The party, meanwhile, is about twenty-eight hours away. Over the weeks since I suggested it, more and more has been taken out of my hands until my only job, apart from the Herculean cleaning task, has been to fetch booze and crisps from Waltham. Lady Brock, aided by Lucy Horne, has presided over a guest list that has swelled to encompass the whole village. “Oh, they won’t all come,” she says, dismissing my anxiety with a flap of her hand. I’ve had no more control over the catering than I have over the guest list. The Sunday school children will make a nonalcoholic punch, and there will be sausage rolls. There are always sausage rolls, apparently, at the vicar’s party, homemade by Deirdre Harper from the Women’s Institute who, I remember being told by Lady Brock, sustains the elderly who can’t cook for themselves. “Get that range of yours going nice and early on the day, if you don’t mind, Reverend,” Mrs. Harper told me when I took her the cash for the makings. “A good reliable fire.” She gave me a sharp look. “I’m not going to all this trouble for them to be served anything but piping hot.”

Therefore I am this very morning installing a new flue damper in the range. Nobody needs to tell me I’m courting disaster, leaving it so late. Luckily I’ve got the help of William Kennet, caretaker at Upton Hall School. He’s a man apparently hewn from walnut wood, with a very old and terrible wound to his right hand. The ingrained sunburn is from his days as gardener at Upton Hall when Lady Brock still lived there. I met Mr. Kennet a fortnight ago, when Lady Brock invited me to the sheepdog trials, spending a few pleasant hours in his company as he explained to me the various challenges of the trial: the drive, the fetch, the shed. This last entails, by means of a canny dip and weave on the part of Lamp or Mist or Sweep (sheepdogs’ names being of high tradition), the extraction of a single red-collared sheep from his unmarked fellows. It’s how to get a bad ’un out, Mr. Kennet told me as we watched. You could take a tip from Lamp, Vicar, in my opinion. This last remark was directed at my failure to charge one Alice Goodenough with habitual pilfering from the poor box. We take weekly collections on Sundays during service and so the poor box, which hangs unobtrusively on the wall just inside the church doorway, only gets a handful of change. Since Alice Goodenough is herself poor, I see this as more of a shortcut than a theft. William doesn’t approve.

True to his word, it’s precisely nine o’clock when he arrives, carrying not only the flue damper but a large squashy-looking parcel. “This was on your step, Mr. Acton.”