Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [5]
Stephenson grinned. “How does she manage communion wine, then?”
“It’s consecrated, and the evil of the grape has been taken out.”
The doctor chuckled, then poured his own glass. “Yes, well, the mind is a wonderful thing, wonderful.”
“It’s about the mind I’ve come,” Father James said slowly.
“Oh, yes?” Stephenson sipped his sherry with relish, letting it warm him.
“I’d like to ask you if Herbert Baker was in full control of his faculties when he called me to him on his deathbed.”
“Baker? Yes, well, that was an odd business, I daresay. But he was dying of congestive heart failure, and his mind was, as far as I could tell, clear to the end of consciousness. Any reason why you feel it might not have been?” His voice lifted on a query. Stephenson was a man who liked his own life and that of his patients as tidy as possible.
“No,” the priest replied. “On the other hand, I’m seldom asked to second-guess Mr. Sims’s parishioners. Or he mine, for that matter. It was curious, and I found myself wondering about it afterward. Baker most certainly appeared in full control, though understandably weak. Still, you never know.”
“Which reminds me,” Stephenson said, turning the subject to something on his own mind. “There’s one of your flock I do want to talk about. Mrs. Witherspoon. She’s been refusing to take her pills again, and I’m—er—hanged if I can understand it.”
The priest smiled. “There’s a challenge for you. At a guess, I’d say that when she feels a little stronger, she’s convinced she doesn’t need them. Then she feels unwell again and quickly takes two to make up for it. A good-hearted woman, but not overly blessed with common sense. If I were you, I’d have a talk with her husband. She pays more heed to what he says than to anyone else. The sun shines out of Mr. Witherspoon, in her view.”
The ironmonger was the most lugubrious man in Osterley.
Stephenson laughed. “The eye of the beholder. Well, there’s a thought. That woman will make herself seriously ill if she doesn’t heed someone!” He looked at his wine, golden in the little glass. “I had a patient once who swore that sherry was Spanish sunlight caught in a bottle. Never been to Spain myself; I’m hard-pressed to escape for a few hours in Yarmouth. But there’s most certainly medicinal magic in it.” He finished the wine, then said, “How are those triplets of yours?”
Father James beamed. The triplets were his younger sister’s children and lived some distance away. “Thriving. Sarah is coping, with the help of two nuns I found for her, and every member of the family we can dragoon into service. I’ve done my own turn walking the floor at night. I expect those boys will be holy terrors by the time they’re eight. Their father was something of a devil himself at twelve!”
Stephenson said, “Aren’t we all? But responsibility comes soon enough.”
The priest’s face changed subtly. “It does. I’ll be on my way, then. Get some rest, you look as if you could use it!”
Watching him out the door, Stephenson had the curious feeling that Father James should take his own advice.
Nearly two weeks had passed since the funeral. Stephenson, rested and busy, had long since put Herbert Baker out of his mind when he took his wife to visit friends.
It was a dinner party like a dozen others the doctor attended with some enthusiasm whenever he could. There were eight couples, and he’d known all of them for years. Comfortable with each other, sharing a common history, they had found in one another a companionship that had few boundaries. Stephenson could count most of them as his patients, and his wife had sat on committees of one sort or another with every one of the women—church bazaars, flower arrangements, food baskets for the poor, spring fetes, charity cases, visiting the sick, welcoming