No Graves As Yet

No Graves As Yet

A Novel of World War I

ANNE PERRY

Ballantine Books • New York

Dedicated to

my grandfather,

Captain Joseph Reavley,

who served as chaplain in the trenches

during the Great War

And they that rule in England,

In stately conclave met,

Alas, alas for England

They have no graves as yet.—G. K. Chesterton

CHAPTER

ONE

It was a golden afternoon in late June, a perfect day for cricket. The sun burned in a cloudless sky, and the breeze was barely sufficient to stir the slender, pale skirts of the women as they stood on the grass at Fenner’s Field, parasols in hand. The men, in white flannels, were relaxed and smiling.

St. John’s were batting and Gonville and Caius were fielding. The bowler pounded up to the crease and sent the ball down fast, but a bit short and wide. Elwyn Allard leaned forward, and with an elegant cover drive, dispatched the ball to the boundary for four runs.

Joseph Reavley joined in the applause. Elwyn was one of his students, rather more graceful with the bat than with the pen. He had little of the scholastic brilliance of his brother, Sebastian, but he had a manner that was easy to like, and a sense of honor that drove him like a spur.

St. John’s still had four more batsmen to play, young men from all over England who had come to Cambridge and, for one reason or another, remained at college through the long summer vacation.

Elwyn hit a modest two. The heat was stirred by a faint breath of wind from across the fenlands with their dykes and marshes, flat under the vast skies stretching eastward to the sea. It was old land, quiet, cut by secret waterways, Saxon churches marking each village. It had been the last stronghold of resistance against the Norman invasion eight and a half centuries ago.

On the field one of the boys just missed a catch. There was a gasp and then a letting out of breath. All this mattered. Such things could win or lose a match, and they would be playing against Oxford again soon. To be beaten would be catastrophic.

Across the town behind them, the clock on the north tower at Trinity struck three, each chime on the large A-flat bell, then followed the instant after on the smaller E-flat. Joseph thought how out of place it seemed, to think of time on an eternal afternoon like this. A few feet away, Harry Beecher caught his eye and smiled. Beecher had been a Trinity man in his own years as a student, and it was a long-standing joke that the Trinity clock struck once for itself and once for St. John’s.

A cheer went up as the ball hit the stumps and Elwyn was bowled out with a very respectable score of eighty-three. He walked off with a little wave of acknowledgment and was replaced at the crease by Lucian Foubister, who was a little too bony, but Joseph knew his awkwardness was deceiving. He was more tenacious than many gave him credit for, and he had flashes of extraordinary grace.

Play resumed with the sharp crack of a strike and the momentary cheers under the burning blue of the sky.

Aidan Thyer, master of St. John’s, stood motionless a few yards from Joseph, his hair flaxen in the sun, his thoughts apparently far away. His wife Connie, standing next to him, glanced across and gave a little shrug. Her dress was white broderie anglaise, falling loosely in a flare below the hip, and the fashionable slender skirt reached to the ground. She looked as elegant and feminine as a spray of daisies, even though it was the hottest summer in England for years.

At the far end of the pitch Foubister struck an awkward shot, elbows in all the wrong places, and sent the ball right to the boundary. There was a shout of approval, and everyone clapped.

Joseph was aware of a movement somewhere behind him and half turned, expecting a grounds official, perhaps to say it was time for lemonade and cucumber sandwiches. But it was his own brother, Matthew, who was walking toward him, his shoulders tight, no grace in his movement. He was wearing a light gray city suit, as if he had newly arrived from London.

Joseph started across the green, anxiety rising quickly. Why was his brother here in Cambridge, interrupting a match on a Sunday afternoon?

“Matthew! What is it?” he said as he reached him.

Matthew stopped. His face was so pale it seemed almost bloodless. He was twenty-eight, seven years the younger, broader-shouldered, and fair where Joseph was dark. He was steadying himself with difficulty, and he gulped before he found his voice. “It’s . . .” He cleared his throat. There was a kind of desperation in his eyes. “It’s Mother and Father,” he said hoarsely. “There’s been an accident.”

Joseph refused to grasp what he had said. “An accident?”

Matthew nodded, struggling to govern his ragged breathing. “In the car. They are both . . . dead.”

For a moment the words had no meaning for Joseph. Instantly his father’s face came to his mind, lean and gentle, blue eyes steady. It was impossible that he could be dead.

“The car went off the road,” Matthew was saying. “Just before the Hauxton Mill Bridge.” His voice sounded strange and far away.

Behind Joseph they were still playing cricket. He heard the sound of the ball and another burst of applause.

“Joseph . . .” Matthew’s hand was on his arm, the grip tight.

Joseph nodded and tried to speak, but his throat was dry.

“I’m sorry,” Matthew said quietly. “I wish I hadn’t had to tell you like this. I . . .”

“It’s all right, Matthew. I’m . . .” He changed his mind, still trying to grasp the reality. “The Hauxton Road? Where were they going?”

Matthew’s fingers tightened on his arm. They began to walk slowly, close together, over the sun-baked grass. There was a curious dizziness in the heat. The sweat trickled down Joseph’s skin, and inside he was cold.

Matthew stopped again.

“Father telephoned me late yesterday evening,” he replied huskily, as if the words were almost unbearable for him. “He said someone had given him a document outlining a conspiracy so hideous it would change the world we know—that it would ruin England and everything we stand for. Forever.” He sounded defiant now, the muscles of his neck and jaw clenched as if he barely had mastery of himself.

Joseph’s mind whirled. What should he do? The words hardly made sense. John Reavley had been a member of Parliament until 1912, two years ago. He had resigned for reasons he had not discussed, but he had never lost his interest in political affairs, nor his care for honesty in government. Perhaps he had simply been ready to spend more time reading, indulging his love of philosophy, poking around in antique and secondhand shops looking for a bargain. More often he was just talking with people, listening to stories, swapping eccentric jokes, and adding to his collection of limericks.

“A conspiracy to ruin England and everything we stand for?” Joseph repeated incredulously.

“No,” Matthew corrected him with precision. “A conspiracy that would ruin it. That was not the main purpose, simply a side effect.”

“What conspiracy? By whom?” Joseph demanded.

Matthew’s skin was so white it was almost gray. “I don’t know. He was bringing it to me . . . today.”

Joseph started to ask why, and then stopped. The answer was the one thing that made sense. Suddenly at least two facts cohered. John Reavley had wanted Joseph to study medicine, and when his firstborn son had left it for the church, he had then wanted Matthew to become a doctor. But Matthew had read modern history and languages here at Cambridge, and then he joined the Secret Intelligence Service. If there was such a plot, John would understandably have notified his younger son. Not his elder.

Joseph swallowed, the air catching in his throat. “I see.”

Matthew’s grip eased on him slightly. He had known the news longer and had more time to grasp its truth. He was searching Joseph’s face with anxiety, evidently trying to formulate something to say to help him through the pain.

Joseph made an immense effort. “I see,” he repeated. “We must go to them. Where . . . are they?”

“At the police station in Great Shelford,” Matthew answered. He made a slight movement with his head. “I’ve got my car.”

“Does Judith know?”

Matthew’s face tightened. “Yes. They didn’t know where to find you or me, so they called her.”

That was reasonable—obvious, really. Judith was their younger sister, still living at home. Hannah, between Joseph and Matthew, was married to a naval officer and lived in Portsmouth. It would be the house in Selborne St. Giles that the police would have called. He thought how Judith would be feeling, alone except for the servants, knowing neither her father nor mother would come home again, not tonight, not any night.

His thoughts were interrupted by someone at his elbow. He had not even heard footsteps on the grass. He half turned and saw Harry Beecher standing beside him, his wry, sensitive face puzzled.

“Is everything . . . ?” he began. Then, seeing Joseph’s eyes, he stopped. “Can I help?” he said simply.

