Her intention had been to go straight down to the pub, and not even look at Poldore’s central church. St Piran’s stood in the centre of a small graveyard, at the intersection of three roads, all of which eventually led back to the same place. Tamsyn started to hurry by, averting her eyes from the ancient building, as if somehow even acknowledging it would change things. But when the moment to walk past it actually arrived, she discovered she couldn’t do it. It was impossible to pass by, her pace slowing even as she determined to hurry, rivulets of running water swelling into little streams around her feet. Eventually she came to a standstill.
How could she not say hello to her best friend? Her best friend, whose empty grave was one of the most recent in the graveyard, the last to be dug before the diocese declared that it was full.
Tamsyn stopped noticing the water drenching her as she remembered the day she’d heard the news that her friend was lost at sea.
There had been a fight, a fight between Merryn and Ruan, and Merryn had gone out on her boat to calm down. It was something she had done a thousand times, a million times before. Like all of them back then, Merryn had learnt to sail practically before she could walk. Most kids in Poldore spent their lives on boats the way other children spent them on bikes. No one could have known that when the weather turned suddenly she would be taken by surprise. And even then no one would have guessed that Merryn – bright, funny, clever Merryn – the girl that used to make Tamsyn laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe, would never come back from a quick little trip out around the harbour.
Tamsyn bit her lip as she found her way to Merryn’s gravestone, the white marble shining like new amongst the old mossy stones that surrounded it. It was in a peaceful spot, set in the ground beneath the cedar tree. And there had been no coffin, just a small metal box of some of her favourite things, mementos that her family and friends had collected. Tamsyn had put a few things in, including a photo of the two of them as teenagers, sitting under this very same cedar tree. It had been on this very spot where she and Merryn had first tried their hands at smoking, where they used to drink cider on a Friday night, waiting for the boys they liked to walk by. Oh, how they had riled the vicar; he’d sent them packing a hundred times, but they would always come back. Hanging around in the graveyard, kissing boys in the alley that ran behind the church. The vicar had never been particularly sympathetic to their claims that it wasn’t their fault, they didn’t have anywhere else to go and it was impossible to get served in a pub in a town where everyone knew your name. They had been tearaways, the two of them, it was true. But they never meant anyone any harm; they had just been trying their hardest to feel alive.
For a moment as she looked down at the stone at her friend’s name, etched into the marble, Tamsyn didn’t care about rain, or the cold. Just for a moment it was that warm spring evening again, the evening Ruan had first noticed that Merryn – newly crowned the Queen of the May – wasn’t just his big sister’s sidekick any more. And it was here, under this very tree, where her brother had fallen hook, line and sinker for her best friend. At first Tamsyn had been a little jealous, but soon enough the three of them became a little unit, a band of dreamers and adventurers leading the town’s youth astray, making campfires in the woods, forming new bands from week to week, writing terrible poems and reciting them under a full moon. Tamsyn had drawn a portrait of each and every one of her friends in black charcoal, and she still had them in a folder somewhere, all except one. The one she had drawn of Merryn was buried beneath Tamsyn’s feet.
They’d had this idea that they were the first children of Poldore ever to really understand the world and what it was about. They thought that all of the generations before them had simply been sleepwalking. But even then the differences between Tamsyn and her brother had started to grate. She was always plotting ways to leave, and Ruan was always thinking of ways to keep Poldore alive. When their mother declared that she was leaving Poldore for Suffolk, to be near her eldest daughter Keira, who had been barely more than a child bride, nineteen-year-old Tamsyn had jumped at the chance to go with her. Soon after, she had escaped to university and then to Paris. Whereas Ruan had stayed, even taking on the responsibility for their baby sister Cordelia, despite the fact that he was only eighteen. It was inevitable, Tamsyn supposed, as she looked down at the plaque, that someday Merryn would have had to choose between them. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to hide the tears that merged with the rain, even though there was no one there to see them.
‘What on earth are you doing, standing there in the pouring rain?’ A male voice, followed by a hand on her shoulder, startled Tamsyn so much that her wet, irresponsibly shod feet skidded out from underneath her for a moment, so that she wobbled like a baby gazelle, and was as much reliant on her captor to steady her as she was keen to be out of his clutches.
