ALL MORTAL FLESH
ALSO BY JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING
To Darkness and to Death
Out of the Deep I Cry
A Fountain Filled with Blood
In the Bleak Midwinter
ALL MORTAL FLESH
Julia Spencer-Fleming
Thomas Dunne Books St. Martin’s Minotaur New York
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
ALL MORTAL FLESH. Copyright © 2006 by Julia Spencer-Fleming. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-31264-0
ISBN-10: 0-312-31264-4
First Edition: October 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To independent booksellers everywhere, and especially to:
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Acknowledgments
If every publishing company was as supportive as St. Martin’s Press, authors would have nothing to complain about over drinks. Thanks to Ruth Cavin, Toni Plummer, Rachel Ekstrom, Matthew Baldacci, Pete Wolverton, Matthew Shear, Talia Ross, Ann-Marie Talberg, Sally Richardson, and everyone in the art, marketing, and sales departments for taking such good care of me.
Much appreciation to my former agent, Jimmy Vines, enjoying his retirement, and my new representative, Meg Ruley. She, Christina Hogrebe, and the folks at the Jane Rotrosen Agency routinely leap tall buildings in a single bound and make it look easy.
Several people allowed me to pick their brains (mmm, brains!) for this book: Thanks to the Rev. Mary Allen, the Very Rev. Ben Shambaugh, Timothy Lamar, Roxanne Eflin, and Ellen Pyle. My thanks also to Joanne Wetter for suggesting the title.
A writer spends her time alternately avoiding all human contact and relying utterly on the kindness of family and friends. Thank you, Ross, Victoria, Spencer, and Virginia Hugo-Vidal; John and Lois Fleming; Dan and Barbara Scheeler; Patrick and Julia Lent, Calvetta Inman Spencer; Denise Hamilton, Mary and Bob Weyer, Jamie and Robin Agnew, Ellen Clair Lamb, Rachael Burns Hunsinger, and Leslie Smith.
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
—Liturgy of St. James; para. by Gerard Moultrie
The Hymnal, 1982, The Church Publishing Company
Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly-minded,
For with blessing in his hand
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.
King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth he stood,
Lord of lords in human vesture,
In the Body and the Blood,
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.
Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of Light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.
At his feet the six-winged seraph;
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the Presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry:
“Alleluia, alleluia! Alleluia, Lord Most High!”
ALL MORTAL FLESH
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright Notice
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapte
r Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Epilogue
In the Bleak Midwinter
ONE
Monday, January 14
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Clare smelled the smoke first. She came to a standstill, breathing in the chill and windless air. Pine tar and wet wool and the frozen freshwater smell of snow. And smoke. She had crammed as many logs as she could into the cabin’s woodstove before she left that morning, but they would have burnt down into glowing cinders by now, their smoke long vanished into the air.
So. Someone had stoked the woodstove. She wasn’t alone. She clutched her poles and almost—almost—turned back into the woods. She had food and matches and a blanket and a knife in her day pack. She could escape.
A cold touch on her bare hand startled her. A single fat snowflake melted onto her skin. As she watched, another fell. Then another. She sighed. There was no escape. She trudged forward, breaking through the last of the hemlock and white pine, clambering over a hard-packed wall of snow thrown up in the wake of the private road’s plowing.
Gathering her poles in one hand, she sprung her bindings, stepped free of her snowshoes, and scooped them up with her free hand. Her legs felt shaky and insubstantial as she tottered toward the cabin.
Thank God, thank God, she didn’t recognize the SUV parked next to her car. It was a clean, late-model Scout, anonymous in this area where everyone spent the winter in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. She supposed it could belong to a relative of the cabin’s owner. Mr. Fitzgerald had offered the place when she told the congregation she was looking for a post-Christmas retreat, but he was into his early eighties and perhaps had forgotten promising the space to a grandkid.
She mounted the steps to the uncovered front deck and hung her snowshoes and poles on two of a row of pegs jutting from the log wall. Please, Lord, let it not be someone from my congregation. Anyone making the hour-and-a-half drive from Millers Kill would have to be hurting bad. I don’t have it in me to minister right now. She opened the door.
The man rooting beneath the kitchen counter stood up and up and up before turning toward her. “Ms. Fergusson. Finally. I confess, I was beginning to feel a bit concerned.”
Clare blinked. “Father Aberforth?” She looked around, as if there might be someone else who could explain why Albany’s diocesan deacon-at-large was standing in the kitchen on a Monday afternoon holding a battered teakettle. The open floor plan didn’t leave much scope for hiding, however, unless the presiding bishop was lurking in the bathroom. “What are you doing here?”
Father Aberforth plunked the kettle into the sink and twisted the tap on. “Making tea.” He gestured behind her. “You might want to shut the door before you let all the heat out.”
She kicked the door closed without turning around. “I’ve been on retreat.” Her voice sounded shaky, as if she were excusing her absence from her parish. Willard Aberforth was known as the bishop of Albany’s hit man, a scarecrow in black who dealt discreetly and firmly with problem priests. And she, they both knew, was a problem priest. Or at least a priest with a problem.
“I hadn’t forgotten that,” he said dryly, shutting off the water and swinging the kettle onto the stove. “I spoke to Father Lawrence before driving up here. To see how everything went. He said you had called him and told him you were coming back early?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“You had Wednesday to Wednesday, you know.”
“I know. I just . . . I did what I came up here to do. Now I think getting back to work will be good for me.”
