Acts of faith Read Online Free PDF Page B

a half-step backward and extended her hand as she looked Fitzhugh up and down with the bluest eyes he had ever seen.
    “I’d heard you were a footballer, and I must say, you look the part.”
    Her smile fell on him like a gift, and her accent, thankfully, lacked the marbles-in-the-mouth mutter of the British upper classes. She spoke with the precision of a BBC news reader.
    Fitzhugh was something of a sexist. To his mind, beauty forgave almost everything in a woman. Not that Diana Briggs was exceptionally beautiful; she only seemed so in comparison with the picture he had formed of a stout matron, Malachy having told him that she was in her early fifties. The body that suggested itself under a black cotton blouse and a pair of linen trousers, while it wasn’t slender, was a long way from matronly. If there was any gray in her blond hair, it had been artfully disguised. Only the cat’s whiskers at the corners of her eyes and the crescent furrows at the corners of her mouth betrayed her age, and you had to be within an arm’s length of her to see them; otherwise, you would have sworn she wasn’t beyond thirty-five. All this and the smashing smile made it impossible for Fitzhugh to dislike her, as he’d been prepared to do.
    He couldn’t resist complimenting her looks. She responded with a toss of her head and a short, self-deprecatory laugh before telling the servant, in flawless Swahili, to bring in a fresh pot of tea.
    They followed her through a hall decorated with ancestral memorabilia—crossed elephant tusks, the hide of a leopard that appeared to have been slain back in the days when Denys Finch-Hatton and Isak Dinesen were loving it up. Diana’s loose trousers flowed about her hips and legs as she walked, and the swirl of linen over flesh would have been erotic if it weren’t for her brisk, straight-backed stride, like a sergeant major’s on parade. They entered a study—a lot of old books, more old photographs and moth-eaten skins, a Masai buffalo-hide shield hanging over a fireplace, in front of which two men sat, backs to the door.
    “John, Doug, the circle for our seance is now complete,” Diana said.
    The pair stood. One was in his forties, going bald, and stood five-six at the tallest. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his complexion was the color of uncooked oats. This was John Barrett. When, with a kind of reflexive respect, Fitzhugh called him “Father Barrett,” he grinned tightly and reminded him, in a brogue less pronounced than Malachy’s, that he had lost claim to that title.
    “It’s just plain John,” he said.
    The other man was about Fitzhugh’s height, with thick hair hued like khaki, a slim frame, and a long, thin nose, slightly hooked, giving him the aspect of a handsome raptor. He might have been thirty, though he easily could have passed for an undergraduate. Straight away Fitzhugh knew he was an American. It wasn’t the cowboy boots and Levi’s that declared his nationality, nor the scrubbed, healthy complexion, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower after a game of pick-up basketball. It was the way he stood, chin cocked up, shoulders slouched just a little, projecting the relaxed belligerence of a citizen of the nation that ran the world. Fitzhugh imagined that a young Englishman would have struck a similar stance out in India a century ago, or a young Roman in the court of some vassal Gaul.
    “Doug Braithwaite,” he drawled, shaking Malachy’s hand, then Fitzhugh’s, gripping his forearm with his other hand, as though they were old comrades, reunited.
    “Fitzhugh Martin.” He flexed his arm after a moment to signal Braithwaite to let it go.
    “Great to meet you. Been hearing a lot about you.”
    If it’s possible for eyes to embrace another person, his embraced Fitzhugh. They had that effect on everyone, creating an instant intimacy. Clear and gray, giving off the appealing gleam of artificial pearls, they flattered you the moment they fell on you, the