Chapter 1 The Restless Heart

Thea Shaw had come to Calderwick for a job. She had not expected to hear that voice again.

Ten days before she was due to start at Calderwick University, Thea Shaw arrived in the city with a signed contract and her teaching timetable already settled.

That left her a little time to look around.

Whitestone was the oldest part of Calderwick, a tangle of four streets between the river and two tributaries, with three hills rising behind it. Above the archway into the old quarter, a carved panel showed the town at the height of its prosperity: crowds by daylight, a thousand lamps after dark.

At seven in the morning, there was neither.

The shops were still shuttered. Mist lay over the cobbles, cool enough to make each breath feel clean. Thea and her friend walked deeper into the old town.

After ten minutes, other people began to join them.

“St Anselm's is popular with the locals,” her friend said. “People go up to light a candle before work. The tourists start arriving about nine, so everyone who lives here gets it over with early. There's a retreat day today, too.”

Thea nodded. Through the trees, she could just make out the abbey roof halfway up the hill. She and her friend walked slowly, letting the people in a hurry pass.

Thea wasn't religious. She liked churches, though. Whenever she visited somewhere new, she made a point of looking inside one.

“You could light a candle,” her friend said. “A little help settling in. There's a talk this morning, if you have nothing else to do.”

“Do you believe in any of it?”

“No.” Her friend smiled. “But the talks are usually good. An hour of beautifully arranged words isn't a bad way to pass the time. Have they decided what you're teaching?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Medieval literature. And an option on Chaucer.”

“Your own territory, then?”

“I proposed two options. Chaucer, and the history of Christian thought. They chose Chaucer.”

“Good for you.” Her friend sounded briefly wistful. “All those years studying, and now you actually get paid to do what you like. The rest of us just smell of money.”

Thea smiled. “We all smell of something. Money, if that's what we love. Bookworms, if we love books.”

Her friend laughed. “True enough.”

By then they had reached the abbey gate.

There was very little level ground in Calderwick. St Anselm's occupied the slope above the town, its entrance giving onto more than a hundred stone steps. At the top, the morning sky shone so brightly that Thea had to narrow her eyes.

They climbed past a small chapel, crossed a cloister, and went up again. Outside the abbey church, a broad stone basin stood between two beds of lavender. A trace of incense drifted through the open door.

Thea sat beneath the arcade, facing the people going in to pray.

She wasn't much of a talker. Her friend knew that, and left her there while she went to explore.

From the hillside, Thea could see the old town through the overlapping roofs. The sun was coming out now. Light caught the leaves of two ancient trees beside the church and turned them bright as metal.

Shortly before nine, she got up. She wandered along two passages and climbed a few more steps, eventually finding the old chapter house.

A man sat at its centre.

Rows of chairs faced him. Behind him, a gilded image of Christ watched from the wall, one hand raised in blessing. The room was spacious and quiet, with a lingering scent of incense. The man turned a page of his book.

Thea stayed in the doorway.

He looked up.

“Here for the talk?”

“Yes.” She pressed her lips together. She was looking straight at him.

“It starts at ten. You're early.”

Behind him, the painted face remained grave and gentle.

Thea shifted her weight.

“May I sit here until then?”

He inclined his head. “Of course.”

She went in and chose a chair at the far left, as close to the corner as she could get.

Silence settled around her. Somewhere a bell sounded, so distant she couldn't be certain she was still hearing it. The incense came and went.

Thea was annoyed with herself.

She knew perfectly well that staring this openly was rude. He had once stood at the front of a room full of students while she sat unnoticed at the back; that gave her no right to stare at him now. In ten minutes, she had spent at least five looking at him, in three separate attempts to stop.

First, there was his age.

She knew he was thirty-five. She had looked him up years ago, with an embarrassment that returned intact whenever she remembered it. Yet at first glance he might have been twenty-five or twenty-six; then he looked older, and then younger again.

Surely thirty-five should look older than this.

Yet men of twenty-five were often restless, too sure of themselves, full of the conviction that the world was theirs to take. He had none of that. He was as still as the candle burning beside the painted Christ.

And there was something old about him, too. Not weariness, or the disappointment people accumulated and called experience. Only a quiet that seemed to have survived a great deal without turning bitter. He had the settled weight of the stone basin outside.

Then there was his face.

Long brows. Dark eyes. A straight nose and a mouth drawn in a thin, unsmiling line. His features were sharp enough to make him look unapproachable.

Taken on their own, they might even have looked severe. But something in his manner softened them. It made her want to come nearer.

Not, she told herself, as a woman might want to approach a man.

More as someone outside a church might be drawn towards its light.

Finally, there was the question of what he was doing here.

The philosopher she remembered was giving a talk in an abbey. He still wasn't a monk. No habit, no clerical collar. Not even a cross that she could see.

Thea wasn't certain he believed in God at all.