Joseph shook his head a little. “No . . . no, there isn’t anything.” He made an effort to pull his thoughts together. “My parents have had an accident.” He took a deep breath. “They’ve been killed.” How odd and flat the words sounded. They still carried no reality with them.

Beecher was appalled. “Oh, God! I’m so sorry!”

“Please—” Joseph started.

“Of course,” Beecher interrupted. “I’ll tell people. Just go.” He touched Joseph lightly on the arm. “Let me know if I can do anything.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you.” Joseph shook his head and started to walk away as Matthew acknowledged Beecher, then turned to cross the wide expanse of grass. Joseph followed him without looking back at the players in their white flannels, bright in the sunlight. They had been the only reality a few moments ago; now there seemed an unbridgeable space between them.

Outside the cricket ground Matthew’s Sunbeam Talbot was parked in Gonville Place. In one fluid motion Joseph climbed over the side and into the passenger seat. The car was facing north, as if Matthew had been to St. John’s first and then come all the way through town to the cricket ground looking for Joseph. Now he turned southwest again, back along Gonville Place and finally onto the Trumpington Road.

There was nothing to say now; each was cocooned in his own pain, waiting for the moment when they would have to face the physical proof of death. The familiar winding road with its harvest fields shining gold in the heat, the hedgerows, and the motionless trees were like things painted on the other side of a wall that encased the mind. Joseph was aware of them only as a bright blur.

Matthew drove as if it demanded his entire concentration, clutching the steering wheel with hands he had to loosen deliberately now and then.

South of the village they turned left through St. Giles, skirted the side of the hill over the railway bridge into Great Shelford, and pulled up outside the police station. A somber sergeant met them, his face tired, his body hunched, as if he had had to steel himself for the task.

“Oi’m terrible sorry, sir.” He looked from one to the other of them, biting his lower lip. “Wouldn’t ask it if Oi din’t ’ave to.”

“I know,” Joseph said quickly. He did not want a conversation. Now that they were here, he needed to proceed as quickly as possible, while his self-control lasted.

Matthew made a small gesture forward, and the sergeant turned and led the way the short distance through the streets to the hospital mortuary. It was all very formal, a routine the sergeant must have been through scores of times: sudden death, shocked families moving as if in a dream, murmuring polite words, hardly aware of what they were saying, trying to understand what had happened and at the same time deny it.

They stepped out of the sunlight into the sudden darkness of the building. Joseph went ahead. The windows were open to try to keep the air cool and the closeness less oppressive. The corridors were narrow, echoing, and they smelled of stone and carbolic.

The sergeant opened the door to a side room and ushered Joseph and Matthew in. There were two bodies laid out on trolleys, covered decently in white sheets.

Joseph felt his heart lurch. In a moment it would be real, irreversible, a part of his own life ended. He clung to the second of disbelief, the last, precious instant of now, before it all changed.

The sergeant was looking at him, then at Matthew, waiting for them to be ready.

Matthew nodded.

The sergeant pulled back the sheet from the face. It was John Reavley. The familiar aquiline nose looked bigger because his cheeks were sunken, and there was a hollowness about his eyes. The skin on his forehead was broken, but someone had cleaned away the blood. His main injuries must be to his chest—probably from the steering wheel. Joseph blocked out the thought, refusing to picture it in his mind. He wanted to remember his father’s face as it was, looking as if he were no more than asleep after an exhausting day. He might still waken and smile.

“Thank you,” he said aloud, surprised how steady he sounded.

The sergeant murmured something, but Joseph did not listen. Matthew answered. They went to the other body, and the sergeant lifted the sheet, but only partially, keeping it over one side, his own face crumpled with pity. It was Alys Reavley, her right cheek and brow perfect, skin very pale, but blemishless, eyebrows delicately winged. The other side was concealed.

Joseph heard Matthew draw in his breath sharply, and the room seemed to swing and slide off to one side, as if he were drunk. He grasped Matthew and felt Matthew’s hand tighten hard on his wrist.

The sergeant covered Alys Reavley’s face again, started to say something, then changed his mind.

Joseph and Matthew stumbled outside and along the corridor to a small, private room. A woman in a starched uniform brought them cups of tea. It was too strong and too sweet for Joseph, and at first he thought he would gag. Then, after a moment, the heat felt good, and he drank some more.

“Oi’m awful sorry,” the sergeant said again. “If it’s any comfort, it must’ve been very quick.” He looked wretched, his eyes hollow and pink-rimmed. Watching him, Joseph, in spite of himself, started to recall his days as a parish priest, before Eleanor died, when he had had to tell families of tragedy, and try to give them whatever comfort he could, struggling to express a faith that could meet the reality. Everybody was always very polite, strangers trying to reach each other across an abyss of pain.

“What happened?” he said aloud.

“We don’t know yet, sir,” the sergeant answered. He had said what his name was, but Joseph had forgotten. “The car came off the road just afore the Hauxton Mill Bridge,” he went on. “Seems it was going quite fast—”

“That’s a straight stretch!” Matthew cut across him.

“Yes, Oi know, sir,” the sergeant agreed. “From the marks on the road, it looks as if it happened all of a sudden, like a tire blowing out. Can be hard to keep a hold when that happens. It could even’ve bin both tires on the one side, if there were something on the road as caused it.” He chewed his lip dubiously. “That could take you right off, no matter how good a driver you were.”

“Is the car still there?” Matthew asked.

“No, sir.” He shook his head. “We’re bringing it in. You can see it if you want, o’ course, but if you’d rather not . . .”

“What about my father’s belongings?” Matthew said abruptly. “His case, whatever was in his pockets?”

Joseph glared at him in surprise. It was a distasteful request, as if possessions could matter now. Then he remembered the document Matthew had mentioned. He looked at the sergeant.

“Yes, sir, o’ course,” the sergeant agreed. “You can see them now, if you really want, before we . . . clean them.” That was almost a question. He was trying to save them hurt and he did not know how to do it without seeming intrusive.

“There’s a paper,” Matthew explained. “It’s important.”

“Oh! Yes, sir.” The sergeant’s face was bleak. “In that case, if you’ll come with me?” He glanced at Joseph.

Joseph nodded and followed them out of the room and along the hot, silent corridor, their footsteps self-consciously loud. He wanted to see what this damnable document could possibly be. His first vague thoughts were that it might have something to do with the recent mutiny of British army officers in the Curragh. There was always trouble in Ireland, but this looked uglier than usual—in fact, various politicians had warned it could lead to the worst crisis in over two hundred years. Joseph knew most of the facts, as the newspapers reported them, but at the moment his thoughts were too chaotic to make sense of anything.

The sergeant led them to another small room, where he unlocked one of the several cupboards and pulled out a drawer. He carefully extracted a battered leather attaché case with the initials j.r.r. stamped just below the lock, and then a woman’s smart, dark brown leather handbag heavily smeared with blood. No one had yet attempted to clean it.

Joseph felt sick. It did not matter now, but he knew the blood was his mother’s. She was dead and beyond pain, but it mattered to him. He was a minister of the Church; he should know to value the spirit above the body. The flesh was temporary, only a tabernacle for the soul, and yet it was absurdly precious. It was powerful, fragile, and intensely real. It was always an inextricable part of someone you loved.

Matthew was opening the attaché case and looking through the papers inside, his fingers moving delicately. There was something to do with insurance, a couple of letters, a bank statement.

Matthew frowned and tipped the case upside down. Another paper slithered out, but it was only a receipt for a pair of shoes—12/6d. He ran his hands down inside the main compartment, then the side pockets, but there was nothing more. He looked across at Joseph and, with fingers trembling, put down the case and reached for the handbag. He was very careful not to touch the blood. At first he just looked inside, as if a paper would be easy to see. Then when he found nothing, he began carefully moving around the contents.

