, there’s his signature—Samuel Crowbridge!’

Marcus squinted at the drawing, but he hardly had time to focus on it before she danced away with it, spinning round and then running to the window to hold it up and compare.

‘That’s two pieces of evidence in one day!’ she yelled over her shoulder. It was more than she could ever have hoped for.

But then she stopped smiling, stopped talking, and her eyes grew wide again. She ducked down and spread the cartoon on the floor, smoothing it out gently. She was staring at the drawing, but her brain was refusing to compute. It kept telling her eyes the information they were sending it was wrong. Return to sender.

Marcus walked over and stood behind her to take a look.

And so he should. Right at the bottom, roughly where the rectangle they’d been discussing earlier was, were some words. She looked up at him.

‘This isn’t in the window now. Somebody changed it.’ She lowered her voice to barely a whisper. ‘Somebody took it out.’

Marcus wasn’t moving. His eyes were blinking and his mouth was slightly open. ‘“Proverbs Four, Verse Eighteen,”’ he finally read, his voice hoarse. ‘Why would someone want to take that out?’

Faith swallowed. ‘Because to someone it meant something.’

But that would make it…That would make it …

‘Bertie was right after all,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘Once upon a time there was a message in this window.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘PROVERBS, Chapter Four, Verse eighteen …’ Faith couldn’t help muttering it to herself over and over as she got dressed. A message in the window? Maybe. But a very cryptic one.

She left an earring hanging in her ear without its back so she could go and pull the piece of paper she’d scribbled the verse on out of her purse.

‘“But the path of the just is as a shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day”,’ she read out loud.

Beautiful poetry, nice sentiment, but was this the kind of message a husband would send his wife? It seemed Bertie’s message in the window asked more questions than it answered.

She put the piece of paper on the nightstand and went back to getting ready. In a moment of weakness, of sheer jubilation, after finding two bits of proof that were going to put her name on the academic map, she’d relented and agreed to go to the Christmas Ball. Bertie had rubbed his hands together when he’d heard the news, and had insisted escorting her personally to a bedroom with a wardrobe stuffed with evening gowns. Another sign that hoarding went hand in hand with the Huntington genes, she guessed.

She’d chosen a red velvet dress from the early sixties, with a scooped neck and tight bodice that skimmed her hips and then flared into a full fishtail at the bottom. It was gorgeous. Maybe a little snug, but gorgeous. Bertie had also insisted she borrow a necklace that he’d retrieved from a walnut jewellery box on the dressing table. She touched the simple V of glittering stones with her fingertips. My, she hoped they were paste.

Before she lost the matching earrings, she returned to the dresser and pushed the missing back on. The only thing to do before taking her first good look at herself in the mirror was to put on the pair of long red gloves that had been stored with the dress. She put them on slowly, avoiding the moment she had to meet her own eyes in the full-length glass.

When she had the courage to look it was as bad as she’d feared.