Free Evil Intent by Kate Charles Page A

Peace: she’d turned round to find that Adam was behind her. He’d clasped her hand warmly, looked into her eyes, and said, ‘Peace be with you, Cal.’
    For the rest of the service she’d been shamefully distracted; her hand still burned from his touch, and she was sure she could feel his eyes on the back of her head.
    She knelt at the end of the Eucharist, trying to pray, hoping that he would be put off from trying to speak to her.
    It seemed to work; when she eventually rose from her knees, he had gone, and she was alone in the chapel.
    But she realised that she couldn’t stay there indefinitely, and perhaps Frances had gone into the church hall already.
    When she got into the hall, though, Frances wasn’t there. Callie hovered in the doorway and assessed the situation.
    Adam was in one corner, talking to a tall, wiry man in an open-necked shirt. Brian Stanford was nearby with an elderly man in a black shirt. Everyone, styrofoam cups in hand, seemed to be engaged in conversation. And she, it appeared, was the only woman in the room, apart from the one who presided over the urn.
    If this had been a Barbara Pym novel, Callie reflected, the woman at the urn would have been elderly or middle-aged, wearing a hat and capably pouring out cups of tea from a large, battered metal pot. But this one didn’t fit that mould at all: she was quite young, with spiky red hair and a gold ring through one nostril. And the beverage on offer was instant coffee.
    Callie headed for the table. She didn’t really want coffee, but she felt that holding a cup in her hand would be some sort of defence.
    ‘Sorry about the brew,’ said the young woman cheerfully. ‘It’s pretty nasty stuff, even if it is fair traded.’ She proffered a plastic bowl of sugar. ‘This might help.’
    ‘I’ll take it as it comes,’ Callie said.
    She turned from the table and noticed that there was one person on hisown, standing slightly to the side and nursing his coffee with a bemused expression. Callie thought that he looked a rather nice man, with an expressive mouth and attractive eyes; in spite of the fact that he was wearing a black clerical shirt, which she had vowed to avoid, she decided to risk talking to him.
    ‘Are you new here, too?’ she ventured. ‘This is my first time. I don’t know anyone.’ Anyone but Adam, she said to herself. Adam, and Brian Stanford.
    ‘Actually,’ said the man, smiling at her, ‘I’m the speaker. And I don’t know a soul. Except by reputation, of course.’
    They chatted for a few minutes; she discovered that he was a recently ordained priest who had come to it even later in life than she had, after a career as a solicitor, and that he had a wife who was an artist. ‘It was touch and go,’ he told her. ‘She’d always said that she would never want to be married to a priest, as her father was one, and she knew what it entailed to be a vicar’s wife. That was before we were married, before it ever occurred to me to be ordained.’
    ‘You must have managed to change her mind,’ Callie observed.
    ‘Well, it got to be crunch time. We’d been together for a few years, and everything was fine, but when I was accepted to train for ordination, we knew that we either had to make it legal, or go our separate ways. Maintaining the status quo, continuing to live together, wasn’t an option as far as the Church was concerned. So something changed her mind. I’m not sure it was me.’ His mouth twisted in a self-deprecating smile. ‘Perhaps it was divine intervention. But it’s very reassuring, in a way. I know that she must really love me, to have married me in spite of the way she feels about the Church.’
    ‘She hasn’t come round, then? Joined the Mothers’ Union? Taken up baking?’
    ‘No, she still hates it.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what I had to accept – that Lucy would never be a traditional vicar’s wife. And I wouldn’t want her to be,’ he added earnestly. ‘She’s a very