by Joyce Cato
As the other woman finished her tale about a young lad who’d asked her who the ‘Holy Toast’ was, they both laughed and Jessica leaned forward absently to brush a dried grass stem from her shin. As she did so a shadow fell across her, moving rapidly away to the left. She gave a small start and then a long heavy sigh as she recognized instantly the backs of the man and woman walking towards a tightly knit group, chattering away beneath the shade of a far, mighty cedar.
‘Isn’t that Bishop Bryce?’ her companion asked, looking at Jessica with a very definite question in her eyes.
Jessica forced a brief smile. ‘Yes.’
‘And the woman with him is his wife, I suppose?’
‘Chloe. Yes. Wherever Arthur is, his wife is sure to follow,’ she added, then glanced at the Welsh woman quickly. ‘Or so I’ve heard,’ she added hastily.
The woman, a plump, matronly looking soul with quicksilver eyes, darted another curious glance at the couple. ‘She’s very … scary looking, isn’t she?’ the lilting Welsh voice, which seemed to turn every sentence into the line of a song, uncannily produced just the right word.
‘Yes, she is that,’ Jessica agreed wryly.
Today, Chloe Bryce was dressed in a long white summery dress with a broad black trim, and a sun hat to match. She wore huge dark glasses. With a bright red mouth and red shoes and jewellery to match, she looked extremely eye-catching, chic and sophisticated. And thus, very scary indeed.
Trust Arthur to be here, Jessica thought and promptly wondered what his real agenda was. No doubt it had something to do with furthering his career. And Chloe was like a pet pit-bull, trained to help in any way she could.
Suddenly a great wave of shame washed over her, and she hastily gave up a quick prayer of contrition for being so cynical. She caught the other woman’s eye and muttered something about it being so hot.
‘Ah yes. Being a redhead you feel the sun, I suppose. You’ll have to be careful not to burn.’
Indeed I will, Jessica thought, with a sudden grim laugh. Indeed I will.
In their bedrooms, those due to give lectures re-read their notes and nervously practised their opening lines as they dressed for dinner. Downstairs, the bar was open for something more uplifting and fortifying than mere wine, and many clerics were taking the opportunity for a pre-dinner drink. One of these, Archdeacon Pierrepont, was sitting alone in one corner and was obviously deep in thought. Pierrepoint was a tall, thin, severe-looking man in his mid-seventies; had he been dressed in black robes and given a long-handled sickle many would have given him first prize as the Grim Reaper at any Halloween party.
An elderly deacon sitting at the end of the bar nudged his companion, a retired prelate who came to these things to get away from his wife and his dog, both of whom nagged him incessantly. ‘Old Pierrepont seems rather quiet. Is something bothering him do you know?’
‘No idea,’ the retired bishop turned to glance the archdeacon’s way. ‘But now that you mention it, it’s not like him to be so unobtrusive.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ the deacon nodded sagely. ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with that business a few months ago. Very nasty that, from what I’ve heard. Let’s just hope that it’s taught him a bit of a lesson.’
The former bishop swivelled on the barstool. ‘Really? What was that then?’
The deacon’s face promptly fell. He’d been hoping that the bishop would know more of the gossip. After all, it was his successor who’d covered it up – or so it was rumoured. ‘Well, I’m not actually sure,’ thus wrong-footed, the deacon was forced to retreat hastily. ‘Nobody’s talking about it. Not openly at least, but there’s been a lot of muttering under the breath, if you get my drift. Some nasty bit of scandal, I imagine. But if you ask me, the poor chap’s getting past it. I’m not the only one, by a long shot, who thinks it’s high time he was properly put out to pasture.’
‘Going ga-ga, eh?’ the prelate said, with the marked lack of tact that had been one of the factors in his becoming a former bishop. ‘In which case, he shouldn’t still be driving.’
The choices on the menu provided many a happy conversational topic as the diners began to file in and take their seats. The seating arrangement was simplicity itself, since all the tables had been formed into a single straight line down the centre of the capacious dining hall. There was, however, plenty of elbow room for everyone, and since there were no name cards, nobody was forced to sit with anyone they’d rather avoid.
