Read Online Fire Watch by Connie Willis - Free Book Online

sake, now they’re ripping off Mark Twain! and almost immediately began to consider the possibility of stealing the idea myself. I kept thinking of the horrified expression on Aunt Polly’s face in that moment before she realized Tom was really alive. She looked, I thought, watching Luke listen smirkingly to his own eulogies, as if she had seen a ghost.

Service for the Burial of the Dead
    I should not have come, Anne thought, clenching her gloved hands in her lap. She had come early so that she could sit well to the back, but not so early that people would talk. She had hesitated at the back of the church for only a moment, to take a deep breath and put her head up proudly, and in that moment old Mr. Finn had swooped down on her, taken her arm, and led her to the empty pew behind the one tied off with black ribbon for the mourning family.
    I should not have come alone, she thought. I should have made my father come. Even as she thought it she saw her father’s red and angry face as she tied on her black bonnet.
    “You are going to the funeral, then?” he had said.
    “Yes, Father.” She had buttoned her gray pelisse over her gray silk, tied her chip bonnet under her chin.
    “And not even wear black?”
    She had calmly put on her gloves. “My black cloak is ruined,” she had said, thinking of his face that night when she came in, the black wool cloak soaked with frozen rain, the hem of her black merino heavy with mud. He had thought she’d killed Elliott even then, before the news that he was missing, before they had started dragging the river. He still believed it and would have shown it in his red, guilty face when he walked her down the aisle at the funeral. But he would at least have walked her to a safecorner, protecting her from the talk of the townspeople, if not from their thoughts. Perhaps they thought she had murdered Elliott, too, or perhaps they only thought she had no pride, and that at least was true.
    She had lost what little pride she had that night, waiting on the island for Elliott. She had not even thought what it would mean when she agreed to meet him. She had thought only of wearing her warmest clothes against the November rain, the black merino, the black wool cloak, her sturdy boots. Only after she had stood in the rain for hours under the oak tree, its bare branches no protection from the wind or the approaching dark, had she thought what a terrible thing she was doing. When he comes, I must say no, she thought, the winter rain dripping off her ruined bonnet.
    He had no intention of throwing Victoria over as he had thrown her over. Victoria was small and fair and had a wealthy father. The marriage was set for Christmas. Victoria’s brother, now at sea, had been sent for to be best man at the wedding. Elliott had not even been kind enough to tell her of his engagement. Her father had told her. “No,” she had said, and thought as she said it that it must be true because she had never, in all the time she had loved Elliott, been able to say no to him.
    Was that why she had agreed to meet him on the island? Because she still could not say “no,” even when it meant her downfall? It did not matter. He had not come. She had waited nearly all night, and when she crept home, chilled to the bone, she knew she would not have been able to say no if he had. She could summon no anger at him, and when they found his boat, no grief. She did not feel anything and that had helped her to walk with old Mr. Finn to the front of the church, her eyes dry, no guilty color in her cheeks.
    But I cannot, cannot sit here and face Victoria, she thought. I cannot do that to her. She has never done anything to me.
    It was already too late for her to walk back down the aisle. There was a side door quite close to her that the minister entered by. It led down a hall to the choirs robingroom and the vestry. There was a door just outside the vestry that led to the sideyard of the church. If she hurried, she could escape