I had seen my godfather do this to Louise a score of times.
We walked up the path to the church door, the people staring at us.
I had expected to feel myself a fool, and out of my own character, but it was quite otherwise.
I felt confident and proud, and oddly pleased.
I stared ahead of me, looking neither to right nor to left, and as we passed the men took their hats off to us and the women curtsied.
I could not remember them doing this to me alone.
It was, after all, a great occasion.
As we entered the church, and the bells were ringing, those people who were already seated in their pews turned round to look at us.
There was a scraping of feet among the men, and a rustle of skirts among the women.
We walked up the aisle past the Kendall pew to our own.
I caught sight of my godfather, his bushy brows drawn straight together, a thoughtful expression on his face.
No doubt he was wondering how I had conducted myself during the past forty-eight hours.
Good breeding forbade him to look at either of us.
Louise sat beside him, very stiff and straight.
She had a haughty air about her, and I supposed I had given her offense.
But as I stepped aside to let my cousin Rachel enter the pew first, curiosity proved too much for Louise.
She glanced up, stared at my visitor, and then caught my eye. She raised her eyebrows in a question.
I pretended not to see, and closed the door of the pew behind me.
The congregation knelt in prayer.
It was a queer sensation having a woman in the pew beside me.
My memory went right back to childhood, when Ambrose took me first, and I had to stand on a footstool to look over the bench in front of me.
I would copy Ambrose, holding the prayer book in my hands, but very often upside down; and when it came to murmuring the responses I would echo the mumble he made, with no thought as to meaning.
As I grew taller I would pull the curtains aside and look out upon the people, watch the parson and the choirboys in their stalls, and later, on holiday from Harrow, sit back with folded arms as Ambrose did, and doze if the sermon proved too long.
Now I had come to manhood church had become a period for reflection.
Not, I regret to say, upon my failings and omissions, but upon my plans for the forthcoming week; what must be done upon the farmlands or in the woods, what I must say to Seecombe’s nephew at the fish-house in the bay, what forgotten order must be passed onto Tamlyn.
I had sat in the pew alone, locked in myself, with nothing and no one to distract me.
I sang the psalms and gave the responses from long habit.
This Sunday was different.
I was aware of her beside me all the time.
There was no question of her not knowing what to do.
She might have attended a Church of England service every Sunday of her life.
She sat very still, her eyes fixed gravely upon the vicar, and when she knelt I noticed that she knelt full upon her knees, and did not sit half upon the seat as Ambrose and I were wont to do.
Nor did she rustle, turn her head, or stare about her, as Mrs. Pascoe and her daughters always did, from their pew in the side aisle where the vicar could not see them.
When we came to sing the hymns she put up her veil, and I saw her lips follow the words, but I did not hear her sing.
She lowered the veil again when we sat down to listen to the sermon.
I wondered who had been the last women to sit here in the Ashley pew.
Aunt Phoebe possibly, sighing for her curate; or uncle Philip’s wife, Ambrose’s mother, whom I had never seen.
Perhaps my father had sat here, before he went away to fight the French and lose his life, and my own mother, young and delicate, who survived my father, Ambrose told me, a bare five months.
I had never thought much about them, or felt the lack of them, Ambrose had answered for them both.
But now, looking at my cousin Rachel, I wondered about my mother.
Had she knelt there, on that footstool beside my father; had she sat back, and clasped her hands on her lap in front of her, and listened to the sermon?
And afterwards, did she drive back home and go to pick me from my cradle?
I wondered, sitting there as Mr. Pascoe’s voice droned on, what it had felt like as a child, being held in my mother’s arms.
Had she touched my hair and kissed my cheek, and then, smiling, put me back into the cradle?
I wished suddenly that I could remember her.
Why was it that a child’s mind could not return beyond a certain limit?
I had been a little boy, staggering after Ambrose, shouting to him to wait for me.
Nothing before that.
Nothing at all…
“And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.” The vicar’s words brought me to my feet.