Read Online Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth - Free Book Online Page B

described today’s planned events, “a very
special
service,” and something in the way he had stressed “special” (evil cackling held at bay, one felt, solely by the exercise of strict self-control) seemed to suggest — at the very least — that human sacrifice might be involved. She wouldn’t put it past him. She would probably be the chosen victim, selected like some unfortunate cabin boy clutching the crumpled
X
-marked piece of paper, another black spot with an implacable summons, as the starving shipwrecked survivors of the crew edged salivatingly closer in the overcrowded boat. Ah well, selection as a scapegoat would make a morning in All Saints’ more interesting than usual. She certainly possessed the whiskers for the part, William Holman Hunt’s painting startlingly given shape. She would be a living reenactment of one of the more obscure martyrdoms in the stained-glass windows, like a tiny extract from a mystery play in mediæval England. She liked to see the positive side of things.
    “There was a guzzling Jack and a gorging Jimmy …”
    — she hummed to herself —
    “… There was a guzzling Jack and a gorging Jimmy,
And the third he was little Billee,
And the third he was little Billee …”
    The first mate and the — how appropriate! — ship’s cook closed in on the cabin boy, smiling with unconvincing friendliness, trying not to show their teeth too much, their fingers starting to edge into the pockets where they’d secreted their knives and forks, conveniently close to hand. With the very tips of their fingers they discreetly eased up the flaps, their smiles broadening, gorging Jimmy exerting his every power of gorgeousness. Little Billee — looking deeply suspicious — eyed their approach unenthusiastically, bracing himself to repulse their advances, clenching his fists and scowling. His mother had warned him about this sort of thing.
    Many of the windows had already been removed in preparation for the demolition of the church, and were piled in packing cases along the aisles; saints prepared for shipping like some esoteric export line. For the past few weeks members of the congregation had had to contend with the hazards of ill-stacked saints as they made their way to their pews, barking their shins, catching their elbows. Workmen — there was another big top, the pale crowded faces staring upward, hands pointing — would soon swing across to saw at the wooden angels in the roof, and they would come crashing down to earth like a scene from
Paradise Lost
as the church fell, shooting stars plunging downward.
    Make a wish! Make a wish!
    Years ago, as a little girl, she had once seen angels being jerkily hauled up into the air in a department store (had it been A. T. Stewart’s?) one morning about a month before Christmas. It was a scene that ought not to have been visible during shopping hours, and — when she had suddenly come across it, holding her mama’s hand — it had been like seeing behind the scenery, pulling aside the striped front of the booth at a Punch and Judy show, or (it had occurred to her more recently, as she read
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
to her niece Mildred) tipping over the screen to reveal Oz, the Great and Terrible, to be a little old man with a bald head. There had been a rotunda rising the full height of the building — four or five stories — to a glass roof, and it was toward this glass, darkly silhouetted against the gray November light, that the angels were ascending, rotating slowly like life-size wind-blown tree decorations.
    Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing;
And ever o’er its Babel sounds
The blessèd angels sing.
    On the ground floor, like formally attired tug-of-war teams, young male assistants in dark suits were heaving away together on ropes. “Yo-ho-heave-ho! Yo-ho-heave-ho!” This was the Babel sound in the heart of that temple of commerce.
    Hauling up angels was such a change (the opportunity all too rarely