Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers

tray of things inside.
    As a child Julia had been taught to keep the most desirable of her few treats back until all duties had been discharged. It was a habit she had seen no point in unlearning and she succumbed to it now as she washed up her cup and plate, drying them on the cloth, on which the Statue of Liberty was depicted, brought by one of Signora Mignelli’s tenants as a gift from New York.
    This tea towel always induced in her a slight sensation of guilt. Where she had arrived in Venice empty-handed, the unknown American had had the foresight—like the scarlet-robed Magi she had encountered on her own arrival—to come bearing gifts.
    Her own deficiency made her now ashamed. It was an awful arrogance she now saw, polishing the spoon and knife with a thoroughness as if to make up for other defects, imagining that somehow being English was honour enough to bring to another’s household. How absurd, how absurd we humans are, she thought, settling herself on the sofa with her spectacles.
    *    *    *
    It was many years since Julia Garnet had so much as opened a Bible. As part of her life-long rebellion against her father, even at St Barnabas and St James she had refused to take assembly on grounds of ‘principle’. But now her ‘principles’ had begun to take on for her an altogether different aspect—like old photographs, in which the subjects posed and squinted, oblivious to the embarrassing picture they were recording for posterity.
    What would her old Party friends think, she wondered as she began to find her way through the small print and numbered verses of the red-covered book to ‘Tobit’. It amused her to notice that what she was engaged on felt very like sacrilege.
    The names of the places were what struck her first: Thisbe; Nineveh; Raghes; Media; Assyria. Mysterious names, redolent of flamboyant arcaneries.
The laws of the Medes and the Versions.
Were these the same Assyrians who
came down like a wolf on the fold?
Barbaric people, obviously. But there was a brio about them: according to the poet, weren’t their cohorts
gleaming with purple and gold?
    And the story:
I,
Tobit, have walked all the days of my life in the ways of truth and justice and I did many thousand alms deeds to my brethren…
    But, thought Julia Garnet, surely there is some mistake? For the man sounded, well, so full of his own rectitude—too full, surely, to be quite as holy as his words seemed to claim. The pale sun shone through the window, lighting up the tiny print as she read on.
    It was the same story she had gleaned from the organ-loft panels. But the bare account in the church pamphlet gave little sense of the strange poetry of the tale of Tobit, the Jewish exile, taken forcibly out of Israel by the Assyrians in spite of his extreme righteousness; and his son, Tobias, who is accompanied on a journey to restore the family fortunes by none other than the Angel Raphael, one of the
seven holy angels who go in and out before the Lord.
    Michael, Gabriel, Raphael—who, then, are the other four? wondered Julia, putting down the book for her eyes had grown tired from the small print.
    During the days of her prowlings she had entered one of the many small shops which specialise in Venetian paper and had bought a notebook with a blue-marbled cover. Her original intention had been to note down historical details of Venice, hoping to restore some of her shattered equanimity with the subject which had sustained her for so many years. But the staple of her professional life, her historical mind, seemed also to have suffered from the trauma of Carlo: the memory of the Reverend Crystal, lying abandoned on the floor of the chapel where she and Carlo had first met, acted as a recurrent block to her intentions. So far then, the thick cream pages had remained blank. But now, seeing the blue-marbled book to hand, she picked up a pencil, opened the book and wrote,
Who are