“I don’t believe in magic,” Hirshfield Chatterley-Blackman, the Bishop of Oxford, grumbled at his manservant, Rowland. “I never have. All that business about getting naked out on the heath in the rain. The women I know wear at least ten articles of clothing at any given time.”

Rowland was kneeling at Hirshfield’s feet, buttoning up his gaiters. He coughed an assent.

“In fact, make that twenty. You wouldn’t catch my sisters going around in puris naturalibus, would you? No one would do it, not even imbeciles like Howson. Do you know how much trouble that man has caused me?” The grumble escalated to a bellow.

“England is full of nice, quiet parishes, thick with vicars who do no more than shag the occasional parishioner or fall into the ditch, cock-eyed on drink, but I am the one who ends up with Howson. The man won’t listen to reason. Not a bit of it. This is as mad as that supposed brothel he discovered a few months ago.”

Rowland murmured something before he came to his feet with a slight creaking of joints.

“I suppose he thinks that the gal is out at night lopping off toad fingers and hedgehog whiskers and all the rest of that rot that’s supposed to go into a cauldron,” the bishop—known to his intimates as Chatty—moaned. “At nine years old!”

Rowland said something, the clearest word of which was “earl.”

“That’s bloody right,” Chatty said, twitching his tippet out of his man’s hands. “Let go, that’s good enough. Reeve may be illegitimate, but he’s the by-blow of a peer and that makes all the difference. That’s the sort of thing Howson doesn’t understand. You don’t interfere with nobility.”

He tramped gloomily along a passage leading from the vicarage to the church’s vestry behind the chancel, trying to remember where he’d hidden his flask the last time he had to visit, during the orphanage debacle. It was in the vestry room somewhere.

Hurried footsteps sounded in the passage, and Rowland interrupted his search. “My Lord,” he panted. “You forgot your cross.”

“Right,” Chatty said testily. “I’ll put it on.” Whenever he had to face a mad churchman, he always wore a great Palatine cross that some long-ago ancestor had brought back from the Crusades. It had a ruby at the top that winked in the light.

He fancied that it gave him an air of authority.

There was no getting around the fact that Howson had a way of commanding the stage. Taking up all the air in the room.

It was all that bloody zeal of his. Zeal was a dangerous thing. Howson’s brain sizzled like a pan of sausages. That energy gave him authority, not to mince words.

“I’d like to mince him,” Chatty muttered to himself.

He headed toward the side door that led into the central nave. The curate stood at door, looking nervous. “Is everyone present?” Chatty asked testily.

“Yes, My Lord Bishop,” the curate said, nodding madly. He pushed open the door and announced, “The Right Reverend Hirshfield Chatterley-Blackman, the Lord Bishop of Oxford.”

Chatty marched to his velvet-cushioned seat looking neither left nor right. He’d just realized that he’d never found his flask after the distraction of putting on the cross, and brandy was the only thing that might make these proceedings bearable.

Before he got his bottom settled on the cushion, Howson leapt in front, blocking his view of the pews.

The vicar looked lean and greasy and full of zeal. Chatty would be the first to admit that he himself had a chin or two too many, but he disliked men who were as thin as pencils on principle. It was indicative of an inadequate diet, and that sort of thing was bad for the brain.

“What did you have for breakfast, Howson?” he asked.

“Cabbage,” Howson replied, and started babbling on about witchcraft.

Cabbage. That explained a lot. Probably gave the man wind, which made it particularly objectionable that he was standing so close.

Unless Chatty was mistaken, Howson was starting to hint at satanic possession. Pretentious ass. As if the devil didn’t have better things to do than run around dressed like a nine-year-old.

If he were the devil, he’d possess a nubile young woman with buxom thighs.

“Stand aside, Vicar,” Chatty said, cutting him off. “I suppose I’d better speak to the girl’s brother, but I’ll tell you freely that I don’t believe there is such a thing as magic in Oxford. Or in England.”

Howson’s eyes bulged with fermented zeal. He was the sort of man who never changed his ideas about anything, no matter the evidence.

“I am servant to a higher truth,” he gasped.

“So am I, and a higher servant than you,” Chatty retorted, silently cursing his brandy-less state.

“In this head,” Mr. Howson said, raising his voice, “is a compendium of knowledge related to terrible matters such as these. There is no cure for this situation!”

Decapitation would cure Howson all right, Chatty reflected. It would solve a lot of problems.

“Move aside,” he said irritably. “I expect you’ve made a double ass of yourself this time.”

“I am a hammer of the Lord,” Howson said, demonstrating an adroit avoidance of the topic.

“I wish you were a bloody glass hammer,” Chatty said. “I’d open the sessions with a bang, I would.”

At last Howson moved so that Chatty could see. His heart sank. The vicar had outdone himself.

That man with his arms crossed over his chest, managing to resemble both a hungry wolf and a duke? That was surely the Earl of Gryffyn’s son. The little spell-caster looked like an angel. And . . .

“Holy Bejabbers!” he burst out, “Eugenia Strange, is that you?”