‘What? What do you want?’ she demanded, spinning to face the stranger, taking an unexpected slippery step towards him as if she was indeed fronting up for a fight.
‘Oh, oh God, I’m sorry …’ he said, squinting in the rain as he took in her face. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
Tamsyn narrowed her eyes.
‘Oh yes, that’s your trick, is it? See a woman, standing alone in a graveyard, for God’s sake, and use the old “I thought you were someone else” excuse as a trick to try and feel her up? What kind of a pervert are you?’
‘I wasn’t feeling you up, I was …’
‘Assaulting me?’
‘No, saying hello,’ the man said, utterly unrepentant, his grin infuriatingly cheerful.
‘I deal with far worse than you in Paris all the time,’ Tamsyn warned him. ‘Try anything and I’ll have you on the floor in under thirty seconds.’
‘Well, now you’re being inappropriate …’
‘How dare you, what do you mean? How am I being inappropriate?’
‘Threatening to throw Poldore’s vicar to the ground!’
‘The what, now?’ Tamsyn asked him, glad for a moment that the freezing rain had numbed her face into a mask.
‘I’m Reverend Jed Hayward.’ He repeated the information, offering her his hand. ‘The vicar here in Poldore.’
‘Well,’ Tamsyn spluttered. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Grabbing a woman from behind. It’s not very … vicarish, is it?’
‘I …’ Reverend Jed Hayward laughed out loud, which made Tamsyn want to hit him a little bit. No, actually quite a lot.
‘I’m sorry. I thought you were my verger; she’s due to come and take choir practice tonight. She’s about your height, and in the rain I couldn’t make you out clearly. Although, now I look at you, I can see you are quite different. We had a few things to sort out before I left, but she hasn’t turned up. I promise you, I am a vicar and I wasn’t trying to assault you.’
‘You don’t look like a vicar.’ Tamsyn blinked the rain out of her eyes, to examine the supposed cleric. A man, in his mid-thirties, with a smattering of stubble, hair that was too wet to tell what colour it was, but with a fringe that fell into his eyes and rain running over high, Nordic-looking cheekbones. There was no dog collar, or anything as sensibly identifiable as a cassock. Instead he was wearing a shirt that must once have been white, an opaque veil that now clung to his torso, which, what with its well-defined pecs and an actual six-pack, was one that any of the male models that Tamsyn had worked with over the years would have been proud of.
‘What does a vicar look like?’ Jed Hayward asked her, apparently utterly unconcerned by the rain that punctuated every word a thousand times over.
‘Not bloody gorgeous,’ were the first words that popped into Tamsyn’s head, but she bit them back just in time.
‘Look,’ she said, grabbing onto the handle of her case and remembering what she was supposed to be doing. ‘Honestly, it doesn’t matter. You’re the vicar, you thought I was a – whatever it was you said, fine. I’ve got to go, I’m meeting my family, some of whom I haven’t seen for several years and I’m already late, so …’
‘So
you’re
Tamsyn Thorne?’ the vicar asked, catching Tamsyn off guard for the second time. ‘You’re the only sister I haven’t met yet, the designer who lives in France. I’ve heard so much about you.’
‘Have you?’ Tamsyn asked. That normally wasn’t a good thing.
‘I’m officiating? At Ruan and Alex’s wedding? You know … as the vicar.’
There was a moment when all that Tamsyn could do was stand there, hearing the rain thundering in her ears, acknowledging the wet seeping in through her boots to soak her freezing toes, and wishing that the wind might scoop her up and whisk her off to anywhere in the universe apart from right there, right then.
Instead, a whip of lightning cracked against the church spire, causing Jed and Tamsyn to take an instinctive step towards each other, so that they were standing chest to, for all practical purposes, bare manly chest. If Tamsyn had believed in any sort of celestial higher being, she would have put the lightning down to having improper thoughts about a vicar’s chest, but right now it didn’t seem like a terribly good idea to be standing underneath a tree, even if a sudden strike from the heavens would simultaneously solve her problem with offending vicars and having to wear puff sleeves.
‘Come on,’ Jed said, picking up her case. ‘We’d better get inside.’
‘But I’m already late …’
‘A few more minutes to regroup won’t hurt. And I’m late too, now.’
It took Tamsyn a couple of seconds to realise that he’d grabbed her freezing hand and was jogging to church with her in tow, only releasing her fingers once they were inside.
