Chapter 7

Reverend David Ansell had learned, across ninety-six years of a long and, he believed, faithful life, that the body's eventual failures arrived not as sudden catastrophe but as a slow accumulation of small, private negotiations — a knee that no longer permitted kneeling at the altar rail, a memory that occasionally lost its grip on a name or a date, a heart that had begun, this last year, to remind him with increasing regularity that its service was nearing its conclusion.