The faithful usually approached places like this with a particular care, a reverence that entered even the way they handled a book. He was reading attentively, but without ceremony. There was an ease about him that she couldn't account for.

Still, here he was.

Thea let out a careful breath and dragged her gaze away.

She had done it again.

He appeared not to have noticed.

She lowered her head and examined the worn seam of the chair cushion. The room was so quiet that she was beginning to find the quiet itself unsettling.

Her phone vibrated.

The sound was astonishingly loud. She silenced it at once, without even checking who was calling.

At the front of the room, the man turned another page at the same unhurried pace.

Thea looked at the screen. Her friend.

She sent a message.

*In the chapter house. Waiting for the talk. Can't answer here.*

As she finished typing, voices began to gather around her.

The monks came in first, about ten of them. They greeted the man in twos and threes before taking the front row. Then came the regular worshippers, the visitors, small groups still talking as they found their seats.

Her friend appeared in the doorway, looked around, and spotted her in the corner.

“How long have you been here?” she whispered, making her way through the room.

“Not long.”

Her friend took the next chair and leaned forward to see past the people in front.

“He's young.”

Thea made a small sound of agreement.

By twenty to ten, every chair was occupied. At ten to, the conversations began to fade. At ten, the room was silent.

Someone eased the heavy doors shut. The light dimmed.

“Today,” the man said, “we'll consider providence.”

Something tightened in Thea's chest.

His voice was low and even, with a faint roughness beneath it. She was too far away to make out his face now. In the reduced light, he was little more than an outline.

“We tend to speak of providence as though it were an explanation waiting at the end of every event. This happened because it was meant to happen. That person came into our lives because God sent them. It is a comforting thought. It can also be a way of refusing to admit how little we know.”

He paused.

“None of us came into this room without a history. A decision, a conversation, a missed train. Some of you came to pray. Some came because a friend asked you. When you leave, something you hear today may go with you. It may alter a choice you make tomorrow. Or it may not.

“To trust in providence is not to pretend we can see the whole of that pattern. Nor does it absolve us of choosing. We remain responsible for what we do, and for the harm we cause. But responsibility is different from possession. We can act with care without demanding that life give us the result we have decided it must.

“Augustine wrote: *Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.* Our hearts know no rest until they come to rest in you.

“Notice that he speaks of rest. Not mastery. Perhaps we begin there: with the possibility that peace does not require us to hold everything still.”

Thea glanced around.

There were people listening with the concentration of long belief, and people whose faith plainly exceeded their understanding. Others were looking at the room, at the windows, at their watches. Some believed. Some didn't. All of them had come.

She turned back towards the voice.

Little by little, her unease subsided.

The talk lasted an hour. At the end, he said, “Some of you may have come hoping to take away an argument for faith. But prayer isn't a way of winning an argument. At some point, the mind has to let the heart speak.”

Thea smiled before she could help it.

Outside, her friend asked, “Well?”

“Deep waters,” Thea said. “A very high mountain.”

“That's quite a review. Though I'm not sure the geography works.”

“The water was the talk,” Thea said. “The mountain was the man.”

They followed the arcade past the right side of the church. Beneath one of the old trees, the man stood talking to the abbot.

They had to pass close to him.

Their eyes met. The abbot nodded a greeting; they returned it and went on.

At this distance, the man's brows looked even sharper. Thea felt the brief, absurd sensation of something passing very near her heart.

Above them, red ribbons moved among the branches, startlingly bright in the sunlight.

It was a summer morning full of noise and stillness.

She could hear the insects in the trees.

She could hear her own heartbeat more clearly.

At the church door, she stopped.

“Shall we go in?”

“To pray?”

“Yes.”

“That's new.”

Thea said nothing. She went in through the side door and sat for a moment beneath the high, quiet roof. Then she lit a candle.

Somewhere beyond the screen, a bell sounded.

On their way down, an elderly woman at a little stall held out a ribbon with a small wooden tag attached.

“For someone to love, dear?”

Thea stopped short.

Her friend laughed.

Before Thea could refuse, her friend had taken the tag and put a coin in the woman's tin. The handwritten sign said the money would help repair the guest-house roof.

“Definitely time for one of these.” She handed it over. “It's a local custom. The abbey tolerates it. You throw it into the tree. The higher it catches, the better your chances.”

Thea took it, pressing her lips together. With the pencil tied to the stall, she wrote a few words on the wooden tag: *Somewhere for my heart to rest.* She kept it turned towards her palm until her friend looked away.

She gave it a careless toss.

The tag flew up, grazed a branch, and sailed straight through.

It landed with a small wooden clatter at a man's feet.

Tall. Still. Impossibly composed.

Their eyes met again.

He bent and picked up the ribbon.

For a moment, Thea forgot to move. Then she walked over, making herself look calm, and took it from his hand.

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

A slight inclination of his head. He passed her and went on.

Her friend joined her, smiling.

“Well. That wasn't awkward at all.”