A Convergence Of Birds by Jonathon Safran Foer Read Free Book Online Page B

bind, but that in their next abode, Hagley, the country home of “Red Humphrey” Littleton in Worcestershire, they were exposed by a certain cook, Findwood, who wondered at the excessive amount of food being sent upstairs. That Findwood receives an annual pension for his good deed goes without saying. When the poursuivants arrive, Red Humphrey denies everything, after trying to block their entry. “This is our home, you shall not pass.” Something Roman in his demeanor pleases him at this point. They come in anyway and receive the immediate cooperation of yet another servant, David Bate, who shows them the courtyard in which the conspirators have gone to ground.
    Hindlip is not far away, readied like a fortress, although who is to guarantee the behavior of servants when they hear of John Findwood’s pension, setting him up as an eternal spy before the word gets out about him grafting himself onto the domestic life of some country house in order to undo it, pay promised, no vengeance as yet visited upon him. His breed will prosper in these gruesome times, and the trade of household spy will establish itself among the poor, almost in itself a revenge calling.
    Anne Vaux and Father Garnet, Anne and Henry as they are now just about calling each other, have exhausted all means of delay, even standing their horses in the fashion of a love-seat, he pointing northward, she pointing south, in fervid contemplation of each other, with no help from tradition or literature, but left to the meager resources of eye and hand to express what is forbidden. Now they change places, advancing not at all, but feeling heavy at the much shrunken extent of land between here and Hindlip, that labyrinth of lighthouses; almost, Henry Garnet thinks, like Sicily in little. When at last after much dawdling (which Henry Garnet in his original way calls prevarication) they arrive at the rear of the building, he dismounts on a patch of ice, unassisted by grooms, and immediately slips backward, gathers himself to surge forward, then loses his feet altogether and crashes to the ground, in one fall slamming his knee, outside left ankle, his right thumb and his head on the virtually invisible ice. It is a poor welcome, but he survives it, feeling shaken and shocked, a whole series of fresh pains and aches moving through his body, and in his hands a potent trembling. Anne is almost in tears at this last sight of him before the mansion gobbles him up for what? A month or more. Already Mary Wharmcliff, a scullery maid with child by her lover on a neighboring estate, Blackstone Grange, where she has walked to confront him, has returned with news that Sir Henry Bromley, a local justice of the peace, eldest son of Thomas Bromley, who conducted the trial of Mary Queen of Scots—a brash, invasive family—was already on his way from who knows where, intent on combing through Hindlip from top to bottom. This leads, of course, to a further piece of wisdom that says: If you wish to move from one country house to another, say from Coughton to Hindlip, do not do it on horseback or by any other means that entails travel between two points, lest you gallop right into the gang led by one of the Bromleys. Nor, knowing this and some of the Bromley history, should you extend too much trust to the idea that Sir Henry, related to the recusant Littletons, might go easy on certain Catholics. The schizophrenia of the times allows him to do his job without, in this case, altogether losing face with Muriel Littleton, his sister. It is simply another variant of the William Byrd philosophy, enabling the happy practitioner to face both ways without ever being damned as a hypocrite. It is almost as if opinions, tenets, beliefs, were so many silken handkerchiefs to be floated about in the wind, no more committing you to a certain code of conduct than the passage overhead of a moulting sparrow. Whence, Anne Vaux asks herself, this new breed of trimmers, people who out of corrupt