Across the River by Alice Taylor

him, but whether she got to read it all or not I don’t know. She was so delighted that Mossgrove could not be sold that she wasn’t concerned with anything else. But surely Old Hobbs would have filled her in.”
    “You must be joking,” Sarah told him. “Hobbs would only tell you what you needed to know at any given time. He is second to none but measured, down to the last dot. If Kate did not ask, he did not show.”
    “And Martha did not go to him at the time,” Jack remembered.
    “Well, that cooked her goose anyway, because his crowd have always acted for the Phelans and they look after their own.”
    “I remember Kate quoting him at the time about the making of a will, that it needed to protect the wishes of the dead, the rights of the living and the interests of the unborn.”
    “Some job that,” Sarah smiled, “but Old Hobbs probably succeeded. It might be no harm if Kate called to see him and got the lie of the land.”
    “Might be an idea,” Jack agreed, though he felt that as smart as Old Hobbs was, even he could not have anticipated a problem between Peter and Martha away back before Peter was even born.
    Sarah’s next question was thrown out so casually that he knew straightaway that it was the reason she had stayed on.
    “Hear anything about Kate lately?” she asked lightly.
    His heart leapt with anticipation: maybe Kate was expecting. It would be the best news that he could hear. He knew that not having children was a huge disappointment to her, but of course being Kate she did not make a meal out of it. Time was running out though, and if it did not happen soon they could forget about it.
    “She’s in the family way?” he asked hopefully.
    “’Fraid not, or at least not that I know of,” she told him.
    “What is it so?” he asked worriedly. It wasn’t in Sarah’snature to be hedging around, so it had it be something unpalatable.
    “There is a strange rumour going around about herself and Fr Brady,” she said quietly.
    “What!” he demanded in amazement, and his cup clattered into his saucer. “How could a shagging lie like that get out?”
    “Well, the dogs on the street don’t have it, but it’s there.”
    “But who has it?” he demanded.
    “I think that it came from Julia and Lizzy.”
    “The two poisonous old bitches,” he pronounced with feeling.
    “Julia, of course, living across the road from Kate, watches every stir, and Lizzy being Fr Burke’s housekeeper has it in for Kate since the trouble about the school, and needless to mention himself had no love for her either,” Sarah said.
    “How did you come to hear it, because there’d be no way that they’d say that to you?”
    “Jim in the post office tipped me off,” she told him.
    “Good man, Jim, because the sooner this is shot in the head the better,” he said. “Are you going to tell Kate?”
    “No,” she told him to his surprise.
    “But how are you going to get around it so?” he asked.
    “I think that Fr Brady is the right angle to come at it from,” she said slowly.
    “Why so?”
    “Well, he’s always in and out of the house. Kate can’t stop him, but he could slow down on the visiting,” she said.
    “But himself and David are great friends, and he trains the school teams, and they are both caught up in that. It’s understandable that he would be in and out of the place and he living up the street.”
    “I know all that, Jack, but people will talk, and you can’tgive them anything to say.”
    “Well, it’s a fierce state of affairs when we can’t visit each other now without some bitch putting a quare face on it. Is anybody safe from them?” he demanded.
    “When you’re gone past it like the two of us, Jack, you’re dead safe,” Sarah told him.
    “I’m not sure if that’s a comfort or an insult.”
    “Anyway,” she assured him, “the whole thing is no big deal, but I wanted to find out how far it had gone. If Martha had it, you’d have got a slap of it across the face,