The Tree of Knowledge

A seraphic seminarian, Nigel Stanyon, is lured from pulpit-bound rectitude by Belle, a siren spun from venomous silk; she drinks his savings, his virtue, his future, then vanishes like smoke over a battlefield. Ruin ushers him into the mossy embrace of Brian’s ancestral acres, where furrowed earth and tenant cottages become his reluctant congregation. Idyll curdles when Brian returns from foreign latitudes towing a blushing bride—none other than the rapacious Belle—turning the estate’s manicured hedgerows into a thorny arena of resurrected lust, corroded trust, and spiritual attrition. The triangle tightens: a fallen man of cloth, a genteel patron blind to the serpent in his salon, and a woman whose beauty is sharpened to a stiletto, each orbiting the others in a slow, pre-Code dance of damnation.