Chapter Twenty Five
In which Oscar has a pie box, Portia has a rude awakening, and Father Wright has another thing coming.
Chapter Twenty-Five
With Félix in Paris and the townspeople not entirely disposed to be friendly, Oscar spent most of his evenings walking outside the town. It was small enough that in ten minutes he could be out into the greenbelt surrounding St Thomas, kicking his way along the side of the main road or wandering down bicycle paths that veered off and looped around each other. It gave Portia and Luc some privacy, which was sorely lacking in the little hotel they were calling home, and it gave him time to think.
Wright had not been lying. Oscar hadn't been able to stop the destruction of the L&L, and he still felt that keenly; his mentor had never burnt down a building, and Oscar's first solo restoration project had resulted in precisely that. He might have been Oreglia's chosen son, but he wasn't living up to his father's expectations. This church was -- hah, yes, his redemption.
Each building is a love story, Oreglia had taught him that, but perhaps there was more to love than buildings.
He'd had girlfriends, not very many, because he'd been a quiet kid in high school and studied his heart out in college; it took a certain sort of person to cope with that, and he's always had the vague sense that they deserved better. Most of them had sensed it too, and moved on. He'd loved buildings, instead. The sinuous curve of an arch, the delicate projection of bay windows and porch steps. He'd loved columns and loadbearing walls, ceilings, hardwood, sheet-rock, brick. The older the better, to his mind.
Some people took in stray cats, or repaired old radios; Oscar made buildings beautiful again. He made them what they once were.
"Mr Shelley?"
He had been walking with his head down, away from the sunset along the road, hands in his pockets, and he hadn't noticed anyone approaching -- he should have, given the crunch of bicycle wheels on loose road gravel, but he'd been lost in thought. The pub waitress, Enid, had pulled up alongside him on an elderly cycle, and now swung one leg over and off, straightening the skirt she wore.
"Hello," he said coldly, not stopping to wait for her to dismount completely. She ran a little to catch up with him, right hand steadying the handlebars.
"Mr Shelley, can I talk with you?"
"I've had enough talking for today. Thanks anyway," he answered, picking up his pace a little.
"I know the priest came to see you today. He didn't mean it to end that way," she said, trotting along next to him breathlessly. "You surprised him, that's all. He's in the church this evening doing penance for his pride."
"Good," Oscar answered viciously.
"You're not a Catholic, Mr Shelley."
"No. And I don't care what the church says -- we own the property now, and we're not tearing down the church, so no laws have been broken and there's nothing they can do."
"Mr Shelley, I'm not here from Father Wright. Please, stop and listen, I'm running out of breath."
Oscar turned on her, ready to say something haughty and cruel and impatient, and she flinched back. She actually flinched.
Oscar had never made anyone flinch before, and now three people in one day had done it. He would have felt heady with the power if he didn't feel ashamed of making people afraid of him.
"What?" he asked, sharply. She swallowed.
"This is for you," she said, reaching around her bicycle clumsily and digging in a pannier pack below the seat. She thrust a slim package bound in brown paper into his hands, a book by the feel of it. He opened his mouth, but she was wrestling a larger package out of the bag also. "And this is for Mr Carvell. There's a note that explains everything. For him. Yours doesn't have a note," she blurted, even as she was climbing onto the bicycle and had shoved off back towards town, leaving him with what looked like a pie box and a package of pornography.
Either of which would have been welcome, really, as pie was never unwelcome and it wasn't like he was going to meet some nice English girl in this town and settle down. There just wasn't that much to do unless he went in to London, and driving in London was something he never wanted to experience again. Especially from the passenger's side seat, since Félix had insisted on driving, on the spurious excuse that Oscar would chip a black-nail-varnished fingernail. It had taken him an hour, Sunday morning, to get all the black off his fingernails, not to mention washing it out of his hair. Still, the look on Félix's face had been worth it.
Which still wasn't very comforting now, out on the road with the night coming on and packages to carry back to the hotel.
He turned and set off back into town, unwrapping the book as he walked, shoving the string and folded up brown paper into his pocket -- Oscar was the sort of child who'd always picked the seams of his giftwrapped packages, so as to save the paper to decorate his room with later. The book had a blank, faded grey cover, a little dented around the corners.
He didn't want to open it while walking along a dark road in the middle of nowhere; considering his dealings with Enid and the town priest lately, he wasn't all that motivated to open it at all. He waited until he'd returned to the hotel room, washed and changed, dug up some dinner in the form of Hob-Nob biscuits and orange juice, and contemplated, for nearly half an hour, whether he ought to open Félix's box or not. He didn't think Enid was the sort to blithely deliver mail-bombs in bakery boxes, and it didn't smell like it actually was a pie. He put it in the little icebox in the room, just in case.