Joseph could see two handkerchiefs, a comb . . . He thought of his mother’s soft hair with its gentle, natural curl, and the way it lay on her neck when she had it coiled up. He had to close his eyes to prevent the tears, and there was an ache in his throat so fierce he could not swallow.

When he mastered himself and looked down at the handbag again, Matthew was staring at it in confusion.

“Perhaps it was in his pocket?” Joseph suggested, his voice hoarse, jolting the silence.

Matthew looked across at him, then turned to the sergeant.

The sergeant hesitated.

Joseph looked around. It was bare except for the cupboards, more a storeroom than an office. A simple window faced a delivery yard, and then rooftops beyond.

Reluctantly the sergeant opened another drawer and took out a pile of clothes resting on an oilskin sheet. They were drenched with blood, dark and already stiffening. He did his best to conceal it, handing Matthew only the man’s jacket.

His face blanched even whiter, Matthew took it and, with fingers clumsy now, searched through one pocket after another. He found a handkerchief, a penknife, two pipe cleaners, an odd button, and some loose change. There was no paper at all. He looked up at Joseph, a frown between his brows.

“Maybe it’s in the car?” Joseph suggested.

“It must be.” Matthew stood still for a moment. As if he had spoken it, Joseph knew what he was thinking: Regrettably, he would have to examine the rest of the clothes—just in case. He was startled by how fiercely he did not want to intrude into the intimate, the familiar smell. Death was not real yet, the pain of it only just beginning, but he knew its path; it was like the loss of Eleanor all over again. But they must look. Otherwise they would have to come back and do it later if the document was not in the car.

But of course it was in the car. It had to be. In the glove compartment, or one of the pockets at the side. But how odd not to have put it in the briefcase along with the other papers. Isn’t that what anyone would do, automatically?

The sergeant was waiting. He too did not want to inflict that distress.

Matthew blinked several times. “May we have the others, please?” he requested.

The clothes were inspected, as both brothers tried to distance their minds from what their hands were doing. There were no papers except for one small receipt in their father’s trouser pocket, soaked with blood and illegible, but there was no way in which it could be called a document. It was barely two or three inches square.

They folded the clothes again and set them in a pile on top of the oilskin. It was an awkward moment. Joseph did not know what to do with them. The sight and touch of the garments knotted up his stomach with grief. He wished he had never had to see them at all. He certainly did not want to keep these clothes. Neither did he want to pass them over to strangers as if they did not matter.

“May we take them?” he asked haltingly.

Matthew jerked his hand up. Then the surprise died out of his face as if he understood.

“Yes, sir, o’ course,” the sergeant replied. “I’ll just wrap ’em up for you.”

“If we could see the car, please?” Matthew asked.

But it was still on the way back from Hauxton, and they had to wait another half hour. Two more cups of tea later they were taken to the garage where the familiar yellow Lanchester sat gashed and crumpled. The whole of the engine was twisted sideways and half jammed into the front of the passenger area. All four tires were ripped. No human being could have remained alive inside it.

Matthew stood still, struggling to keep his balance.

Joseph reached out to him, glad to break the physical aloneness.

Matthew righted himself and walked over toward the far side of the car, where the driver’s door was hanging open. He took his jacket off and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt.

Joseph went to the windowless frame of the passenger door, keeping his eyes averted from the blood on the seat, and banged the glove compartment to make it open.

There was nothing inside except a small tin of barley sugar and an extra pair of driving gloves. He looked across and saw Matthew’s face, wide-eyed and confused. There was no document in the side pocket. Joseph held the road atlas and riffled the pages, but nothing fell out.

They searched the rest of the car as well as they could, forcing themselves to ignore the blood, the torn leather, the twisted metal, and the shards of glass, but there was no document of any sort. Joseph stepped back at last, elbows and shoulders bruised where he had caught himself on the jutting pieces of what had been seats and the misshapen frames of the doors. He had skinned his knuckles and broken a fingernail trying to pry up a piece of metal.

He looked across at Matthew. “There’s nothing here,” he said.

“No . . .” Matthew frowned. His right sleeve was torn and his face dirty and smeared with blood.

A few years earlier Joseph might have asked his sibling if he was certain of his facts, but Matthew was beyond such brotherly condescension now. The seven years between them were closing fast.

“Where else could it be?” he said instead.

Matthew hesitated, breathing in and out slowly. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He looked beaten, his eyes hollow and his face shadowed with fatigue from battling the inner shock and grief, trying to keep it from overwhelming him. Perhaps this document was something to cling to, something over which he could have some control.

Joseph understood how it mattered to him. John Reavley had wanted one of his sons to enter the medical profession. He had believed passionately that it was the noblest of callings. Joseph had started medical studies to please his father, and then found himself drowned by his inability to affect all but the smallest part of the suffering he witnessed. He knew his limitations, and he saw what he thought was his strength and his true vocation. He answered the call of the Church, using his gift for languages to study the original Greek and Hebrew of the scriptures. Souls needed healing as well as bodies. John Reavley was content with that, and deferred his dream to his second son.

But Matthew had refused outright and turned his imagination, his intellect, and his eye for detail toward the Secret Intelligence Service. John Reavley had been bitterly disappointed. He despised espionage and all its works, and equally those who occupied themselves with it. That he had called Matthew in his professional capacity to help him with a document he had found was a far more powerful testimony of his judgment of it than anyone else would understand.

It would have been a chance for Matthew to give his father a gift from his chosen calling, and it had slipped away forever. That was part of the pain etched in his face.

Joseph lowered his eyes. Perhaps understanding was intrusive at this raw moment.

“Have you any idea what it is?” he asked, investing his voice with urgency, as if it could matter.

“He said it was a conspiracy,” Matthew replied, straightening his back to stand upright. He moved away from the door, coming around the back of the car to where Joseph was, keeping his voice very low. “And that it was the most dishonorable betrayal he had ever seen.”

“Betrayal of whom?”

“I don’t know. He said it was all in the paper.”

“Had he told anyone else?”

“No. He didn’t dare. He had no idea who was involved, but it went as high as the royal family.” Matthew looked surprised as he said it, as if hearing the words aloud startled him with their enormity. He stared at Joseph, searching for a response, an answer.

Joseph waited a moment too long.

“You don’t believe it!” Matthew’s voice was hoarse; he himself sounded unsure if it was an accusation or not. Looking at his brother’s eyes, Joseph could see that Matthew’s own certainty was wavering.

Joseph wanted to save something out of the confusion. “Did he say he was bringing the document or that he would merely tell you about it? Could he have left it at home? In the safe, perhaps?”

“I would have to see it,” Matthew argued, rolling his shirtsleeves down and fastening the cuffs again.

“To do what?” Joseph pursued. “Wouldn’t it be better for him to tell you what it was—and he was perfectly capable of memorizing it for you—and then decide what to do, but keep it in the meantime?”

It was a sensible suggestion. Matthew’s body eased, the stiffness draining out of it. “I suppose so. We’d better go home anyway. We ought to be with Judith. She’s alone. I don’t even know if she’s told Hannah. Someone will have to send her a telegram. She’ll come, of course. And we’ll need to know her train, to meet it.”

“Yes, of course,” Joseph conceded. “There’ll be a lot of preparations.” He did not want to think of them now; they were intimate, final things, an acknowledgment that death was real and that the past could never be brought back. It was the locking of a door.

They drove back from Great Shelford through the quiet lanes. The village of Selborne St. Giles looked just the same as it always had in the soft gold of the evening. They passed the stone mill, its walls flush with the river. The pond was flat as a polished sheet, reflecting the soft enamel blue of the sky. There was an arch of honeysuckle over the lych-gate to the churchyard, and the clock on the tower read just after half past six. In less than two hours they would hold Evensong.

There were half a dozen people in the main street, although the shops were long closed. They passed the doctor with his pony and trap, going at a brisk pace. He waved cheerfully. He could not have heard the news yet.

