A finer end - Deborah Crombie [35]
She stared at her brother, astounded. “It’s my job to minister to people, parishioners or not. You know that. And I would never have gone to see the girl’s parents without her permission. She’s seventeen years old, for heaven’s sake, and she misses her home and her family!”
“You don’t have a clue what girls are like these days! Or teenagers, for that matter. They’re lazy and they expect the world handed to them on a platter, and this one probably deserved her predicament—”
“That’s absurd—”
“Not to mention the fact that she’s already got a strike against her if she’s involved with these batty friends of yours. And what makes you think this girl’s told you the truth about anything?” Andrew shook his head in disgust. “Since you met Jack Montfort, you seem to have lost all common sense.”
“Andrew, what on earth has got into you?” Then realization dawned. “This isn’t about my work at all! This is about Jack, isn’t it?”
For a moment she thought he would deny it, then he met her eyes. “Glastonbury is a small town, Winnie. People talk. I went to a council meeting last night, and you and Jack Montfort were a great source of speculation. Montfort may have some justification for going off the deep end, but I can’t see that you have any excuse for plunging in with him. I’m surprised that your bishop hasn’t had a discreet word with you about associating yourself with blatant spiritualism—”
“That’s enough!” She pushed back her chair and stood, her bewilderment turning to icy fury. “You’re being bloody offensive, and you don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you’d better go home.”
Andrew stood, too, a little unsteadily, and leaned towards her. “How do you think I feel, being gossiped about? I’ve worked for years to build my reputation in this town—you know how hard it is to get project funding—and now people snigger when they see me and make comments about my sister’s raging hormones causing her to take leave of her senses. They all want to know if you’re sleeping with him—are you sleeping with him, Winnie?”
For the first time since she was nine years old, Winnie raised her hand and slapped her brother across the face as hard as she could.
“Inspector James …”
Gemma said the words aloud as she drove, trying out the sound on her tongue. Heady things, titles. They tempted you to think you were a different person, when in reality the changes were more like the layers of accretion on a pearl. A little more irritation gained you a little more luster, another layer of knowledge, of experience.
Or perhaps she’d wanted the title to make her into a different person—one whose sense of accomplishment wasn’t tempered by her sense of loss. She’d been so busy worrying about how Kincaid would deal with her decision that she’d failed to take her own response to their separation into account. And in spite of her excitement, and the intensity of her focus on her training, she’d felt a constant ache that seemed only to grow more profound with time. She’d come to think of it as the equivalent of the phantom-limb syndrome—she found herself carrying on imaginary conversations with him throughout the day. It was as if their thought processes had become permanently intertwined. Even when they’d been apart in the course of a job, investigating different avenues on a case, she’d been constantly filing away mental references to share with him.
Kincaid had reacted the way she’d expected, his initial dismay turning quickly to angry bewilderment. “Doesn’t our partnership mean anything to you?” he had asked, and her justifications had sounded weak in her own ears. He’d pulled himself together, of course, had even tried to be understanding and supportive—but he had withdrawn from her. During her last weeks of training in Hampshire, she’d rung him a few times and their conversations had consisted of pleasantly