Abi smiled. The affection in Cal’s voice was very genuine.

‘Justin seems a difficult man,’ she said after a pause. ‘Yes, I do find him attractive, but I didn’t take to him. I’m amazed Ben would recommend I get in touch with someone like that. Surely it goes against everything he should be doing to keep me in the church.’

Cal laughed. ‘Justin’s not that bad! No, I expect he was a bit acerbic when you met him! After all, you caught him in the act. He would much rather have slipped in and slipped out again. It is going to be much harder for him to use the library from now on. What Mat didn’t see, he didn’t worry about.’

‘Why should Mat begrudge him the library? Surely Justin could come when Mat is not here.’

‘Dog in the manger.’ Cal laid two more roses on the pile in the basket. ‘I’ve got two bed and breakfast visitors coming this weekend.’ She changed the subject abruptly. ‘So I thought I would make the house look nice. They won’t get in your way, so don’t worry. They will only be here at breakfast time.’

‘I was supposed to be helping you with things like that,’ Abi put in. ‘You must let me do things to pay my way.’

‘The bishop is paying your way, Abi,’ Cal said firmly. ‘So no more of that nonsense. You are a double joy. A nice guest, a good friend and you bring a bit of lovely money!’ She laughed. ‘Sorry. Does that sound too crude?’

Abi smiled. ‘Not at all. But I’m glad the friend bit crept in there. I was afraid I was causing you too much hassle what with my ghosts and Kier and everything.’

‘They are our ghosts too,’ Cal reminded her gently. ‘And as for Kier, well, he makes life more interesting, to be honest!’ She headed for the next flowerbed and began to cut some Michaelmas daisies. ‘Quite exciting, in fact. Wretched man!’

For a moment Abi thought about returning to the fascinating topic of Justin, but she swiftly thought better of it. Cal had changed the subject. Better to let it rest.

When she went back indoors Abi walked on down towards the ruins. The sun was low in the sky again, highlighting the colour of the autumn leaves. Sitting down on the bench, her fingers lying lightly on the crystal stone in her coat pocket, she saw the robin hop at once nearer, watching her with a beady black eye.

Suddenly it flew away. Something moved on the edge of her vision near the archway. She leaned forward. ‘Mora?’

She was there, an insubstantial shadow, no more. Barely visible against the spray of scarlet Virginia creeper. Abi clutched at the stone in her pocket. ‘Mora? Can you see me?’ She was overwhelmed with relief and anxiety.

The young woman was less hazy now, her outline distinct. She was wearing a light-coloured rough woollen robe with a greeny-grey cloak around her shoulders, the hood draped over her hair. She took a step towards Abi and Abi was aware that Mora’s eyes were fixed on her face. Slowly she stood up and took first one then another step towards her, as cautious as she would have been approaching the robin which had retreated to a tree nearby and was making anxious little alarm calls.

‘Mora?’ Abi whispered the name. ‘Can you see me?’ Slowly she reached out her hand.

The colours in the garden leached away suddenly. Abi glanced up at the sun. A huge cloud had drifted across its face. She looked back at the flowerbed. Mora had gone.

‘Blast!’ She sighed. Then she reached into her pocket again and drew out the stone. ‘Mora? Was this yours?’ The robin bobbed up and down and flew closer. ‘Please, come back. I want to talk to you.’

There was no response.

She waited a long time before she turned and walked back to the house.

The kitchen was empty. Abi glanced at the two flower arrangements standing on the table. The late roses had been distributed between them. They were beautiful but there was no sign of Cal in any of the downstairs rooms. Slowly she made her way up the staircase and paused on the landing. Cal was coming out of her bedroom. ‘Abi! I’m sorry. I should have locked the front door. I don’t think he touched anything. He left the second he heard me come upstairs.’

‘What? Who?’ Abi felt a clutch of fear in the pit of her stomach. ‘Not Kier?’

Cal nodded. She stepped away from Abi’s door. ‘The cheek of the man!’

Abi went into her room and stood staring round. ‘What was he doing?’

‘He was standing by the chest of drawers when I came up. None of the drawers was open or anything. As soon as he heard me he came out of the room, gave me a half-apologetic, half-embarrassed smile and raced down the stairs and out of the front door. I must have left it open. I often do. He didn’t say anything!’

Abi shivered. She opened the top drawer and looked inside. It was there she kept her underwear. It was impossible to tell if anything had been touched. Surely he wasn’t that sort of man. What on earth can have possessed him to take a risk like this?

