The wind was blowing, dragging his hair back from his face, shredding the cloud, fretting it into wisps like sea-spume, playing with the tree branches, tossing and shaking the leaves below him on the hillside. Turning slowly he could see the faint shadows race across the surface of the water far below, here shading it to leaden grey, here torn asunder to allow the sunlight through, striking glittering reflections into gold and silver shards.
1
‘If I stay I will probably kill him next time he tries to touch me!’ The Reverend Abi Rutherford put down her cup on the small side table.
‘Ah.’ David Paxman, Suffragan Bishop of Cambridge, leaned forwards and set his own cup down beside hers, the action somehow conveying a sympathy and a collusion which contradicted the anxious frown which had appeared between his eyes.
When she arrived she had seen at once and with relief that they were not going to sit one on either side of his desk; that would have smacked too much of headmaster and naughty pupil. Instead the bishop had waved her to a small sofa near the French windows which opened onto the terrace. She could smell the roses on the wall around the door of the beautiful stone-built Regency house which served as palace to this relatively new bishopric, created to help cater for the ever-expanding population of Eastern England. He had poured their coffee himself before sitting down across from her, from which position he could watch her, she acknowledged wryly, without seeming to be too intrusive. Fair enough. After all, it wasn’t as though he had summoned her. This meeting was at her request and he needed to know what it was about.
‘It’s all gone terribly wrong. I have to resign.’ Her gaze, when she looked up at him, was first pleading, then defiant.