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children’s choir. He made a mental note to compliment her after the service—that is, if he could get anywhere near her; Sophie had more beaus than any girl in Wyckerley, and most of them were sitting in the nave right now, beaming at her with lovesick adoration.
    That night the apostles met in fear;
    Amidst them came their Lord most dear,
    And said, “My peace be on all here.”
    Alleluia!
    From his chair in the presbytery, Christy gazed out at his congregation. He knew everyone, of course, some better than others, because he’d lived his whole life among them. What troubled him was that, even after a year as their vicar, except for a few, he still knew the people best as neighbors and friends, not as parishioners. Christ the Good Shepherd was his model, but the men and women to whom he regularly administered the sacraments of communion, baptism, and marriage could in no way be called his “flock.” Last night he’d had a dream—he remembered it now for the first time, his memory tripped by the sight of Tranter Fox, one of his favorite but also one of his most recalcitrant parishioners, sneaking into the service late and sidling belligerently into a back pew. Tranter had figured in the dream by standing up in the middle of Sunday service and shouting out with aggrieved wonder, “Say,
you
ain’t Reverend Morrell!” Christy had looked down in horror and seen that, instead of his vestments, he was wearing the old buckskin trousers and kneeboots he used to wear when he raced his horses. “No, it’s me,” he’d insisted, “it’s Christy, you know me!” He held up his Bible, solid proof of his calling, and before his eyes it metamorphosed into a magazine edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” He couldn’t remember the rest—mercifully; the congregation had probably tarred and feathered him, chanting “Imposter! Imposter!” all the while.
    When Thomas first the tidings heard,
    How they had seen the risen Lord,
    He doubted the disciples word.
    Alleluia!
    The trouble was, more often than not he felt like an imposter. “This is natural,” Reverend Murth, his favorite professor at theological college, had assured him in a long letter just last week. “Be patient, Christian. Soon enough the great burden of pastoral enlightenment will fall on your shoulders, and you will understand how to minister as one who bears in himself the wounds of Christ.” So far, Christy couldn’t see any signs of it. The gentle shadow of his father followed him everywhere, unintentionally reminding him of who the real vicar of All Saints still was, at least in the minds and hearts of those who had loved him.
    Christy fingered the edge of the page of notes he’d folded and slipped inside his Bible. His teachers had frowned on the practice of carrying notes into the pulpit; a sermon should sound spontaneous, they’d decreed, even if the minister had spent hours memorizing it. All very well in theory, but Christy had learned through painful experience that his sermons went on forever when he preached them without notes—and sometimes even with them—and the primary emotion they summoned from his hearers was relief when they were finally over. He was afraid that even his concise, carefully reasoned, most philosophical discourses failed to persuade anyone to change his behavior, much less his mind, at least not for long. The mind was like a pendulum: a forceful sermon might move it from its habitual position, but sooner or later it always swung back into place.
    The sound of slow footsteps on stone made him look up. Every head in the church swiveled to watch the couple moving up the center aisle of the nave at a pace that, depending on one’s point of view, was either sedate or indifferent. If the Viscount and Viscountess D’Aubrey didn’t quite look to the manor born yet, it wasn’t, at least on Geoffrey’s part, for lack of trying. His new lordship wore an Oxford gray coat and trousers with a bright