Two Weddings and a Baby

by Scarlett Bailey

  ‘A very little. I got the diocese to buy the pub, when it was about to be turned into flats, but the rest is about fundraising. It has its own committee now. Catriona is on it, and I help where I can. There are four self-contained bedsits, one occupied at all times by a youth worker. And downstairs there is a non-alcoholic bar, where the kids go for discos and such. It’s a good little fundraiser.’

  ‘So this seventeen-year-old girl lives there on her own with two men?’ Tamsyn asked.

  ‘No, the youth worker is a woman, and the other tenant, he’s a young man. I was just talking to him. He’s a nice boy, transformed from the kid that got excluded from every school he went to. Kirsten, though, she had a hard time when her mum got a new boyfriend, had a baby. Went off the rails a bit. She couldn’t stay at home, and then soon after she left, the mother got into drugs, the brother went into care. It’s no wonder she seems a little distant. I suppose she’s lost all of the people she loves.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Tamsyn wondered. Would it be possible for a child who’d been through so much just to detach herself from something like having a secret baby? It could happen. But then there were those little teddy buttons. Buttons that seemed to tell much more about Mo’s mother than she could imagine.

  ‘Well, there were no likely candidates amongst the boys I spoke to, either,’ Jed said. ‘Although a lot of them were extremely good at World of Warcraft. Well, it was worth a try; tomorrow is another day, and all that.’

  Whatever her thoughts were about Kirsten, Tamsyn decided to keep them to herself for now. If she was Mo’s mother, she seemed in good health, she wasn’t harmed or in danger. Much better just to see how things went over the next few hours than charge in like a bull in a china shop, as the worst possible thing that could happen would be to scare the girl away.

  ‘Do you think it means something that they left Mo at your church?’ Tamsyn asked him. ‘I mean, the teens had a point. Who leaves a baby at a church these days? Almost no one thinks it wrong to be a single mother any more, and while it might be a tad old-fashioned, Poldore is one of the most tolerant places on earth. A baby out of wedlock, well – it would have to be a certain sort of person to be ashamed enough of it to leave their child in a church porch.’

  Jed thought for a moment, and Tamsyn could see a look of concern cloud his face.

  ‘So you think it’s someone who comes to church regularly?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Someone very …’

  ‘Religious,’ Tamsyn prompted him.

  ‘Traditional, with traditional values,’ Jed said. ‘But then, that sort of person wouldn’t be running around and getting pregnant, especially as the first four or five names of my most dedicated parishioners are all members of the over-sixties club.’

  ‘Well, perhaps the mother is the daughter or granddaughter of someone who attends your church. Or someone with something to hide, maybe,’ Tamsyn added. ‘Someone who thinks that if anyone finds out they have had a baby it will lead to a scandal, or disaster, the like of which Poldore has never seen!’

  Jed smiled at her. ‘You certainly have a talent for the dramatic, Tamsyn.’

  ‘Well, I work in fashion, darling. We tend to get giddy even about zip positions.’ Tamsyn blushed a little; somehow calling the vicar ‘darling’ seemed a bit more daring than she’d anticipated.

  ‘So, who?’ Jed asked. ‘Who would think that the world would come crashing down around them if they were discovered to have had a baby out of wedlock?’

  ‘There is one obvious candidate,’ Tamsyn said, lowering her gaze to Mo, who looked like she was taking her sleep very seriously indeed.

  ‘Is there?’ Jed looked troubled. ‘Who? Cordelia?’

  ‘No, you idiot. I think it’s you! Or at least, someone who got pregnant by you, the vicar!’ Tamsyn said, before she had even had a chance to think about what she was saying, or if it was an awfully good idea to say the words out loud. The trouble was that Jed was so unusually easy to talk to that she seemed to have trouble not talking to him, even when it was about him, and not particularly flattering at that. Now she had gone and done it.

  Jed was silent for a long moment, and then something unexpected happened. He started laughing – not just a chuckle or a giggle, but actual guffaws – breath-stealing, side-splitting guffaws that made him bend over and grab his knees.

  ‘Me?’ He managed to splutter the word out between ragged breaths.

  ‘It’s not funny.’ Tamsyn felt indignant. ‘Abusing your position as a moral compass to seduce some poor young woman is not cause for hilarity!’

