Evil Intent (5 page)

He was still holding the photo when Brian came through from the other room. ‘Well, Elsie and I have set the world to rights,’ Brian said. ‘I hope I haven’t tired her too much.’

‘She always enjoys seeing you, Father,’ Dennis assured him. ‘Tomorrow, God willing, she’ll probably be up and about again.’

‘Well, I’ll be back next week,’ promised Brian. ‘I’ll hope to see her up.’ He glanced towards Callie. ‘I hope you two have been getting on all right?’

‘Fine,’ said Callie, looking in Dennis’s direction. ‘Haven’t we, Mr Harrington?’

The corners of his mouth turned up. ‘We have, girl.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps I was a bit hasty, earlier on.’

He put out his hand towards Callie, and she shook it.

‘Then I can come back?’ she asked.

Dennis Harrington nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes, girl. Yes, I suppose you can.’

On Tuesdays, as on most days, Marigold Underwood met one or another of her friends for lunch. They had a certain number of perennially favourite
luncheon spots – Fortnum’s, Harrods, Peter Jones – but today she and Beatrice were going to try something different, a new restaurant which had just been opened by a celebrity television chef. So popular was it that it had taken them several weeks to obtain a booking, and they were looking
forward
to the experience. So Marigold prepared herself with perhaps even just a bit more than her customary care. She spent over an hour of the morning in the bathroom, soaking in a steaming tub with a skin-firming paste hardening on her face.

Marigold Underwood had never been a typical clergy wife, in any sense. It was a point of pride with her. For a start, she didn’t bake: never had, never would. She didn’t even cook, at least not any more than she had to. That’s what places like Harrods were for, she reckoned – to supply
beautifully
prepared things which didn’t need much additional attention from her. And Marks and Spencers were brilliant, with their ever-expanding range of ready meals.

She never went to church – apart from Christmas and Easter and rites of passage – and despised the sort of women who did, those dim parish spinsters who had nothing better to do. It followed that her friends were not people connected with the church in any way; they were the friends of her youth, who had all come out together as girls and grown together into middle age.

Yes, she had always led her own life, and Vincent had understood that and accepted it, right from the start.

Her friends had thought her mad when she married him.

Marigold had been a deb, back in the late Sixties, and had been the toast of her Season. She could have had any eligible man in London, or beyond. Beautiful and rich, she had lost count of the proposals of marriage which she’d turned down, the spurned suitors and the broken hearts left in her wake.

As her friends married, one by one, they whispered amongst themselves that Marigold was too picky – after all, she had rejected the eldest son of more than one duke, and a handful of lesser nobility. Their speculation gave rise to a rumour that she was hoping for an even more exalted suitor, that she was in fact holding out for the soon-to-be-invested Prince of Wales himself. 

But she had confounded them all.

It was at Beatrice’s wedding, in fact, that she had first spotted Vincent Underwood. The wedding had been the grandest of the Season, held in considerable splendour at a church favoured by high society. Marigold had been a bridesmaid, and not for the first time – by then her wardrobe was stuffed with confections of satin and chiffon in all shades of the rainbow which she’d worn in the weddings of various friends.

Vincent was the curate. His role in the wedding had been minimal, standing off to the side wearing a black cassock, lacy cotta, and a biretta. She’d had plenty of time to observe him during the lengthy nuptial
ceremony,
and Marigold liked what she saw. He was dark and rather mysterious looking, self-contained, somehow aloof from what was going on. He seemed to her like a man with secrets, with unplumbed depths.

He had been at the reception, and she had contrived to speak to him. Her impression of aloofness was borne out, and it made her all the more determined to get to know him.

It was only later that she discovered she was not alone in her
fascination
with the smoulderingly handsome curate: Vincent Underwood was sought after and pursued by any number of women in his parish. They wooed him with cakes and casseroles, with demonstrations of domestic skills, with signs of suitability for a future as his wife.

But Marigold had triumphed.

