The Gloves Were Not There
The chapel of St. Crispin-Without-the-Walls had never been a comforting building, even in daylight, even in summer, even when its organ was being played with something approaching competence. On a wet night in August, with the rain coming sideways across the Dorset downs and the gas lamps of the village extinguished one by one by a wind that seemed to hold a personal grievance against illumination, it was something considerably worse than uncomforting. Mrs. Eleanor Vane knew this. She had been married in the chapel twenty-two years ago, and had spent every Christmas within its damp-smelling walls thereafter, and had always understood, in the way that one understands certain things without examining them closely, that the building was not entirely pleased to contain the living.
She went back that night because she could not sleep, and because the rain on the bedroom window had sounded, at two o'clock in the morning, like someone tapping with particular patience, and because she had lain in the dark for thirteen minutes telling herself she was being foolish before she accepted that she was not going to be anything other than what she was until she had satisfied herself on one point.
The point was this: she had seen her husband's hands crossed upon his chest at the viewing that afternoon. She had noted, with the composed and thorough grief of a woman who expresses nothing in public that she cannot afford to lose, that he was wearing his good black gloves — the ones he had bought in Bath in 1889 and treated with an almost surgical reverence for thirty-four years. She had placed them there herself. She was certain of it.
She could not now remember why she was not certain.
The sexton, Mr. Aldous Pring, was seventy-three years old and had been managing the dead of St. Crispin's for nearly half of those years, and he had developed, in that time, the particular manner of a man who has seen everything and found it all less remarkable than advertised. He met Mrs. Vane at the lych-gate with a lantern and an expression that suggested mild professional inconvenience rather than any alarm.
"The chapel is locked, Mrs. Vane," he said. "As is proper."
"Then unlock it, please."
He looked at her for a moment — at the black silk dress darkening in the rain, at the candle she carried in its glass sleeve which the wind had already rendered decorative rather than functional, at the quality of stillness around her eyes that was, in his considerable experience, more unsettling than weeping — and he unlocked it.
The door opened onto darkness and the smell of cold stone and chrysanthemums and something underneath both that Mrs. Vane could not name and did not try to.
Mr. Pring raised his lantern. The light swelled forward into the nave and came to rest, as light in chapels tends to do, on the thing most worth illuminating: the coffin of Mr. Henry Vane, resting on its bier before the chancel steps, precisely as it had been left.
Precisely, and yet.
"Mr. Pring," said Mrs. Vane, in a voice she was keeping very carefully level, "will you bring the light closer."
He did. They stood together above the coffin and looked at what the light showed them, and Mr. Pring said nothing, which was, she would later consider, the most frightening thing he could possibly have done.
The lid was damp.
Not from condensation — she knew condensation, had lived in this county all her life, understood what damp stone and warm wood produced when left together in the night. This was different in character. This was moisture on the underside of the lid, wicking upward through the grain to bead upon the surface in a pattern that had no business being a pattern, and yet arranged itself, or seemed to arrange itself, in lines that ran in one direction only.
Outward, from the centre.
"The grave has not been opened," said Mr. Pring, before she asked. "I checked the churchyard when I heard you at the gate. The earth is undisturbed."
"I did not ask about the grave," said Mrs. Vane.
She looked at the floor.
From beneath the coffin's bier, threading across the stone flags toward the vestry door with the quiet purposefulness of something that has somewhere to be, ran a thin line of muddy water. It was not wide — no wider than a finger — and it caught the lantern light with a slickness that made one think, unreasonably and without wanting to, of something that had crossed a wet field in the dark.
The vestry door was closed.
"Open the coffin," said Mrs. Vane.
Mr. Pring had a screwdriver in his coat, as sextons, apparently, do. He applied it with the focused efficiency of a man who has performed this task before and intends not to dwell on the present circumstances in which he is performing it again. The lid came loose. He lifted it.
They looked.
Mrs. Henry Vane's late husband lay precisely as he had been placed: the grey face composed, the silver hair arranged, the dark jacket and white shirt entirely correct. The candle in the corner of the chancel, which no one had lit, was dark. Everything was, in the most literal sense, in order.
Except for this: the hands, folded together upon the chest, were bare.
The gloves were gone.
Mrs. Vane stood very still. She was a woman of considerable internal architecture — forty-nine years old, possessed of a classical education and a practical intelligence and a firm belief that the world was explicable to those who applied themselves with sufficient rigour — and she stood in the lantern light above her husband's coffin and applied herself, and found the world not particularly explicable at all.
"The gloves were here," she said. "At four o'clock this afternoon, when I last saw him."
"Yes," said Mr. Pring. He did not say I know or are you certain or any of the things a younger man might have offered. He simply said yes, in the tone of a man confirming a weather report that he had hoped would be wrong.
"Where are they now."
Mr. Pring looked at the thin line of muddy water on the floor. He looked at the vestry door. He did not look at Mrs. Vane.
"I couldn't say," he said.
She turned then and looked at the clocks, because there were three of them in the chapel — a long-case in the corner near the font, a bracket clock on the vestry wall visible through the open arch, and a small carriage clock on the table where the collection plates were kept, placed there by the vicar's wife in 1908 and never moved since, because no one had the energy to contradict her about it. Mrs. Vane could not have said what moved her to look at all three in succession. Perhaps it was the quality of the silence, which was not the ordinary silence of a chapel at night but something more considered, as though the silence were listening rather than merely present.
All three clocks read 2:13.
The long-case was not running. The bracket clock was not running. The carriage clock, which was wound every Thursday without fail, was not running.
She checked her own watch. It was twenty-seven minutes past two.
"Mr. Pring," she said, "when did the clocks stop."
"I don't know that they did stop, Mrs. Vane. I don't come in here at night as a general rule." A pause. "I don't come in here at night."
There was something in the way he said it twice that she understood was not for emphasis.
The rain had changed in character while they stood there. It had been, until recently, the ordinary rain of an English August night — indifferent, persistent, horizontal when the wind assisted. Now it tapped. There was no other word for it, though Mrs. Vane tried several in her mind and discarded them all. It tapped against the stained-glass windows with a sound that had rhythm and intention, that moved from one window to the next as though following the line of the nave, as though something were walking along the outer wall and trailing its fingers across the glass as it went.
Mrs. Vane did not believe that something was walking along the outer wall. She was a rational woman and she had been awake since before two in the morning and the night had been very difficult and she did not believe it.
She watched the tapping progress from the west window to the north windows, and then pause, and then continue, and arrive, at last, at the vestry wall.
The line of muddy water ran to the vestry door.
The vestry door had a latch. The latch moved, slightly, in its housing — not thrown, not forced, but tried, with the patient, exploratory pressure of something determining whether the mechanism would yield to the ordinary application of a hand.
Mr. Pring had taken three steps backward. He was standing against the chancel rail now and his lantern was very bright and neither of these facts helped in any way.
Mrs. Vane stood between the coffin and the door.
The latch moved again. And then, from the other side of the door, at a pitch just below hearing and just above it at the same time — the way that certain sounds announce themselves in the chest before the ears have registered them — she heard her name.
Not called. Not spoken.
Arranged. The way letters are arranged on a page by someone who has only recently learned what letters are for, and is not yet entirely certain of the convention that they should remain still.
Eleanor.
Her hand was on the latch before she understood that it was there.
She understood it then.
She did not move her hand.