  ‘I am not Mo’s father,’ Jed managed to say eventually, shaking his head as he looked at her, laughter still shaking his shoulders. ‘If I was, I’d be so incredibly proud, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops. I certainly wouldn’t ever put myself in a situation where a child of mine ended up being left in the porch of a church. Sadly, I am not Mo’s father.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ Tamsyn said, her confidence wavering as she looked into Jed’s cool, clear eyes.

  ‘Because, Tamsyn Thorne,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been with a woman that way in a very long time. Several years, in fact, if you are so determined to know. And despite my job, I consider pregnancies that aren’t preceded by sex something of a rarity.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tamsyn said, her voice now ever so tiny and small. ‘Well. OK, then.’

  ‘Not that it is any of your business,’ Jed reminded her gently. ‘But for the record, I would only have sex with someone that I really loved, and it would only happen after we were married.’

  ‘Because you’re a vicar?’ Tamsyn asked him.

  ‘Because I believe in the sanctity of marriage.’ Jed nodded.

  ‘But you said … you implied that you have “been” with a woman before,’ Tamsyn stumbled on, aware that she was being incredibly crass, and utterly uncertain as to why she couldn’t simply withdraw from the conversation with what little tatters of dignity she had left, except that the information still seemed to be vitally pertinent to her.

  ‘I wasn’t always a vicar,’ Jed said. ‘I wasn’t ordained until I was twenty-four. Now, is there anything else you’d like to know about my personal life? Times and dates, telephone numbers of old girlfriends, maybe a DNA sample?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tamsyn said. ‘You must think me very rude.’

  ‘Not rude,’ Jed said. ‘Not that. It’s just that you don’t seem to understand that what I do is not just my job, that happens to come with a nice house, outdated uniform and a great big ancient shed I need to keep raising funds for to have the roof fixed. This is my life, Tamsyn. My life, that I have dedicated to God. I take my faith seriously, and I would never, ever leave a woman in a situation where she had to abandon a child of mine on a doorstep. I’m not that man, and I have to say, given that our acquaintance is only a few hours old, for you to even hazard a guess at what sort of man I am is actually rather insulting.’

  ‘But I wasn’t … It’s not that …’

  ‘I don’t suppose …’ Rory’s head appeared around a door at the end of the corridor. ‘Ah Vicar, good. It’s a great big lump of furniture, this; any chance you could give me a hand?’

  ‘Of course,’ Jed said, nodding politely at Tamsyn. ‘Your family is at the top of the tall turret,’ he said curtly. ‘The central spiral staircase to the left of the Blue Lady.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tamsyn said. ‘And, Jed, I’m …’

  She had been about to say sorry, but he had already disappeared after Rory, into the depths of the Red Room.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘There you are,’ Laura said, as Tamsyn shouldered open the vaulted turret door. The room that the Thorne women had been allocated was semicircular, with four single beds, three of which were camp beds, forming a sort of star in the middle of the room. This was usually Cordelia’s room when she was sleeping over at Castle House on nanny duty, as it was at the top of the tallest turret where Sue Montaigne housed her children, for maximum noise-containment purposes – o
ne floor above Meadow and opposite the boys. Sue had been known to joke that she’d have put the nursery in the dungeon if only she’d had one.

  ‘Any noise coming from the pit?’ Cordelia nodded at the boys’ bedroom. ‘I looked in twenty minutes ago and it was like a CBeebies production of Armageddon.’

  ‘No, completely quiet,’ Tamsyn said.

  ‘Ominous,’ Cordelia said. ‘The only time they are ever completely quiet is if there is some sort of arson-related activity going on. I’d better go and take a peek. There’s wine; you’d better not have too much, though. Don’t want you getting drunk in charge of a baby.’

  ‘Again,’ Keira said pointedly.

  ‘I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t in charge of them and they were three,’ Tamsyn said, referring to the one time she had been left to babysit the twins, on a rare visit to Suffolk. ‘And I told you not to go out and leave me with them; I warned you.’

  ‘I just didn’t expect you to actually let them glue their Lego to the sofa,’ Keira said. ‘And then draw a city all around it in permanent marker.’

