Evil Angels Among Them (6 page)

Roger Staines reassured her. ‘No, they can't do anything like that. We're fortunate at St Michael's actually. Through an historical fluke, the diocese have to keep an incumbent in Walston.' He paused, trying to simplify the explanation. ‘The Lovelidge family used to be patrons of the church, and controlled all the endowments and the rectorial tithes. Some time ago, back in the last century, they set up a trust fund to pay the Rector's stipend through the diocese. But it's only payable if there is an incumbent at St Michael's. If the church should cease to exist – be closed down, for example – or if there were no rector, the diocese would forfeit the trust fund and the money would go instead to one of the Oxford colleges. So it's in the interest of the diocese to keep St Michael's as a going concern with a rector in place. That's the reason that a church like St Michael's has been able to continue in such a small village as Walston and not be swallowed up into some united benefice like so many churches in Norfolk.'

‘So Stephen won't lose his job, no matter what Mr Purdy does,' summarised Becca in satisfaction.

Struggling to sit up, Roger's face creased in a fleeting spasm of pain. ‘But that's not really the point,' he stated strongly after a moment. ‘It would be
wrong
to withhold our Quota. What would happen if every congregation felt that way, and no one paid their Quota?'

‘The diocese would be broke,' concluded Stephen thoughtfully.

‘Exactly! And if it happened throughout the dioceses, the Church of England would be broke.' He paused and gave his next words all the weight with which he could invest them. ‘It's the survival of the parish system we're talking about, Father. Nothing less than that. Or to put it another way, the survival of the Church of England as we know it. It's that important.'

Becca looked horrified. ‘We can't let it happen! Mr Purdy has to be stopped!'

Exhausted with expended emotion, Roger sank back on the bed. ‘That, my dear, is why I'm so very sorry that I've let you all down by having this untimely and inconvenient heart attack. It's out of my hands now.'

‘Then,' said Stephen, following his train of thought, ‘we need to be very careful that your successor as churchwarden is someone . . . sound. Someone who can be trusted.'

‘Yes.' He smiled faintly. ‘I've had a few minutes of leisure to think about that, since Dr McNair told me that I wouldn't be able to go on.'

‘And do you have any ideas?'

‘What do
you
think, Father?' Roger challenged him. ‘You've had time to get to know your congregation over the last few months. Who do you think the candidates might be? Good
and
bad?'

Stephen stroked his chin for a moment. ‘Surely Ernest Wrightman wouldn't stand again.'

That elicited a breathless bark of a laugh from the man in the bed. ‘He'd like nothing better, if he thought that his health – or Doris – would allow it. But he's pretty entrenched now as clerk to the educational trust and the almshouse trust, and he's discovered that being churchwarden isn't the only way to pull strings. I think you can count Ernest out.'

‘How about Doris herself, then?' the Rector said, raising his eyebrows in an attempt at humour. ‘Don't you think it's time we had a female warden?'

Roger grimaced. ‘Very funny. A female warden, yes, but Doris – ? You'll be suggesting Enid Bletsoe next.'

‘Well, then.' Stephen was silent as he mentally worked his way through the congregation. ‘I think Quentin Mansfield would probably be the best candidate,' he offered eventually. ‘He's a shrewd chap and he certainly knows about money – that has to be important in the current circumstances. And now that he's taken early retirement, he would have the time to give to it.' Mansfield was a wealthy businessman who, with his wife Diana, had moved to Walston some five years earlier upon buying Walston Hall with an eye to his future in retirement. That retirement had now taken place, which meant that after years of spending most of his time in London he was now permanently in the village.

Roger nodded in approval. ‘Good choice. I don't think he has much imagination, but that's not really what you need right now. As you say, the financial expertise could prove invaluable and he certainly has his head screwed on straight. He won't be pushed around by Fred Purdy or anyone else.'

‘When will the election take place?' put in Becca. ‘Soon?'

‘At the Easter Vestry meeting,' her husband responded. ‘That's only a month away, so we won't have long to wait.'

‘It will be a great relief to me when it's all over,' said Roger Staines quietly. ‘Fred may not be very bright, but I've learned never to underestimate the power of dogged stupidity.'

