stepped away and held out his hand toward a stool. She inclined her head and stepped forward, thanking the man for giving up his seat. Fred placed the frothy brew in front of Maisie, which she sipped before turning around. All eyes were upon her, the outsider.
She set down her glass and looked again at the villagers, weighing her words with care. She had no need to raise her voice; the crackle and spit of a fire in the inglenook was the only sound to punctuate her words. “You’ve all seen me in this village, and you know I’m working for the company involved in negotiations to purchase the brickworks and the estate. And you know by now that my interest has been in the crimes, and more importantly, the fires that have occurred in this village.”
Her words were met with silence. One man shuffled his feet, only to be met with a scornful look from his wife, who crossed her arms and turned away from him. Maisie continued.
“Heronsdene is a beautiful village, and I believe you are all good people.” Again she paused, choosing her words with care. “But a secret cannot be kept forever—”
At that moment the door opened, and it appeared to Maisie that every single man and woman in the room drew breath as the man they had known before the fire only as Webb, the traveling gypsy, came into the bar. Maisie nodded and smiled, holding out her hand to the seat just vacated next to her. No one attempted to leave. No one made an excuse to depart, or coughed, or made a noise.
Webb joined Maisie and looked around the room, as if to remember every single face and to torment each villager with his silence.
“I was just saying,” said Maisie, her voice low, “that a secret cannot be kept forever.”
Webb cleared his throat to speak, but instead nodded to Maisie, who continued addressing those assembled.
“You came together this evening to decide what to do about this man, whom you knew as Pim Martin when he was a boy. He was from a family you understood to be of Dutch blood until the night of the Zeppelin raid, when you came to sense the power of doubt. Will anyone speak to this man of that night?”
There was silence for a moment. Then a woman began to sob and was comforted by Mrs. Pendle. One man stood as if to leave, but was stopped by another, who laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and shook his head.
Maisie spoke again. “Pim Martin went to war as a boy. He fought for his country, as did the other sons of Heronsdene. This man, then barely fourteen years of age, saw death of a most terrible kind—” Her words caught in her throat, as she banished images of the war from her mind. “Then he came home to . . . nothing.” She paused. “So I ask again—will anyone speak to this man of that night?”
Now the silence in the room was interwoven by more sobbing. Maisie watched one woman repeatedly punch her knees with her fist, as if to strike feeling into limbs that were otherwise numb.
The man she knew to be Mr. Whyte coughed and raised his hand, taking off his cap, then passing it from his left hand to his right and back again. “It’s hard, to tell of what happened—”
Another voice joined in. “It was madness. We were all touched by madness and didn’t know what we were doing.”
“It wouldn’t’ve happened if the boys hadn’t been killed.”
“Or if that Sandermere hadn’t been drunk, the lying hound.”
Now voices came from left and right, as if every man and woman wanted to speak at once, to confess and have the hand of absolution laid upon them.
Fred Yeoman raised his hand. “Miss Dobbs is right. We’ve got to tell, and it’s no good starting in the middle and then going both ways at once. Someone has to start at the beginning, and it might as well be me, because I’m the landlord here. But first I’ll put a glass in Pim’s hand, if you don’t mind.”
“Webb. You can call me Webb now.”
Yeoman nodded and pulled an ale, finishing the pour with a hearty head before passing it to the gypsy. Then he wiped the counter once again, threw the cloth to one side, and gripped the edge of the bar as he began to speak, looking down at his whitening fists, then up at Webb and the gathering in front of him.
“After you’d gone, after they’d taken you to the reformatory, there was change here in the village. We lost a lot of our boys, the first lot in ’ 15, then others here and there, then a dozen all together in the summer of 1916. It was during the hop-picking that the telegrams with news of more lost were delivered.” He looked at Webb. “You’ll remember them. There was Derek Tovis, John Barham, Tim Whyte, Bobby Pickles, Sam Pendle, Peter Tillings—all gone on the same day. All our boys.”
Webb nodded. “I remember them, each and every one.”
“Word went round like wildfire, and it was as if we’d lost them all at once. Small village like this, and we’d lost nigh on all our boys.”
Yeoman cleared his throat. Then George Chambers, whom Maisie had visited, looked directly at Webb, raising his hand to speak.
“All I’ve got to say is, that it got us all here, right here.” He thumped his chest. “It felt like we had one big heart that was breaking, here in the village, and we didn’t know what to do. How to get rid of the . . . the pain.”
Maisie looked at Webb, at his fingers, curled and frozen as he clutched his glass, which she feared might break.
Whyte took up the story. “Then, that night, we’d all been in here. You know, Pim—Webb—you know how it was, how we’d always come here, to talk of village matters, sort things out. Well, we were here, talking of the boys, wondering how we would all get through it. And that young Sandermere was in.”
“I refused to serve him, not only on account of his age, but by the smell of him he’d already been at his father’s brandy,” said Yeoman.
Whyte continued. “It’s not as if anyone would ever listen to him, as a rule. Not as if he was respected, like his brother, Henry, and his father before him.” He shook his head and brushed his hand across his forehead. “But he was going on about the Hun this, and Fritz that, and we all sort of joined in. It was somewhere to put the—you know—the