Joseph stiffened a little. That was one of the tasks that lay ahead, telling people. He was too late to wave back. The doctor would think him rude.

Matthew swung the car left, along the side road to the house. The drive gates were closed, and Joseph got out to open them, then close them again as Matthew pulled up to the front door. Someone had already drawn the curtains downstairs—probably Mrs. Appleton, the housekeeper. Judith would not have thought of it.

Matthew climbed out of the car just as Joseph reached him, and the front door opened. Judith stood on the step. She was fair-skinned like Matthew, but her hair fell in heavy waves and was a warmer brown. She was tall for a woman, and even though he was her brother, Joseph could see that she had a uniquely fierce and vulnerable kind of beauty. The strength inside her had yet to be refined, but it was there in her bones and her level, gray-blue eyes.

Now she was bleached of all color and her eyelids were puffy. She blinked several times to hold back the tears. She looked at Matthew and tried to smile, then took the few steps across the porch onto the gravel to Joseph, and he held her motionless for a moment, then felt her body shake as she let the sobs wrench through her.

He did not try to stop her or find any comforting words. There was no reason that made any sense, and no answer to the pain. He tightened his arms around her, clinging as much to her as she was to him. She was nothing like Alys, not really, yet the softness of her hair, the way it curled, slightly choked the tears in his throat.

Matthew went in ahead of them. His footsteps faded along the wooden floor of the hall, and then they heard his voice murmuring something and Mrs. Appleton replying.

Judith sniffed hard and pulled back a little. She felt in Joseph’s pocket for his handkerchief. She took it out and blew her nose, then wiped her eyes, screwing up the linen and clenching it in her hand. She turned away and went inside also, talking to him without looking back.

“I don’t know what to do with myself. Isn’t it stupid?” She gulped. “I keep walking around from room to room, and going out again, then coming back—as if that would make it any different! I suppose we’ll have to tell people?”

Joseph went up the steps behind her.

“I sent Hannah a telegram, but that’s all,” she went on. “I don’t even remember what I said.” Inside she swiveled around to face him, ignoring Henry, the cream-haired retriever who came out of the sitting room at the sound of Joseph’s voice. “How do you tell people something like this? I can’t believe it’s real!”

“Not yet,” he agreed, bending to touch the dog as it pushed against his hand. He stood in the familiar hallway with its oak staircase curving upward, the light from the landing window catching the watercolors on the wall. “It’ll come. Tomorrow morning it will begin.” He could remember with sickening clarity the first time he had woken up after Eleanor’s death. There was an instant when everything was as it had always been, the whole year of their marriage. Then the truth had washed over him like ice, and something inside him had never been warm again.

There was a fleeting pity in Judith’s face, and he knew she was remembering also. He made an effort to force it away. She was twenty-three, almost an afterthought in the family. He should be protecting her, not thinking of himself.

“Don’t worry about telling people,” he said gently. “I’ll do that.” He knew how hard it was, almost like making the death itself happen over again each time. “There’ll be other things to do. Just ordinary housekeeping, for a start. Practical things.”

“Oh, yes.” She jerked her attention into focus. “Mrs. Appleton will deal with the cooking and the laundry, but I’ll tell Lettie to make up Hannah’s room. She’ll be here tomorrow. And I suppose there’s food to order. I’ve never done that! Mother always did.”

Judith was quite unlike either her mother or Hannah, both of whom loved their kitchens and the smells of cooking, clean linen, beeswax polish, lemon soap. For them, to run a house was an art. To Judith it was a distraction from the real business of living, although to be honest, she was not yet certain for herself what that would prove to be. But Joseph knew it was not domesticity. To their mother’s exasperation, she had turned down at least two perfectly good offers of marriage.

But this was not the time for such thoughts.

“Ask Mrs. Appleton,” Joseph told her. He steadied his voice with an effort. “We’ll have to go through the diaries and cancel any appointments.”

“Mother was going to judge the flower show,” she said, smiling and biting her lip, tears flooding her eyes. “They’ll have to find somebody else. I can’t do it, even if they were to ask me.”

“And bills,” he added. “I’ll see the bank, and the solicitor.”

She stood stiffly in the middle of the floor, her shoulders rigid. She was wearing a pale blouse and a soft green narrow skirt. She had not yet thought to put on black. “I suppose somebody’ll have to sort . . . clothes and things. I—” She gulped. “I haven’t been into the bedroom yet. I can’t!”

He shook his head. “Too soon. It doesn’t matter, for ages.”

She relaxed a fraction, as if she had been afraid he was going to force her. “Tea?”

“Yes, please.” He was surprised how thirsty he was. His mouth was dry.

Matthew was in the kitchen with Mrs. Appleton, a square, mild-faced woman with a stubborn jaw. Now she was standing at the table with her back to the stove on which a kettle was beginning to whistle. She wore her usual plain blue dress, and her cotton apron was screwed up at the right-hand corner as if she had unthinkingly used it to wipe the tears from her eyes. She sniffed fiercely as she looked first at Judith and then at Joseph, for once not bothering to tell the dog not to come in. She drew in her breath to say something, then decided she could not trust herself to keep her composure. Clearing her throat loudly, she turned to Matthew.

“Oi’ll do that, Mr. Matthew. You’ll only scald yourself. You weren’t never use to man nor beast in the kitchen. Do nothing but take my jam tarts, as if there was no one else in the house to eat ’em. Here!” She snatched the kettle from him and with considerable clattering and banging made the tea.

Lettie, the general housemaid, came in silently, her face pale and tearstained. Judith asked her to make up Hannah’s room, and she departed to obey, glad to have something to do.

Reginald, the only indoor manservant, appeared and asked Joseph if they would want wine for dinner and if he should lay out black clothes for him and Matthew.

Joseph declined the wine but accepted the offer to lay out the mourning clothes, and Reginald left. Mrs. Appleton’s husband, Albert, was outside working off his grief alone, digging in his beloved garden.

In the kitchen they sat around the scrubbed table in silence, sipping the hot tea, each sunk in thought. The room was as familiar as life itself. All four children had been born in this house, learned to walk and talk here, left through the front gate to go to school. Matthew and Joseph had driven from here to go to university, Hannah to go to her wedding in the village church. Joseph could remember the endless fittings of her dress in the spare bedroom, she standing as still as she could while Alys went around her with pins in her hands and in her mouth, a tuck here, a lift there, determined the gown should be perfect. And it had been.

Now Alys would never be back. Joseph could remember her perfume, always lily-of-the-valley. The bedroom would still smell of it.

Hannah would be devastated. She was so close to her mother, so like her in a score of ways, she would feel robbed of the model for her life. There would be nobody to share with her the small successes and failures in the home, the children’s growth, the new things learned. No one else would reassure her anxieties, teach her the simple remedies for a fever or sore throat, or show the easy way to mend, to adapt, to make do. It was a companionship that was gone forever.

For Judith it would be different, an open wound of things not done, not said, and now unable ever to be put right.

Matthew set his cup down and looked across the table at Joseph.

“I think we should go and sort some of the papers and bills.” He stood up, scraping his chair on the floor.

Judith seemed not to notice the tremor in his voice or the fact that he was trying to exclude her.

Joseph knew what he meant: It was time to look for the document. If it existed, then it should be here in the house, although why John would have set out to show it to Matthew and then not taken it with him was hard to understand.

“Yes, of course,” Joseph agreed, rising as well. They had better give Judith something to do. She had no need to know anything about this yet, and perhaps not at all. He turned to her. “Would you go through the household accounts with Mrs. Appleton and see if there is anything that needs doing? Perhaps some orders should be canceled, or at least reduced. And there may be invitations to be declined.”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“You’ll be staying?” Mrs. Appleton said with another sniff. “What’ll you be wanting for dinner, Mr. Joseph?”