  ‘They were being creative!’ Tamsyn used the same defence every time the Lego sofa/permanent marker incident came up. ‘And anyway, I bought you a new sofa, and to be frank it was much nicer than the old one. Not to mention more washable.’

  ‘Now, now, girls,’ Laura said to her daughters. ‘It really is about time you let that incident go, Keira. Tamsyn, let me have a look at that little darling there. Come on, stop hogging the baby.’

  ‘You do know we can’t keep her, don’t you, Mum?’ Tamsyn said as Laura hungrily took hold of Mo, cooing at the poor child and pressing several kisses on her forehead, which Tamsyn thought belatedly was a nice thing to do. She didn’t suppose that Mo had been kissed as much as a baby should be in her first hours of life. Even so, this would be the prelude to some inevitable variation of the ‘I don’t think you’re happy in life’ discussion that her mother seemed to try to have with her whenever they were in the same room. ‘She’s not a stray kitten. At some point someone in charge will come and take her away, you know.’

  The baby, sensing the change in her situation, opened one dark eye and flushed a deep red.

  ‘Oh, someone’s having a poo,’ Laura said cheerfully. ‘Are you having a poo? Are you having a little baby poo? Shall Aunty Tamsyn change your little botty-bots? Shall she? Shall she?’

  ‘Mum, she’s a baby, not an idiot,’ Tamsyn said. ‘And anyway, I’ve already changed her.’

  ‘You do know you have to do it more than once, right?’ Laura asked her.

  ‘Well, you were the one who was so keen to get hold of her. Surely there’s a rule that whoever it is who’s holding her when she poos has to be the one to change her. Isn’t that a rule? That should be a rule. Like the last person to use the bath always has to clean it. Or whoever smelt it, dealt it. That one.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, I’ll change her,’ Keira said, taking a nappy from the packet that Cordelia had brought up with her and holding her arms out for Mo. ‘Oh, look how tiny she is; it makes me feel broody. Doesn’t she make you feel broody, Tamsyn?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Is broody like a sort of low-level sensation of exhaustion, anxiety and grief over your long-lost suitcase? If so, then yes.’

  ‘They are asleep,’ Cordelia said when she came back. ‘And amazingly all in a bed, although not the beds they started out in, but still, I’m counting that as a victory.’ She looked Tamsyn up and down. ‘Have you seen yourself, Tam? You look like you just escaped from a trailer park.’

  ‘A rude but accurate assessment,’ Tamsyn was forced to concede. ‘These belonged to Lucy, apparently, but I’ve seen her taste in clothes and it’s definitely not this. I think this came out of the lost-property box in the pub. These are the sort of clothes that a person has to be drunk to wear. Have you got something I can borrow, sis?’

  ‘Well, what do you give a bedraggled fashion designer, who smells faintly of baby sick, to wear at nearly two in the morning?’ Cordelia mused cheerfully.

  ‘Literally anything but this,’ Tamsyn pleaded. ‘And I forgot about the baby sick. She’s going to need a feed in a minute and … oh God, I had a go at the vicar, smelling of baby sick!’

  ‘You had a go at Jed?’ Cordelia said. ‘What did you say to him? What could you possibly have a go at Jed about? He is, like, the goodest person I know. He’s like, one step down from Jesus, really.’

  ‘I may have slightly accused him of secretly being Mo’s father,’ Tamsyn mumbled, cringing as she remembered that she had genuinely made the ridiculous accusation, and out loud, too.

  ‘Oh my God, Tamsyn!’ Laura gasped. ‘I’ve raised you better than that. Only just, I know, but still.’

  ‘I know, but it all made sense to me at the time.’ Tamsyn sat on the edge of her bed and pulled her cloud of candyfloss hair over her face, just like she had when she was a little girl in maths class and was doing her best to avoid getting noticed by the teacher. ‘And then he was all noble and heartfelt and “How could you even think such a thing” and I felt awful. And I must have smelt of sick and looked like I’d escaped from an eighties Australian soap …’

  ‘He wouldn’t care what you looked like,’ Cordelia said primly. ‘He’s not that shallow.’

  ‘But why would you even think like that?’ Keira said. ‘You should have talked to Cordelia first. Cordelia thinks the vicar might even be gay. Although her evidence for that fact is mainly that he doesn’t seem to fancy her.’

