Mrs Henrietta Kennion, the Australian wife of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, had been passing through Yatbury in a carriage on her way home to the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, in the company of her nephew Frank, when they noticed smoke and heard a commotion ahead. Although it was so dreadful a night – she had been up most of it attending the sickbed of an old friend – and it was to be Christmas Eve in the morning and a very busy time indeed in the Church Calendar, she had the carriage stopped. She had been horrified to realize that the fire was at St Aidan’s, in her husband’s diocese, and that the fire, fanned by an unreasonably strong wind, had spread to the Rectory too. She hastened out with Frank into the wet and chaos of the night, and was in time to see, in the reddish, smoky reflected light of flames upon the low clouds overhead, the church steeple with its melting weathercock collapse and fall in upon itself. St Aidan’s and its troublesome rectory had been a thorn in her husband’s side for some time, but all the same it was a most upsetting sight.
‘Magnificent!’ cried Frank – who, Henrietta had to remind herself, was a young man who lived for his art – and he ran back to the coach to fetch the satchel where he kept his sketchbook and charcoal. Thus it was that he missed the sight of George carrying the half-conscious Adela out of the Rectory across the threshold to safety, but in time to see her laid upon the ground, and then the firemen, who seemed hopelessly disorganized, bring two distorted bodies out on their single stretcher. It was a horrible sight: the kind you did not forget. It would not be fitting, in the presence of death, to take out charcoal and draw, though he was tempted. He would record it in his mind for future use.
‘It’s the Reverend Hedleigh,’ said Henrietta, aghast, ‘and his wife. He’s a great trouble to my husband but who could wish an end like this for them?’
‘It will have been from the inhalation of smoke,’ Frank said firmly. ‘They will not have suffered. These are not bodies that struggled to get away,’ and Henrietta was relieved to believe the young man. She was fond of Frank: he saw the best in everything, and so the best tended to happen: saw good where others saw evil. She was glad to have him with her, Frank Overshaw, her sister’s son aged twenty-nine, born in South Australia. He’d come all the way over to England to study for Holy Orders, and then changed his mind, and now he studied art at the Slade, and wrote poetry for little literary magazines. But he was a thoughtful, supportive and practical person, always prepared to make the best of things and share his good nature with anyone who seemed in need of it.
It was Frank who pointed out that the daughter, her face smeared with soot and mud, her hair wet, whose eyes were open but who seemed to be in shock, might be beneath a blanket but was lying on the ground in a thin nightdress on wet muddy ground. Once she was wrapped in Henrietta’s cloak it was Frank who, with the coachman’s help, got Adela to the carriage and settled her there under fur rugs.
A large-boned, practical young woman, who seemed to be the maid at the rectory, and was busy with bandages, told Henrietta there were no immediate friends or relatives, the ambulance had been called but would take its time, and the best thing Henrietta could do was take the girl off somewhere safe and warm. Henrietta said this was what she intended to do. It was fortunate that the maid knew the name of the family solicitor – she had taken letters to the post often enough – and was able to write down the firm’s name slowly but legibly.
So that was how it came to be that when Adela came to open her eyes, it was to discover herself bumping along in a carriage on the road to Wells, all but naked amongst strangers, her hand held by a woman she did not know but who told her she was the wife of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, whom she knew only as her father’s enemy, telling her that her parents were dead.
They asked her what her name was and Adela tried to tell them but, oddly, found she could not. Her lips seemed to be sealed. Adela was a person with a mother and a father; now she was without them she didn’t see how she could claim the name. She had seen the entwined and twisted black shapes on a stretcher and if she thought about it knew what she had seen. Everything from now on would be different. It was not necessarily worse. Dawn was breaking. That suggested breakfast. If she ate she might be able to think.
A young man with watery blue eyes and narrow shoulders was sitting across from her, staring at her. He did not look strong enough to fling her over his shoulders. He had a piece of charcoal in his hand and was drawing her. It seemed a great impertinence. He had a silly expression on his face, a kind of devoted intensity which annoyed her.
‘I’m so sorry, my dear,’ the woman with the big teeth and the large jaw was saying. But she looked kind. She had tears in her eyes. Adela closed hers again.
‘I think she’s in shock,’ she heard the strange woman say. ‘Poor little orphaned thing.’
‘Death shall have no dominion. The body dies, the soul goes on,’ said the young man.
‘Oh please, Frank, none of that Theosophy stuff,’ said Henrietta. ‘Not now. We’re all much too tired. And do put away your artistic things. Just leave the poor girl be.’
‘But this has to be recorded,’ he said. ‘She is an angel, dropped from the skies. An angel in great distress, but look at the purity of that chin, the clarity of the cheekbones. How often in life does this kind of thing happen? I feel we are twin souls. I am blessed. It is karma.’
‘She could do with feeding up,’ said Henrietta. ‘She is much too thin.’
By the time the carriage had reached the moated mediaeval castle that was the Palace of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, Frank Overshaw, unmarried, artist, Theosophist, heir to the hundred-thousand-acre Overshaw Estate in Western Australia, a vast area of scrub and brush, but which included the small town of Overshaw and three working gold mines, announced that he was in love with Adela Hedleigh.
‘Oh don’t be absurd, Frank,’ said the Bishop’s wife, whose brother was Governor of South Australia, whose husband had been the Bishop of Adelaide until promoted to Bath and Wells, who knew nothing about her new ward’s aristocratic connections, and was never one to be nervous of speaking her mind. ‘You have no idea who or what she is. You know nothing about her at all.’
‘She is an angel dropped from heaven,’ he said, stubbornly. ‘She is my destiny.’
Frank tried to take Adela’s hand but she shook his off, instinctively, like a cat might shake off an annoying fly.