‘Everything will be all right,' the Rector reassured him. ‘You can relax now and concentrate on getting better.' He rose and went to the side of the bed. ‘You've got that book to finish, you know. We're all waiting for it.'

The other man's face was shadowed with worry at the introduction of this new issue. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘That's another problem. All these years I've resisted having any help with the book. But what if something were to happen to me? My notes are in no fit shape for anyone else to work from. No one else could even read my writing. I can't bear thinking that all those years of research – my whole life's work – should go to waste if I died tonight. I really can't carry on alone. But who is there in Walston to help me?'

Becca startled both men with her eagerness as she leaned forward and seized Roger Staines's hand. ‘Oh, I could do it,' she asserted fervently. ‘Please, Mr Staines, let me help you with your book. I could do it. I used to be my father's secretary – I could transcribe your notes and help you get everything in order. Please let me help you.'

Her husband stared at her. ‘But Becca!' said an off-balance Stephen. ‘I thought you said before we were married that you didn't want a job – that you wanted to stay at home and get used to being a Rector's wife for a while, before you . . . well, before we started a family.'

‘I've changed my mind. Besides, it wouldn't be full time – only for a few hours a week.' She focused all her attention on Roger Staines, willing him to agree. ‘Please, Mr Staines?'

The man in the bed smiled and squeezed her hand. ‘If you're really that keen, my dear, I accept with pleasure.'

‘What's all this carry-on?' The gruff Scots voice at the door affected to sound fierce, but the two men knew Dr Fergus McNair too well to be alarmed.

Stephen turned towards the door. ‘Oh, hello, Dr McNair.'

Fergus McNair was small and wiry, with weather-beaten freckled skin and hair that had once been a violent carroty red; he was now nearly fifty and his hair had faded to a more sedate shade, though it was still thick and bushy. He had come to Walston some twenty years earlier to help out with and eventually take over his uncle's practice. In spite of that length of service he was still universally referred to as ‘the new doctor', or alternatively ‘young Dr McNair', his uncle having long since gone to his eternal reward. ‘Don't you realise that this man is very poorly?' he said, drawing his grizzled brows together over shrewd blue eyes. In over twenty years south of the border his Scottish burr had, if anything, intensified rather than faded, and the richly rolled ‘r's made Becca smile.

‘Isn't it a pity,' spoke the man in question from the bed, sounding far less ‘poorly' than he had when they'd arrived, ‘that Dr McNair is a heathen Scot, and an unbeliever at that? Wouldn't he make a jolly fine churchwarden?
He'd
see off all this nonsense about not paying the Quota, make no mistake about it!'

CHAPTER 4

    
And that because of thine indignation and wrath: for thou hast taken me up, and cast me down.

Psalm 102.10

Roger Staines's heart attack, in and of itself, was a short-lived cause of excitement in Walston, especially as it soon became clear that it wasn't going to prove fatal. However, the consequences of the heart attack, more specifically his resignation as churchwarden, provided an ongoing source of interest for some of the men of the village; Fred Purdy, Ernest Wrightman and Harry Gaze passed many hours in discussion of possible successors.

The women of Walston, though, found far more fascinating the imminent arrival of Gillian English's partner, Lou: according to Enid Bletsoe, the self-professed expert on the newcomers, he was due to make his first appearance in the village on Friday. Furthermore, as Enid delighted to inform her sister Doris and their friend Marjorie Talbot-Shaw, she had secured his presence at her dinner table on his very first night in Walston, ensuring that she would be the first to make his acquaintance.

‘I'll be sure to tell you what he's like,' she told them with ill-concealed glee over coffee on Friday morning. ‘Knowing Gillian as well as I do, I'm sure he's perfectly delightful.'

Doris shook her head, unconvinced. ‘I don't know how you can be so sure he's not a foreigner,' she murmured. ‘Italian.'

‘He's definitely not Italian,' Enid assured her with triumph. ‘I asked Gillian what his surname is, and she said it's Sutherland. That's certainly not an Italian name. Or even a Welsh name, come to that.'

‘Scottish, if anything,' pronounced Marjorie judiciously. ‘What did you say his job is, Enid?'

‘It's got something to do with computers,' the expert explained. ‘Telecommuting, you know. Quite the thing these days.'