“Nothing special,” he answered. “Whatever you have.”

“Oi’ve got cold salmon and summer pudding,” she said a little truculently, as if she were defending Alys’s choice. If it was good enough for the master and mistress, it was certainly good enough for the young master, whatever had happened in the world. “And there’s some good Ely cheese,” she added.

“That would be excellent, thank you.” He then followed Matthew, who was already at the door.

They went along the passage and across the hall to John Reavley’s study, overlooking the garden. The sun was still well above the horizon and bathing the tops of the orchard trees in gold. The leaves shimmered in the rising wind, and a swirl of starlings rose into the sky, black against the amber and flame, turning in wide spiral arms against the sunset.

Joseph looked around the familiar room, almost like an earlier pattern of his own in Cambridge. There was a simple oak desk, shelves of books covering most of two walls. The books dated back to John’s university days. Some were in German. Many were leather-bound, a few well-thumbed cloth or even paper. There was a recently acquired folio of drawings on the table by the window.

A Bonnington seascape hung over the fireplace, its color neither blue nor green, but a luminous gray that holds both at its heart. Looking at it, one could draw a cleaner breath and almost feel the sting of the salt in the wind. John Reavley had loved everything in this room. Each object marked some happiness or beauty he had known, but the Bonnington was special.

Joseph turned away from it. “I’ll start over here,” he said, taking the first book off the shelf nearest the window.

Matthew began with the desk.

They searched for half an hour before dinner, and all evening afterward. Judith went to bed, and midnight found the two brothers still sifting through papers, looking in books a second or third time, even moving furniture. Finally they admitted defeat and forced themselves into the master bedroom to look with stiff fingers through drawers of clothes, in shelves where toiletries and personal jewelry were kept, in pockets of the clothes hanging in wardrobes. There was no document.

At half past one, head throbbing, eyes stinging as if hot and gritty, Joseph came to the end of places to investigate. He straightened up, moving his shoulders carefully to ease the ache. “It’s not here,” he said wearily.

Matthew did not answer for several moments. He kept his eyes on the drawer he had been going through for the third time. “Father was very clear,” he repeated stubbornly. “He said the effect of it, the daring, was so vast it was beyond most men’s imagination. And terrible.” He looked up at last, his eyes red-rimmed, angry, as if Joseph were attacking his judgment. “He couldn’t trust anyone else because of who was involved.”

Joseph’s imagination was too tired and too full of pain to be inventive, even to save Matthew’s feelings. “Then where is it?” he demanded. “Would he trust it to the bank? Or the solicitor?”

Denial was in Matthew’s face, but he clung to the possibility for a few seconds, because he could think of nothing else.

“We’ll have to speak to them tomorrow anyway.” Joseph sat down on the chair by the desk. Matthew was sitting beside the drawers on the carpet.

“He wouldn’t give it to Pettigrew.” Matthew pushed his hair back off his forehead. “They’re just family solicitors—wills and property.”

“Then quite a safe place to hide something valuable and dangerous,” Joseph reasoned.

Matthew glared at him. “Are you trying to defend Father? Prove that he wasn’t imagining it out of something that was really perfectly harmless?”

Joseph was stung by the accusation. It was exactly what he was doing—defending, denying—and he was confused and dizzy with loss. “Do I need to?” he demanded.

“Stop being so damn reasonable!” Matthew’s voice cracked, the emotion raw. “Of course you need to! It wasn’t in the car! It isn’t in the house.” He jerked his hand sharply toward the door and the landing beyond. “Doesn’t it sound wild enough to you, unlikely enough? A piece of paper that proves a conspiracy to ruin all we love and believe in—and that goes right up to the royal family—but when we look for it, it vanishes into the air!”

Joseph said nothing. The tag end of an idea pulled at his mind, but he was too exhausted to grasp it.

“What is it?” Matthew said roughly. “What are you thinking?”

“Could it be obvious?” Joseph frowned. “I mean, something we are seeing but not recognizing?”

Matthew looked round the room. “Like what? For God’s sake, Joe! A conspiracy of this magnitude! The document is not going to be hung up on the wall along with the pictures!” He put the papers in the drawer, climbed to his feet, and carried it back to the desk. He replaced it in its slots and pushed it closed. “And before you bother, I’ve taken the backs off all the drawers and looked.”

“Well, there are two possibilities.” Joseph was driven to the last conclusion. “Either there is such a document or there isn’t.”

“You have a genius for the obvious!” Matthew said bitterly. “I had worked that out for myself.”

“And you concluded that there is? On what basis?”

“No!” Matthew snapped. “I just spent the evening ransacking the house because I have nothing better to do!”

“You don’t have anything better to do,” Joseph answered him. “We had to go through the papers anyway to find what needs attending to.” He gestured toward the separated pile. “And the sooner we do it, the less bloody awful it is. We can think of a conspiracy while we look, which is easier than thinking that we are performing a sort of last rite for both our parents.”

“All right!” Matthew cut in. “I’m sorry.” Again he pushed the thick fair hair off his face. “But honestly, he sounded so certain of it! His voice was charged with emotion, not a bit dry and humorous as it usually is.” His mouth pulled a little crooked, and when he spoke again his voice cracked. “I know what it must have cost him to call me on something like that. He hated all the secret services. He wouldn’t have said anything if he hadn’t been certain.”

“Then he put it somewhere we haven’t thought of yet,” Joseph concluded. He stood up also. “Go to bed now. It’s nearly two, and there’s a lot we have to do later.”

“There was a telegram from Hannah. She’s coming on the two-fifteen. Will you go and meet her?” Matthew was rubbing his forehead sore. “She’s going to find this pretty hard.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll meet her. Albert will drive me. Can I take your car?”

“Of course.” Matthew shook his head. “I wonder why he didn’t drive Father yesterday.”

“Or why Mother went,” Joseph added. “It’s all odd. I’ll ask Albert on the way to the station.”

The next day was filled with small, unhappy duties. The formal arrangements had to be made for the funeral. Joseph went to see Hallam Kerr, the vicar, and sat in the tidy, rather stiff vicarage parlor watching him trying to think of something to say that would be of spiritual comfort and finding nothing. Instead they spoke of the practicalities: the day, the hour, who should say what, the hymns. It was a timeless ritual that had been conducted in the old church for every death in the village. The very familiarity of it was comfortable, a reassurance that even if one individual journey was ended, life itself was the same and always would be. There was a kind of certainty in it that gave its own peace.

Just before lunch Mr. Pettigrew came from the solicitors’ office, small and pale and very neat. He offered his condolences and assured them that everything legal was in order—and that he had been given no papers to keep recently. In fact, not anything this year. A couple of bonds in August of 1913 were the last things. He did not yet mention the will, but they knew it would have to be dealt with in time.

The bank manager, the doctor, and other neighbors called in or left flowers and cards. Nobody knew what to say, but it was done in kindness. Judith offered them tea, and sometimes it was accepted and awkward conversations followed.

In the early afternoon Albert Appleton drove Joseph to the railway station at Cambridge to meet Hannah’s train from London. Joseph sat beside him in the front of Matthew’s Sunbeam Talbot as they followed the lanes between the late wild roses and the ripening fields of corn already dappled here and there with the scarlet of poppies.

Albert kept his eyes studiously on the road. He looked tired, his skin papery under its dark sunburn, and he had missed a little gray stubble on his cheek when he had shaved this morning. He was not a man to give words to grief, but he had come to St. Giles at eighteen and served John Reavley all his adult life. For him this was the ending of an age.

“Do you know why Father drove himself yesterday?” Joseph asked as they passed into the shade under an avenue of elms.

