The pew’s edge bit into the back of Walter’s knees, and he’d learned by the second Sunday not to shift when it did.
The kirk held its cold the way stone always did in this country a cold that settled in and stayed regardless of how many bodies packed the benches and Walter sat where he’d sat the week before, three rows from the back, hands folded, spine straight, the posture of a man who had absolutely nothing to hide and had rehearsed looking that way until it cost him nothing to hold.
Father Bain stood at the front in black that had gone rusty at the seams with age, his voice pitched to carry to the rafters without ever quite raising into a shout the specific, practiced volume of a man who’d delivered a thousand sermons in this exact room and knew precisely how far his words would travel before the stone swallowed them.
“There are those among us,” Father Bain said, and let the sentence hang a beat before continuing, “who would offer comfort to the body and call it godliness.
Who would steep a root and speak a charm over it, and let the ignorant believe the two are one and the same.”
Walter did not move.
He had known, from the moment he’d walked into this room and seen the shape of the homily forming behind Father Bain’s eyes during the opening psalm, that this was coming not a surprise so much as a weather system he’d watched build on the horizon all week, ever since the first villager had stopped him on the green to ask, with careful casualness, whether it was true the Sassenach apothecary had cured the Murray boy’s leg in a single day.
He’d given the honest answer, mostly a poultice and some luck, mistress, nothing more and watched the answer travel anyway, gathering shape as it went, the way answers always did in a place this small.
“The Lord sees all in this parish,” Father Bain said, and his eyes moved, briefly, unhurried, across the gathered rows not stopping on Walter, not lingering, but passing over him with the particular weight of a man taking a count he already knew the number of.
“Political enthusiasm has its cousins, and so does false comfort.
I am minded that a cure without prayer is no cure a Christian ought to trust.”
Behind him, close enough that Walter could feel it without turning, a woman’s attention had settled on the back of his neck and stayed there steady, unblinking, a watching that had weight to it even through wool and hair and the space of a pew’s width.
He didn’t need to turn to know roughly where it was coming from.
He’d clocked her on the way in, an older woman three rows back with the particular set to her mouth of someone who collected observations the way other people collected coin. Read this novel at novelping dot com for the best experience.
He kept his eyes forward.
He kept his hands folded.
He let the homily run its length and did not, at any point, give it the satisfaction of a reaction it could report on later.
Two pews ahead, Una sat with her own hands folded, and though he couldn’t see her face from this angle he could read the set of her shoulders well enough unbothered, unhurried, a woman who’d sat through forty years of this man’s sermons and had long since stopped flinching at any of them.
The line at the door moved slow, the way it always did, Father Bain shaking each hand in turn with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who considered the handshake itself part of the service.
Walter took his place in the queue without hurrying toward it and without hanging back from it either the middle distance, always, the place a man stood when he had nothing urgent to prove in either direction.
“Master Bryce.” Father Bain’s hand was dry, cool, his grip brief and exact.
His eyes, up close, were paler than Walter had registered from the pews a washed-out grey that gave away nothing at all.
“Ye’ve settled well at Mistress Una’s shop, I’m told.”
“I’ve been fortunate in the position, Reverend.” Walter matched the brevity, matched the register, let nothing in his voice reach for more than the exchange required.
“I thank ye for the word this morning.”
“Mind ye take the whole of it,” Father Bain said, mild, and there was nothing in the sentence that could be pointed to as a threat, and everything in the way he held Walter’s eye a half-second longer than the handshake needed that made clear he intended it as one anyway.
“A cure is a fine thing, so long as a man remembers where cures come from.”
“I’ll not forget it,” Walter said, and meant that much at least he wasn’t likely to forget a single detail of this exchange for a good while yet and moved on before the moment could stretch into something either of them would have to acknowledge directly.
He didn’t look back at the woman with the watching eyes.
He felt her gaze find him again anyway, out in the daylight, tracking him across the green the way a hawk tracks something it hasn’t decided yet whether to call prey, and he kept his pace even and unhurried all the way to the shop door, because the day a man’s walk changed to match the eyes on his back was the day those eyes learned something worth reporting. The source of this chapter is novelping dot com.
Una fell into step beside him halfway across the green, not looking at him either, her voice pitched for exactly the two of them.
“Margaret Reid,” she said, by way of explanation, nodding at nothing in particular.
“Ye’ll want to ken the name.
She tells Father Bain everything she sees, and imagines a good deal more besides.”
“Noted,” Walter said, and let the single word carry the whole of his thanks, because Una wasn’t a woman who wanted gratitude dressed up in more words than it needed.
She didn’t offer anything further, and he didn’t ask for it the two of them crossing the last stretch of green toward the shop’s north-side door with the particular, comfortable silence of two people who’d decided, without discussing it, that some things were better carried than spoken aloud in the open air of a Sunday morning where anyone might be listening.
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