“What are you saying, that someone here used it to watch the wood? You must be mad. We had nothing to do with Hensley’s attack that day. Except to save his life.”
“Don’t deliberately misunderstand me, Baylor. I simply want to stand at the window to judge how much of the wood is visible from there.”
Hamish said quietly, “There’s someone in yon room.
And you must pass it to reach the stairs—”
Rutledge could feel the presence in the room, silent and apprehensive.
“Look, I’ll just go up the back stairs to the attic, if you’ll lead the way. I needn’t disturb the rest of the household.”
Torn, Baylor considered the alternatives. “Oh, very well.
This way.”
He brushed past Rutledge with the intention of irritating him and walked back toward the kitchen. Through another door were the back stairs, narrow, curving, and with short treads. Baylor went up them with accustomed ease, but Rutledge had to duck through the door and keep a hand on the wall as he climbed.
They came out on the floor above, and then walked a short distance to a second flight of steps going up to the next floor.
It wasn’t an attic as Rutledge had thought, but another passage with small rooms intended for children or servants. The doors were shut, giving a claustrophobic air to the corridor, making it appear to be narrower than the one below. The carpet running down the center was worn with use but sound.
It would, Hamish was pointing out, muffle footsteps.
Baylor opened the door into a bright corner room, with square windows and an iron bedstead against one wall, a washstand nearest the door, and a tall chest of drawers to Rutledge’s left. The room seemed unused, empty of personal touches or the ordinary signs of someone’s presence. There was a desk between the north windows, and he went to it to lean his hands on the wooden top so that he could look out.
He could see the wood quite well, but not into it as clearly as he had from the church spire.
“It would be helpful if I could send someone into the wood and then stand here to observe his progress,” Rutledge said. “A test of sorts. Would you be agreeable to walking there for ten minutes or so?”
“I don’t set foot in the wood if I can help it. Find yourself another ferret.”
Without haste, Rutledge turned to the west window, where he could look toward the church, and found himself facing the narrow east opening where he’d stood on the ladder not twenty minutes before. A pale light came through from the opposite side of the spire, illuminating the interior, and he thought, Someone could have seen me, it’s not impossible.
“Do you have a woman who cleans for you?” he asked aloud, turning to Baylor. “Or perhaps your brother comes up here from time to time, to look out at the fields. It’s really quite a fine vantage point.”
“Nobody uses this floor. We haven’t since we were children, and my parents were still alive.”
“Can you be sure of that?”
“I told you. We don’t use this floor.”
But Rutledge was nearly sure someone had, at least for a short time, not more than half an hour ago. There was the partial print of a hand in the dust collecting on the win-dowsill beside him.
As they came down the stairs and into the kitchen, the kettle was just on the boil.
Baylor said, “I won’t offer you a cup of tea.”
It was a clear message to leave.
“Thank you for your willingness to help.” Rutledge went out the door and heard it shut behind him, almost on his heels.
He retraced his steps as far as the rectory, and an exhausted Hillary Timmons opened the door at his knock. She stood aside, almost wary of him, and he remembered his outburst of anger in the kitchen of The Oaks.
“How is the rector?” he asked after greeting her.
“Tiresome.” She smiled a little to take the sting out of the word. “He doesn’t feel like doing much of anything, and that drags at his patience.”
“Perhaps a visitor will help.”
“Oh, if you would, please. I need to see to his dinner, and there’s been no time.”
He went up the stairs to the first floor and down the passage to the rector’s bedroom. Towson greeted him with undisguised relief. “Thank God you’re here,” he said. “I need so many things, and young Hillary is hopeless.”
“What would you like?” Rutledge inquired, setting his hat to one side and tossing his coat over a chair.
“Tsk! There’s a coat-tree in the hall, didn’t she point it out?”
“It doesn’t matter. What can I find for you?”
“There are three books by the desk in my study. Paper, pens, and something to write on. Ink. My blotter—” He went on urgently, as if afraid Rutledge would desert him before he’d finished his requests.
“I’m surprised Hillary couldn’t have helped you earlier,” Rutledge said. “It doesn’t seem all that complicated.”
“She doesn’t like touching anything in my study. She never even ventures in there to dust it. You’d think she was afraid of it, as if God lived there, to help me with my sermons.”
Rutledge laughed. “Very well, I’ll do my best.”
He went to the study, a small room overlooking the church, and began to search for the items Towson had listed.
The books were easy enough to find on the shelf by the rector’s desk, and the writing materials lay next to the blotter. Rutledge was just looking around the room to find some means of carrying the lot back up the stairs, when he noticed a framed photograph on the small table by the only upholstered chair in the room. A lamp stood on the table as well, next to a book filled with strips of paper to mark various chapters. He crossed the room to look at the photograph, and then was distracted by the book.
It was leather bound, an album of sorts, with cuttings pasted to the pages. He could see the curled edges sticking out.
Rutledge reached to open it, and Hamish said, “I wouldna’ pry—”
He ignored the voice.
The cuttings had come from various newspapers, with the name of the paper and the date written in ink on each of them.
Most of them were obituaries. In the front was Mrs.
Towson’s, short but flowery, identifying her as the beloved wife of our dear rector. Others were of local men killed in the war, each one pasted carefully in the center of a sheet of black paper, as if honoring them. He ran his eye down one or two, thinking as he did that each of these young men hadn’t had time to live very far beyond boyhood. The war had given them their only reality; their rank and dates and the battle in which they’d fallen stood out starkly as their only achievement.
Son of... Young men who hadn’t married, hadn’t had families of their own, had left no mark in the world, and no posterity.
How many of them had he seen go into battle and fall?
How many had he tried to remember as individuals, repeating their names to himself as he stood in the trenches during the dark nights of winter and the short ones of summer.
MacKay, Sutherland, Gordon, Campbell, Scott, MacIver, MacInnes, MacTaggert, Chisholm, Kerr, Fraser—
He found himself reminded of Elizabeth Fraser, seeing her against the snow light, her hair so fair, like a crown, her body long and slim. The memory was slipping away from him now, and it hurt him to think that he was beginning to forget.
He made himself return to the album, scanning the names and ages and battles.
And then one name in particular caught his eye.
Robert Baylor, age twenty, son of the late Robert and Ellen Baylor of Dudlington Farm, survived by his brothers Theodore and Joel, and his fiancée, Grace Letteridge.
He closed the album carefully so as not to lose any of the markers.