By the time he sat down at the little table near the window, with the grey-bound book sitting flat in front of him, it was nearly midnight. He picked up the book, examining the blank cover and the spine, where the stamped-on gold leaf, illuminating the book's title, had worn away. He opened it, crossing his legs and resting it on one knee, bowing his head to read.
The title page said "English Myths and Folkways", which was baffling enough; the slickness of the pages and the peculiar layout reminded him of an old school textbook. He flipped through it idly, not reading so much as scanning the photographs, and any surrounding text that looked interesting. There were chapters on morris dance, for god's sake. If this was some kind of snide commentary on four foreigners moving into St Thomas, it was falling short of the mark. The English were weird.
Then he turned the page, and his eyes widened.
***
Portia was asleep. Happily asleep. There were few things Portia loved more than sleep, especially after college, when she'd gotten about two hours. Total. All four years.
She was even more happily asleep because Luc, who put out body heat like a furnace, was curled up against her, snoring gently in her ear. So when someone leapt on her and began shouting, she punched him. Hard.
"Wake up! Portia! Get out of bed!" Oscar cried, undeterred. Portia tried to punch him again, but he was moving too quickly. "Luc! Come on! wake up!"
Luc swore in French and caught the sheets before Oscar pulled them off fully. Oscar tugged again, and Luc nearly tumbled out of the bed.
"Come on, I want to show you something," he said. "Get dressed! Come on!"
Portia, not to be deterred, tried to punch Oscar again. Luc looked as though he was considering it, but then Oscar tossed him his jeans, and he sighed, pulling them on.
"What's wrong?" he asked, buckling his belt. Portia, furious, was trying to climb back into bed, but Oscar was blocking her.
"Nothing. Nothing's wrong. Something's weird, and I want you to see it."
"Now? It's the middle of the night!" Portia said.
"Now!" Oscar insisted. Luc passed Portia a lacy bra while Oscar tried not to notice. Portia sniffed and pulled it on in a feat of acrobatic engineering which would dazzle and amaze if Luc weren't busy finding his shirt and Oscar wasn't busy looking anywhere else at all.
Luc's truck bumped down the gravel road to the church, headlamps casting eerie shadows over the carved stone, and came to a stop with the lights still on, so that nobody would trip, fall, and die, as much as Portia might want them to. Oscar was first out, still clutching the book and beginning to curse just a little that he hadn't brought a jacket along with him. Portia, bundled to her ears in wool, followed grumblingly, and Luc brought up the rear with two enormous electric torches.
The doors weren't locked; anyone who wanted in could climb through a window without bothering to break the front doors, and the generator and anything else of value were padlocked in one of the storage rooms. Oscar dashed back down the nave, took one of the torches from Luc, and played it across the half-cleaned face in the rose window.
"Now," he said. "Look at that, and then look at this."
He opened the book and flipped through it madly, offering it to them. Luc took it with the air of a man accepting something potentially explosive from a bearded lunatic in a shack in Montana. Portia peered over his shoulder.
Luc looked back up at the face, then down at the book. Portia, a split second after, did the same.
"Eh? Eh?" Oscar demanded. "Mystery solved!"
"Can I go back to bed now?" Portia asked. Luc, however, shushed her gently.
"The Green Man is the symbol of spring's plenty, dis...." he stumbled over the word, unused to reading English.
"Disgorging foliage from his mouth," Oscar put in.
"Merci. In the early...early..."
"In the early medieval period," Portia read for him, "It was the signature of the master stonemason of the church and can be..."
She looked up again.
"Well," she said. "That takes balls, doesn't it. Smack dab in the middle of the window. It'd be like if da Vinci took the Mona Lisa and scrawled LEO WUZ HERE on it."
"Wright said that the town was full of stonemasons. He knew about this!" Oscar said.
"Oscar," Luc answered, his blunt, callused fingers turning the pages slowly, "Where did you get this book?"
"Enid! And she gave me something for Félix too!"
"What did she give Félix?"
"I left it in the hotel room," Oscar said regretfully. "It was in a box."
Luc was reading the rest of the page, lips moving silently as he mouthed the words to himself. Oscar was moving towards the rose window, playing one of the torches over the face, still not fully cleaned of mortar and soot. Now that he had a model to go from, he could see that vines were emerging from behind the fanged mouth, and what he'd thought was a misshapen forehead with horns was actually the edge of an oak leaf that overlaid the entire face. The vines spread across the entire window -- what had looked like more soot he now realised were small leaves and berries overlaying the glass. It wasn't dirty glass -- it was designed that way.
