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“Prophecy is not a gift, it’s a curse. The original Ursula Southill may be the best known for it but all the women in my family have had the faculty in one form or another. I had it as a child, along with telekinetic powers. I’d have been one of those kids at the centre of your Type Three category poltergeist hauntings. And you’re right, as the dreams became more intrusive, I sought the solace of the Church. It helps but sometimes something in the environment triggers it off again.
    “Moving to this parish was a mistake. I thought I’d be escaping to a rural idyll but instead the history of the place, the influence of the ley line, the time I stayed at the Hopton parsonage and, finally, my encounter with John Patmos have just exacerbated the situation. You haven’t helped either,” she pauses to smile, “though you do offer consolation in other ways. In fact I could do with a little consoling right now.”
    “I can do that,” I reply. “And remember, Mother Shipton was happily married and lived to a ripe old age, at a time when most people barely survived beyond middle-age.”
    “It sounds corny,” says Ursula, “but I think Mother Shipton really did live a charmed life. Do you know the words they inscribed on her tomb?”
    “Naturally,” I reply. “
Here lies she who never lied – Whose skill often has been tried – Her prophecies shall still survive – And ever keep her name alive.
”
    “Wow, she really is your special subject,” says Ursula, snuggling up closer to me.
    “Actually,” I say, “the present-day Ursula Southill is my special subject.”
    But, even as I pull Ursula closer to me, at the back of my mind is a nagging memory of a comment she made the evening of our visit to John Patmos, “I have this awful premonition that my days are numbered and I’m not going to get out of this alive.”
    I also remember something else.
    According to the legend, the original Ursula Southill correctly predicted the date and time of her own death.

7. For Every Season
    Summer turns to autumn, then to winter, before turning to spring again. Much to our mutual surprise we keep on seeing each other. Will something more permanent ever come of our relationship? Who knows? As they say on Facebook: “It’s complicated.”
    Our lives contain certain immutable incompatibilities. There’s a part of her world I can never share in. And there’s a part of my world I must always shield her from.

8. Whisky and Tea
    I still remember a conversation I had with Archdeacon Jaffa a couple of years before I met Ursula. At the time we were sitting in the Abbey Gardens, at Bury St Edmunds, drinking neat malt whisky poured from a teapot into bone-china cups.
    “Perfectly logical,” Jaffa had explained. “When actors are required to drink whisky as part of the
business
in a play, they use cold tea. The audience are none-the-wiser as, from where they’re sitting, the liquid in the glasses looks exactly the same as Scotch. I’ve just reversed the logic by decanting the malt into a teapot. Besides, it would be highly inappropriate for a senior cleric of the Church of England to be spotted drinking alcohol at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in such a public place.”
    At some point that afternoon, we get onto the subject of the latest American armageddon cult to find itself with egg on its collective face, when their self-appointed messiah’s Day of Judgement failed to take place on schedule.
    “The trouble with these latter-day prophets of doom,” said Jaffa, “is they are so busy foretelling death and damnation for others that they forget to watch out for themselves and more mundane risks closer to home.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Oh, you know. They are forever warning us to repent because
The End is Nigh
and that the Angel Gabriel is poised to blow his horn but then they die in a house fire at their own home because they forget to replace the battery in the smoke alarm! Truly a prophet is not