Читать книгу The Dream Weavers онлайн | страница 11

She had lost Mark, but she had not lost her interests. She began to attend workshops and seminars, meeting people with the same abilities as herself. She studied healing and spiritual development. She studied ghosts. That was when she realised she had found her true calling.

Boyfriends came and went. No one serious. No one who could ever take Mark’s place. And then, out of the blue, they met again quite by accident and that had been that. She’d put aside her reservations, swept into the giddy passion that carried them into marriage and through his first two parishes, where she had proved herself remarkably good at being a vicar’s wife with two children and a respectable job in a local school.

But her gift never left her, nor did her wish to help the people who needed her services as a healer and a medium. That was a part of her, and she’d told Mark about it before they married. At first he was shocked and incredulous. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that this is all in your head? That you’re imagining it?’

And she had said, yes, of course it had occurred to her, and perhaps he was right, that was all it was. ‘But it is very real to me, Mark. And it works.’ They left it at that.

She knew he was uncomfortable with it, but he had reluctantly accepted his wife’s strange gifts in the end, what else could he do? She had helped him by keeping that side of her life to herself as far as possible. People came to her through quiet recommendations and mostly she worked alone. She was discreet. She never charged. Her grandmother’s advice, to keep schtum, stayed with her; it was the unspoken rule she and Mark both lived by. Most of the time.

Everything changed after it was suggested that his career, his popularity in his parishes, his calm competence and his background in business, had been noticed and that the Dean and Chapter at Hereford Cathedral might view his application for the vacant position as Canon Treasurer with interest. She hadn’t been at all sure what it would mean to give up their sprawling rural parish and move into the Cathedral Close; the idea worried her, but Mark had been so certain this was God’s calling. These days, clergy partners follow their own lives, he assured her. She could still be a teacher.