"Oscar," Luc said, in that tone of voice which is normally reserved for the discovery of a poisonous spider in one's bathtub.
"What is it?" Oscar called. Luc gave the book to Portia, who read aloud.
"One of the last Green Man festivals existing in a continuous unbroken documented tradition since the sixteenth century and possibly as many as five hundred years before that occurs every spring in the district of Seven Oaks, outside of London," Portia read. Her voice echoed off the dome, filling the space. "Although the tradition was supposedly Christianised by the Catholic church, the predominant denomination in the area, town records show that the natives of at least one town in Seven Oaks continued to hold separate Pagan rites in the evening after the "approved" Catholic activities of the afternoon."
"Seven Oaks?" Oscar asked, still staring up at the wrought-iron face in the rose window.
"The tradition of the Green Man festival and of masonic handcrafting, as an art if not a profession, continues to this day -- " Portia read.
" -- in the small village town of St Thomas," Oscar said, not needing to hear it from the book.
"...where the current master mason, Sir Alexander Wright, is Keeper of the Masks," Portia finished.
"What?"
Portia turned to the front of the book. "It was published nearly thirty years ago -- that can't be the priest, he doesn't look like he's thirty himself."
"Probably his father," Luc said. He cocked his head at the window, still holding the torch-beam on the book while Portia flipped through it. "Perhaps his grandfather, if he was a master stonemason. That's not an honour lightly given."
"This church is perfectly useable," Oscar said, turning around to look at them, the Green Man looming over one shoulder. "The pews were taken out and burned, the windows were smashed, the big one bricked up -- someone couldn't bear to destroy it. The house was torched."
"Traditionally, the Church has not approved of things like this," Luc said quietly. "They have pulled down stone circles -- "
"Syncretism," Portia said. "They brought the traditions into the church...and someone didn't like it, two hundred years ago."
"Someone doesn't like it now, either, I think," Oscar said. "I don't think Father Wright's angry because we're turning a church into a mansion -- I think he's angry because he wants it to stay a ruin."
"What are you going to do?" Portia asked, looking up from the book.
"I think I'm going to go to Mass tomorrow," Oscar answered.
Chapter Twenty-Five
With Félix in Paris and the townspeople not entirely disposed to be friendly, Oscar spent most of his evenings walking outside the town. It was small enough that in ten minutes he could be out into the greenbelt surrounding St Thomas, kicking his way along the side of the main road or wandering down bicycle paths that veered off and looped around each other. It gave Portia and Luc some privacy, which was sorely lacking in the little hotel they were calling home, and it gave him time to think.
Wright had not been lying. Oscar hadn't been able to stop the destruction of the L&L, and he still felt that keenly; his mentor had never burnt down a building, and Oscar's first solo restoration project had resulted in precisely that. He might have been Oreglia's chosen son, but he wasn't living up to his father's expectations. This church was -- hah, yes, his redemption.
Each building is a love story, Oreglia had taught him that, but perhaps there was more to love than buildings.
He'd had girlfriends, not very many, because he'd been a quiet kid in high school and studied his heart out in college; it took a certain sort of person to cope with that, and he's always had the vague sense that they deserved better. Most of them had sensed it too, and moved on. He'd loved buildings, instead. The sinuous curve of an arch, the delicate projection of bay windows and porch steps. He'd loved columns and loadbearing walls, ceilings, hardwood, sheet-rock, brick. The older the better, to his mind.
Some people took in stray cats, or repaired old radios; Oscar made buildings beautiful again. He made them what they once were.
"Mr Shelley?"
He had been walking with his head down, away from the sunset along the road, hands in his pockets, and he hadn't noticed anyone approaching -- he should have, given the crunch of bicycle wheels on loose road gravel, but he'd been lost in thought. The pub waitress, Enid, had pulled up alongside him on an elderly cycle, and now swung one leg over and off, straightening the skirt she wore.
"Hello," he said coldly, not stopping to wait for her to dismount completely. She ran a little to catch up with him, right hand steadying the handlebars.
"Mr Shelley, can I talk with you?"
"I've had enough talking for today. Thanks anyway," he answered, picking up his pace a little.
"I know the priest came to see you today. He didn't mean it to end that way," she said, trotting along next to him breathlessly. "You surprised him, that's all. He's in the church this evening doing penance for his pride."
"Good," Oscar answered viciously.
