A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny Read Free Book Online Page B

round the village and into the snow-covered hills. The children crawled under the ratty bearskin rug and cradled hot chocolate while the dignified gray giants pulled them along in a manner so calm and measured it was as though they knew their cargo to be precious. Inside the bistro parents were granted the window seats where they could sip hot cider and watch their children disappear over rue du Moulin, then they’d turn back to the warm interior with its faded fabrics, mismatched furniture and open hearths.
    Clara and Peter finished their decorations, putting up splays of pine branches in their kitchen to complement the huge Scotch pine in the living room. Their home, like everyone else’s, smelled of the forest.
    All the presents were wrapped and placed under the tree. Clara walked by them every morning thrilled that finally, thanks to Jane’s will, none of their gifts came from the Williamsburg dump. Finally they’d exchange gifts that didn’t need disinfecting.
    Peter hung their stockings on the mantelpiece. The shortbread cookies were baked into stars and trees and snowmen and decorated with silver balls that could have been buckshot. In the living room each evening before caroling Peter would tend the fire and read his books while Clara noodled on the piano, singing carols off key. Many nights Myrna or Ruth, Gabri or Olivier would drop by for drinks or an easy dinner.
    Then, before they knew it, it was Christmas Eve and they were all off to Émilie’s for her réveillon party. But first, midnight service at St Thomas’s church.
     
    ‘Silent night, holy night,’ the congregation sang, with more gusto than talent. It actually sounded slightly like the old sea shanty, ‘What shall we do with the drunken Sailor’. Gabri’s beautiful tenor naturally led them, or at least made it clear they were wandering in a musical wilderness, or lost at sea. Except one. From the back of the wooden chapel came a voice of such exquisite clarity it staggered even Gabri. The child’s voice swooped out of the pew and mingled with the meandering voices of the congregation and hovered around the holly and pine boughs the Anglican Church Women had placed all over so that the worshippers had the impression they were not in a church at all, but a forest. Bare maple limbs had been attached to the rafters by Billy Williams, and the ACW, led by Mother, had asked him to twine small white lights loosely about the branches. The effect was of the heavens sparkling above the small gathering of faithful. The church was filled with greenery and light.
    ‘Green is the heart chakra,’ Mother had explained.
    ‘I’m sure the Bishop will be pleased,’ Kaye said.
    On Christmas Eve St Thomas’s was also filled with families, children excited and exhausted, elderly men and women who’d come to this place all their lives and sat in the same pew and worshipped the same God and baptized and married and buried those they loved. Some they never got to bury, but instead immortalized in the small stained glass window placed to get the morning, the youngest, light. They marched now in warm yellows and blues and greens, for ever perfect and petrified in the Great War. Etched below the brilliant boys were their names and the words ‘They Were Our Children’.
    This night the church was full of Anglicans and Catholics and Jews and non-believers and people who believed in something undefined and unrestricted to a church. They came because St Thomas’s on Christmas Eve was full of greenery and light.
    But, unexpectedly, this Christmas it was also full of the most beautiful singing.
    ‘All is calm,’ the voice sang, rescuing the sinking congregation. Clara turned, trying to find the child. Many were also craning to see who was leading them. Even Gabri was forced to relinquish his place in the unexpected and not totally welcome presence of the divine. It was as though an angel, as Yeats would have it, became weary of the whimpering dead and chose this