Cal shook her head. ‘What did he want? He could see you weren’t in here. Did he just want to be near you?’

Abi sat down on the edge of the bed and felt the bump of the Serpent Stone in her jacket pocket against her thigh. She extricated it and stared down at it. ‘I wonder,’ she said after a moment, ‘if he was looking for this.’ She turned it over in her hands. ‘It might explain why when he saw I wasn’t here he might have decided to look round. If my father has told him about this and shown any of the fury and antagonism about it he showed me, then there was more than enough reason for Kier to try and find it.’

‘If you’re right, what would he have done with it if he had found it, I wonder?’ Cal said thoughtfully.

Abi gave a rueful smile. ‘Goodness knows, but I think you can be certain I wouldn’t have seen it again.’

‘You will have to hide it somewhere better than that,’ Cal said. ‘You can’t risk it.’

Abi stared at her. ‘You think he’ll come back?’ She nodded in answer to her own question. ‘Of course he will. You’re right. If this is what he’s after he will probably get obsessed by it the way he does about everything.’

‘You could go to the police, Abi,’ Cal said after a few moments’ thought. ‘The man is stalking you.’

Abi shook her head. ‘I can’t. Think of the scandal. He was rummaging through my knicker drawer. Two priests in the Church of England. Ex-priests. Lust. Passion. The Occult as you called it. We’d have the nation’s press camped on the doorstep within hours.’

Cal nodded. ‘It might put off my B & B guests, certainly.’ They both laughed uncomfortably. ‘I’ll remember to lock the front door in future. If we had been indoors we would have heard him. He must have known Mat and the dogs were out.’

‘Which means he’s been watching the house.’ Abi glanced towards the window. ‘Oh God, I hate this!’

‘Do you want to go and stay with Ben?’ Cal eyed her sympathetically. ‘Just for a few days. Kier won’t hang around forever.’

Abi shook her head again. ‘No, he’d guess where I’d gone at once. Besides, I am not going to let him chase me away.’ She hesitated. ‘Unless you would rather – ’

‘I’ve told you before.’ Cal headed for the door. ‘You can stay here for as long as you like.’

‘It will be good if you’ve got guests this weekend, though, Cal.’ Abi followed her to the staircase. ‘More cars outside. More people in the house at night.’

‘And I’ll make sure Mat leaves the dogs here when he goes out. They may not be the world’s greatest guard dogs, but they do bark at the right moment.’ Cal reached over and touched her arm. ‘Don’t worry. You have the Cavendish clan behind you. If he comes back we’ll be ready for him. He’s not going to be allowed to pester you and he’s not going to find your stone. I can show you somewhere to hide it which Kier will never find in a million years.’

It was in the garden. Cal left Abi to tuck the stone away and walked back to the house. Abi watched her go with a fond smile, then, almost without realising she had done it she turned aside to the bench and sat down, with it still in her hands. ‘What happened?’ she whispered. ‘Mora? Romanus? What happened next?’

‘Tell me about Judea. I’ve never been anywhere very far from here. My sister was born near there, wasn’t she?’ Romanus and Flavius were walking side by side now, the horse’s rein over Romanus’s shoulder, the horse plodding behind them. The fog had grown thicker.

Flavius nodded. ‘Indeed she was. My first posting when I was a young man was to the service of Herod the Great in Jerusalem. I was in the legion which went to Galilee to put down the uprising at a town called Sepphoris. We taught them a lesson they wouldn’t forget in a hurry. I was noticed by my commanding officer and selected to join an elite force of undercover agents and we were ordered to look for a family of insurrectionists who claimed to be descendants of King David. They were expecting the birth of a child who people claimed would inherit the throne according to some sort of prophecy. The Jews are always talking about prophecies.’ He shook his head disparagingly. ‘Herod knew they would use it as an excuse to revolt again, so our mission was to find the kid and kill it.’

Romanus frowned. ‘A baby?’

‘Yes. A baby who would grow up to be a traitor.’

‘And did you?’

‘As it turned out, no. We killed a good few babies while we looked, but it turned out none of them was the right one. The parents knew we were after them and they fled to Egypt. It took us a while to find out. All the time we were a few steps behind them. They returned to their home town eventually, but they were protected all the time by people who knew about this wretched prophecy of theirs and hid them, and the boy grew up and left home.’

‘And this is the man you are searching for now?’ Romanus was frowning.

‘That’s it. He’s dangerous.’

‘But how can a healer be dangerous?’