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of her tours of the facilities had taken her deeply into the cemetery. She had peered from the door and pronounced it beautiful. She wondered whether her hosts had sensed her silent shirking when confronted with what Professor Gyver, back at the div school, used to call the Big E and the Big O, Eternity and Oblivion.
    Christopher Taite seemed comfortable here. He walked with his hands linked behind his back, ear cocked toward her like a professor listening to a slow but promising student. He explained that his family had provided for over a century hereditary thurifers at Trinity, and later, after the merger, at Trinity and St. Michael. Trinity, she knew, had been an all-black Episcopal church, founded before the Civil War. It had merged with St. Michael, a dying but upscale white congregation, in the pandemonium of the 1960s.
    â€œDo you by any chance happen to know what a hereditary thurifer is?” he asked with insulting patience.
    â€œI know the thurifer carries the incense.”
    A brisk shake of the slender head. Traditionalists liked their traditions perfect. “The thurifer carries the thurible. The thurible holds the incense. In the strict Anglican tradition, the title of thurifer was often hereditary. It ran in families, devolving usually upon the first-born male child.”
    â€œLike primogeniture,” Amanda murmured, working hard to get a smile out of him.
    â€œPrecisely,” said the thurifer, never missing a step. “Here.” He pointed to a wide patch of earth set off by a low metal rail. Easily two dozen headstones were encompassed within the border, with room for several more. “This is where the Taites are buried. My older brother.” He pointed. “My father.” He pointed, again and again. “Two uncles, my grandfather, his older brother, their father. All served as thurifers at Trinity, or here. I was the eighth in the line, and, as I have no children of my own, I may be the last.”
    â€œI would assume it’s permissible to select a new thurifer.” Again she smiled. “Even if he—or she—isn’t a Taite.”
    The frown on the unlined face deepened without shifting. “That would be up to the rector.”
    His use of the title in the abstract rather than a simple pronoun—say, up to you —solidified Amanda’s fear that Christopher Taite was among those unready to accept, even after all these years, that women could be properly ordained as priests. She wondered, sometimes, whether the traditionalists were traditional enough to endorse Apostolicae Curae , Pope Leo XIII’s late-nineteenth-century bull proclaiming all Anglican ordinations null and void.
    â€œI see,” she said. Then, as directly as she dared: “The congregation thinks I was forced upon them.”
    â€œYou were.” He waved aside her squawked objection. “You have no cause for apology or explanation. The canons are clear. The authority rests with the diocesan bishop.”
    She nearly sagged with relief. “Not everyone agrees.”
    â€œOnce the bishop has acted, the matter is closed. It makes no difference what others may prefer.”
    â€œIt makes a difference to me.”
    The hereditary thurifer said nothing. He had them walking again, now along the crumbling stone wall, eight feet high, shielding the cemetery from the side streets. Beyond stood the staid, expensive houses of the black rich, the neighborhood of the city known as the Gold Coast: the heart of the opposition to her appointment.
    â€œTell me about the murder,” the priest said finally.
    â€œAn affair of the heart, I’m afraid.” He uncurled his hands briefly, plucked a leaf from a tree, sniffed it, dropped it. The wind carried it before them along the path. “I find it fascinating,” he said, “that no one has mentioned the story to you. Or perhaps you read an account in the newspapers.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThe victim was