The nib caught on a snag in the page before Father Bain smoothed it through, and the name he’d just written sat there wanting company.
Bryce, Master W.
Ink still wet, the letters careful and upright the way he’d been taught to write them fifty years past in a schoolroom that had cared a great deal about a man’s hand and rather less about the state of his soul.
He held the pen above the page a moment longer, weighing what came next, and let the weak ale at his elbow go untouched while he did it.
The sacristy held its cold well past noon regardless of the season, stone walls that had never once in his tenure warmed to anything resembling comfort, and Father Bain had long since stopped minding it a cold room suited the work of an accounting conscience better than a warm one ever could.
The ledger before him was not the parish’s financial book, though it sat beside it on the same shelf for any curious eye to mistake the two.
This one held no coin.
It held names, and beside each name, in his own careful hand, a note toward the question that mattered rather more to him than any tithe.
Duncan, Mistress G.
Written some weeks past, in the same ink, under a note that read simply: wit exceeds her station.
observe.
He drew the pen down beneath the Sassenach’s name and connected the two with a single unhurried line, the way a man draws a line between two figures in a sum he suspects, without yet being able to prove, share a common source.
Margaret Reid arrived for her tea at the appointed hour, flushed with the eagerness of a woman convinced she was indispensable to matters rather larger than her actual standing in the parish warranted, and settled into the chair across his small table with her hands already folding themselves into the posture of someone ready to be helpful.
“Ye asked to see me, Father.”
“I did, Mistress Reid.” He poured her tea himself a courtesy that cost him nothing and bought, he’d found over the years, a great deal of loyalty from parishioners who mistook small kindnesses for genuine regard.
“I’ve been minded, of late, to consider the spiritual temperature of certain new faces in the parish.
Ye sat behind him at service some weeks past, I recall.”
“Aye, Father.
I did.” Something in her face brightened with the specific pleasure of a woman handed exactly the errand she’d hoped for.
“He sat through the whole of the homily without so much as a flinch, Father not at the cunning-folk passage, not at any of it.
Cool as ye like.”
“Cool,” Father Bain repeated, tasting the word the way he might taste a suspect wine.
“Not troubled, then.
Not stirred to conscience by the Word.”
“Not that I could see, Father.
Though I’ll say” she leaned forward, the particular lean of a woman about to deliver what she believed was her finest evidence “he thanked ye at the door after, proper and correct, same as any decent Christian would.
Ye’d think naught amiss of him, watching only that.”
Father Bain sat with that a moment, turning it the way he turned most information brought to him not for what it proved, but for what it failed to disprove.
A guilty man who flinched at scripture was easy enough to name.
A man who sat untroubled through every word aimed near him, and thanked the priest correctly on his way out the door, was either genuinely innocent or considerably more disciplined than an apothecary’s apprentice had any earthly reason to be.
“And the widow Duncan,” he said.
“Does he call at her house?”
“I couldn’t say for certain, Father.” Margaret Reid’s face did the delicate work of a woman reluctant to admit the limits of her own surveillance. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
“Though I’ve heard from Mrs Baird, who has it from her sister who keeps house two doors from the Duncans that a shop-boy’s run more than one folded note between the two households this summer past.”
There it was.
Nothing a magistrate could act on, nothing a bishop would accept as more than parish gossip dressed up as concern but a thread, all the same, exactly where he’d suspected one might run.
“Ye’ve done well to bring me this, Mistress Reid.” He allowed himself the small, private satisfaction of watching her flush deepen at the praise, a woman who would go home tonight considerably more devoted to her priest’s good opinion than she’d arrived.
“Continue to watch, if it’s no trouble to ye.
Quietly.
The Lord’s business is rarely served by loud accusation before its season.”
Alone again once she’d gone, Father Bain drew the ledger back toward himself and sat a while with the two names joined by their single connecting line, weighing what the bishop’s October visitation would actually require of him.
His Grace would want a parish in order attendance figures, a clean account of any spiritual irregularity properly noted and properly, visibly, managed.
A vague suspicion involving a Sassenach herbalist and a procurator’s clever widow was not, on its own, the kind of order that impressed a bishop.
It was, however, exactly the kind of raw material that became impressive once it had been cultivated a season or two longer, watched patiently, allowed to ripen into something a young and hungrier man than himself might one day be trusted to prosecute while Father Bain himself remained, as always, above the unpleasantness of having personally brought the charge.
Caleb Stark’s name did not yet belong in this ledger.
The lad was two valleys over still, learning his register under a mentor Father Bain had chosen with care precisely because the boy’s zeal ran hotter and less cautious than his own useful, in time, for exactly this kind of work, and disposable in exactly the way Father Bain himself intended never to be.
Not yet, though.
A tool sharpened too early dulled before the task arrived.
He wrote, beneath the joined names, three final words in his smallest, most private hand: bears observation.
Then he closed the book, drank the last of his now-cold ale with the small, grim satisfaction of a man content with modest pleasures and total patience, and rose to see about the parish’s ordinary Wednesday business a christening to arrange, a roof needing repair before the winter, and, tucked somewhere in the unhurried months between now and October, a visit to Mistress Una’s herb-shop that he intended, when the moment finally suited him, to make appear entirely, innocently, like nothing more than a pastor’s ordinary care for his flock.