Free Murder in a Cathedral by Ruth Dudley Edwards Page A

food she was prepared to tolerate: sardines, pilchards, tuna, hot dogs, beef stew and so on. A couple more visits to St Martha’s, thought Amiss sourly, and she would refuse anything other than rare roast beef and best new season English lamb, washed down with a rather piquant little claret. ‘ “Eat, drink and be merry,” as Ecclesiastes recommended,’ the baroness had told him she’d instructed Plutarch as she deposited her in Westonbury. When Amiss had retorted that Ecclesiastes wasn’t thinking of cats, the baroness had accused of him being a life-denying specieist.
    If the bishop was free, they shared a cold lunch and in the evening cooked something simple. The bishop was a novice cook, but he was keen, and he took simple pleasure from preparing a meal which they both enjoyed. Amiss never saw him happier than when he managed to produce a spaghetti bolognaise where the pasta was al dente and the sauce delicious.
    Breakfast over, Amiss would clear the table and wash up, Plutarch would go about her business and the bishop would disappear to dress for daily duties like services, diocesan management meetings, listening to local pressure groups, attendance at ecclesiastical committees and visits to parishes within his diocese. Amiss would then settle down to his administrative and research duties, for it had rapidly become clear that the bishop badly needed help on both fronts. Amiss’s main job might be to hold the bishop’s hand and try to make sense of what was going on in the cathedral close, but he had much to do as a substitute for Cornelia. There were the bishop’s domestic affairs – such as the payment of bills – and on the research front checking references and footnotes, posting off to, and requesting books from, the London Library and typing up whatever scholarly scrawl the bishop had produced standing at his lectern early in the morning or after dinner.
    Even more important was Amiss’s role as soother and distracter when the bishop was distressed by ecclesiastical scandals (a married vicar running off with his deaconess, an archdeacon found fiddling his expenses, a General Synod committee wondering if in a very real sense sin existed at all, or some new vulgarization of the liturgy) which elicited squeals of pain and a flood of oh-dear-oh-dear- oh-goodness-gracious- how-distressing-how-dreadfuls.
    Amiss was pleased to feel that even if he were to fail absolutely on the cathedral front, he would still earn the £300 a week the bishop had insisted augment his free board and lodging – a sum which came from the bishop’s own pocket and which Amiss later discovered represented about two-thirds of his pre-tax earnings.
    As a bonus, Amiss began to enjoy reacquainting himself with aspects of early and medieval history to which he had not given a thought since Oxford, so as to be able to – if not maintain a sophisticated debate with the bishop – at least ask reasonably intelligent questions about the performance of this or that pope or about what it was that particularly upset Tertullian about bringing philosophy into theology. It was, he realized, a useful part of his job to act as a surrogate pupil: he could see that losing his students had been almost as terrible a blow to the bishop as losing his wife.
    Being both enthusiastic and humble, the bishop was a good teacher. There were moments when Amiss thought he almost cared about St Augustine of Hippo and when one evening, over the shepherd’s pie, they got into a dispute about the ontological proof of the existence of God (that than which no greater thing can be thought exists not only in the mind but in reality) – a concept which Amiss had always regarded as a prime piece of theological claptrap – the bishop was so lucid and eloquent that over the next few days Amiss wondered a few times if St Anselm might not have had a point.
    Amiss always allowed himself a prelunch stroll around the close and the cathedral. Initially this was to take the