The marriage had evolved on its own terms, not like the marriages of any of her friends. While she was not the dim clergy wife of the type she so despised, nor was she the sort of complacent, worldly wife who viewed her husband’s affairs with detached amusement, as so many of them did. It was the one thing she felt she couldn’t have borne: for Vincent to be unfaithful to her, to favour another woman over her. To prove that her friends had been right to question her choice of husband.

Not that Vincent gave her worries on that score. In spite of the women who continued to throw themselves at him, even after their marriage, she was certain that he wasn’t even tempted.

Of course there had been that silly business all those years ago, but that hadn’t really counted. And no one had ever known about it. Not the
people who mattered, anyway. As far as Marigold was concerned, it was ancient history.

There were no children of the marriage. They hadn’t planned it that way; it just hadn’t happened. Marigold didn’t think she minded. She’d never known her own mother, and didn’t consider herself a particularly maternal person.

And as for the physical side…

If she’d been expecting grand passion from her husband, Marigold would have been disappointed. It had been years since they’d shared a bed. As far as Marigold could recall, Vincent was the one who had suggested separate rooms, and she had not objected. In her circle of friends, that sort of thing was commonplace.

So, too, were affairs. Her friends had all had them, with men of varying suitability. It was always discreet. Sometimes their husbands didn’t know; often they did. But the husbands were all engaged in affairs of their own and weren’t generally bothered. Now her friends were at the stage of life where they all seemed to be involved with younger men. Beatrice, for instance, was having a wild fling with a young man who was some sort of minor functionary at Number Ten, and this connection provided Beatrice with enviable titbits of gossip as well as the thrill of illicit passion.

Marigold, though, was not the sort of woman to have affairs. It wasn’t that she’d never had the chance; indeed, she’d had ample opportunity, not least with the husbands of most of her friends. They let her know in ways sometimes subtle and often forthright that they wanted her. She was
flattered,
especially now that she’d reached her mid-fifties, but she just wasn’t interested. She’d never even been tempted; she was too fastidious to find the idea of sharing her body with men she scarcely knew – or knew all too well – to be the least bit appealing.

Marigold rinsed the mask from her face, climbed out of the tub,
towelled
herself dry with a fluffy bath sheet, and regarded herself
dispassionately
in the steamy full-length mirror.

For her age, she wasn’t bad at all. She took care of herself, and it showed. Even in the glare of the bathroom light, the little lines on her face were not too noticeable. Her body was good: slender still, with taut muscles and a
bottom free of droop. Her breasts had never been large, and at this point she was glad of it; they didn’t sag as so many of her friends’ now did, unless they resorted to surgery.

And there was her hair, which had always been her crowning glory. It was, in fact, the source of her name: when she was but a few hours old, her mother had held her and remarked that the aureole of gilt hair with which she’d been born made her look just like a tiny marigold. A few days later her mother was dead of septicaemia, and her light-hearted remark was
forever
enshrined in her daughter’s name.

That hair had been truly golden, and thick as well – the envy of her friends. She had worn it long for years, sometimes loose over her shoulders and sometimes swept up in an elegant chignon. In time, though, its
brightness
had faded. Marigold’s hairdresser, who was very good at his job, had convinced her that rather than trying to retain the colour through artificial means, she should accept the inevitable and go progressively lighter. The process had been gradual if no less artificial, and Marigold’s hair was now a light ash blond, cut flatteringly and stylishly short, and as becoming to her at her stage of life as the luxuriant mane had been in her youth.

Marigold went through to her bedroom, dressed in a new outfit, and carefully applied her make-up. She checked her watch: she’d lingered
overlong
in the bath, and Beatrice would be waiting when she arrived at the restaurant.

At the bottom of the stairs, though, her progress was blocked by her husband, who was just showing his curate to the door.

‘The speaker should be very good,’ Vincent was saying. ‘I think it will be worth going.’ Vincent’s voice, which Marigold had once thought
beautifully
sonorous, now possessed an unattractive hooty quality, though he continued to regard it as a fine instrument.

