Water, Stone, Heart by Will North

Author:Will North
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307451934
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

Janet Stevenson answered his knock wearing blue jeans and a University of Michigan sweatshirt.

“Reverend Janet?” Andrew said, thinking, absurdly, that the priest would be in her vestments.

“It's Andrew, isn't it?” she said, smiling.

“That's some memory you have, ma'am,” he replied, trying to recover from his surprise at her outfit.

“It helps in this trade,” she said. “Would you like to come in?”

Andrew looked down at his dirty clothes, then smiled. “Perhaps not, given the state I'm in.”

“I'm not exactly overdressed myself,” she said. “It's my son's sweatshirt. I was cleaning; I'm the help as well as the vicar.”

“Look, I've just barged in without an appointment, so let me begin with an apology. Do you have a moment? Maybe we could take a short walk?”

“Yes, and yes. My husband's doing dinner tonight. Let me just tell him where I'm going. Where am I going, by the way?” she said, smiling again.

Andrew looked around. The church sat on high ground, looking out to sea. “The churchyard?”

“I've been there before,” she said. “But it has its charms. I'll just be a tick.”

A few minutes later, they were walking up the hill.

“There may have been a church here for nearly a millennium, you know,” Janet said, filling the silence. “A document from 1189 records the gift of the church to the abbey at Hartland, up in Devon, but clearly it was here earlier. There are still portions of the building that are Norman, but much of what you see is much more recent. But you'd know that; I hear you're an architect. An architect learning to build Cornish hedges, which—pardon me for saying this—sounds a bit backward to me.”

Andrew paused, looked at her, and started walking again. They were strolling among the ancient, lichen-encrusted headstones that surrounded the church. He wondered if the close-cropped grass was the work of a mower or sheep. He hoped the latter: Jesus, the Good Shepherd.

“It started as a whim, I suppose; or maybe a kind of therapy. But it's become something else, something elemental.”

They stopped at a gate that looked west, toward the sea and Forrabury Common, a medieval system of raised farming beds that had remained in use until only recently.

“It sounds like you're searching for something. Is that what got to you in my sermon about Peter last Sunday?” she asked.

Andrew leaned on the top of the gate. “I've certainly had my faith tested recently, Reverend Janet.”

“Just ‘Janet’ is fine.”

“Janet.… But that's not why I came to see you.”

The priest said nothing. She had learned the value of silence.

Andrew began walking again; Janet walked with him.

“Let's say you knew someone,” he began, “to whom something terrible seems to have happened. Maybe a long time ago. But it's clear it haunts the person still.”

“Why do I think it's not you you're talking about? It's someone else, isn't it?”

“Yes.” He wondered whether everyone in this village was a mind reader.

“How can I help?”

Andrew was impressed that she didn't ask, “Who?” He took a deep breath. “I don't know. That's what I came here to ask you” he said.

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