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old; and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken. Yet never. Yet never. They lean on the heavy door – dear me, this implausible frailty, this affront of elderliness that has come upon them! – and stagger into the warmth and shelter, where the memory of myriad candles lingers in the air. They pull off their furry Russian hats, their leather gloves, and wipe their noses on pocket handkerchiefs. Then begin the long walk up the south aisle to the chapel of St Michael and All Angels.
    You will like this chapel, I think. Take a seat and admire the Burne-Jones stained glass: angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. On summer days the flagstones are puddled with colour. A macho bronze of St Michael (school of Epstein) offsets the androgynous languishing in the windows; while above the altar hangs a vast abstract, brooding, shot through with wild joy (or quite possibly terror). If you like your Annunciations with lilies, this will not be to your taste. The Chapter clergy are all waiting prayerfully, apart from Mr Happy, who will rush in with sick on his shoulder as the late bell starts chiding. Miss Blatherwick is here, of course, along with a handful of other stalwarts; and so, today, is the bishop. Beside him sits his chaplain, a tightly wound coil of Evangelical passive-aggression. Quite a gathering for eight o’clock on a January morning.
    Freddie is here too. Does that surprise you? Perhaps he has struck you so far as utterly irreligious. By no means. He was a chorister, remember: cut them and they bleed Psalms. He is staring up at the altarpiece the way he stared at another by the same artist, in a different chapel, in unhappier times. He’s remembering how he vowed that when he got out he would do two things: go up onto the moors, lie on his back and see nothing, nothing but sky, literally, and hear the larks? And second, he’d find the guy (he wrongly assumes) who painted this and thank him. He has done the first, borrowing the car without permission, and earning himself a right reverend bollocking when he got back (Paul rather leapt to conclusions, I’m afraid: Lindford Common, police car on the drive). Freddie has not yet fulfilled his second vow. This is what he is thinking about as he stares up at the canvas. He should totally do it? Yeah, he should really get on to that? But this triggers a cascade of dread: so much he should do! He should get his act together, look for work, apply for stuff? He shoves his hands up his hoodie sleeves. His fingers play the guitar fret scars on his upper arms. Time is running out. Should have applied for the Winchester job. Shit, why does he keep missing the closing dates? He’s got to check out the Church Times ads again, bound to be something somewhere. Please let there be. But what if there’s not? Oh, shit. Oh, Jesus. Help me? He hugs himself and shivers under the glass gaze of Burne-Jones’s angels, looking, with his ragged hair and fading black eyes, not unlike a trashy angel himself.
    I don’t want my readers to think that the bishop is unaware of Freddie’s distress. He is not a brute. Even now as the matins bell picks up speed and Mr Chancellor comes clattering in, Paul is praying for Freddie. How to handle this? He knows from experience that any attempt to force Freddie to face reality will provoke panic and a knee-jerk barrage of bad behaviour, which must then be confronted, punished and forgiven. And frankly, he just does not have the time for another spin on that pointless merry-go-round. Yet having agreed to this arrangement, he is in some sense responsible. So he prays. For wisdom, and for Freddie, who he can see on the other side of the chapel there, shivering. The way he had that first evening. Standing in the palace hallway, ashen-faced, shaking with misery. Paul had known at a glance he was trouble, yet he couldn’t find it in his heart to turn him away.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â O Lord, open our