The waiters hovered, taking down choices as and when the guests dictated them; many a chocoholic eye had already pegged the profiteroles.
As usual various cliques had already formed. There was a large, older and male contingent taking up one area in the centre. Husbands and wives tended to be interspersed throughout the party, though.
Chloe Bryce, her hair swept up into an elegant chignon and dressed in a long coffee-coloured evening dress, held court at the far bottom left-hand corner where her husband was due to give the after-dinner speech. Eventually the last empty places were filled and plates began arriving. Dr Carew had invited Sir Andrew to join them for this first meal, and he sat at the head of the table, with Dr Carew at the other. Tomorrow, no doubt, it would be all change.
And if Arthur doesn’t manage to sit at the head of one end of the table or the other tomorrow night, I’ll eat my hat, Jessica Taylor thought sourly as the soup was served.
She’d opted for the asparagus.
Fate had been against her, though, for she’d taken a seat at the bottom end of the table before the Bryces had entered and had then found them only a few seats down from her when she’d looked around a few minutes later. But her Welsh companion of earlier was seated on her right, and to her left was a young and rather shy cleric who was enthusiastically telling her what a thrill it had been to see some dippers earlier on.
Celia Gordon had taken a seat almost in the exact centre of the table, and thus found herself facing a phalanx of male cronies. To her left was a missionary from Chad, to her right, a vicar who seemed to know no one.
‘So I said to him, young man, you can’t possibly eat rat,’ the voice of the missionary from Chad stopped all the surrounding conversations immediately, not because of its level, but – not surprisingly – because of its content. ‘And he turned to me and said, “Why not? If I were dead, the rat would most certainly eat me!” ’
Someone across the table from Celia laughed, ‘So what did you say?’
‘I said that wasn’t the point: rats are vermin.’
‘Did that convince him?’ another asked.
‘Oh no. He said, in that case, he’d stop off at the village and tell the farmer who was growing some maize that he’d done him a big favour in eating the rat, and would he give him a bowl of corn for his trouble.’
Everyone laughed.
‘Nobody likes to see a rat in a cornfield, eh?’ The voice, cracked with age and malice and raised to a booming level, belonged to Sir Matthew Pierrepont. His rheumy grey eyes were glittering directly across the table at Celia Gordon.
Several men stiffened, sensing trouble. A few academically–minded clerics looked interested. Sir Matthew was a former Don and noted academic, after all, and several within earshot had expectations of an interesting and well-reasoned debate in the making; these people didn’t know him very well.
Celia, of course, knew exactly what was coming.
‘You’re quite right about what you say concerning rats in cornfields, Archdeacon,’ she said, interrupting him before he could get started, her voice cool and slightly sardonic. ‘Nobody welcomes them. Take our own cornfield as an example,’ she carried on smoothly, giving him no chance to get in a word. ‘Why, I heard only the other day that some cleric out east somewhere,’ she waved a hand vaguely, ‘actually attacked a parishioner. And a woman at that, I believe,’ she added.
She leaned back to let a waiter with a studiously deadpan face remove her soup plate. ‘And can you believe that his bishop actually made sure
that it was all hushed up?’ she added, smiling across the table at Sir Matthew, who’d suddenly gone pale with rage. ‘Now I’m sure that we’d all agree that that cleric should have been … well … at the very least, pensioned off quietly,’ she continued. ‘Given the current media attention over cases of abuse committed within the Church, nobody wants to create yet more scandal. And the cleric involved was very old, or so I heard, and going … well … senile, I expect,’ Celia continued brightly. She turned to the hapless vicar next to her. ‘Don’t you agree that such behaviour shames us all, Mr McReady?’
‘Huh – oh yes. Of course. It’s shocking. I don’t know what the world’s coming to,’ that worthy gentleman mumbled uneasily.
Celia glanced across the table, not at Sir Matthew, who was now looking apoplectic, but at his companions. Nearly all of whom had heard the same rumour – or variation thereof – but hadn’t, necessarily connected it with Sir Matthew.
