“Your mum going to marry that Russell bloke?”

Tom shrugged.

“Be OK. He’s OK.”

“It wouldn’t and he isn’t. He’s weird.”

“Does make you wonder.”

“What?”

“What sort of teacher goes Internet dating.”

Tom flushed. “Who said that?”

“You did.”

“No. No, I never did. I’ve never told anyone about that.”

“Right. I dunno then. Didn’t know it was a secret. Jesse Cole said Mr Russell told them.”

“Phil told Jesse’s class?”

Their food arrived. Luke stabbed a knife point into the pastry to release a plume of steam. “No big deal,” he said.

“Yes it is. It makes her look weird as well and she isn’t.”

“I know she isn’t. Everybody knows she isn’t. What’s it matter? What do your Jesus lot think then?”

Tom bent his head. He didn’t answer. He never did. That was his. And private.

“Anyway, you’ll be off, doing this Bible-bashing course, won’t make any difference to you, will it? When you get back what do you do with it?”

“What?”

“This Bible-bashing thing.”

“Don’t c”

“You going to stand on street corners and that? Come and be saved?”

Tom flicked a pea across the table into Luke’s face.

“Right.” Luke flicked a pea expertly back.

When they came into the street, stuffed full, Tom said, “I hate him.”

“You can’t say that.”

“Why?”

“You can go to hell for hatred.”

“I would,” Tom said. “I’d even go to hell.”

Luke glanced at him. He means it, he thought. He hates him and he bloody means it.

At home, Tom made himself more tea and found a slab of milk chocolate at the back of the fridge. He stood at the kitchen window, biting a chunk of chocolate and then slurping hot tea and sloshing the two around his mouth together. He thought about his feelings with both shame and a certain amount of interest. He had never hated anyone, as far as he could remember. He had hated things. The cancer that had killed his father, for instance, but that had felt like a righteous and pure kind of hate. If he thought about it enough he could conjure up that hatred even now and it was like a clean burning flame, straight and steady. What he felt for Mr Russell was messier. A dirty, dingy sort of hate. It was mixed up with too many other things. His father again. Anger. Confusion. A small-boy jealousy. Dislike of Mr Russell’s brand of atheism, which scored intellectual points and sneered and jested and talked clever. He could demolish arguments so comprehensively that Tom felt inept and a failure because he couldn’t defend his beliefs and speak out convincingly for what he knew as Truth. But what he did most was worry. He knew that it was his responsibility to bring his mother and sister to Jesus, to save them, and he had failed.

He stopped himself. NO. Failed so far, not failed period. When he got to the States and to the Bible college he would learn the way to succeed and when he got back he would begin again. He couldn’t bear the idea of them being outside in the darkness of ignorance, condemned. But he knew what might happen while he was away. He’d seen them together. Lizzie thought it would. Lizzie thought it was a brilliant idea, make sure Mum wasn’t on her own once the two of them had left. And maybe getting together with someone was a good idea. The right someone. A picture of Phil Russell came into his head, smirking, a sarcastic, superior sneer on his face, and fury surged up inside him. He went and knelt down in front of the cross on his bedside table and closed his eyes.

“Jesus Lord and Saviour, who paid for my salvation with your blood c” He stopped. What was he praying for? That his mother would not marry Phil Russell? “Dear Jesus, make Mum and—and Phil come to know you and ask you to come into their lives and give them new birth. Make them see the light. Take Satan from his heart and mind and wash him in your holy blood. Praise and worship. Amen.”

His heart felt ablaze with love and fervour and hope. Later he was due at a youth worship meeting and he would ask them to pray. He was leading the group for the first time tonight and it set him alight just thinking of it and the trust placed in him.

The front door banged. “Tom, you up there?”

He got to his feet in case Lizzie came bounding in. He shouldn’t feel ashamed and foolish to be caught on his knees in prayer and praise, but that was how it always was.

He went downstairs.

“Hey.”

Lizzie was feeding the toaster. She held up a slice.

“Two,” Tom said. “Hey, Liz, why don’t you come with me?”

“Come where?”

“Youth worship. I’m leading it tonight.”

“Right.”

“It’d be good. If you came.”

The toast jumped up, smoking slightly. “Bugger, it keeps doing that, it sticks somewhere and then the side bit gets burned. It’s only the one side. Can you have a look at it?”

“I did. Couldn’t see anything. We just need a new toaster.”

“Jam or Marmite?”

“Marmite. So, will you come?”

Lizzie opened the wall cupboard. “In your dreams. I’m going to see Mum but even if I wasn’t. That’s what you should be doing as well, that’d be more Christian.”

“I went this afternoon.”

“Oh. OK. How was she?”

“Seemed to have quite a lot of pain still. They don’t come round to check much.”

“Short-staffed, aren’t they? You have to speak up for yourself in those places.”

“He was there.”

“Good.”

“Not.”

“Don’t start, Tom.”

Tom held up his hands.

“Just heard on the news. Another one died today c she was on the bottom level when it all came down.”

“Nine.”

“I’ll never go on one of those things again. I’ll probably never go near a fair again. Too bloody dangerous.”

“Lafferton’s dangerous, right? They haven’t got the gunman yet either.”

“The royals aren’t going to that wedding now, last I heard.”

“Don’t blame them. They’ve not been married all that long themselves, have they? He might take a potshot at Charles and Camilla. He doesn’t seem to go for marriage much, our local sniper.”

“God, I hope they get him before Mum and Phil go down the aisle.”

Tom scraped back his chair loudly and went out of the kitchen.

Fifty-nine

“Another person has died as a result of the accident at Lafferton’s Jug Fair last Saturday night when a ghost train collapsed. Today’s death brings the toll to nine. Tanya Lomax, aged twenty-five, was on the ride with her husband, Dan, when the cart in which they were travelling was overturned as the ride fell to the ground. Dan Lomax was badly injured and is still in intensive care. The couple were married only last month.”

He stood still in the middle of the bedroom, naked after his shower, transfixed by the radio report. It was ten o’clock. He had been about to switch off when the item had started. Now, he stood while the newsreader blathered on and his mouth twitched into another of the smiles he could never suppress.

So, nothing had happened at the Jug Fair!

And it had happened without his having to lift a finger. Something was looking after him.

He pulled on the old grey T-shirt and shorts which he wore to bed. He would read for a bit before listening in again. There was a local news bulletin on Radio Bevham every half-hour. He couldn’t wait.

Sixty

“As abbess of the Paraclete, Héloïse wrote to her former lover Abelard asking for guidance on the observance which should best be adopted by nuns. Her letter hit on a critical problem; the lack of a rule written for women c”

The ringing on her desk made Jane start. She had been working for an hour, so immersed in The Monastic Order in Yorkshire 1069–1215 that for a split second she stared at the phone in bewilderment before picking it up.