the track under his tires was soft from the storm of the other night.
When he reached the churchyard, the graves were, to his surprise, well kept, the grass cropped short, flowers blooming here and there where they had been planted at a headstone. He could also see, as he got out to walk among the graves, that the village had buried its dead here for centuries, for the older stones had settled crookedly, any inscription on them long since covered by lichen or flaked into dust.
At the back of the churchyard, marking the far boundary of graves, he could see a pair of low tumuli. They were long grass-covered mounds, and surely not old enough to be prehistoric.
Hamish said, “Plague victims.”
Rutledge thought he was right. It was often the practice to bury the dead quickly in lime-filled trenches. But he couldn’t remember having seen any as clearly defined as these.
Walking among the stones, glancing at dates here and there, he read the familiar names. There were any numbers of Willets and Barbers, Brotherses and Montgomerys, going back generations, and among them a score or more of other family surnames. Among the Willets, someone-was there a sexton here?-had dug Ned Willet’s grave. Next to his were two memorial stones to his sons lost in the war.
Behind a phalanx of tall yews stood a stone mausoleum. As he approached it, he could read the name incised above the grille that formed the doorway. RUSSELL.
He was more than a little surprised to find it here. He would have thought that the family would have preferred to bury its dead elsewhere. Ornate stone urns, draped in the carved folds of mourning crepe, were set to either side of the doorway. They were empty, and he realized that there was no one to care for them. Certainly not Cynthia Farraday. Did she ever come here? And where was Wyatt Russell?
He stared into the shadowy interior, trying to read the names on the marble squares that marked each interment. But it was too dark, and all he could decipher were the inscriptions on a pair of plaques nearest the grille.
The first was a memorial to Captain Malcolm Arthur George Russell, his dates, and the final inscription, DIED OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN THE RELIEF OF MAFEKING.
Below it was the memorial to his wife: IN LOVING MEMORY OF E MILY ELIZABETH MARGARET TALBOT RUSSELL, and the dates of her birth and her disappearance.
This was the plaque that Morrison had spoken of, the one villagers had objected to because of the possibility that Mrs. Russell was a suicide.
He walked on, beyond the lilacs that encircled the mausoleum, as if setting it off in death from the village just as the circumstances of their material worth had set the occupants apart in life.
Another ten steps, and he stumbled over what he thought at first was a low stone wall marking the edge of the churchyard and nearly invisible in the thick grass that hadn’t been mown here.
But it wasn’t that sort of wall. Pushing aside the grass and brambles, he followed it some distance before he reached the end and realized that it turned. Here the stones had been pulled apart and tossed about, one or two with carvings that must have come from around a doorway, others cut and dressed. Many of them were blackened, as if they had been enveloped in flames.
I’ve found the missing church, Rutledge thought, the much older one that had stood here next to its churchyard. And it would make sense too that the Russell mausoleum, rather than being at the outer fringe of holy ground-as it now appeared to be-had actually stood nearest the church. In its shadow, where the Russells could take their rightful place at the last trump.
He paced the breadth and then the length of the foundation. It had been small, like many early village churches, and over the years after what must have been a disastrous fire, stones must have found their way into byres and walls, for stone was scarce out here, and brick had been the main building material.
Morrison, the rector, had talked about drainage issues, and the church here was far enough from the river in flood stage to survive. Here too a crypt could be dug, and the dead could lie in the earth, not raised tombs.
There was no way to judge how long ago the church had burned-or even when it had been built. Had its fate been decided in the upheaval and dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, or had the long arm of Cromwell reached even Furnham, with his strong Puritan revulsion for anything that smacked of High Church?
Hamish said, “Naught so dramatic. Verra’ likely it came down in a storm, and yon village couldna’ afford to rebuild it.” Rutledge smiled to himself. Depend on Hamish to see the practical, not the fanciful. The staunch Covenanter whose pragmatism had often made sense of the nonsense of war and military decisions.
Walking back to the motorcar, he said aloud, “Furnham hasn’t struck me as a godly place.”
Hamish retorted, “More than likely they fear the devil.”
He continued along this ill-kept track and saw that a mile before it reached the London road, a small cottage stood alone in a clearing, the marsh grass beaten back and a pair of trees as tall as the low roof sheltering it.
Rutledge would never have guessed that this was St. Edward’s Rectory-it looked far more like a farm laborer’s cottage-if he hadn’t noticed the rector, his sleeves rolled to his elbow, working in his garden.
Morrison looked up just then, seemed surprised to see Rutledge in front of his house, then quickly turned to look back the way the Londoner had come.
It was an odd reaction. As if he had expected to see that Rutledge was being followed.
Rutledge didn’t stop. With a single wave of his hand, he went on to the crossroads and turned back toward Furnham.
“Hardly a proper house for yon priest,” Hamish said.
“At a guess he preferred the cottage to living in Furnham.”
Here in the open, the motorcar was being whipped by a rising wind, and looking ahead of him, out over the North Sea, he could see the storm clouds gathering. The rain had held off when he’d come here with Frances, but this time the clouds kept their dark promise. Just as he pulled into the yard of The Dragonfly, the creaking of the inn’s sign on its post was drowned out as the rain came down in earnest. At first a few large drops hitting the dust of the street and his bonnet as he got out of the motorcar, and then with a flash of lightning, a deluge swept across Furnham like a gray curtain as he made a dash for the door.
Shaking the rain off his hat, he took the stairs two at a time and went into his room.
He knew at once that someone had searched it.
The photograph of the body of Ben Willet was safely in his motorcar, and the locket that had belonged to Mrs. Russell was still in his pocket.
What else could the intruder have been looking for?
He debated confronting the inn’s owner, and decided against it. Standing by one of the windows in the passage, he watched the lightning move up the river, coming from the sea, the thunder loud enough to rattle the sash in front of him. At one point the very air seemed to turn blue around him, and a tree shattered, then went down with a roar he could hear above the thunder that followed. Someone shouted, but he couldn’t tell just where the lightning had struck.
Even after the worst of the storm had subsided, rain continued to fall. But toward the east the clouds broke and a faint rainbow arced above the river to the west. Someone began using an axe to clear away the tree, strong, rhythmic blows, and shortly afterward Rutledge could hear the ring of a second axe as well.
It was nearly time for lunch, and he decided not to dine in the inn but to go up the High Street to the same tearoom where he and Frances had stopped.
He could see as he left the inn that a tree had fallen across the road where the bend led toward the outlying farms. Jessup was one of the men with an axe.
The welcome in the shop was no warmer than before, but he was served a sandwich, a cup of tea, and a Banbury bun. There were several women at two of the other tables, and the topic of conversation appeared to be the death of Ned Willet. One of the women was saying, “Do you suppose Ben will come for the funeral? Sandy told me that Abigail had written to him when her father took ill. But there’s been no word.”
There was a silence, filled only with the strokes of the axe. And then one of her companions said, “Haven’t you heard? He was murdered. In London.”
“No-oh, no, I hadn’t.” The woman shook her head. “What a terrible blow. Do they know who killed him? And what’s Abigail to do? First Ned, and now Ben. He was the last of those Willet boys. How is she holding up?”
“Sandy hasn’t told her yet. She was fond of Ben,” the first woman said.
“He didn’t return the feeling,” the third woman put in. “How many times has he shown his face here? Too good for the likes of us.”
