The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [40]
Annabella pointed to the flagstones where the sun through a stained-glass window cast a delicate circle of coloured floating light. Hannah nodded.
She walked up the nave towards the pulpit and stopped at the bronze eagle lectern with the big Bible on its outspread wings. She looked at the page. And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God. The elaborate large initial reminded her of her explorations of how beautifully the letters AT and HA could be calligraphically combined. Afterwards she had burned the page in the stove, her heart pounding, as though destroying the evidence of a murder. To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
She looked up. Annabella was seated in a pew, her lovely eyes upcast at the east window. Hannah joined her, sitting on the pew on the other side of the aisle. She lowered herself into the creaking wood and looked up at the glass, the stiff translucent figures around Christ on the cross, His handsome head lolling on His right shoulder. She looked at the muscles of His body, at His sadness, until she felt a genuine pity bloom inside her.
After long quiet, the church door opened: the warden, Mr Tripp. He crossed himself and walked into the vestry, glancing across under heavy overhanging eyebrows at the two girls apparently praying, and recognised the doctor’s daughter and the pretty one. When he was gone, they looked at each other. Hannah pointed at the door and they got up and crept away.
John was no longer allowed out of bounds, not even to return to work in the admiral’s garden. For that he had been replaced. His key had been taken from him. He could wander only within the grounds of Fairmead House and knew that he was being watched. It was his challenge had done it.
His few days in darkness had been a living death, but worse: without rest, without God, without ceasing.When the door was shut the room had started to sink down and down until it was deep underground, deeper than a mine. He could call upward to the surface, but no one would hear. When the door was opened again and he was freed at ground level, the coloured world had rushed howling in, into the vacuum of his starved senses. The force of it had knocked him on his arse. His head was too heavy to lift, his hands as feeble as leaves. He sat on the ground outside, feeling light hit the back of his head, the breeze swarming all over him, and stared down at the blades of grass between his thighs and one climbing ant until he could manage more. Later, he wondered if he was dreaming it all: he’d wanted the world back so much that maybe his crazed mind had made it for him and he was still underground. The clouds, the trees, the birds all moved so exactly as he knew they did.
After he’d regained himself, pieced the parts back together, he felt a terrible and righteous rage and John shuddered and faded and flinched while Jack Randall again took charge.The doctor he would never forgive, and there was no one from whom he would not seek redress. To proclaim this, he’d issued a challenge.
Jack Randall The Champion of The Prize Ring Begs Leave To Inform The Sporting World That He Is Ready To Meet Any Customer In The Ring Or On The Stage To Fight For The Sum Of £500 or £1000 Aside A Fair Stand Up Fight Half Minute Time Win Or Lose He Is Not Particular As To Weight Colour Or Country All He Wishes Is To Meet With A Customer Who Has Pluck Enough To Come Up To The Scratch Jack Randall
So Let Thine enemies perish O Lord
That was a while ago. He was mostly John again now, but still he couldn’t go anywhere. He looked up at slow, steep-sided clouds. He held a fine twig at the end of a branch and looked at its tight triangular buds like an infant’s tiny fingernails. He heard a woodpecker drumming out in the forest and felt distance tug at him. He pulled