Free The Christmas Angel by Marcia Willett Page B

too, remembering those earlier days and the excitement of slowly drawing out the character of each cottage, and he sees the pretty, sexy Kitty with whom he’d fallen in love back then. With her short bed-rumpled hair and the glow of the firelight on her pale skin she suddenly looks younger , more vulnerable, and he is pricked by affection and desire.
    He stands up, still laughing. ‘We’d better get some clothes on …’ He hesitates, eyebrow quirked. ‘Unless you have any better ideas?’
    She hesitates but glances at the window. ‘I thought you said the farmer might come down to see how you’re coping.’
    He shrugs. An untimely visit from the farmer wouldn’t faze him but Kitty is already clasping her dressing gown around her and standing up.
    ‘I think we ought to get dressed,’ she says firmly. ‘Thank God you’ve got the shower working. I’ll go first.’
    ‘OK,’ he says lightly, and follows her up the stairs.
    The narrow alleyways are full of streaming golden sunlight. It gleams on old wet cobbles, slants across slate-hung walls, slides into a secret corner where a tub of pansies shelters beside a cottage door. Janna passes like a shadow down the steep hill; beneath a tiny, pointed slate roof with a crooked chimney; past uneven whitewashed granite walls; below the slits of windows peering slyly down. Far beyond the uneven, lichen-painted roof-scapes, seen in glimpses between angles of jutting walls, the sea rocks placidly, its back turned to the land as if sleeping between the rise and fall of tides.
    Janna slips into a passage that leads uphill again towards gorse-covered cliffs and the small Norman church perched halfway up on a grassy plateau. Father Pascal’s cottage is the last in a row of tinners’ cottages, next to the churchyard wall, and kept by the Church as a ‘house for duty’. He moved into it from his parish rectory near Padstow when he retired, and he takes services in the little church next door – which is now served by a team ministry – and anywhere else where he might be needed.
    From his upstairs study window, Father Pascal watches Janna appear from between two cottages and begin to climb the stony lane. He likes it here in Peneglos amongst the odd mix of villagers: locals, who try to wrest a living from the hostile countryside or the sea; incomers, who come looking for a quieter, more peaceful existence, and the second-homers, who appear and disappear like small bands of swallows, following the sun. He walks between them all, maintaining a delicate balance, smoothing ruffled feelings, softening antagonisms, diluting prejudices. He loves them, and despairs of them, and supports them. A Breton by birth, with an English mother, he feels at home on this rocky, turbulent coast where every other village honours a saint: a misty land, where the borders between myth and legend and reality are not distinct.
    When his father, fighting with the French Resistance, was killed at the end of the war, he and his mother returned to England to live with her family between Penzance and Zennor and, ever since, he’s had a deep passion for his mother’s birthplace. Named for the great French mathematician and moralist, he was quite at home amongst the children of fishermen and miners, who called him ‘Frenchy’ but accepted him as one of their own. His black eyes, and blacker hair, were not remarkable amongst these Celtic people who lived for centuries at the mercy of Spanish invaders, smugglers and seafarers.
    Now, he sets aside the homily he’s been preparing and descends the narrow, steep staircase. He opens the door into his little parlour and hastens to put another log into the small wood-burning stove. The cottage has no heating, apart from this stove and the old Cornish range in the living-room-kitchen across the passage, but he is content. Between them they warm the two rooms above – his study and his bedroom – though the bathroom built over the scullery extension at the back of