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‘Well, you can have him. I don’t want the two-timing, loony bastard. But don’t think you will get away with this. The whole parish is talking and I’m going to report you. I’m going to make sure you are sacked. You are not fit to enter a church!’
    Abi stood completely still in shock as Sue ran back down the stairs. Moments later the sound of the slamming front door echoed up to her.
    Kier had been standing below in the front hall. He walked slowly up towards her as she appeared in the doorway and looked down. ‘I’m so sorry, Abi.’ He looked exhausted. ‘I suppose it was inevitable.’
    ‘Why? Why was it inevitable?’ She stared at him furiously. ‘What on earth gave that poor woman the idea that you and I are having an affair?’
    He shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her much lately. You and I’ve been so busy with the parish. I talk about you a lot, I suppose.’ He looked away uncomfortably and lapsed into silence. ‘She just got the wrong end of the stick.’
    Abi pre-empted the situation at once, phoning the bishop’s office the same evening in spite of Kieran’s protests that it would all blow over, explaining that it was not possible for a female curate to share a house with an unmarried priest and two days later she moved out of the Rectory to a small furnished flat in a terrace of pretty two-storeyed houses several blocks away. Her sitting room there had no view. It opened out into a small courtyard garden, thick with nettles and brambles. In its centre there was an abandoned rusty bicycle, but strangely the atmosphere was fine. It was a cheerful little place; it seemed to welcome her and as soon as the door had closed behind her she felt cherished and safe. The upstairs flat was empty. She liked it that way.
    She knew the bishop had spoken to Kieran. She wasn’t sure of the outcome. Kieran never mentioned what was said. He took back more of her workload, encouraged her to take more services on her own at St Hugh’s and their regular meetings took place more often than not in St John’s. It seemed convenient. They would sit in a pew at the back, talking quietly, keeping to business. There were no more glasses of wine. She didn’t ask him if he and Sue had made up their quarrel.

3
    While Abi was standing in the patch of nettles at the back of her new flat, surveying the scene and wondering if she had time to cut back some of the weeds and plant a few token flowers to give the place a bit of colour, almost exactly 203 miles away by road, in Woodley in Somerset, Cal Cavendish was standing in the gardens behind her somewhat larger, detached house, staring into space, a pair of secateurs in her hand. A basket of cut flowers lay at her feet and she hadn’t moved for several minutes, lost in thought. They were in trouble, deep trouble financially, far worse than they had thought. The only income that came in now that her husband, Mat, had retired was from his suddenly rather meagre-seeming pension and her B & B business and it had not been a good summer. She sighed. She and Mat had just come back from one of those interminable meetings with the bank and the trustees in Taunton, which always left them feeling so depressed. Her instinct had been to go into the garden to hide amongst the flowers, Mat’s to take the dogs and go out for a long walk.
    As the sun set the house threw oblique shadows across the lawn. It was a beautiful place, the kind of house anyone would kill for. She had thought it a dream come true when she realised that she and Mat were going to live here. It was an ancient manor house, built of mellow local stone. Parts of it still reflected its medieval foundations, parts had been remodelled in the eighteenth century to give it, outwardly at least, a Georgian symmetry which was to her mind utterly beautiful. A building had stood on this site for nearly two thousand years – they had Roman remains in the garden to prove it – and it wore its history like an ancient velvet cloak,