“No, Mr. Joseph,” Albert replied. It would be a long time before he called Joseph “Mr. Reavley,” if he ever did. “Except there’s a branch on the old plum tree in the orchard hanging low, an’ tossled in the grass. He wanted me to see if Oi could save it. Oi propped it up, but that don’t always work. Get a bit o’ wind an’ it goes anyway, but it tears it off rough. Leaves a gash in the trunk, an’ kill the whole thing. Get a bit parky an’ the frost’ll have it anyway.”

“I see. Can you save it?”

“Best to take it off.”

“Do you know why Mother went with him?”

“Jus’ liked to go with him, mebbe.” He stared fixedly ahead.

Joseph did not speak again until they reached the station. Albert had always been someone with whom it was possible to sit in amicable silence, ever since Joseph had been a boy nursing his dreams in the garden or the orchard.

Albert parked the car outside the station and Joseph went in and onto the platform to wait. There were half a dozen other people there, but he studiously avoided meeting anyone’s eye in case he encountered someone he knew. The last thing he wanted was conversation.

The train was on time, belching steam and grinding to a halt at the platform. The doors clanged open. People shouted greetings and fumbled with baggage. He saw Hannah almost immediately. The few other women were in bright summer colors or delicate pastels. Hannah was in a slim traveling suit of unrelieved black. The tapered hem at her ankles was smudged with dust, and her neat hat was decorated with black feathers. Her face was pale, and with her wide brown eyes and soft features she looked so like Alys that for a moment Joseph felt his emotions lurch out of control and grief engulf him unbearably. He stood motionless as people pushed past him, unable to think or even focus his vision.

Then she was in front of him, portmanteau clutched in her hand and tears spilling down her cheeks. She dropped the bag on the platform and waited for him.

He put his arms around her and held her as close to him as he could. He felt her shivering. He had already tried to work out what to say to her, but now it all slipped away, sounding hollow and predictable. He was a minister, the one of all of them who was supposed to have the faith that answered death and overcame the hollow pain that consumed everything from the inside. But he knew what bereavement was, sharply and recently, and no words had touched more than the surface for him.

Please God, he must find something to say to Hannah! What use was he if, of all people, he could not?

He let go of her at last and picked up her bag, carrying it out to where Albert was waiting with the car.

She stopped, staring at the unfamiliar vehicle, as if she had expected the yellow Lanchester. Then, with a gasp that caught in her throat, she realized why it was not there.

Joseph took her by the elbow and helped her into the backseat, straightening the slender black skirt around her ankles before closing the door and going around to the other side to get in next to her.

Albert got back in and started the engine.

Hannah said nothing. It was up to Joseph to speak before the silence became too difficult. He had already decided not to mention the document. It was an unneeded concern for her.

“Judith will be glad to see you,” he started.

She looked at him with slight surprise, and he knew immediately that her thoughts had been inward, absorbed in her own loss. As if she read his perception, she smiled slightly, an admission of guilt.

He put out his hand, palm upward, and she slid hers across and gripped his fingers. For several minutes she was silent, blinking back the tears.

“If you can see sense in it,” she said at last, “please don’t tell me now. I don’t think I could bear it. I don’t want to know a God who could do this. Above all I don’t want to be told I should love Him. I don’t!”

Several answers rose to his lips, all of them rational and scriptural, and none of them answering her need.

“It’s all right to hurt,” he said instead. “I don’t think God expects any of us to take it calmly.”

“Yes, He does!” She choked on the words. “ ‘Thy will be done’!” She shook her head fiercely. “Well, I can’t say that. It’s stupid and senseless and horrible. There’s nothing good in it.” She was fighting to make anger conquer the fearful, consuming grief. “Was anyone else killed?” she demanded. “The other car? There must have been another car. Father wouldn’t simply have driven off the road, whatever anyone says.”

“Nobody else was hurt, and there’s no evidence of another car.”

“What do you mean, evidence?” she said furiously, the color flooding her face. “Don’t be so pedantic! So obscenely reasonable! If nobody saw it, there wouldn’t be!”

He did not argue. She needed to rage at someone, and he let her go on until they were through the gates and had drawn up at the front door. She took several long, shuddering breaths, then blew her nose and said she was ready to go inside. She seemed on the edge of saying something more, something gentler, looking steadily at him through brimming eyes. Then she changed her mind and stepped out of the door as Albert held it for her and gave her his hand to steady her.

They ate supper quietly together. Now and again one of them spoke of small, practical things that had to be done, but nobody cared about them. Grief was like a fifth entity in the room, dominating the rest.

Afterward Joseph went to his father’s study again and made certain that all the letters had been written to friends to inform them of John and Alys’s death and tell them the time of the funeral. He noticed that Matthew had written the one letter he had considered most important, to Shanley Corcoran, his father’s closest friend. They had been at university together—Gonville and Caius. Corcoran would be one of the hardest to greet at the church because his pain would be so deep and the memories were so long, woven into so many of the best days right from the beginning.

And yet there were ways in which the sharing would also help. Perhaps afterward they would be able to talk about John in particular. It would keep some part of him alive. Corcoran would never become bored with it or let the memory sink into some pleasant region of the past where the sharpness did not matter anymore.

About half past nine the village constable came by. He was a young man of about Matthew’s age, but he looked tired and harassed.

“Oi’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head and pursing his lips. “We’ll all miss ’em terrible. I never knew better people.”

“Thank you,” Joseph said sincerely. It was good to hear, even though it twisted the pain. To have said nothing would be like denying they mattered.

“Sunday was a bad day all round,” the constable went on, standing uncomfortably in the hall. “Did you hear what happened in Sarajevo?”

“No, what?” Joseph did not care in the slightest, but he did not wish to be rude.

“Some madman shot the archduke of Austria—and the duchess, too.” The constable shook his head. “Both dead! Don’t suppose you’ve had time to look at the papers.”

“No.” Joseph was only half aware of what he was saying. He had not given the newspapers a thought. The rest of the world had seemed removed, not part of their lives. “I’m sorry.”

The constable shrugged. “Long way from here, sir. Probably won’t mean nothin’ for us.”

“No. Thank you for coming, Barker.”

The constable’s eyes flickered down. “I’m real sorry, Mr. Reavley. It won’t be the same without ’em.”

“Thank you.”

CHAPTER

TWO

The funeral of John and Alys Reavley was held on the morning of July 2, in the village church at Selborne St. Giles. It was another hot, still day, and the perfume of the honeysuckle over the lych-gate hung heavy in the air, making one drowsy even before noon. The yew trees in the graveyard looked dusty in the heat.

The cortege came in slowly, two coffins borne by young men from the village. Most of them had been to school with either Joseph or Matthew, at least for the first few years of their lives, played football with them or spent hours on the edge of the river fishing or generally dreaming away the summers. Now they shuffled one foot in front of the other, careful to look straight ahead and balance the weight without stumbling. The tilted stones of the path had been worn uneven by a thousand years of worshipers, mourners, and celebrants from Saxon times to the present day and the modern world of Victoria’s grandson, George V.

Joseph walked behind them, Hannah on his arm, barely keeping her composure. She had purchased a new black dress in Cambridge, and a black straw hat with a veil. She kept her chin high, but Joseph had a strong feeling that her eyes were almost closed and she was clinging to him to guide her. She had hated the days of waiting. Every room she went into reminded her of her loss. The kitchen was worst. It was full of memories: cloths Alys had stitched, plates with the wildflowers painted on them that she had loved, the flat basket she used to collect the dried heads from the roses, the corn dolly she had bought at the Madingley fair. The smell of food brought back memories of crumpets and lardy cakes, and hot, savory onion clangers with suet crust.

Alys had liked to buy the blue-veined Double Cottenham cheese and butter by the yard, instead of the modern weights. It was the smallest things that hurt Hannah the most, perhaps because they caught her unaware: Lettie arranging flowers in the wrong jug (one Alys would never have chosen); Horatio the cat sitting in the scullery, where Alys would not have permitted him; the fish delivery boy being cheeky and answering back where he would not have dared to before. All of these were the first marks of irrevocable change.

