Juliet glanced at him, still wearing the same beige, bobbly cardigan he had sported for the last twenty years, its pockets stuffed with half-used tissues, and sighed. ‘Hello, Brian, lovely day.’
Brian peered into her basket.
‘Hmmmmm. Having a party, are we?’
‘Nope! All for little old me.’
‘Won’t be so little if you eat allthisby yourself.’
‘No, maybe you’re right. It is anawfullot. Actually, quite hard to carry. Perhaps I’ll put it back and get the big supermarket to deliver instead.’
Juliet knew that one of Brian’s biggest hatreds – and fears – was the competition from delivery services. She believed in shopping locally when she was at home but missed the blissful anonymity of some non-judgemental delivery driver turning up at the front door with her guilty pleasures. Even the one who had delivered nothing but a bottle of champagne, some pretzel sticks and a sixteen-pack of loo paper – the time she had preloaded her online trolley to save her delivery slot then forgotten about it – didn’t bat an eyelid.
Brian glowered at her and snatched the basket towards him, scanning the items at speed and stuffing them into bags, before she could make good on her threat.
‘Enjoying being back at home, are you?’ he asked pointedly, as he slid the wine bottles into a bag.
‘It’s marvellous,’ said Juliet, touching her card to the reader. ‘I’m so glad I chose to return.’
‘Nothing to do with Feywood crumbling around Rousseau’s ears, then, and you being the last hope of providing some money to prop it up for another few years?’
‘Not at all. Thank you!’
She trilled a goodbye as she swept from the shop, as confidently as she could pretend to, then marched down theroad and turned into the nearest place she could sit down and gather her thoughts. That happened to be the graveyard, which suited her dark frame of mind perfectly. She sank onto a convenient bench and contemplated the stone in front of her, some poor unfortunate who had, at twenty-five years of age, ‘drowned while bathing in the Boca Grande, Mexico’ in 1860. She was unable to dwell on this, or anything else, as a deep voice drifted across the cemetery.
‘Juliet! Marvellous to see you.’
She looked up, a smile at the corners of her weary mouth. She would recognise that dear, familiar voice anywhere.
‘Father Benedict!’
The vicar came bounding towards her, and she stood up to be enveloped in his enormous, warm hug. The smell of frankincense, furniture polish and old books lingered, as ever, on his vestments, and she thought of how much she had paid in the past for a candle to evoke that very thing. It seemed ridiculous, now, to have burnt a forty-pound candle in her London flat, when all she had needed to do was to come home.
‘How are you, my dear, dear girl?’
The tall, bearded vicar held her at arm’s length and inspected her. She never minded his scrutiny, his advice, his occasional admonitions. Never had. It was funny how some people you justtrusted.
‘I’m all right, thanks.’
‘Okay being back at home? Bit different living there without Lilith.’
‘Yes, very. I’m enjoying it, getting plenty of work done.’
‘Hmm, good. Well, I was going to come up to Feywood this week to seek you out, as it happens. And look! Put in my path, right here on church land. I wonder who could be responsible for that, eh?’
Juliet wasn’t sure where she stood on the subject of God and his interventions in the world, but she loved the way Father Benedict always credited the Almighty for every ‘God-incidence’, as he called them. Today, she wasn’t going to argue.
‘I needed to get away, and this was the perfect sanctuary.’
‘Of course it was. Now. What did I want to talk to you about, you might wonder?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, it is something of a favour. You are aware that Lammas is fast approaching?’
Juliet frowned as she delved into her memory for this particular reference.
‘Lammas? Oh, isn’t that something to do with bread? Isn’t it also called Loaf Mass?’
