‘I’ve a suggestion,’ she said at last, and, sitting down, made her offer.

‘Just until I find somewhere else,’ stipulated Agathe.

‘Of course,’ agreed her sister, knowing there was little likelihood of that.

The next day Agathe Sauze left the Clergy House for the last time, carrying her few possessions in a small suitcase and her meagre savings in a purse tied round her waist, and moved in with her sister.

Chapter 2

It was some weeks after Agathe left the house that Annette began to discover Father Thomas’s ‘ways’.

At first he’d hardly spoken to her, just expected his food to be on the table, his clothes to be laundered and the house to be cleaned. Agathe had taught Annette well and she had no trouble performing these tasks. She kept the house clean and tidy and took messages for the priest when he was out of the house. The first time she had written down a message, Father Thomas had looked at her askance.

‘Where did you learn to read and write?’ he demanded.

‘Please, Monsieur l’Abbé,’ she replied, addressing him as he had stipulated that she should, ‘Madame Sauze taught me.’

Father Thomas pursed his lips. That interfering old woman again, he thought, but he looked at Annette with new interest in his eyes. She was young, not more than eighteen, and had a certain awkward prettiness. She was, of course, a child of shame, dumped as a newborn bundle on the doorstep at St Luke’s. As such, obviously conceived in sin, she was hardly worthy of thought, and provided with bed and board, she was paid a few sous a month, hardly more than a slave.

Over the next few weeks things began to change. To his dismay Father Thomas found himself watching her. When she came into the dining room to serve his meals his eyes followed her, aware of the fluid movement of her maturing body unconfined beneath her shapeless, black uniform dress.

Child of the devil, he thought. Conceived in sin and now tempting him as Eve had tempted Adam. For several days he closed his mind to the way she ‘flaunted’ herself, provoking him to sin, but she was there, in the house, and he found it increasingly difficult to ignore her and his own response.

It was on a dark November evening, when she was in the kitchen clearing away the supper dishes before sitting down to her own evening meal, that she suddenly found him at the kitchen door.

‘I am going to a meeting now,’ he said. ‘There is no need to wait up for me.’

This surprised Annette. If Father Thomas had no evening meetings he normally remained in his study, having curtly dismissed her after supper. If he was going out on parish business he expected her to remain downstairs and wait for his return, despite the fact that he always insisted he should lock up himself.