Matthew walked with Judith a few steps behind, both of them stiff and staring straight ahead. Judith, too, had a veiled hat and a new black dress with sleeves right down to the backs of her hands, and a skirt so slender it obliged her to walk daintily. She did not like it, but it was actually dramatically becoming to her.

Inside the church the air was cooler, musty with the smell of old books and stone and the heavy scent of flowers. Joseph noticed them immediately with a gulp of surprise. The women of the village must have stripped their gardens of every white bloom: roses, phlox, old-fashioned pinks, and bowers of daisies of every size, single and double. They were like a pale foam breaking over the ancient carved woodwork toward the altar, gleaming where the sunlight came in through the stained-glass windows. He knew they were for Alys. She had been all the village wanted her to be: modest, loyal, quick to smile, able to keep a secret, proud of her home and pleased to care for it. She was willing to exchange recipes with Mrs. Worth, garden cuttings with Tucky Spence even though she never stopped talking, patient with Miss Anthony’s endless stories about her niece in South Africa.

John had been more difficult for them to understand: a man of intellect who had studied deeply and often traveled abroad. But when he was here his pleasures had been simple enough: his family and his garden, old artifacts, watercolor pictures from the last century that he enjoyed cleaning and reframing. He had delighted in a bargain and searched through antique and curio shops, happy to listen to tales of quaint, ordinary people, and always ready to hear or pass on a joke—the longer and shaggier, the more he relished it.

Joseph’s recollections continued as the service began, and he stared at all the long, familiar faces, sad and confused now in their hasty black. He found his throat too tight to sing the hymns.

Then it was time for him to speak, just briefly, as representative of the family. He did not wish to preach; it was not the time. Let someone else do that—Hallam Kerr, if he had a mind to. Joseph was here as a son to remember his parents. This was not about praise, but about love.

It was not easy to keep his voice from breaking, his thoughts in order, and his words clear and simple. But this, after all, was his skill. He knew bereavement intimately, and he had explored it over and over in his mind until it had no more black corners for him.

“We are met together in the heart of the village, perhaps the soul of it, to say goodbye for the moment to two of our number who were your friends, our parents—I speak for myself, and for my brother, Matthew, and my sisters, Hannah and Judith.”

He hesitated, struggling to maintain his composure. There was no movement or rustle of whispering among the upturned faces staring at him.

“You all knew them. You met in the street day by day, at the post office, at the shops, over the garden wall. And most of all you met here. They were good people, and we are hurt and diminished by their going.”

He stopped for a moment, then began again. “We shall miss my mother’s patience, her spirit of hope that was never just easy words, never denial of evil or suffering, but the quiet faith that they could be overcome, and the trust that the future would be bright. We must not fail her by forgetting what she taught us. We should be grateful for every life that has given us happiness, and gratitude is the treasuring of the gift, the nourishing of it, the use, and then to pass it on bright and whole to others.”

He saw a movement, a nodding, a hundred familiar faces turned toward him, somber and bruised with the suddenness of grief, each one hurt by its own private memory.

“My father was different,” he continued. “His mind was brilliant, but his heart was simple. He knew how to listen to others without leaping to conclusions. He could tell a longer, funnier, more rambling joke than anyone else I know, and they were never grubby or unkind. For him, unkindness was the great sin. You could be brave and honest, obedient and devout, but if you could not be kind, then you had failed.”

He found himself smiling as he spoke, even though his voice was so thick with tears it was hard to make his words clear. “He did not care for organized religion. I have known him to fall asleep in church and wake up applauding because he thought for an instant that he was in a theater. He could not bear intolerance, and he thought those who confessed religious faith could be among the worst at this. But he would have defended St. Paul with his own life for his words on love: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am nothing.’

“He was not perfect, but he was kind. He was gentle with others’ weaknesses. I would gladly labor all my life that you would be able to say the same of me when I, too, come to say goodbye—for the time being.”

He was shaking with relief as he returned to his seat beside Hannah and felt her hand close over his. But he knew that under her veil she was weeping and would not look at him.

Hallam Kerr took the pulpit, his words sonorous and sure but curiously lacking in conviction, as if he, too, had been swept out of his depth. He continued the service in the familiar way, the words and music woven like a bright thread through the history of life in the village. It was as certain and as rich as the passing seasons, barely changing from year to year down the centuries.

Afterward Joseph again chose the part that was in a way the most harrowing, standing by the church door and shaking hands with people as they fumbled for words, trying to express their grief and support, and few of them knowing how to. In some way the service had not been enough; something was still unsaid. There was a hunger, a need unmet, and Joseph was aware of it as a hollowness within himself. Now, when he needed it most, his words had lost their consuming power. The last shred of certainty in himself melted in his grasp.

Judith and Hannah stood together, still in the shadow of the arched doorway. Matthew had not yet come out. Joseph moved into the sun to speak to Shanley Corcoran, who waited a few yards away. He was not a tall man, and yet the power of his character, the vitality within him, commanded a respect so that no one crowded to him, although most did not even know who he was, let alone the brilliance of his achievements, nor would they have understood had they been told. The word scientist would have had to suffice.

He came forward to Joseph now, holding out both his hands, his face crumpled in grief.

“Joseph,” he said simply.

Joseph found the warmth of touch and the emotion it evoked almost unbearable. The familiarity of such a close friend was overwhelming. He was unable to speak.

It was Orla Corcoran who rescued him. She was a beautiful woman with a dark, exotic face, and her black silk dress with its elegant waist, flowing jacket to below the hip, and slender skirt beneath was the perfect complement to her delicate bones.

“Joseph knows our grief, my dear,” she said, laying her gloved hand on her husband’s arm. “We should not struggle to say that for which there can be no words. The village is waiting. This is their turn, and the sooner this duty is accomplished, the sooner the family can go back home and be alone.” She looked at Joseph. “Perhaps in a few days we may call and visit with you for a little longer?”

“Of course,” Joseph answered impulsively. “Please do. I shall not go back to Cambridge until the end of the week at least. I don’t know about Matthew—we haven’t discussed it. We just wanted to get today over.”

“Naturally,” Corcoran agreed, letting go of Joseph’s hand at last. “And Hannah will go back to Portsmouth, no doubt.” There was a pucker of anxiety between his brows. “I assume Archie is at sea, or he would be here now?”

Joseph nodded. “Yes. But they may grant him compassionate leave when he is next in port.” There was nothing he could do for Hannah. She must now face the ordeal of helping her children recover from the pain of their grandparents’ death. It was the first big loss in their lives, and they would need her. She had already been away for the larger part of a week.

“Of course, if it’s possible,” Corcoran acquiesced, still looking at Joseph with the slight frown, his eyes troubled.

“Why should it not be possible?” Joseph said a trifle sharply. “For heaven’s sake, his wife has just lost both her parents!”

“I know, I know,” Corcoran said gently. “But Archie is a serving officer. I dare say you have been too busy with your own grief to read much of the world news, and that is perfectly natural. However, this assassination in Sarajevo is very ugly.”

“Yes,” Joseph agreed uncomprehendingly. “They were shot, weren’t they?” Did it really matter now? Why was Corcoran even thinking about it—today, of all days? “I’m sorry, but . . .”

Corcoran looked a little stooped. It was so slight as to be indefinable, but the shadow in him was more than grief; there was something yet to come that he feared.

“It wasn’t a single lunatic with a gun,” he said gravely. “It’s far deeper than that.”

“Is it?” Joseph said without belief or comprehension.

“There were several assassins,” Corcoran said gravely. “The first did nothing. The second threw a bomb, but the chauffeur saw it coming and managed to speed up and around it.” His lips tightened. “The man who threw the bomb took some sort of poison, then jumped into the river, but he was pulled out and lived. The bomb exploded and injured several people. They were taken to hospital.” His voice was very low, as if he did not want the rest of the people standing in the graveyard to hear, even though it must be public knowledge. Perhaps they had not grasped the meaning of it.

