“Yes,” he agreed.
“Can we use Latin and Greek words too?” I inquired.
He laughed, that low rumbling sound. “Any language. If it’s been used in a book then it is fair game.”
“German? French?”
“Anything at all,” he said.
“The best way to play,” I replied. “Warnie? Will you join us?”
“Not tonight.” He rose but smiled at me.
Jack and I moved to the table and sat, bowing our heads over the board. It was a game he must have started with Warnie. I scanned my row of letters in their tray and chose five squares to spell verti against his word article, and scored a triple. Jack leaned back in his chair and bellowed loud enough to make Warnie poke his head back into the room.
“I’ve met my match.”
CHAPTER 24
How the wind
Whips all our talk and laughter out of mind,
And time, far more than Thames, has power to drown
“SONNET VII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I awoke slowly in that cold room in Jack’s house and pulled the covers to my chin. A pounding came from inside the walls, like someone trying to escape from a stone-walled dungeon. The plumbing, ancient and groaning like one of Jack’s fictional frozen statues come to life.
The house bustled around me, doors opening and closing, Warnie’s voice calling out to Mrs. Miller. A man’s low voice, must have been Paxford, and then Jack’s reply, that rumble of familiarity.
I stretched and rolled over to glance at the clock. Already nine. They must think me lazy, but I didn’t mind. At home, this one thought—lazy—would have made me nervous, the jittery feelings overcoming me as I thought about Bill being angry that I’d slept in.
After I dressed and finished my morning routine, I entered the common room to find Jack reading the Bible, a Latin version that morning.
“Good morning,” I said quietly.
His pipe bent down from the corner of his mouth and he startled, sending it to drop onto his lap. He brushed the ashes onto the carpet as if they were crumbs from breakfast and smiled at me. “Good morning, Joy.”
He didn’t move to stand but held his finger fast to the spot in the Psalms. “Mrs. Miller has some breakfast in the kitchen if you’d like some. We were gifted a few extra eggs from the neighbor.” The war was over but egg rationing wasn’t, and Jack always managed to finagle a few extra.
“Thank you,” I said, suddenly a bit shy. We were no longer at a pub or on a hike or in his Oxford rooms. This was his home, and he had his routine.
I spent some time in the sunny warm kitchen with Mrs. Miller, satisfied with tea and a biscuit when Jack joined us.
“My correspondence is done for the day, and Warnie is off to work on his Sun King. How’s for a walk, just enough to get the blood flowing for the day’s work?”
A smile was my answer.
Once we bundled and left the house, the wind came in great gusts as if the sky were holding its breath and then exhaling. I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and moved as close to Jack as possible. We were headed to the Headington Quarry’s Holy Trinity Church, a half-mile walk on sidewalks and then down a frozen-mud lane. A high stone wall with bits of broken bottle capping the top like a crown bordered the narrow walkway to the church. Jack walked ahead of me, only room for one at a time, and I followed quietly. As we neared the churchyard he opened a wrought iron gate to enter a graveyard with a stunted forest of headstones.
I turned away from the irrefutable proof of death and instead focused on the church. It appeared as old as the land on which it sat, a limestone building with a bell cote and two bells on the west end. A slate roof sloped toward the ground and then seemed to take an abrupt halt at the building’s edge. White and stolid, the church spread east and west, its doorway hidden under a portico of stone where a cross was mounted, another engraved in a circle above the doorway.
“Anglican,” I said.
“Yes.” Jack surveyed the church with a proud stance. “Are you?”
“If I defined myself as anything, it would be Anglican, but I’m hard-pressed to be put into a category.”
“I don’t believe you need a category,” he said, and it sounded very much like a compliment.
“It’s very medieval looking,” I added with a shiver, closing my coat tighter, “like something out of one of MacDonald’s stories.”
“I’m quite sure that’s what the designer was after; he’d be flattered to know you think so.” He put out his cigarette in a puddle. “Let’s see if it’s any warmer inside.” He opened the doorway of the church and then stepped aside to allow me entry.