The Inheritance

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Through Him, With Him, In Him. In the Unity of the Holy Spirit, One God, for ever and ever.’

Reverend Slaughter enjoyed the sound of his own voice as it resonated throughout the packed church. Few things pleased him so much as seeing St Hilda’s full to the rafters. Clearly his Fittlescombe flock had been as eager to hear his sermon on Our Lord’s passion and its relevance today as he was to deliver it. No one ever gave sermons on the passion outside of Easter week. Reverend Slaughter was convinced it was the way that he ‘changed things up’ and kept his parishioners guessing that was tempting them back to Sunday services in ever-increasing numbers.

It hadn’t occurred to him that it might be the soap opera being played out in the front three pews that had actually dragged seo many of the reluctant faithful from their beds. The war over Furlings was the most interesting thing to have happened in Fittlescombe in many a long moon, not least because both factions were so glamorous and attractive. Up till now, the key battlefields had been the school, the pub and the village shop, where Tatiana Flint-Hamilton had been relentlessly campaigning. But, perhaps sensing he was losing ground, Brett Cranley had decided belatedly to make his presence felt in the village. Last week Brett had attended church for the first time and had ostentatiously led his wife and children to the front left-hand pew, a bench that for three hundred years had been the exclusive preserve of the Flint-Hamilton family.

Naturally this had instigated a frenzied round of gossip in the village. Once news reached Tati, suitably embellished (by the time Tati heard the story, Brett had been ‘strutting like a rooster, as if he owned the place’) it was only a matter of time before she would show up in person to defend her birthright.

It was all wildly diverting. From the moment the first bells had begun pealing for the ten o’clock service, at nine forty-five that morning, it had been standing room only in St Hilda’s Parish Church.

Max Bingley, who had somehow managed to rise above the drama and was out of the ‘Pew-gate’ loop, sat in his usual spot in a pew about halfway down the nave. He’d arrived early to light a candle for his wife, as he always did on Sunday mornings, and exchanged a few kind words with Angela Cranley, until her husband appeared and hurried her away. Max couldn’t be sure, but he got the sense that Mr Cranley didn’t like his wife talking to other men, even if those men were years older and the headmaster of her child’s school. It was clearly one rule for the goose and another for the gander in the Cranley marriage.

He wondered why Angela Cranley put up with it. Like one of those kidnap victims who fall in love with their captor. Then again, Max was old enough to understand that one could never really know anything about another person’s marriage. There were those who’d thought that he and Susie weren’t right for each other. How very, very wrong those people had been. Max still missed his wife every day, even if the sharp agony of eighteen months ago had dulled now to a slow and steady ache.

‘The Lord be with you.’

‘And also with you.’

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