  ‘That’s not what I said, what I said was, he didn’t look at me in the way that most men do, which is from the chest up.’

  ‘He’s not gay,’ Tamsyn said, perhaps a little too quickly.

  ‘How do you know, and why do you care?’ Keira raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I just … I don’t think he is, that’s all. He talked about wanting to get married someday, to a woman. And he’s had intimate relations in the past, before he was a vicar.’

  ‘Anything else you covered during this conversation?’ Cordelia asked her. ‘Like what sort of underwear he wears, favourite cheese, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Look, it’s been a very strange day and I am very tired,’ Tamsyn said. ‘You know, I came here for my brother’s – who I am not really talking to – wedding, not to get caught up in a hurricane and find a baby and meet a s … s … erious vicar.’

  Keira and Cordelia exchanged a look that Tamsyn knew only too well, and her heart sank like a lead balloon.

  ‘You were going to say “sexy”, weren’t you?’ Cordelia said.

  ‘No.’ Tamsyn crossed her arms and her sisters shrieked with glee.

  ‘Girls, we’ve just got the boys off to sleep, and this little one doesn’t need you lot shouting in her ears – settle down,’ Laura told her daughters, although the look on her face showed she’d been here a million times before and knew exactly how it was about to play out, and settling down wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.

  ‘You were,’ Cordelia pointed at Tamsyn. ‘You were going to say I met a sexy vicar and I fancy him, you love the sexy vicar, you love the sexy vicar! Tamsyn and Jed, sitting in a tree …’

  ‘I do not love him!’ Tamsyn protested. ‘But you have to admit, he is quite attractive. I mean, it’s his fault, really, that I accused him of fathering an illicit love child. If he looked like a vicar was supposed to look, then it never would have occurred to me.’

  ‘Tamsyn Isobel Thorne,’ Laura said. ‘I thought I’d brought you up not to judge a book by its cover.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to judge his cover, Mum,’ Cordelia smirked.

  ‘No, she wants to rip it off,’ Keira added, and her sisters cackled like a pair of little fiends.

  ‘Girls!’ Laura shushed, tutting loudly. ‘Well, you are going to have to go and apologise,’ she told Tamsyn. ‘Reverend Hayward is officiating at your brother’s wedding in a couple of days. We can’t have you standing at the f
ront in your bridesmaid’s dress with this accusation hanging between you.’

  ‘It’s not an accusation she wishes was hanging between them,’ Keira said, making Cordelia stuff a pillow into her mouth to stop her howls of laughter.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Tamsyn told her sisters. ‘And, fine, I will apologise to him. In the morning. Or maybe when I’m back in Paris, by letter. Everyone likes to get a letter.’

  ‘You will go and do it now,’ Laura said. ‘I brought you up properly. You may have ignored me, most of the time, but I still did it. Go and say sorry.’

  ‘I smell of baby sick!’ Tamsyn pleaded.

  ‘She can’t go and tell him she loves him smelling of baby sick,’ Keira said.

  ‘Fine, go and have a shower, and then come back and Cordelia will sort you out some fresh clothes, and then it will be time for Mo’s feed and you can go downstairs and get the bottle and say sorry at the same time. You have ten minutes.’

  ‘Can I straighten my …?’

  ‘Now!’ Recognising her mother’s don’t-mess-with-me tone, Tamsyn grabbed a towel from the hook on the back of the door and hurried down a level of twisting stairs to the bathroom opposite Meadow’s bedroom. She shut the door and stood there for several seconds, getting the distinct feeling that she had forgotten something. And then she realised. It was the weight of Mo in her arms that she was missing.

  Tamsyn stood outside the kitchen a little after two a.m. and listened to the sound of voices. There were fewer now; she could only hear her brother and Alex. And Jed. Just the three of them in there, only two of whom she had mortally offended. Which was pretty good for her: most of the times she walked into a room she could be reasonably sure that at least seventy-five per cent of the people in there hated her. Actually, now she came to think of it, she realised that two out of three was almost seventy-five per cent. This wasn’t fair; Ruan had his reasons, but Jed, he was supposed to be all about forgiveness and love and … not that sort of love. Nice love, sensible love. Love that could take a wild accusation of loose morals and move on, no big deal.