Aberforth raised his eyebrows, unfurling an expanse of sagging skin. “Do you have concerns about Father Lawrence’s abilities? I’m the one who approved him as your supply priest for the week, you know.”
“Ah. No. No worries. He seemed quite”—geriatric—“nice. When I briefed him. Experienced. Very experienced.”
“He was a good friend of your predecessor.”
The late, lamented Father Hames, who had become St. Alban’s priest around the time Betty Grable was a pin-up girl.
“I believed he and your parishioners would feel quite comfortable together.”
She had thought, after the events of the past night, that her reserves of grief and dread were plumbed out, but she felt a fresh upwelling of fear at his words. “Are you . . . is the bishop suspending me?”
Father Aberforth looked at her. He had once been a younger and heavier man, and his face fell in deceptively drooping folds, but his black eyes showed that inside he was still all hard lines and angles. “Does that thought distress you?”
“Yes!” She was surprised how much. Over the past four months, she had been praying for some sign that she was in the right place, that God intended her to be a parish priest rather than a social worker or a chaplain or a helicopter pilot—her old, easy calling. God had remained resolutely silent on the matter. Maybe now He was talking to her, in the sick clench of her gut.
Father Aberforth nodded. “I thought it might. The answer is no, the bishop is not suspending you from your duties.”
The last of her energy left her body with her breath. Clare let her day pack thud to the floor and collapsed into a nearby sofa without bothering to remove her parka. She heard the click-click-clicking of the burner as Aberforth turned on the gas and a whoosh as his match lit the ring into flame. “I know you’re a coffee fiend, but there must be tea here somewhere,” he said.
“In the pantry. In one of the Tupperware boxes.” She listened to Aberforth rummage around, the clink and clunk of mugs and spoons and the sugar tin, and she could hear her grandmother Fergusson chiding her to get up and act the hostess, but for once she couldn’t bring herself to care about Doing the Right Thing. She sat there dully, rubbing her hands over the smooth twill of the sofa cushions.
The kettle whistled shrilly and cut off. “Do you take your tea the same way you do your coffee? Ridiculously sweet?”
“Gosh,” she said. “You remember.” She waited without expectation as he crossed the floor and set a mug on the table in front of her. He folded himself into one of the leather Eames-style chairs opposite the sofa. It wasn’t meant for Aberforth’s storklike six and a half feet, and he struggled to get comfortable for a moment before snatching a kilim pillow off the companion chair and stuffing it beneath his knees.
“Idiotic furniture,” he said. “Where did you find this place?”
“Belongs to one of my parishioners,” she said. “He doesn’t use it very much since his wife died a few years ago.”
Father Aberforth grunted. “Drink your tea. You look half dead.”
She reached for the hot mug with as little effort as possible and managed a few sips. “What are you doing here, Father? I didn’t think we were due for another chat until after I had sorted myself out up here.”
“My visit has two purposes.”
Clare smiled to herself. Who but Willard Aberforth talked like that?
“First, to tell you that the bishop has assigned you a new deacon.”
She cradled the warm mug between her hands. “I don’t need an assistant.”
“This will be a full-time position, salary paid for by the diocese.”
Clare looked closely at the old man. “St. Alban’s isn’t large enough or prosperous enough to warrant a full-time deacon.”
“Nevertheless.”
The penny dropped. “I’m getting a babysitter.”
“Consider her more of a guide. To keep you on the straight and narrow.”
“Emphasis on the straight.” It had been her celebration of a gay union the year before that originally brought her to the bishop’s—and Aberforth’s—attention. She had broken her vows of obedience and flouted the bishop’s policy toward homosexuals, both faults she had admitted but failed to repent of. She had been waiting for the bishop’s reaction since last November, but the flaming car crash that
was her personal life had kept her distracted. Now she tweaked to something else Aberforth had said. “Her?”
“The Reverend Elizabeth de Groot. She was raised up from St. James in Schuylerville. Since you’ll be back tomorrow, I’ll let her know she can report for duty as of Tuesday.”
“Is she transitional?” That is, on the road to priesthood, which would give Clare some chance that the woman would be shuffled off to another parish within a year.
“Oh no. She’s a career deacon. She was ordained over a decade ago after helping build St. Stephen’s into the church it is today as a volunteer and a vestry member and a warden.”
Clare translated that to mean old enough to be your mother and has already seen it all twice. “What’s she like?”
“An elegant lady. Dignified. She has a lovely sense of tradition.”
Clare translated that to mean so high church she makes the archbishop of Canterbury look like a guitar-strumming folksinger. She sighed. It wasn’t as if there were anything she could do. As a response to her transgressions, it was fairly mild. “So that’s the one thing,” she said. “What’s the other?”
Father Aberforth fussed a bit with his tea. “I came to check on you. To see if you needed to talk. Having found myself in the position of your confessor.”
Clare smiled faintly. “You can’t take confession.” Despite his honorary title of “Father,” the deacon was not eligible to act as God’s intermediary when people spilled their most painful secrets. Still, he probably believed more wholeheartedly in the rite than did Clare, who forgave sins on a weekly basis.
“It wouldn’t do you any good if you weren’t prepared to repent and mend your ways,” he said. She could feel her cheeks coloring. “Yes, I thought this retreat had more to do with your situation than with some post-Christmas and Epiphany exhaustion. Have you figured out what you’re going to do with this married man of yours?” He craned his neck, trying to peer over the edge of the upstairs loft. “He’s not staying here with you, is he?”
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