Rectory

Charismata

Chapter 102: Rectory

Beca Penhaligon had written NO ONE GETS CREDIT FOR STAYING CHEERFUL PAST MIDNIGHT on the Exeter sheet at 00:43 on a Thursday and then taped the page to the kitchen cupboard with the righteous violence of a woman preserving both church and marriage.

By Saturday evening the same page had acquired gravy, candle wax, and a second rule in smaller handwriting:

IF THE RECTORY DOG REFUSES A ROOM, TRUST THE DOG BEFORE THE CURATE.

This was how theology improved in Devon.

The rectory itself was not interesting.

That helped.

Pebbledash. Cold hallway. Parish newsletters multiplying on the side table like a minor curse. A back study barely large enough for one desk, two chairs, and the sort of fern only ever seen in clergy houses where someone felt guilty about the atmosphere.

The girl in the box room was called Tamsin Ware. Sixteen. Sharp face. No gift language she trusted yet. Only two bad nights, one church youth supper that had gone sideways, and a third night at the rectory when every time someone downstairs said we're all fine she started hearing the sentence repeated back in voices no wall should have kept.

Beca believed in many Christian things.

Cheerfulness under sleep deprivation was not among them.

Her husband Matthew, curate of Saint Luke's-with-Saint Jude's, had developed it anyway.

He was currently in the kitchen making tea for the third time in an hour and speaking at a pitch Beca associated with hostage videos and parish fete openings.

"Chamomile for everyone."

The dog, a bent old lurcher called Queen Esther, left the kitchen without comment.

Beca watched the dog go.

"That is not a good sign."

Matthew kept smiling.

"We're stabilizing."

"You are performing."

"Bec."

"No. If you say Bec in that voice again I shall involve Hull out of spite."

From the back study, Churchwarden Moira Craddock said,

"I can hear the curate lying from two rooms away."

Matthew looked wounded.

"I'm encouraging."

Moira leaned in the doorway, rain still on her coat from having arrived with lentil soup and unwilling holiness.

"You've had three hours' sleep in two nights and your eyebrows have gone pastoral. Sit down."

Beca loved Moira with the uncomplicated gratitude usually reserved for sacraments and boiler engineers.

Tamsin was not in the back study now.

Earlier in the week everyone had kept trying to coax her into the box room because it was quiet and therefore looked therapeutic to church people. Then Queen Esther had refused the threshold so completely that Moira crossed out half the page and said, very calmly,

"If the dog thinks the room is lying, pick another room."

So they had moved into the back study.

Smaller. Untidier. More truth.

One desk lamp. One radiator with a pessimistic view of winter. One window onto the lane where ordinary Devon rain carried on regardless of spiritual developments.

Tamsin sat in the desk chair with her knees up and Moira's cardigan around her shoulders. Beca sat on the floor by the radiator because adulthood was mostly furniture sacrifice with better nouns.

"How is it."

Tamsin made a face.

"Quieter."

"In your head or in the house."

"Both. Mostly because he stopped smiling through his teeth."

From the kitchen Matthew said,

"I can hear you."

"Excellent," Beca called back.

"Let that help."

Moira passed Tamsin a mug.

"Soup first. Accuracy later."

They had learned that from Hull and then improved it locally by adding bread thick enough to rebuke abstraction.

Tamsin took the mug in both hands.

"I don't want this becoming a thing."

"It already is a thing," Beca said.

"You are in our study in my cardigan insulting my husband. We are well past secrecy. The question is whether it becomes the wrong thing."

Tamsin looked at the sheet taped inside the study door.

The original sleep questions. The crossed-out bits. Moira's additions. Beca's midnight commandment.

"What's the wrong thing."

Beca thought of deanery people. Pastoral initiatives. The hunger clergy had for anything that could become a language before it became a room.

"A ministry."

That got the smallest smile out of Tamsin yet.

"Terrible word."

"Yes."

From the kitchen Matthew appeared with tea and the devastated expression of a man recently made to lie down for eleven minutes by his own churchwarden.

Better. Still annoying. More human.

Moira took one look at him.

"Did you sleep."

"Briefly."

"Did you dream."

"About rosters."

"Then you are banned from helping for half an hour."

He set the tray down.

"This seems punitive."

"This is Devon mercy."

Tamsin drank. Not gracefully. Real children rarely did.

"My mother keeps ringing."

"Does she help when she rings," Beca asked.

"No. She apologizes in circles."

"Then Moira will ring her back."

Moira nodded as if accepting weather.

"Happy to."

"Tell her what."

Beca looked around the study. At the fern leaning away from clerical optimism. At the cardigan. At the dog now asleep exactly where the hallway met the study door, as if guarding the house from unnecessary Christian phrasing.

"Tell her we are not building a response team. We are using a room."

Tamsin let her head tip back against the chair.

"That sounds manageable."

"Good."

"What if it gets bad again."

Beca answered honestly because Hull had taught them that reassurance was one of the more respectable lies.

"Then we get smaller first, not larger. More local, not more grand. Moira next. Your mother when she can be useful. Me when I'm not pretending not to be tired. Matthew only after sleep and repentance."

"I object to the order."

"Overruled."

The doorbell went.

Matthew started up automatically. Moira pointed at the chair.

"Sit."

Beca went to the hall instead.

It was only Mrs. Hooper from three doors down with a casserole and the sort of silence that meant she had already guessed enough not to require explanation.

"I made too much," Mrs. Hooper said.

"This is a lie."

"Obviously. Who needs feeding."

Beca took the dish and, with it, the cleanest part of the whole night. One woman on the lane noticing the rectory lights behaving strangely and answering in food.

When she got back to the study, Tamsin had shifted to the floor. Closer to the radiator. Closer to sleep. Matthew had finally stopped vibrating. Moira was writing on the back of the copied sheet with the heavy parish biro reserved for electoral roll corrections and serious prophecy.

"What now."

Moira held the page up.

NO FRONT OFFICE FOR A BACK-STUDY PROBLEM.

Beca read it.

"Good."

"Too wordy."

"That's Exeter."

Tamsin, eyes half shut:

"Put the first one up bigger."

"Which."

"The cheerful one."

Beca took the sheet, uncapped the thicker pen, and wrote over her own earlier line until the cupboard looked properly warned.

NO ONE GETS CREDIT FOR STAYING CHEERFUL PAST MIDNIGHT

Then she added beneath it, in the smaller hand of a woman learning not to flatter the moment:

AN ORDINARY ROOM STILL COUNTS

The rectory settled after that.

Not beautifully. That was for diocesan brochures and funerals with good flowers.

Truly.

The dog slept. Tamsin slept. Matthew finally slept sitting up in the kitchen chair like a rebuked apostle. Moira phoned Tamsin's mother and was so practical she may as well have rung from Sinai.

Near midnight Beca copied the new rule onto a clean sheet for Hull. Not for permission. Company mattered.

Outside, the lane stayed dark and provincial and entirely unimpressed.

Inside, the study kept being what it was: one ordinary room telling the truth before the parish office got the chance.