'Grantchester' Recap: Season 9 Episode 2

Grantchester airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode and other seasons. 
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Will is struggling to find the perfect time to tell Geordie that he and his family are leaving Grantchester next week for a position at a larger church in Newcastle, where Will thinks he can have more of an impact. A Sunday filled with church and a meal at the vicarage with the Keatings, Chapmans, and Leonard and Daniel feels perfect – until a baby is found abandoned in the church and a man found dead in a hotel.

First, the man. He’s the hotel manager, Mr. Daniels, and he broke his neck falling down the stairs. Sissy, a chatty maid, found him. One of his shoelaces is undone and a ring of keys is on the stairs.

The baby is only hours old, and was left with an apologetic note and wrapped in a blanket with the logo of the hotel stitched into it.

A “Mrs. Smith” was the last person to check in to the hotel, at 9:30 pm last night, and the only woman. Bloody towels in her empty room’s sink suggest she gave birth in the room.

This is the moment that Will chooses to finally tell Geordie about his departure. Geordie, shocked and hurt, basically ignores Will’s admission, to Will’s dismay. Geordie continues gathering clues, and learns from the operator that “Mrs. Smith” made a call from the hotel last night to Leonard’s halfway house. Leonard has the people staying there keep a record of outgoing calls but not incoming.

The only lead the detectives have on the baby is a shaky one from Will’s stepson Ernie, who saw a woman entering and then leaving the church just before the infant was found. He thinks she was wearing a gray blazer with a yellow badge.

That leads the detectives to an upper-class local girls’ school. Its Headmistress Bradley insists that none of the students could have gotten pregnant, but allows Will and Geordie to speak to the older ones. One girl asks about the sex of the baby, and she has lately been withdrawn and not eating, according to the school.

But the handwriting on student reports matches that on the note left with the baby as well as that of the hotel registry. The woman who gave birth wasn’t a student; she was their teacher, Rose Shirley.

Geordie finds Rose at school in pain and sends her to the hospital to recover from the birth. The staff there place her newborn in a crib beside her, even though she gave the baby girl up. The headmistress visits Rose at the hospital and hugs her – Rose is her niece, and the headmistress is sorry to have failed her and not realized she was pregnant. She says that Rose spoke to a man on the phone every Saturday for a time.

Geordie and Will look through the call log of Leonard’s halfway house to see if there were regular outgoing calls on Saturdays, and find that the street preacher Sam was the man Rose spoke to. Sam says he’s not the father of Rose’s newborn. He met Rose and she eventually confided in him that she was pregnant and didn’t want the baby. He gave her a doctor who could help, but it had been a bit since they had spoken – until she called him from the hotel while she was in labor. She seemed scared, and simply said “They’re here,” before hanging up. Another guest reported to the police that they heard pounding on the door of Rose’s room.

Meanwhile, Will has been trying to sneak in conversations about his impending departure with Geordie. He tells Geordie that he loves Grantchester and sharing his family’s life with the Keatings – but he doesn’t want to look back on his life in years and feel that he missed his chance to make a difference. Geordie tells Will that he’s being selfish by leaving and refuses to give him his blessing. He also breaks the news to his family, the Chapmans, and Leonard and Daniel, then accuses Bonnie of convincing Will to leave.

Obviously, that puts him in a bad place with both Will and Bonnie. Will had hoped he would act more like Leonard, who almost asks Will to stay for love of him but instead tells him to go off and be brilliant. They hug and call each other brothers, and Leonard promises to look after Geordie.

Geordie is responsible for looking after his staff, and Larry has told him that he wants to ask Ms. Scott to marry him after they spent a night together. Geordie suggests discussing it with Ms. Scott first, but Larry simply jumps into proposing with a ring. Ms. Scott quickly tells him to stop. It was just sex, she says. You don’t want to marry me. Larry eventually realizes she’s right, and she assures him that there’s a Mrs. Peters somewhere out there who’s a better fit.

Continuing their investigation despite their anger at each other, Geordie and Will return to the hotel maid and ask why she didn’t tell them about someone banging on the door of Rose’s room. She admits that she witnessed it, and that the man paid her not to mention him.

He’s a fellow teacher at the girls’ school, a Mr. Warne. The baby’s not his, either; he was in Dublin until three months ago. But he says that he helped Rose to the hotel. She didn’t want him to stay, but he wanted to be sure she was ok – hence the pounding on the door. He paid the maid for discretion so people wouldn’t learn about Rose’s pregnancy.

But that’s not true, as Will and Geordie learn when they return to Rose in the hospital. Her newborn is gone, having been taken by her aunt, the headmistress. The headmistress found out about Rose’s pregnancy and forced Rose to keep the baby against her wishes because she wanted a child for herself. She sent Warne to the hotel to look for Rose when she disappeared to give birth – that’s why Rose told Sam “they’re here” over the phone. But Rose wouldn’t let Warne in.

The headmistress has disappeared, having suddenly taken a year-long sabbatical from school for her “nerves.” Rose says she will have absconded with Warne, whom she has bullied into being in a relationship of sorts with her.

The police find the pair in the countryside and rescue the baby. Warne, out of fear of the headmistress, waited to tell her that he had found Rose at the hotel. So when the headmistress herself visited, she was too late – not that she knew. She pounded on Rose’s door and the hotel manager confronted her from the stairs. She went to grab the keys from him and he fell down the stairs, breaking his neck. And Rose was already gone.

Geordie brings a woman from the adoption agency to Rose once she’s reunited with her baby, but first asks her what she really wants. She seems to want to keep the girl, but fears it will be impossible to raise her on her own. Geordie encourages her that she can do it, and she decides to keep her daughter.

Will cries during his final sermon, and is disappointed that Geordie is not there with the rest of his friends to see him off. He, Bonnie, and their children drive off in the new car that Jack and Mrs. C bought for them, but before they leave Grantchester Bonnie tells Will to go find Geordie.

He runs to the path they often walked together and finds Geordie striding towards him. Geordie tells Will that he saved him, and that Will has his blessing. They hug and express their love for each other. Before turning away, Will tells Geordie that he hopes he made him proud.

“Every day, son,” Geordie replies. “Every day.”