‘That’s marginally better,’ he grinned, shaking his hair like a dog. ‘Dry, at least. I turned the heating off in March; didn’t plan on needing it again before November.’
‘I don’t suppose you did,’ Tamsyn said, finding herself shivering now that she was out of the rain.
‘Anyway, like I said, my verger is in charge of choir practice tonight, not that I can see anyone coming out in this weather. I’m going down to the pub, too, so once I’ve changed my shirt we can head down there together. I’ve probably got a raincoat or something that might keep you a bit drier. It’s like a branch of M&S in the vestry, people always leaving things in the pews; once I found a flask full of whisky – that one never got claimed …’
The second Tamsyn realised that Jed was hurriedly unbuttoning his shirt, she averted her eyes, but it was a second too late not to notice how the wet cotton of the shirt peeled off his firm chest. Was it possible to be struck by lightning inside a church, Tamsyn wondered, for noticing a vicar’s wet chest? She braced herself, but the next time the lightning flashed, seemingly right overhead, it was still outside the window. A few seconds later a distant rumble of thunder followed, and Jed froze for a moment, looking up at the heavens.
‘Not a fan of thunder?’ Tamsyn asked him.
‘Worried about the town,’ Jed said. ‘It’s typical of Poldore people that everyone is hoping for the best and not preparing for the worst. They are all in the pub right now, as if they can simply drink through the worst storm we’ve seen here in years.’
‘Well,’ Tamsyn said, ‘who knows, maybe they can? Probably do more good than praying, anyway.’
Jed grabbed a towel that was hanging over the back of a pew and dried himself, before pulling on a light grey shirt and a slightly darker sweater that was also waiting there.
‘Well, of course you are entitled to your opinion,’ he said. ‘But so far I have yet to see evidence that getting drunk improves anything. Whereas prayer gives a great deal of people comfort and hope.’
‘Hope,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I always think it’s an overrated concept. Much better simply to expect that everything is going to hit the fan, and then be pleasantly surprised if things are less bad than you imagine.’
‘Sorry,’ Jed said, his brow furrowing briefly as he looked at her.
‘For what?’ Tamsyn asked him.
‘That you feel that way, so pessimistic.’
‘I’m not a pessimist,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I am a realist, and I just don’t do the whole happy-clappy thing, that’s all.’
‘Shame,’ Jed grinned. ‘You are so going to feel awkward when everyone in the congregation stands on the pews and holds hands during the wedding …’
He stopped what he was doing to take in Tamsyn’s naked expression of pure horror and then doubled up with laughter.
‘Funny,’ Tamsyn said. ‘A funny vicar, how very modern. I bet you play guitar and rap the Lord’s Prayer, don’t you?’
‘That’s a pretty good idea,’ Jed said, and Tamsyn found it was hard not to return his smile, although she did her best. She wasn’t a fan of do-gooders. She’d met a lot of them, during her life. Always trying to understand her; always trying to work her out. She never wanted to be worked out; she just wanted to be left alone.
‘I was just trying clear out the guttering when it really started coming down. I was up a ladder when I saw you there in that long coat, but then I thought it had to be Catriona, the verger. Either way, good job you turned up when you did – if I’d still been up that ladder when the lightning struck, chances are it would be a small pile of ashes leading the service at your brother’s wedding. God does move in mysterious ways. Towel? I’ll get you a fresh one, of course.’
‘I am, you know, sorry,’ Tamsyn mumbled, rather half-heartedly, as he bent down between the pews and produced another towel, from where it seemed he kept an impromptu changing room. ‘And not only because I’m dripping on your floor. I’m sorry I accused you of being a … pervert. You must think I am an idiot.’
‘Not at all.’ Jed smiled at her in exactly the way that one person who thought another person was an idiot would do, as he handed her the towel. Tamsyn made a vague effort at towelling her hair, which she let down knowing that the moment it approached anything near being dry it would snake into the same unruly, untamed curls that had blighted her teenage years. ‘I’ll just change these trousers, and then I can walk you down.’
‘Mmm,’ was all that Tamsyn could manage to say, waiting for Jed the vicar to strip off his kecks right in front of her, but it seemed that that was where his sense of propriety kicked in.