1
England, November 1856
The Reverend Lloyd mopped his glistening brow and ascended the pulpit. It wasn’t the temperature making him perspire. The air was chilled by the stone walls of the church, and the wintry sunlight filtered cooler still through the glass saints keeping watch over the vicar’s shoulder.
The faces of his congregation, however, were ablaze with zeal. Not for the faith, or his sermon—never that, in his memory—but for the great contest they waged every December. The echoes of who achieved glorious victory—and who fell in shameful defeat—would draw up battle lines in the village for the next twelve months.
He couldn’t stop the Bickerton Christmas Poultry Show—but perhaps he could prevent its worst excesses from corrupting the souls of his flock.
Just because it had never succeeded before was no reason not to try. It was his duty as a man of God.
Even if it made him feel like Samson after Delilah’d been at him with the shears.
He cleared his throat, braced himself, and began: “Again, I considered all travail, and every right work, that for this a man is envied of his neighbor. This is also vanity and vexation of spirit.”
Please, he wanted to beg them in plainer language. Please remember that there are more important things than chickens.
The widowed Mrs. Outerbridge acknowledged the verse with a nod of her head, the dyed plumes on her hat bobbing with the motion. In his pew behind her, lonely Mr. Brome shifted slightly to clear his view, the better to glare at the vicar, who tried not to take it as a personal affront.
Years before, when the Reverend Lloyd was new to St. Gilbert’s and still sunny about his prospects and his parish, Mrs. Outerbridge’s husband and Mr. Brome’s wife had indulged in an affair. This torrid passion had been discovered when Mr. Outerbridge collapsed during a bout of lovemaking, and Mrs. Brome ran a quarter mile in the rain for the doctor. Alas, Mr. Outerbridge was beyond human help, and Mrs. Brome caught a mortal chill and passed a few weeks later.
The surviving spouses turned the full force of shame and grief upon one another, with their main field of combat the Bantam Class rankings at the annual Christmas fair.
In the darkness of his secret heart, where the most unspiritual thoughts were forever creeping from the soil, the vicar had sometimes considered that the wrong spouses had perished. He’d briefly indulged himself in the fantasy of starting his sermon a few verses earlier, with the far more pointed: “Wherefore I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive.”
But experience had taught him that there was such a thing as too much honesty, and that Mrs. Outerbridge in particular had a door of iron on her mind that would allow no uninvited thoughts admittance. He could stand at the pulpit and rail against her every failing, precisely and in depth, and it would merely roll off her as she curled up snug in the belief that he was talking about anyone and everyone else.
The vicar continued, trying to make the small church ring with the sound of his voice, tolling out well-polished phrases about the poison of envy and the emptiness of earthly rewards.
But soon the Reverend Lloyd began to realize he’d gravely misjudged his audience. Gazes were sharpening, and spines straightening. The glint of that horrible eagerness was beginning to sparkle in every eye that met his. It was clear that every mention of strife was firing his flock’s determination, every warning about envy was whetting their desire to take home the first-place cup.
He could see it, in the way each person’s glance cut to their favorite rival when they thought he wouldn’t notice. There was Miss Rushcliff, all maiden modesty—except where the corners of her lips curled up smugly as she caught the baleful glower of Miss Inch. They’d been fast friends once, until they’d caught the fancy. Now rumor was Miss Inch had trained her Pinwheel Bantams to attack Miss Rushcliff’s Scots Dumpies on sight.
There in the last pew, Mr. Finglass of the Cock and Apple was working his hands, undoubtedly cracking his knuckles. With every crack—not that the vicar could hear them, thank heavens, but he knew the sound far too well—Mr. and Mrs. Campbell-Cole’s sinews went a little stiffer across the aisle. Lucky Mr. Finglass only had ten fingers, or the couple might have done him violence.
A disagreement about the results of the Brahma judging some years back had never been resolved. The Campbell-Coles’ haberdashery shop stood across the way from the tavern, and Mr. Finglass more than once had been heard to suggest their hats as receptacles for anyone who’d overindulged in the Cock and Apple’s strongest ale.
And then there was the spinster.
Miss Lydia Wraxhall had just turned thirty when the Reverend Lloyd arrived at St. Gilbert’s. She was mid-forties now, with silver streaks in her dark hair—but her brown eyes still glowed, and her frequent smile turned an otherwise plain face into something striking and attractive. She was a soft, kind, thoughtful, comforting sort of woman, and at first it had quite baffled the vicar that none of the village’s available men had taken the trouble to court her.
There had been one or two proposals the lady had turned down, he understood now. And what’s more, he understood why there had never been more: Miss Wraxhall was, to put it simply, too good.
She radiated affability more than anyone he’d ever met. You liked it at first—until it started to feel like standing in sunlight for days on end, when all you wanted was darkness and a good night’s rest. That secret, horrible part of the vicar’s soul had whispered some very uncharitable thoughts about nobody liking to feel like they were the worst person in any conversation.
And it wasn’t just that air of hers which infuriated. Whereas everyone else in the poultry show had a particular rival and a particular favorite breed, Miss Wraxhall chose a different kind of bird every year, hopping from class to class and threatening everyone else’s equilibrium. Because of course she was good at showing birds, too: her chickens’ plumage always shone, their points were inevitably impeccable and received high marks from the judges who came down by train from larger, busier Birmingham. And every triumph only made the others all the more determined to best her next time.
The Reverend Lloyd didn’t think she was doing it deliberately, but the fact remained that Miss Wraxhall alone stirred up more venom around the poultry show than any other single participant.
Even now she was watching him, hands folded serenely, eyes fixed on his face. Listening as attentively as if St. Gilbert himself had stepped out of the stained glass and addressed the congregation. The vicar flushed as he noticed a few infelicities of phrasing that had somehow escaped his notice until this moment.
He’d wanted to bring this sermon to a thunderous, powerful end; instead, he stammered and stumbled his way through the final paragraph, and could feel nothing but nauseous relief to hear his flock begin the familiar words of the Creed. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead…
Not for the first time, the Reverend Lloyd had the unsettling thought that his parishioners spent most of the year courting judgment, when they would do better cultivating grace or mercy instead. He hoped they never had cause to truly regret it.
Amen, his congregation said.
The Cochin and red hens were still snug in their roosts, and the old Pinwheel Bantam hen (Best of Breed, said the shining cup on Lydia’s bedroom shelf) was happily scratching away beneath the apple tree—but she was alone. The Snortington’s Red cockerel that usually stuck close by her side was nowhere to be seen. A light dusting of snow had fallen in the night, so it only took moments for Lydia to find the tracks that led to a spot in the fence where the wire mesh had been tugged loose from the wooden beam.
