‘My mother loved that brother of hers. She preserved all his notes, the ones he made as a student at Cambridge. And the sermons too, all carefully annotated … let me show you—’ Serena unlocks the Chinese chest. Flat boxes repose within its recesses. Christian theology to confound the knowledge of Confucius. She opens the boxes with great care. Each sermon is preserved intact. Tied neatly with yarn meant for her weaving. Blue yarn. She, Serena’s mother, was dilettantish. She could afford to be. Tried everything—weaving, designing furniture, painting, singing, but nothing left its impact on history. She was a woman of her era where wealth gave her the privileges of living abroad and studying under European masters, then returning to her country, her inherited estates and properties with an English governess for her son. The evidence is there. The documentation. The whole house belongs to Serena’s mother. Everything that is here is hers. And her ghost watches the two women, Serena and Lydia.

Each sermon is preserved intact. Tied neatly with yarn meant for the sister’s weaving. Blue. A deep royal blue. The dryad looms are now breaking up—left unused for years. Tapestries woven in the past gather dust in some hidden corner of the house.

‘My uncle was a young curate in Hampstead. Every sermon he preached in that parish still remains. He returned to the country of his birth. Rose high in the hierarchy of the Anglican Church.’

Serena places the box of sermons in Lydia’s hands. She opens it. Yellowing pages like some faded moth. The writing is meticulous. There is a pattern of thought. Clarity and simplicity, no confusion, no abstruse, complex, mind-confounding theology. Each detail in that fine, almost scholarly script. Recorded history: the church he preached in, the dates, the places, the subject; churches and cathedrals in England—Cirencester—and in his own country where once the coffee gardens had flourished, before they were blighted by the pest that devastated thousands of acres. The cash crops of the new colonial economy ushered in.

‘My uncles were in trade,’ Serena explains.

A special calling in the Anglican Church for this uncle. His sermons are preached in every Anglican church built by the British missionaries. The Church of St. Paul, St. Michael, St. John, St. Jude, St. James, Holy Trinity. Sermons of half a century ago. Lydia gently takes up one of the sermons and reads: