Читать книгу The Dream Weavers онлайн | страница 29

Mark was in his study when Bea returned home. She paused outside his door. His room had once been the formal dining room of the house, overlooking the Close with its ancient lime trees and the huge squat shape of the cathedral itself filling the view from the windows, and it made a pleasant study with more than enough space for his desk and his books and chairs for when he needed to use it for private meetings. All was silent behind the door. She turned away to tiptoe upstairs without disturbing him.

While he had been a parish priest they had grown used to living in what they liked to call tied cottages, the last, a small modern house built in the corner of a rapidly expanding rural village, a typical new rectory to replace the long-ago-sold Old Rectory. Since they had moved into the Close, however, home had been this wonderful piece of history. It was one of several houses upgraded for the senior clergy in the early nineteenth century from a range of far older buildings. It had the best of both worlds – the back rooms still felt medieval, the front were late Georgian. Bea loved it.

It was on the attic floor at the back, high under the hipped slate roof, that Bea had made her own sanctuary in a room overlooking their small garden. It was her private domain. She called it her study. This was where she felt safe, where she studied the world that meant so much to her, the world with which she didn’t want to embarrass her husband.

Going in, she quietly closed the door and leaned against it. Up here she kept her books, her notes, her meditation space. There was a large cushion on the floor, candles, framed hand-coloured Arthur Rackham prints, and pictures of sacred landscapes on the walls. She stood staring out of the window across the walled garden towards the huddled roofs of the old town beyond it for a few long minutes then turned back into the room. She needed to think, and by think she meant meditate and pray. Now she was safely home, on her own ground, she wanted to analyse what had happened.