Read Online Twelve Drummers Drumming by C. C. Benison - Free Book Online Page B

had been content to hone to traditions established many years earlier. A new broom in modern dress, Kinsey had shifted worship times to make room for a modern family service, decidedto take out some pews so people could gather for coffee and a chat after services, removed pictures from the Lady chapel, and was musing about moving the altar before his disappearance. Shifted from their comfortable pews—literally, in a few cases—some churchgoers felt they were being pushed a bit too far. A few welcomed the changes. However, Kinsey wasn’t around long enough to have really put his mark on things, and so the fabled “demographic”—so much the concern of forward planners—hadn’t changed significantly. They’re like ripe fruit, the bishop, a wintry fellow, had mused to Tom between bites of sultana cake as he surveyed the flock at the reception in the village hall after Tom’s induction service: Pretty soon they would begin to drop off the branch. The message was clear: Innovate to draw new blood into the church. But, added the bishop, giving him the gimlet eye, try not to shake the branch
too
vigorously. That message was equally clear: Don’t be an overeager arborist like your predecessor. Softly, softly, Mr. Christmas.

    One of Peter Kinsey’s legacies was a splendid new bloodred Thorn Sherpa touring bicycle, the sort you might buy if you were thinking of cycling by way of France, Turkey, and Iran to India. It was a bit flash for a vicar, and rather expensive, but Tom, applying bicycle clips to his ankles, suspected his predecessor had merely to say “carbon footprint” and all qualms—his and others’—would vanish. Well, it was true. A bicycle was a greener way to get about. But some used model would have done just as well, if a little village was the four corners of your cycling world. So, too, would a biro from the corner shop instead of a Mont Blanc fountain pen, or a pair of Boots sunglasses instead of Oliver Goldsmith’s, both of which had been overlooked at the vicarage when Peter’s effects were packed away pending resolution to his missing person’s file. The archdeacon told Tom that Peter’s parents, wealthy farmers in Zimbabwe, had been killed and their land seized just before his ordination, leaving Peter,their only child, with virtually nothing more than his stipend. That didn’t seem to stop him from acquiring the finer things in life, Tom reflected, as he waved at Miranda, who was holding one of the cats in the sitting room window, and pedalled out into Poynton Shute, with its row of stone cottages opposite. Looking down Church Lane towards the lych-gate, he glimpsed Sebastian John, keys in hand, preparatory to opening the church for the day, and gave a passing thought to hailing him and asking after Colonel Northmore’s condition. But the bike seemed to have a mind of its own and it whisked Tom onwards, past the Church House Inn and along towards Pattimore’s shop and the post office.
    Or perhaps he was attributing agency to the bicycle to avoid talking with his verger. Sebastian seemed to live in silences, approaching conversation as if it were a necessary, but not wholly welcome, obligation. Likewise, his expression often lacked animation, as if he had learned to rid his face of emotion, though occasionally, at church council meetings, say, when Karla Skynner was on her high horse about something, a gush of inner light would illuminate his deep-set blue eyes and a faint smile would curl the corners of his mouth, illuminating the suppressed intelligence. It was the infrequency of these emotional punctuations that made his entrance into the village hall the day before all that much more remarkable. Sebastian had burst through the doors, panting slightly, a line of perspiration against his hairline, as if he had dashed from the other end of Purton Farm. Tom had assumed his concern was for Colonel Northmore. He knew from Madrun that the colonel had interceded with Giles James-Douglas to