Until now.
‘Of course, a man lacking such self control will eventually be caught out again,’ Celia continued unrelentingly, as the waiters began to distribute silver tureens of mixed steaming vegetables along the length of the tables, ‘but until then, who knows what trouble he might cause?’
‘I think you’d better …’ Sir Matthew roared, at the same time as everyone else around him also began to speak – very loudly.
‘Did you see that news spot last week about falling Church attendance?’ the missionary from Chad all but bellowed, whilst several others turned to their neighbours and began to discuss such unlikely topics as the benefits of having Sir Cliff Richard as a spokesman for something or other.
Celia smiled levelly across the table at Sir Matthew, a flicker of disgust crossing her face as she realised a trickle of drool was actually running down his chin. The man’s mad, she thought calmly, meeting his glowing, glowering gaze head on. Quite mad.
Down at the other end of the table, and not wishing to get embroiled in the fracas, the other guests were also busily conversing between themselves.
‘And so, you see, because they’re so prone to the effects of pollution, you almost never see dippers,’ the young cleric was saying to Jessica.
‘What a shame,’ Jessica murmured. ‘I don’t get to see many birds at all, coming from Birmingham,’ she added gently.
‘There’re some nice birds in Ecuador,’ a Welsh voice popped up beside her, and all heads turned, in some surprise, to the woman from Bangor. She flushed. ‘Wilbur and I went there for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.’
Chloe Bryce laid her hand lightly over that of her husband and turned to the man on her right to ask him what he thought about the current modern thinking on the Gospel of St Luke.
‘Lovely holiday that was,’ the lay-preacher from Bangor concluded. ‘You ever been anywhere special, dear?’
With a start, Jessica realized that her companion was talking to her. She’d been trying so hard to keep her eyes from Chloe’s manicured, red-painted nails resting atop her husband’s hand that she almost missed the question.
‘What? Oh no. Actually, it’s funny you should ask though, because I was just thinking of a great friend of mine. She moved to Portugal only a few months ago. She said the prices over there were so much cheaper and that she’d be mad to stay in wet and rainy England.’
‘I dare say she’s right. You ought to go out there and join her for a week or two,’ the Bangor lady advised. ‘Take my advice – a visit to a foreign country really broadens the mind.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Jessica agreed abstractedly. ‘But I haven’t got her address. In fact, I’m getting a little worried about her – I’d have expected her to write to me long before this, telling me all about things, and giving me her contact details.’
Arthur Bryce reached for a glass of wine and smiled and nodded at a waiter who enquired loftily if he might be the Beef Wellington.
‘Ah, I expect she’s having too much of a good time to bother,’ the lay-preacher prophesied. ‘It can’t be easy, emigrating.’
Jessica frowned. ‘No. Even so … Didn’t I see from the agenda that there’s a missionary here from an African country?’
‘Yes, that’s him down there,’ the woman from Bangor leaned across and obligingly pointed down the table to a ginger-haired man with a dark tan.
‘Hmm, I wonder if I can pick his brains about travelling in Portugal. If nothing else, perhaps he can tell me how I can set about tracking down my friend. I’m really starting to worry that something might have happened to her. You do hear such horror stories sometimes, don’t you? There must be authorities I can approach to advise me on that sort of thing,’ Jessica mused. ‘Is it the Foreign Office, do you think? Or do I need to get in touch with the Portuguese Ambassador’s office?’
At the other end of the table, Sir Andrew Courtenay observed his waiters and waitresses professionally dishing out plates of Dover sole, baked salmon and vegetarian curries with a vague but pleased eye. Luckily, Celia Gordon was seated a long way down towards the middle of the table. But he mustn’t think about her. Not now. Not yet. He watched the beautiful bishop’s wife in the fetching coffee-coloured dress reach for a glass of wine and wondered how such a woman had ended up married to a clergyman of all people.
Down on his left, an inoffensive curate from Edinburgh was telling him how much he was looking forward to seeing the St Bede’s manuscript tomorrow. He even went so far as to confess, a little timidly, that the manuscript was the main reason for his coming down. ‘I think history is so important, don’t you Sir Andrew?’ he concluded.
