Saints and Sinners

Chapter Thirty-Five

Manhattan

New York

"Scotch...on the rocks," Nora Buckingham demanded, sliding onto the high stool in the bar of the Landmark Hotel, on the ninety-first floor, expertly smoothing her dark blue gown beneath her. She smiled apologetically at the woman on the next stool as her skirts brushed against her. "Do excuse me...these things aren't designed for places like this?"

"Obviously not..." Shannon Bateman barely looked up from her cell phone, not sounding in the mood to chat. But the reporter from the New York Times was undeterred, smiling her thanks as the bartender put her drink down in front of her.

"Baptist gentlewomen are allowed to drink...as it happens?" She said, more affably than she would have done in different circumstances. Her wardrobe was modest, but in no way Reformist, and she was tired of explaining that to people. She liked to look elegant, but she was not covering herself up or hiding herself away like some other true believers would have her do. She had a life, although she did not usually frequent bars on her own. But business was business. She looked up at the television screen above the bar, stuck on the rolling news channel, which was rerunning footage of the state funeral from earlier in the day. "And even I think that is all a bit much?"

"Fucking extremists," Shannon muttered under her breath. She was a pretty girl, two years older than Nora at twenty-eight, dressed in white jeans and a pink top. New York was still the most cosmopolitan city in the world, and their modesty laws reflected that reputation for being open to all. So, she was not doing anything wrong by appearing like that in a bar, even if Nora did find it offensive. "And our very own President was right up there...dragging his poor wife around on her lead?"

"Yeah, well...he is a Reformist, isn't he? And presumably, she is too?"

"He'd swallow the Quran if it won him an election...and she is just a doormat," Shannon sneered, clearly not a fan, which intrigued Nora Buckingham. The President's two sons had not campaigned with him, and were known not to be Reformists. But as Bill Bateman had never deliberately used his family to win any votes, the world's media had quite correctly left them alone. Politicians families were always off limits if they stayed out of the limelight in normal circumstances. But Nora had heard about Mrs Shannon Bateman through a mutual friend, and got an inkling that she and her husband, Neil Bateman, were facing up to a messy divorce. Not in itself remotely interesting or particularly newsworthy. Not for a very serious political commentator, at any rate. But the mutual friend, who happened to know the female lawyer handling Shannon Bateman's case, said that Shannon blamed her father-in-law for a number of the problems in her marriage. And that dragged it into the sphere of public interest and made Nora Buckingham think.

"I'd heard that they are both genuinely devout?" Nora commented, trying to make it sound like just one of those hotel bar conversations that people on their own often got into.

"You said you were a Baptist, right? Southern, from your accent...would you change your church just like that and ratchet up the fancy dress, like overnight?"

"No...I'm invested in the congregation I was born into...it's part of me?" Nora responded honestly, because it was something she had thought about, after moving to the big apple. Her church back in Charleston was part of her family and she missed it and the people she knew there, because she had never found another Baptist church like it in New York. She had ended up watching services from Charleston online more often than not, which felt wrong and made her feel slightly guilty. Her father had actually accused her of rejecting her faith, because she was working in what he considered to be an unsuitable occupation for a gentlewoman, not to mention living on her own in the big apple. "But Bateman went to work for Aaron Lumsfield in thirty-two, didn't he?"