The next morning in the Portsmouth Cathedral rectory, there was the usual hubbub. Mrs. Owseyfather, the stout housekeeper and keeper of the bishop’s Guinness and Dogs Bollix Ale, was busy preparing breakfast for the priests and a separate morning repast for the bishop, who ordinarily isolated himself in his side of the big house. The other side of the massive (if you pardon the Catholic pun) rectory accommodated two priests and a deacon and then, there was Father Mike, with whom even the bishop was wary, and this priest without portfolio wandered within the rectory wherever the fancy took him.
The two priests and deacon sat around the breakfast table waiting to be fed by the comfortably plump, no-nonsense housekeeper who, just as the telephone rang, crashed down a dish of scrambled eggs a