"You're not a Catholic, Mr Shelley."
"No. And I don't care what the church says -- we own the property now, and we're not tearing down the church, so no laws have been broken and there's nothing they can do."
"Mr Shelley, I'm not here from Father Wright. Please, stop and listen, I'm running out of breath."
Oscar turned on her, ready to say something haughty and cruel and impatient, and she flinched back. She actually flinched.
Oscar had never made anyone flinch before, and now three people in one day had done it. He would have felt heady with the power if he didn't feel ashamed of making people afraid of him.
"What?" he asked, sharply. She swallowed.
"This is for you," she said, reaching around her bicycle clumsily and digging in a pannier pack below the seat. She thrust a slim package bound in brown paper into his hands, a book by the feel of it. He opened his mouth, but she was wrestling a larger package out of the bag also. "And this is for Mr Carvell. There's a note that explains everything. For him. Yours doesn't have a note," she blurted, even as she was climbing onto the bicycle and had shoved off back towards town, leaving him with what looked like a pie box and a package of pornography.
Either of which would have been welcome, really, as pie was never unwelcome and it wasn't like he was going to meet some nice English girl in this town and settle down. There just wasn't that much to do unless he went in to London, and driving in London was something he never wanted to experience again. Especially from the passenger's side seat, since Félix had insisted on driving, on the spurious excuse that Oscar would chip a black-nail-varnished fingernail. It had taken him an hour, Sunday morning, to get all the black off his fingernails, not to mention washing it out of his hair. Still, the look on Félix's face had been worth it.
Which still wasn't very comforting now, out on the road with the night coming on and packages to carry back to the hotel.
He turned and set off back into town, unwrapping the book as he walked, shoving the string and folded up brown paper into his pocket -- Oscar was the sort of child who'd always picked the seams of his giftwrapped packages, so as to save the paper to decorate his room with later. The book had a blank, faded grey cover, a little dented around the corners.
He didn't want to open it while walking along a dark road in the middle of nowhere; considering his dealings with Enid and the town priest lately, he wasn't all that motivated to open it at all. He waited until he'd returned to the hotel room, washed and changed, dug up some dinner in the form of Hob-Nob biscuits and orange juice, and contemplated, for nearly half an hour, whether he ought to open Félix's box or not. He didn't think Enid was the sort to blithely deliver mail-bombs in bakery boxes, and it didn't smell like it actually was a pie. He put it in the little icebox in the room, just in case.
By the time he sat down at the little table near the window, with the grey-bound book sitting flat in front of him, it was nearly midnight. He picked up the book, examining the blank cover and the spine, where the stamped-on gold leaf, illuminating the book's title, had worn away. He opened it, crossing his legs and resting it on one knee, bowing his head to read.
The title page said "English Myths and Folkways", which was baffling enough; the slickness of the pages and the peculiar layout reminded him of an old school textbook. He flipped through it idly, not reading so much as scanning the photographs, and any surrounding text that looked interesting. There were chapters on morris dance, for god's sake. If this was some kind of snide commentary on four foreigners moving into St Thomas, it was falling short of the mark. The English were weird.
Then he turned the page, and his eyes widened.
***
Portia was asleep. Happily asleep. There were few things Portia loved more than sleep, especially after college, when she'd gotten about two hours. Total. All four years.
She was even more happily asleep because Luc, who put out body heat like a furnace, was curled up against her, snoring gently in her ear. So when someone leapt on her and began shouting, she punched him. Hard.
"Wake up! Portia! Get out of bed!" Oscar cried, undeterred. Portia tried to punch him again, but he was moving too quickly. "Luc! Come on! wake up!"
Luc swore in French and caught the sheets before Oscar pulled them off fully. Oscar tugged again, and Luc nearly tumbled out of the bed.
"Come on, I want to show you something," he said. "Get dressed! Come on!"
Portia, not to be deterred, tried to punch Oscar again. Luc looked as though he was considering it, but then Oscar tossed him his jeans, and he sighed, pulling them on.
"What's wrong?" he asked, buckling his belt. Portia, furious, was trying to climb back into bed, but Oscar was blocking her.
"Nothing. Nothing's wrong. Something's weird, and I want you to see it."
"Now? It's the middle of the night!" Portia said.
"Now!" Oscar insisted. Luc passed Portia a lacy bra while Oscar tried not to notice. Portia sniffed and pulled it on in a feat of acrobatic engineering which would dazzle and amaze if Luc weren't busy finding his shirt and Oscar wasn't busy looking anywhere else at all.