‘How is he getting here?' Doris probed. ‘Is he coming to Norwich by train?'

Again Enid replied with authority. ‘He has a company car. A BMW, I believe, so it should be easy to spot when he arrives.'

In the event, though, no one witnessed Lou Sutherland's arrival in Walston. Even Enid was not capable of being in two places at once, and meal preparations neccessitated her presence in the kitchen that afternoon over her favoured spot at the front window. So the reunion at Foxglove Cottage was a private one.

Around teatime, though, on one of her periodic peeks through the front window, Enid spotted the car, and took a moment off from peeling potatoes to ring her sister.

‘He's here!' she announced. ‘He has a dark blue BMW.'

‘You saw him, then? You've met him?'

‘Well, not exactly,' Enid temporised. ‘At least, I might have had a glimpse of him through the window, in their sitting room. Dark hair, it looked like, and of course Gillian and Bryony are fair.'

‘You see!' Doris triumphed. ‘Italian – I told you so!'

The bell chimed promptly at seven. Uncharacteristically nervous, Enid removed her apron, patted her hair with a quick glance in the hall mirror, and opened the door. Bryony stepped forward, smiling, with a box of chocolates, and her mother, behind her, proffered a bunch of flowers. In London they would have taken a bottle of wine, but Gillian had decided that didn't seem quite the thing in Walston, and especially not for Enid, whose favourite drink seemed to be bitter lemon. ‘These are for you,' Gillian said. ‘And I'd like you to meet Lou.'

Lou was small and slight, with eyes that would probably be described as hazel in colour, though they were closer to brown than green, and short curly hair of a brown so dark that it was almost black. Lou was also undeniably, unquestionably a female.

Enid didn't speak. ‘This is Lou,' Gillian repeated. ‘Louise Sutherland.'

The evening had been got through somehow, and it was with a strange mixture of excitement and reluctance that Enid made her way through a chill drizzle to Doris's house on Saturday morning. The news had to be told, yet how could she admit to her sister how wrong she had been?

‘A woman!' Doris goggled at her over the coffee, her pencilled eyebrows reaching nearly to her hairline. ‘You mean . . . ? They're – lesbians!'

Jowls quivering, Enid nodded solemnly. ‘I've read about women like that in my magazines, but I never thought I'd be forced to entertain them in my own house.'

‘But she – Gillian – told you that Lou was a man! She lied to you!'

Thinking back, as she had so often since that horrible moment at the door, Enid acknowledged to herself, if not to Doris, that Gillian had never actually said so. ‘She misled me. She let me think so.'

‘But that's terrible!' Doris reached for a biscuit and munched on it avidly. ‘Poor old you – how did you ever get through the evening with them? They stayed for dinner?'

‘It was very difficult.' Enid lifted a brave chin. ‘I had to pretend that I'd known it all along. It put me in a very difficult position.'

‘I would have thrown them out,' her sister stated with self-righteous relish. ‘I wouldn't have allowed those perverts to cross my doorstep!'

‘But I couldn't do that – not in front of dear little Bryony!'

‘Oh.' Doris's thoughts turned to the unfortunate child. ‘Oh, the poor little scrap! How terrible for her.'

‘Yes.' For a moment Enid was silent. ‘We must have compassion on poor dear Bryony, and try to do everything we can to help her.' She narrowed her eyes as she went on. ‘But as for those women . . . They're evil, Doris. Evil.'

‘Wicked,' her sister echoed fervently. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if they were witches. I mean, doesn't she grow herbs? Herbs for witches' potions most likely!'

‘They'll never cross my threshold again.' Enid reached for the coffee pot and refilled her cup, almost trembling with righteous indignation. ‘I have been deceived once, and taken advantage of. My trusting nature has been betrayed. It won't happen again.'

Perhaps to Enid's disappointment, on Saturday no one set foot out of Foxglove Cottage, as Lou spent much of the day sorting out her office and getting her computer system hooked up. Gillian, who found Lou's high-tech setup incomprehensible and considered her office out of bounds, stayed out of her way, busying herself elsewhere in the cottage, preparing lunch and supervising Bryony at play. Her placid nature enabled her to ignore the noises, interspersed with muffled curses, which issued from the direction of the office. Around lunchtime, though, Lou appeared in the kitchen.