The Masque of the Black Tulip by The Masque of the Black Tulip (v1.0)

Author:The Masque of the Black Tulip (v1.0)
Language: eng
Format: epub

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Chapter Twenty-Two

"Is there really a Phantom Monk of Donwell Abbey?"

The vicar grinned at me as he dumped a very unclerical portion of gin into his glass. "Has someone been bending your ear with that old yarn?"

I waved a hand in the direction of Colin Selwick, who stood several little groups of people away in the heavily Victorian drawing room of Donwell Abbey, eyes glazing over under the conversational onslaught of Joan Plowden-Plugge. He must have sensed he was being talked about, because his head turned in our direction, and he lifted his wine glass in an infinitesimal salute.

I looked hastily away.

The vicar, bless him, seemed not to notice. He was on his second drink ("Hazard rations, my dear," he had informed me, as he went for the second), and over the past twenty minutes we had become great chums. Joan had pounced the moment I entered the room. "You'll want to talk to the vicar," she announced with a tug on the arm, towing me in the direction of the drinks table. With me safely deposited, she had marched back off to the doorway to reclaim her spoil of war, i.e., Colin.

I didn't mind terribly much. For one thing, there was a certain amusement in watching an ambushed Colin glance distractedly around the room for means of escape. For another, the vicar was the most delightfully un-vicar-like vicar I had ever met.

Admittedly, I hadn't encountered a wide range, but anyone raised on a steady diet of British literature has a pretty good idea of what a village vicar is supposed to be like. I had expected someone spare and white-haired, with pale veined hands, and a saintly aspect. The sort of vicar who putters through old village records, writes long treatises on the local flora and fauna, and spends his spare time in gentle labor in his garden, contemplating God's purpose as revealed through His creation.

Instead, I found myself shaking hands with a rangy man in his late thirties, with a crooked nose and equally crooked smile. He had, he explained, played rugby for Durham University until a dodgy knee forced him to abandon sport. Nothing daunted, he had presented himself to a talent agency in the hopes of a career in film. Two commercials and several stints as an extra in given up acting, acquired an M.Phil, in History of Architecture at Cambridge, tried his hand at journalism, written for a gossip column, and taken up skydiving. It was that last, he informed me, which had led him to theology, since, "There's nothing like plummeting towards the ground to make a man reconsider his relationship with his Maker." His predecessor, he assured me, had served the parish since 1948, and been the very model of an aged village vicar. "They're still getting used to me," he informed me with an unregenerate grin.

It took us most of his first gin and tonic—heavy on the gin, light on the tonic—to make our way through his life story. The preparation

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