Luc's truck bumped down the gravel road to the church, headlamps casting eerie shadows over the carved stone, and came to a stop with the lights still on, so that nobody would trip, fall, and die, as much as Portia might want them to. Oscar was first out, still clutching the book and beginning to curse just a little that he hadn't brought a jacket along with him. Portia, bundled to her ears in wool, followed grumblingly, and Luc brought up the rear with two enormous electric torches.
The doors weren't locked; anyone who wanted in could climb through a window without bothering to break the front doors, and the generator and anything else of value were padlocked in one of the storage rooms. Oscar dashed back down the nave, took one of the torches from Luc, and played it across the half-cleaned face in the rose window.
"Now," he said. "Look at that, and then look at this."
He opened the book and flipped through it madly, offering it to them. Luc took it with the air of a man accepting something potentially explosive from a bearded lunatic in a shack in Montana. Portia peered over his shoulder.
Luc looked back up at the face, then down at the book. Portia, a split second after, did the same.
"Eh? Eh?" Oscar demanded. "Mystery solved!"
"Can I go back to bed now?" Portia asked. Luc, however, shushed her gently.
"The Green Man is the symbol of spring's plenty, dis...." he stumbled over the word, unused to reading English.
"Disgorging foliage from his mouth," Oscar put in.
"Merci. In the early...early..."
"In the early medieval period," Portia read for him, "It was the signature of the master stonemason of the church and can be..."
She looked up again.
"Well," she said. "That takes balls, doesn't it. Smack dab in the middle of the window. It'd be like if da Vinci took the Mona Lisa and scrawled LEO WUZ HERE on it."
"Wright said that the town was full of stonemasons. He knew about this!" Oscar said.
"Oscar," Luc answered, his blunt, callused fingers turning the pages slowly, "Where did you get this book?"
"Enid! And she gave me something for Félix too!"
"What did she give Félix?"
"I left it in the hotel room," Oscar said regretfully. "It was in a box."
Luc was reading the rest of the page, lips moving silently as he mouthed the words to himself. Oscar was moving towards the rose window, playing one of the torches over the face, still not fully cleaned of mortar and soot. Now that he had a model to go from, he could see that vines were emerging from behind the fanged mouth, and what he'd thought was a misshapen forehead with horns was actually the edge of an oak leaf that overlaid the entire face. The vines spread across the entire window -- what had looked like more soot he now realised were small leaves and berries overlaying the glass. It wasn't dirty glass -- it was designed that way.
"Oscar," Luc said, in that tone of voice which is normally reserved for the discovery of a poisonous spider in one's bathtub.
"What is it?" Oscar called. Luc gave the book to Portia, who read aloud.
"One of the last Green Man festivals existing in a continuous unbroken documented tradition since the sixteenth century and possibly as many as five hundred years before that occurs every spring in the district of Seven Oaks, outside of London," Portia read. Her voice echoed off the dome, filling the space. "Although the tradition was supposedly Christianised by the Catholic church, the predominant denomination in the area, town records show that the natives of at least one town in Seven Oaks continued to hold separate Pagan rites in the evening after the "approved" Catholic activities of the afternoon."
"Seven Oaks?" Oscar asked, still staring up at the wrought-iron face in the rose window.
"The tradition of the Green Man festival and of masonic handcrafting, as an art if not a profession, continues to this day -- " Portia read.
" -- in the small village town of St Thomas," Oscar said, not needing to hear it from the book.
"...where the current master mason, Sir Alexander Wright, is Keeper of the Masks," Portia finished.
"What?"
Portia turned to the front of the book. "It was published nearly thirty years ago -- that can't be the priest, he doesn't look like he's thirty himself."
"Probably his father," Luc said. He cocked his head at the window, still holding the torch-beam on the book while Portia flipped through it. "Perhaps his grandfather, if he was a master stonemason. That's not an honour lightly given."
"This church is perfectly useable," Oscar said, turning around to look at them, the Green Man looming over one shoulder. "The pews were taken out and burned, the windows were smashed, the big one bricked up -- someone couldn't bear to destroy it. The house was torched."
"Traditionally, the Church has not approved of things like this," Luc said quietly. "They have pulled down stone circles -- "
"Syncretism," Portia said. "They brought the traditions into the church...and someone didn't like it, two hundred years ago."
"Someone doesn't like it now, either, I think," Oscar said. "I don't think Father Wright's angry because we're turning a church into a mansion -- I think he's angry because he wants it to stay a ruin."
"What are you going to do?" Portia asked, looking up from the book.
"I think I'm going to go to Mass tomorrow," Oscar answered.