Holy Matrimony
by Chris Cottom
[this is the second in the five part series–
read Good and Faithful Servent from the beginning, here]
When anyone pressed her, and she tried hard to make sure they did not, Rose told them she’d married in her twenties. The God who’d invented time wouldn’t mind that this wasn’t completely accurate. Anyway He clearly loved her, sparing Edwin from the Orient and calling him instead to Buckinghamshire and the living of St John the Baptist in Little Pulford. Here Rose found herself expected to chair the Flower Guild, the Young Wives Group and even the Mothers’ Union.
‘But I’m not a mother,’ she said, although she hoped to be. On their wedding night, Edwin had explained how he believed priests should reserve the sexual act for procreation, not recreation.
The previous vicar and his wife had retired to a bungalow in Hastings. Accordingly, Rose took immediate charge of two henhouses and their dozen or so residents, a pond on which four white ducks held their daily business meetings, and an irascible nanny goat called Proserpina. To these, she and Edwin added a ginger tomcat called Ptolemy and a cocker spaniel puppy they named Zillah. Edwin soon barred the latter from his study after she gnawed the spine of the ancient leather-bound Book of Common Prayer, so large it would fit only on the bottom shelf of his enormous bookcase.
One morning, after they’d been at Little Pulford for six months, Rose collected five warm brown eggs from under her hens. I’ll have time to milk Proserpina and lay the fire in the dining room before the service, she thought, happy that today she and Edwin would have the vicarage to themselves, without their daily woman, the daunting Mrs Harrop, chattering as she clomped around doing the heavy cleaning. Rose wondered what her severe and remote papa would think of her new life, wedded as he’d always been to a full complement of servants, indoors and out.
As she turned back towards the house, she saw Edwin walking through the garden towards the church for Matins. The mist hung low and, in his long black cassock, he appeared to be floating across the lawn. When he disappeared through the yew trees into the churchyard, the sexton began tolling the single bell high in the flinty tower to summon the faithful. In that moment Rose felt washed with a sense of peace, understanding that this was the life to which her heavenly father had called her, to serve Him here alongside Edwin in this draughty Victorian vicarage. It was too bad if her earthly father had never countenanced his daughter’s delicate fingers being chafed winter-raw through tugging the teats of a recalcitrant nanny goat before breakfast. Although right now she’d be thankful if God could see his way to the minor miracle of healing her chilblains.
Rose taught the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed to the grubby-kneed boys and smock-frocked girls of the Sunday School. She visited the poor with a basket on her arm, dispensing eggs and kindness, rhubarb from the kitchen garden, and tracts from Scripture. She lifted broth to the lips of the infirm, and made chasubles, altar frontals, and a Girls’ Brigade banner with golden tassels. In the evenings she embroidered hassocks and repaired surplices. She ferried cups of tea to Edwin and his visitors in his study and, before they’d celebrated their first wedding anniversary, presented him with a son, after a labour in which she feared she’d screamed loud enough to waken the churchyard dead. They named the boy Roland, after Rose’s eldest brother, lost at Gallipoli, the uncle the child would never know.
More of the 2024 FLASH SUITE Contest
What’s New at Defenestrationism.net
home/ Bonafides
by 
by
Our sphere