the best man had been giving this storybook groom a decidedly wide berth.
Heaving one of his more ill-disguised sighs, Ambrose peered hopefully up into the now cloudless sky. It wasn’t as though Ambrose actually wished for rain on this radiant wedding day. It was just that he so despised, detested really, being wrong. “Ah. You never do know, do you?” he said to his young friend.
“Yes, you do,” Hawke said, “Sometimes you actually do know, Constable. You’ve got the ring, I daresay?”
“Unless it has mysteriously teleported itself from my waistcoat pocket to a parallel universe in the five minutes since your last enquiry, yes, I imagine it’s still there.”
“Very funny. You must amuse yourself no end. And, why are we so bloody early? All this lollygagging about. Even the vicar isn’t here yet.”
The Scotland Yard man gave his friend a narrow look and, after a moment’s hesitation, pulled a small silver shooter’s flask from inside his morning coat. He unscrewed the cap and offered the flagon to the groom, who clearly was in need of fortification.
Rising early that morning, a cheery Congreve had breakfasted alone in the butler’s pantry and then hurried out into the Hawkesmoor gardens to paint. It was delightful sitting there beside the limpid stream. Lilacs were in bud and an unseasonably late snowfall had all but melted away. The light haze of spring green in the treetops had recently solidified. Beside the old dry-stone wall meandering through the orchard, a profusion of daffodils thick as weeds.
He’d been sitting at his easel, slaving over what he judged to be one of his better watercolour efforts to date, when the memory of Hawke’s earlier remark stung him like a bee. Hawke had made the comment to the aged retainer, Pelham, but Ambrose, lingering at the half-opened Dutch door leading to the garden, had overheard.
I think Ambrose’s paintings are not nearly as bad as they look, don’t you agree, Pelham?
Of course, Hawke, his oldest and dearest friend, had meant the jibe to be witty and amusing, but, still—that’s when a solitary raindrop spattered his picture and interrupted his revery.
He looked up. A substantial pile of gravid purple clouds was building in the west. More rain today, of all days? Ah, well, he sighed. The fat raindrop’s effect on his picture was not altogether unpleasant. Gave it a bit of cheek, he thought, and decided the painting was at last finished. This lily study was to be his gift for the bride. The title, whilst obvious to some, had for the artist a certain poetic ring. He called it The Wedding Lilies.
Packing up his folding stool, his papers, paints, pots and brushes, he looked again at the purple clouds. The best man had decided on the spot that, while an umbrella may or may not come in handy on Alexander Hawke’s wedding day, the brandy flask was a must. Grooms, in his experience, traditionally needed a bracer when the hour was at hand.
Hawke tilted back a quick swig.
When Ambrose recapped the flask and slipped it back inside his black cutaway without taking a bracer for himself, Hawke shot him a surprised look.
“Not even joining the groom in a prenuptial?” Hawke demanded of his companion. “What on earth is the world coming to?”
“I can’t drink, I’m on duty,” Congreve said, suddenly busy with his calabash pipe, tamping some of Peterson’s Irish Blend into the bowl. “Sorry, but there it is.”
“Duty? Not in any official sense.”
“No, just common sense. I’m responsible for delivering you to the altar, dear boy, and I fully intend to discharge my duties properly.”
Ambrose Congreve tried to appear stern. To his lifelong chagrin, achieving that cast of expression had never been easy. He had the bright blue eyes of a healthy baby, set in a keen but, some might say, sensitive face. His complexion, even at fifty, had the permanent pinkish pigmentation of a man who’d once had freckles lightly sprinkled across his nose.
For all that, he was a lifelong copper who took his duties extremely seriously.
Having gained an upper rung at the Metropolitan Police, he had had a distinguished career at New Scotland Yard, retiring four years earlier as Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. But the Yard’s current Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, unable to fill Congreve’s shoes at CID, still retained his services from time to time. Sir John was even kind enough to let him keep the use of a small office in the old Special Branch building in Whitehall Street. In the event, however, Congreve spent precious little time in that cold, damp chamber.
Numerous globe-trotting escapades with the fidgety groom now standing beside him on the church steps had mercifully kept the famous criminalist away from his humble office and hot on the trail of various villains and scoundrels these last five years or so. Their last adventure had been a somewhat heated affair involving some rather unsavory Cuban military chaps down in the Caribbean.
Now, on this bright morning in May, on the steps of this small “chapel of ease” in the picturesque if unfortunately named village of Upper Slaughter, the groom was giving a first-rate impression of a lamb on his way to the slaughter. Hawke’s glacial blue eyes, normally indomitable, finally wandered from the study of a lark singing in a nearby laurel to rest uneasily upon Congreve’s bemused face. Hawke’s gaze, Congreve often noted, had weight.
“Interesting. Since I was a child, I’ve always wondered why they call this place a ‘chapel of ease,’ ” Hawke remarked.
“Any sense of ‘ease’ being notable by its current absence?”
“Precisely.”
“These small chapels were originally built to ease the overflowing congregations at the main churches.”
“Ah. That explains it. Well. My own personal demon of deduction strikes again. I’ll have another nip of that brandy if you don’t mind. Cough it up.”
Congreve, a shortish, round figure of a man, removed his black silk top hat and ran his fingers through his disorderly thatch of chestnut brown hair. Alex had nowhere near the tolerance for alcohol he himself possessed, even at his somewhat advanced age; and so he hesitated, stalling, pinching the upturned points of his waxed moustache.
“And, of course,” Congreve said, with a sweeping gesture that included a good deal of Gloucestershire, “Every one of those yew trees you see growing in this and every other churchyard were ordered planted there by King Edward I in the fourteenth century.”
“Really? Why on earth should young Eddie have gone to all that bother in the first place?”
“Provide his troops with a plentiful supply of proper wood for longbows.” Congreve had removed the flask but hesitated in the uncorking of it. “You know, dear boy, it was King Edward who—”
“Good lord,” Hawke said, exasperated.
“What?”
“I want brandy, not arboreal folklore for God’s sake, Ambrose. Fork it over.”
“Ah. Smell that air.”
“What about it?”
“Sweet. Mulchy.”
“Ambrose!”
“Alex, it’s only natural for the groom to experience certain feelings of—anxiety—at a time like this, but I really think…ah, well, here comes the wedding party.” Ambrose quickly slipped the flask back into his inside pocket.
A procession of automobiles was winding its way up the twisting lane, bounded on either side by the hawthorn hedges, leading to the little church of St. John’s. It was a beautiful chapel really, nestled in a small valley of yews, pear trees, laurel, and rhododendron, many just now coming into full pink and white bloom, the trees filtering light onto dappled grass. The surrounding hillsides were green with leafy old forests, towering oaks, elms, and gnarled Spanish chestnuts many hundreds of years old.
The little Norman church was built of the mellow golden limestone so familiar here in Gloucestershire. St. John’s had been the scene of countless Hawke family weddings, christenings, and funerals. Alexander Hawke himself, red-faced with rage, age two, had been christened in the baptismal font just inside the entrance. Only a mile or so from this wooded glen, stood Hawke’s ancestral country home.
Hawkesmoor still held a prominent place in Alex’s heart and he visited his country house as frequently as possible. The foundation of the centuries old house, which overlooked a vast parkland, was built in 1150, with additions dating from the fourteenth century to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I. The roofline was a fine mix of
