Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night by James Runcie Read Free Book Online Page B

intelligent women difficult; particularly if they are cleverer than them.’
    ‘None of them are as intelligent as you, of course.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
    Amanda smiled. ‘You’re not sorry at all. You are extremely pleased.’
    ‘Well I do like to be top in some regard. Would you like another glass of wine?’
    ‘That would be kind; although I myself seem to have been displaced from the top spot.’
    ‘Not at all. You are very different women.’
    The waitress arrived with two plates in her hand. ‘Who’s having the daube?’ she asked.
    ‘I am. I’m still cold,’ Amanda replied, before asking, ‘Do you think you’ll marry her?’
    Sidney hesitated.
    Ever since his ordination to the priesthood, he had resigned himself to the idea of celibacy. He could no more imagine a life shared with a German widow than he could with his dazzling friend opposite. Even if he were to marry he was sure that he would make an unsatisfactory husband. He was incapable of concentrating on the traditionally masculine areas of everyday life. He may have been able to translate Herodotus from the Greek but he was not able to drive a car. He could listen to the darkest fears of his parishioners and comfort them in their hours of anxiety, but he was not sure that he could change a fuse. He was hopeless with money, finding that he always had more pressing things to do than go to the bank or pay his bills. No, Sidney had always said to himself in the past; marriage was not for him. He would take as many wedding services as his parishioners required, and marry hundreds of couples in the course of his ministry, but he was destined to remain a bachelor.
    ‘Hildegard is a widow, you will remember. I don’t think she’s ready for marriage.’
    ‘Does that mean that you are?’
    Sidney imagined himself sitting in his study with Hildegard playing the piano in a room across the corridor. He could even picture a small child, a daughter perhaps, standing in the doorway, asking him if he’d help mend her kite.
    ‘Are you going to answer my question?’ Amanda asked.
     
    Snow lay heavy on the tiled roofs, turrets and parapets of Corpus; outlining the cinquefoil lights and gabled dormers of Old Court, that most ancient of all the enclosed areas of Cambridge, as Sidney returned from seeing Amanda on to her train.
    He remembered how the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler had been intrigued by snow crystals, writing a small treatise entitled On the Six-Cornered Snowflake . In 1611 he asked the fundamental question: ‘There must be some definite cause why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation invariably displays the shape of a six-cornered starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or seven?’
    In his treatise, Kepler compared their symmetry with that of honeycombs and Sidney had once heard a sermon that used the miracle of the snowflake as an example of both the simplicity and the complexity of God’s creation. It might be worth reviving that idea, he thought, particularly in this weather. Instead of seeing the mass of snow, the congregation could be persuaded to look into the smallest details of it in order to find God.
    ‘STOP!’
    Sidney did so.
    ‘STAY THERE!’
    A large weight of stone fell from the roof of New Court and landed in front of him.
    ‘Good God, sir,’ cried the porter. ‘You could have been killed.’
    Sidney felt the fear run through him.
    ‘That was close. We’ve had such trouble with the snow, sir. The college is falling apart. Some of the older buildings can’t stand it. It’s the water, you see. It gets into the stone and then freezes and thaws, expands and contracts . . .’
    ‘Yes,’ Sidney cut him off. ‘I understand the process.’
    ‘I’ll get one of the men to clear up. You must have someone watching out for you.’
    ‘I suppose I do.’
    ‘Of course, as a priest, you probably have extra protection. I imagine the angels