‘Yes, I do. Yes indeed. My own family has lived here for nearly twenty generations,’ he agreed absently.
Don’t think about her, he told himself. Ignore her. Pretend she’s not here. No, that was impossible. Damn her, why hadn’t she left? When she knew who he was and where she had fetched up, why hadn’t she had the decency to just turn around and go? And then he laughed at himself. Decency? What would Celia bloody Gordon know about such a thing?
‘How wonderful for you. You must almost be able to trace your ancestry back to… .’ the Edinburgh academic went through a swift mental calculation, ‘well, very nearly the Restoration?’
‘Yes, quite,’ Sir Andrew agreed absently.
‘And your son. Is he keen to keep the house going?’
Sir Andrew blinked. Once, twice, then again. He turned very slowly to look at the curate, and found him to be a pink-faced individual with round cheeks and a pair of rather startlingly dark blue eyes.
There came upon some members of the party a sudden silence, one of those kinds that seems to transmit itself, by some curious sort of ESP, to others. Down the table, Celia Gordon, who’d clearly heard the cleric’s question, drew in her breath sharply. Her lips formed into a tight, grim line. Several local people, who also knew Sir Andrew’s circumstances, looked at each other quickly, then even more quickly looked away.
The man from Edinburgh went pinker yet, embarrassingly aware that he’d made some sort of gaffe, but distressingly unsure how to rectify it.
Sir Andrew forced himself to smile. And to take a long, slow, calming breath. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, his voice steady and affable. ‘I have no children any longer,’ he added rather obscurely.
From the head of the table he then turned to the cleric sitting down on his right. ‘And you, Reverend … er…?’
‘Fisher, Sir Andrew.’
‘Reverend Fisher. Are you much of a history buff?’
The table quickly became awash with voices once again.
Across from Celia Gordon, Sir Matthew Pierrepont was getting steadily drunk. And as a consequence, was becoming even louder and more obstreperous.
The waiters began to remove plates and a little while later, circulate with the dessert trolleys, overflowing with elaborately decorated gateaux and tarts.
And seated somewhere at the table, someone who had only a few short months ago, forged a letter and fiddled with a gas cooker, was n
ow feeling as cold as ice, and thinking furiously.
Danger. Totally unexpected, striking from out of the blue, and utterly sick-making.
But who’d have thought to come across such danger here? Here of all places! But there must be a way out. There had to be a way out… .
It was perhaps not totally surprising that after Arthur Bryce’s amusing and informative after-dinner speech, things broke up early; everyone agreed this was because they’d had such a long day and needed to recuperate – certainly, nobody spoke openly of the uneasy, tense atmosphere pervading the house.
The bar did a surprisingly poor trade that night, as people made their way almost straight to bed.
Just off the foyer was a narrow corridor that lead to a door marked Private. This door, which lead to the private downstairs apartments of the hotel owner, was usually kept locked. It was nearly midnight when that door opened and Sir Matthew Pierrepont came out and made his slow, stiff-legged way back across the foyer and towards the lift.
His face was thoughtful. Could the man be relied upon to go through with things? That was the real question. Once in his room he ignored the bed, although, from the quietness of the house around him, he was sure that most of his fellow conference goers had to be well and truly in the land of nod by now. But for himself, he was wide-awake and totally alert.
That viper Celia Gordon was not going to get away with this – making him look like a damned fool in front of everybody.
He sat gingerly down at a small Queen Anne writing bureau and pulled forward a sheet of hotel paper. Sir Matthew knew just the man they needed. Old ‘Smuthers’ Bodington at The Times had no time for trouble-making women anymore than he did – ever since that female from The Telegraph had piped him for that journo award. Yes, he’d be interested in a story about scandal and women vicars all right.
As he began to write, a flicker of doubt crossed his mind. Perhaps The Times was not quite the right paper for this, but old Smuthers was bound to know of somebody in the ranks of the more trashy tabloids who’d be in the market for a woman-vicar scandal.