‘Very well, then,’ said Father Jonah. ‘I will meet you there.’

As Marigold descended towards them, Father Jonah turned and looked at her, his eyes deep black pools. He inclined his head respectfully. ‘Good morning, Mrs Underwood,’ he said with grave courtesy.

She had to brush past them in the narrow hallway to get to the door. ‘Good morning, Father.’ Her tone was as cool as his.

But she was suddenly hot – burning as if with one of the hot flushes she’d experienced a few years ago. She slipped out of the door, closed it and stood with her back against it for a moment while she tried to remember to breathe. Unconsciously her hand cupped the arm where his sleeve had brushed against hers.

In all of her married life, no man had ever had this sort of effect on her.

Her friends talked about this kind of thing casually. ‘Oh, he just melts me,’ they would say about a new lover.

She’d never known what they meant until now. Now she knew. At the sight of her husband’s curate, her insides liquified.

And she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he had ever given her any encouragement, or telegraphed availability or interest.

Quite the opposite, in fact. He was untouchable, reserved, austere. It was, she realised, the same sort of remoteness which had originally drawn her to Vincent – the detachment of one whose character had led him to choose a life of celibacy.

Whenever they met, he was coolly polite. Nothing more.

Why, then, did she dream of him at night? Why did she think of him a hundred times during each day?

When she’d first known Vincent he had been handsome, though his good looks had hardened into a perpetual expression of self-regarding pomposity.

But Jonah was beautiful. Beautiful, with the lithe grace of a panther or some other exotic jungle cat. When he moved, he didn’t walk as ordinary men did: he glided, almost as though he were on wheels.

Marigold loved to picture his face, sculpted and lean, with impossibly high cheekbones and those deep, deep eyes. She wished she were an artist so she could draw that face, paint it, fashion it in clay or marble or wood. Sometimes she thought she was obsessed with his face.

There was more, though, and it was even more shameful.

In the sleepless hours of the night, in her solitary bed, she thought about him, and it was not his face which obsessed her then.

Beneath his cassock he was not just a priest, but a man of flesh and blood. If someone – if
she
, God help her – were to unbutton those
thirty-nine 
buttons and free the man beneath, what would happen? She imagined that it would be like unstopping a flood, unleashing a torrent of passion all the more uncontrollable for having been kept so tightly in check.

Marigold Underwood knew that life had been good to her in every material way. She had been born into a life of privilege, and she had never been denied anything she really wanted. With that in mind, if a genie had magically appeared before her and offered to fulfil one wish, she would not have been greedy. She wouldn’t have asked for the secret of eternal youth, or true love that would last a lifetime.

No, she wouldn’t have been greedy. She would have asked for just one night. One night – free from guilt, free from inhibitions and free from
consequences
– with Jonah Adimola.

By Tuesday afternoon, in spite of Leo’s encouragement and her own
bravado,
Frances still had serious misgivings about her promise to act as deacon for him at the Eucharist before the Clergy Chapter meeting. She was used to facing hostility from a certain type of male clergy; at times she had even courted it. But she did not underestimate the capacity for venom from the likes of Vincent Underwood and Jonah Adimola, especially when they had not been warned. And she was feeling a bit fragile as the result of something else entirely: a telephone conversation with her daughter Heather.

Frances had always known that Heather was a restless sort of girl, who would take more time than most to find her place in the world. Heather had never had a clear idea of what she wanted, except in the short term; she followed her enthusiasms and whims without heed to their consequences. To her parents’ disappointment, she had refused to go to university, although she was a very bright girl who could have had a place at any
university
she’d fancied. Instead she had thrown herself into a series of
deadend
jobs and no-hope relationships.

She was almost twenty-five years of age, yet she showed no signs of
settling
down, either with a permanent job or a permanent man. By the time she was Heather’s age, Frances reflected, she had a husband, a baby, and a job which was a vocation. Heather hadn’t even decided what she wanted to be when she grew up.