'Grantchester' Recap: Season 11 Episode 3

Grantchester airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode and other seasons. 
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To occupy himself after his mother Mira’s disappearance and cessation of communication, Alphy is unusually tidying up the vicarage – not that he will admit he’s anything but fine or that he’s trying to distract himself. Geordie asks Alphy to accompany him on a trip to Lord Worley’s home to investigate a reported burglary – an excuse to check in on Alphy and keep him busy. On the way, Geordie admits that he told Mira that she needed to be committed if she was going to maintain a relationship with Alphy, to Alphy’s annoyance. 

Alphy is familiar with Lord Worley’s manor, since the old man is dying; Alphy has been praying with him. He always has to enter through the back, because the butler Briggs won’t let “help” in the front door. Geordie ignores this stricture, even as the lord’s antagonistic children arrive.

Jonathan, who will inherit everything, is the one who reported the burglary. Much of his mother’s jewelry is missing, including a piece his sister, Allegra, coveted. But the crime scene is odd. For one, unsecure drawers in a drawing room seem a strange place to store valuable jewelry. And why break a window with a blue glass paperweight when you could just come in through a door?

Geordie wants to speak to Lord Worley even though the whole house objects; he has just gone to sleep. While Geordie heads upstairs to wake him, Alphy takes up Allegra’s offer of a second drink. 

Lord Worley is dead.

Hepzibah, the nurse Jonathan hired to take care of Worley, says she checked on him every two hours. But it appears that he’s been dead for hours, with a burn around his mouth that suggests he was poisoned with morphine. 

Worley’s children say they visited every Friday morning for tea – but it had been a while, maybe more than a month. He was a difficult father. The butler Briggs says they haven’t visited all year. He thought Hepzibah was negligent, and would occasionally check on Worley himself, even though the bed pull in his room was broken, like so much else in the aging house.

Allegra asks Alphy to stay with her and he does – to comfort a grieving woman, of course. She opens a bottle of wine her father warned her to never touch. Alphy sees Jonathan berating Reuben, the gardener, through a window. 

Meanwhile, Geordie questions Hepzibah and Briggs at the police station. Train and movie tickets inside Hepzibah’s purse reveal that she absconded from her work caring for Worley yesterday to go to the seaside and see a movie. She needed a break from the airless misery and impending death. 

Briggs says Worley was a miser, noting every single expense in Silas Marner, the novel Geordie found on his bedside table. Inside, Geordie finds notes that Worley’s kids never answered phone calls, and that the gardener Reuben received a blue glass paperweight as a gift. 

Geordie returns to the manor the next day to question Reuben and finds Alphy just leaving. He tried to go home after dancing with Allegra and kissing her, but couldn’t resist when she pleaded with him to spend the night. Before he runs into Geordie, he spots a number of packages being sent to an auction house, and Jonathan again scolding Reuben, who tells Jonathan that his family will be homeless if he sells the manor.

Reuben tells the detectives that both he and his father dedicated their lives to the manor, with little thanks for it. He lives in a cottage on the property whose dampness makes his daughter sick, but Lord Worley wouldn’t do anything about it. Upset by the meager gift of a paperweight, he hurled it through a window. But he didn’t take anything. 

Alphy and Geordie get a catalog of goods for sale from the auction house to which packages were being sent from the home and find that all the jewelry Jonathan reported as being stolen in the “burglary” has already been listed and sold – two months ago. Allegra has been selling it off and used the broken window caused by Reuben to cover her tracks with a staged burglary. 

But the contents of the house aren’t hers or Jonathan’s to sell. Worley’s will gives everything to an “Eppie,” not his children. The detectives at first guess this is a nickname for Hepzibah, the nurse, who is shocked by the windfall.

Then Alphy recalls that “Eppie” is the girl in Silas Marner who saves the titular character from loneliness. They return to Worley’s room and note stains for two tea cups on his bedside table and that the lamp was lit some 11 hours before his death, when Hepzibah was at the movie. Despite the neglect of his children and nurse, someone was keeping him company.

It was Briggs. The butler admits that Worley called him “Eppie.” The night before he died, Worley asked Briggs to phone his children. As usual, they refused to visit, but Briggs wanted to spare Worley the suffering of being abandoned and told him they would come in the morning. He was dying anyway, so Briggs put morphine in his tea to end his suffering and keep him from knowing how alone he was. Going to prison will be worth it for his friend, and he doesn’t care about the inheritance. In fact, Worley revised his will before his death to give the house to a worthier cause: Reuben and his family. Worley’s kids are appalled – but tough luck.

Leonard wants to return to the church, feeling like his life is lacking purpose. He finds a small one when Mrs. C tells him there has been a raft of thefts of milk and bread from doorsteps. He sets a trap outside the vicarage with her and catches…the young boy Raymond Hayes. The boy kicks Leonard and runs away. They haul him back and he once again flees. This time, Leonard follows him home – where he finds Raymond’s father wasting away in a chair. Leonard calls an ambulance and Mrs. C, and is warmed when Raymond says, “Thank you, vicar,” to him. 

He still gives advice like a vicar, after all. Alphy tells him about his hurt about his mother’s disappearance, and Leonard advises him to go see her for closure, even if the result is painful. 

Geordie makes a big decision when he decides to apply for his retiring boss’ job. Larry is showing promise under the tutelage of Miss Scott, and Geordie feels that his work is his calling and can’t imagine retiring and sitting at home alone – especially now that Cathy has CeCe’s Boutique to keep her busy, and is increasingly not at home. She even accepts her new accountant’s invitation to grab a drink one night.