cooing over her, it was men old enough to be her father or her grandfather watching her on the street, or stopping her to make comments. 'That's a pretty dress, young lady.' Or 'I like that hair ribbon. Did you know it was the color of your eyes?' It made Emma uncomfortable, long before she was old enough to understand why.'
'Did you tell her grandmother what you'd observed?'
She laughed harshly. 'She told me I was jealous of the attention being paid to Emma. And my father punished me for bearing tales. I was sent to bed without my dinner for a week. People see what they want to see-or expect to see. So I took it on myself to be Emma's protector, and I was hardly more than a child myself. It wasn't a task I felt I could do, but I didn't have anywhere else to turn.'
'And Emma accepted this-protection?'
She shrugged. 'She appeared to be grateful for it. Or so she said. We more or less looked after each other.'
'How old are you?' Rutledge asked bluntly.
Grace Letteridge bristled. 'It's none of your business.'
But he thought he'd been wrong in his earlier estimate of her age. Young herself, vulnerable, and perhaps reading more into what she saw around her than was true, she might have made up the notion that Emma needed protection. It might, indeed, have been her own loneliness that made her seek out the younger child, and cling to her. Anything but coming home to a drunken father filled with his own misery.
'Why are you so certain that Constable Hensley killed Emma Mason?' he asked.
'He would stop and talk to her, tell her about London, and plays and concerts-which he'd probably never attended in his life-or describe an evening at the opera, watching the King and Queen step into the royal box, and how the Prince of Wales had spoken to him one morning as he rode his horse into the park. It was pathetic, an attempt to hold her attention, and he would lie in wait for her, ready with a new tale to spin, making London seem glorious, and she knew-she knew!-her mother lived there somewhere. I listened to her concocting schemes to go there as soon as the war ended, and find her mother and live in this fairy-tale world. He had no idea what harm he was doing, and it's possible he wouldn't have cared.'
'More a reason for you to kill him, than for him to kill Emma.'
'Ah, but what you don't know is that Emma fell in love! And that put a spoke in Constable Hensley's wheel. I believe he killed her in a jealous rage.'
Try as he would, Grace Letteridge refused to tell him who it was that Emma had thought she was in love with. 'It doesn't matter. He's dead, anyway. In the war.'
But Rutledge could tell it did matter, a very great deal.
As he left, Hamish was pointing out that very likely Grace Letteridge had been in love with this man herself. It might explain why she went to London-leaving Emma to her own devices-and why she came home.
'I canna' believe her father would let her go sae easily. Unless he was dead in 1914.'
In 1914, Grace Letteridge couldn't have been more than nineteen. Which would make her four and twenty now. And Emma would have been a very impressionable fourteen.
Rutledge walked to the churchyard, feeling the cold wind across his face as he reached the gate, and went inside to search the gravestones for Grace Letteridge's father.
It was a wild-goose chase, trying to find one man amongst so many gravestones, most of them green with moss and overgrown with lichen. But a 1914 grave would still be raw enough.
What he found was unexpected. The young men of the village had not been brought home from France, but stones had been set in a garden for them, and the lonely rows of names struck him as sad and forgotten.
The cold wind had brought more rain in its wake. He stood there, looking at the line of empty graves, and felt a sadness that went deeper than his compassion for their deaths. It was what all of them, the living and the dead, had lost in four years of suffering.
Hamish was silent, for he too was only a marker in a lonely churchyard, his last resting place a muddy hole in France with none of the trappings of home to see him into a peaceful rest.
'There are poppies,' Hamish said finally. 'They'll grow again.'
Rutledge could see the poppies on the shell casings, and hear again the roar of a revolver shot over the sound of his heavy motor and the calls of the crows as they flew up, startled. The flight of the bullet, close enough for its breath to touch his face and its whine to be heard over all the other sounds, brought back more than the war, it brought back his willingness to die for what he'd done.
But not like this, not shot by someone who hid in the shadows, with no reality and no right to be his executioner.
It had all begun at Maryanne Browning's house in London. And it was time he went back to the beginning and found out what had gone wrong on the eve of a new year. He could hear someone shouting and looked up, distracted from his thoughts. Hamish said, 'Yon rector.' It was indeed Mr. Towson calling from the porch of his house, his voice thin in the rain and wind. 'You'll take your death standing there, young man. Come and have a cup of tea before I freeze to death just watching you.'
13
Rutledge splashed across the churchyard, found the gate in the wall that led to the rectory, and reached the porch like a wet dog, wondering what the rector would think if he shook himself violently. Not so much to rid himself of the water, but to rid himself of the mood that had swept over him.
Towson reached for his hat and coat, tut-tutting over their condition.
'I watched you for a good quarter hour, out there. Paying respect is one thing, foolishness another. I can't think you knew any of our dead.'
Rutledge followed him from the hall into the parlor, gloomy in the light of a single lamp.
'I was looking for the grave of a Mr. Letteridge. Grace Letteridge's father.'
'Ah. Well, it's nearer the rectory than the memorial garden you were standing by.' He spread Rutledge's coat across the back of a chair and stooped to put a match to the fire already laid on the hearth. 'Sit down, do. Why did you want to find him? Clifford Letteridge has been dead for five years, I should think. Yes, it must be going on five.'
'I called on his daughter an hour or so ago. I was curious about him after our conversation.'
'I'm not surprised. She's bitter, is young Grace, and I can't say that I blame her. She's had a sad life, and yet no thanks to her father, she's become a very fine young woman. Or could be, if she'd let go some of the anger inside her.'
'She told me he drank himself into oblivion.'
'His heart was dead long before he died, and that's the truth. He put food on the table, clothes on her back, kept a roof over her head, and sent her to church of a Sunday with strict regularity, and called that fatherhood.'
'I wonder that she didn't marry, if only to leave such a cold and empty life.'
Towson smiled. 'I'm no fool. You're here to pry the secrets of other people out of me. Sit there and warm yourself, and I'll bring in a tray of tea.'
He left the room, effectively cutting the conversation short.
Rutledge looked at the dark paneling on the wall and somber drapes at the window, then turned his attention to the portrait of an elderly man-a cleric, if he was any judge-hanging over the hearth. A grim face, with no humor in it or even kindness. Who did it remind him of?
Hamish said, 'The minister who railed against my Fiona.'
Yes, of course, that pitiless man in Scotland who would willingly have hounded a defenseless young woman to her death. And it had been a close-run thing. She had loved Hamish, and it had nearly been her undoing.
The similarity was not so much in their features, but in the unbending view both churchmen must have held of human frailty. Impatient to cast the first stone.
