The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Squire Archie’s Rectory Christmas
By Harper Fox
Published by Foxtails, 2020
Five stars

I bought this and started reading it on the Winter Solstice, which is a special day for me, particularly in a year such as this one has been. “Squire Archie’s Rectory Christmas” is a follow-up (not really a sequel) to Harper Fox’s wonderful historical romance, “Seven Summer Nights” from 2016; but it is more than that. It is a gentle, love-filled Christmas gift that brings a message of light and love to the darkest time of a very dark year.

It has been just six months since the cataclysmic events of “Seven Summer Nights,” and Archie Thorne, having turned in his collar, is trying to get used to being called Squire Thorne (an even more Trollopian title than Vicar Thorne). Dr. Rufus Denby, the man he loves, has rediscovered his bearings, and been off on an archaeological dig for some time. He is expected back any moment.

Oddly, Archie is still at the rectory, which he and Rufus and their housekeeper Maria Nettles, seem to have taken over as their own, while the diocese has built a new vicarage for a new young vicar. We are given to understand that the rambling, tumble-down rectory has continued to be a place of safe harbor for the community, who continue to seek Archie out, in spite of the fact that he has no standing in the church and is no longer employed.

Fox’s marvelous winter tale focuses on the three days leading up to Christmas, and it is very crowded. Except for a few quiet moments when Archie and Rufus are alone together, the page is filled with people, arriving with almost comic timing to complicate Archie’s reunion with Rufus. A cast of characters from the first book are reintroduced as they appear at the front door of the rectory, interrupting Archie’s plans for a quiet evening with Rufus, attended to by Mrs. Nettles, who is still his housekeeper, but also a devoted friend and co-proprietor of the house.

What we realize as the mildly chaotic scenario unfolds, is that everyone is there for Archie, drawn to his home like moths to a benevolent flame. By Christmas eve, the house is filled to the rafters, its mostly-uninvited guests including a very tall Black archdeacon and six orphans abandoned in the rectory garden. It would be hilarious—and often is—if not for the underlying anxiety that Archie and Rufus feel over the possibility of their “secret” being discovered.

Fox reminds us that, in England in 1947, any disgruntled neighbor or colleague could expose a gay man simply by going to the police and telling them they’d seen something fishy going on. What she doesn’t mention, although it was very much on my mind as I read this, is that England’s vicious anti-gay laws would be used in the next few years to persecute, prosecute, and then chemically castrate Alan Turing, the man who cracked the Nazi Enigma Code and saved England. Turing would kill himself at the age of 42 in 1954. (He was pardoned by the Crown in 2013, which seems rather pathetically too little too late to me.) Of course, Archie and Rufus know nothing of Alan Turing, but do refer to Oscar Wilde, whose sad end came as a result of the same draconian laws.

There is a quiet cataclysm in this story, as opposed to the physical one that rocked the finale of “Seven Summer Nights.” The same landscape, imbued with old, pre-Christian magic and meaning, fills the book with its wonder, once again through the gentle perspicacity of both Archie and Rufus, who seem to amplify each other’s mental and spiritual gifts. These two men, soulmates, and each other’s saviors, see beyond modern-day laws and religion. There is, we are meant to believe, something in their love that sets them apart and gives them courage to face a harsh, unfeeling world.

The denouement to this tragi-comic Christmas tale is a little miracle, a gift of community and compassion. Fox ends the book with a postscript about which I can’t write without spoiling it. Let’s just say it left me in happy tears, immeasurably moved by Fox’s optimistic vision of humanity.