“The archduke continued with his day’s agenda,” he went on, ignoring Orla’s frown. “He spoke to people in the town hall, and later he decided to go and visit the injured, but his chauffeur took a wrong turn and came face-to-face with the final assassin, who leaped on the running board of the car and shot the archduke in the neck and the duchess in the stomach. Both died within minutes.”

“I’m sorry.” Joseph winced. He could picture it, but the moment he did, their faces changed to those of John and Alys, and the death of two Austrian aristocrats a thousand miles away melted into unimportance.

Corcoran’s hand gripped his arm again, and the strength of him seemed to surge through it. “It was chaotically done, but it comes from a groundswell of feeling, Joseph. It could lead to an Austro-Serbian war,” he said quietly. “And then Germany might become involved. The kaiser reasserted his alliance with Austria-Hungary yesterday.”

It rose to Joseph’s lips to argue that it was too unlikely to consider, but he saw in Corcoran’s eyes how intensely he meant it. “Really?” he said with puzzlement. “Surely it will just be a matter of punishment, reparation, or something? It is an internal matter for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, isn’t it?”

Corcoran nodded, withdrawing his hand. “Perhaps. If there is any sanity in the world, it will.”

“Of course it will!” Orla said firmly. “It will be miserable for the Serbs, poor creatures, but it doesn’t concern us. Don’t alarm Joseph with such thoughts, Shanley.” She smiled as she said it. “We have enough grief of our own without borrowing other people’s.”

He was prevented from replying to her by the arrival of Gerald and Mary Allard, close friends of the family whom Joseph had known for many years. Elwyn was their younger son, but their elder, Sebastian, was a pupil of Joseph’s, a young man of remarkable gifts. He seemed to master not only the grammar and the vocabulary of foreign languages but the music of them, the subtlety of meaning and the flavor of the cultures that had given them birth.

It was Joseph who had seen the promise in him and encouraged him to seek a place at Cambridge to study ancient languages, not only biblical but the great classics of culture as well. Sebastian had grasped his opportunity. He worked with zeal and remarkable self-discipline for so young a man, and had become one of the brightest of the students, taking first-class honors. Now he was doing postgraduate studies before moving on to a career as a scholar and philosopher, perhaps even a poet.

Mary caught Joseph’s eye and smiled at him, her face full of pity.

Gerald came forward. He was a pleasant, ordinary-seeming man, fair-haired, good-looking in a benign, undistinguished way. Brief introductions were made to the Corcorans, who then excused themselves.

“So sorry,” Gerald murmured, shaking his head. “So sorry.”

“Thank you.” Joseph wished there were something sensible to say, and longed to escape.

“Elwyn is here, of course.” She indicated very slightly over her shoulder to where Elwyn Allard was talking to Pettigrew, the lawyer, and trying to escape to join his contemporaries. “And unfortunately Sebastian had to be in London,” Mary went on. “A prior commitment he could not break.” She was thin, with fierce, striking features, dark hair, and a fine olive complexion. “But I am sure you know how deeply he feels.”

Gerald cleared his throat as if to say something—from the shadow in his eyes, possibly a disagreement—but he changed his mind.

Joseph thanked them again and excused himself to speak to someone else.

It seemed to stretch interminably—the kindness, the grief, the awkwardness—but eventually the ordeal was over. He saw Mrs. Appleton, somber and pale-faced, as she said goodbye to the vicar and started back to the house. Everything was already prepared to receive their closest friends. There would be nothing for the staff to do but take the muslin cloths off the food already laid out on the tables. Lettie and Reginald had been given time off also, but they would both be back to help with the clearing away.

The house was a mere six hundred yards from the church, and people straggled slowly under the lych-gate and along the road through the village in the quiet sunlight, turning right toward the Reavley home. They all knew each other and were intimately concerned in each other’s lives. They had walked to christenings, weddings, and funerals along these quiet roads; they had quarreled and befriended one another, laughed together, gossiped and interfered for better or worse.

Now they grieved, and few needed to find words for it.

Joseph and Hannah welcomed them at the front door. Matthew and Judith had already gone inside, she to the drawing room, he presumably to fetch the wine and pour it.

The last person was ushered in, and Joseph turned to follow. He was crossing the hall when Matthew came out of John’s study ahead of him, his face puckered with concern.

“Joseph, have you been in here this morning?”

“The study? No. Why? Have you lost something?”

“No. I haven’t been in since last night, until just now.”

Had his brother looked any less concerned, Joseph would have been impatient with him, but there was an anxiety in Matthew’s face that held his attention. “If you haven’t lost anything, what’s the matter?” he asked.

“I was the last one out of the house this morning,” Matthew replied, keeping his voice very low so that it would not carry to anyone in the dining room. “After Mrs. Appleton, and she didn’t come back—she was at the funeral all the time.”

“Of course she was!”

“Someone’s been in here,” Matthew answered quietly, but with no hesitation or lift of question in his voice. “I know exactly where I left everything. It’s the papers. They’re all on the square, and I left some of them poking out a fraction, to mark my place.”

“Horatio?” Joseph said, thinking of the cat.

“Door was closed,” Matthew answered.

“Mrs. Appleton must have . . . ,” Joseph began, then, seeing the gravity in Matthew’s eyes, he stopped. “What are you saying?”

“Someone was in here while we were all at the funeral,” Matthew replied. “No one would have noticed Henry barking, and he was shut in the garden room. I can’t see anything gone . . . and don’t tell me it was a sneak thief. I locked up myself, and I didn’t miss the back door. And a thief wouldn’t go through Father’s papers; he’d take the silver and the ornaments that are easy to move. The silver-rimmed crystal bud vase is still on the mantelpiece, and the snuffboxes are on the table, not to mention the Bonnington, which is quite small enough to be carried.”

Joseph’s mind raced, wild ideas falling over each other, but before he could put words to any of them, Hannah came out of the dining room. She looked from one to the other of them. “What’s wrong?” she said quickly.

“Matthew’s mislaid something, that’s all,” Joseph replied. “I’ll see if I can help him find it. I’ll be in in a moment.”

“Does it matter now?” There was an edge to her voice, close to breaking. “For heaven’s sake, come and speak to people! They’re expecting you! You can’t leave me there alone! It’s horrible!”

“I’d be happier to look first,” Matthew answered her before Joseph found the words. His face was miserable and stubborn. “Have you been upstairs since you came home?”

She was incredulous, her eyes wide. “No, of course I haven’t! We have half the village in the house as our guests, or haven’t you noticed?”

Matthew glanced at Joseph, then back at Hannah. “It matters,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. I’ll be down in a minute. Joe?”

Matthew took a deep breath and walked to the foot of the stairs.

Joseph followed after him, leaving Hannah standing in the hall, fuming. When he reached the landing, Matthew was in the doorway to their parents’ bedroom, staring around as if to memorize every article there, every line and shadow, the bright bars of light through the window across the floorboards and the carpet. It was so achingly familiar, exactly as it had been as long as he could remember: the dark oak tallboy with his father’s brushes and the leather box Alys had given him for cuff links and collar studs; her dressing table, with the oval mirror on a stand that needed a little piece of paper wedged to keep it at the right angle; the cut-glass trays and bowls for hairpins, powder, combs; the wardrobe with the round hatbox on top.

He had stood here to tell his mother that he was going to leave medicine because he could not bear the helplessness he felt in the face of pain he could do nothing to ease. Joseph knew how disappointed his father would be. John had wanted it so fiercely. He had never explained why. He would say very little, but he would not understand, and his silence would hurt more than any accusation or demand for explanations.

And Joseph had come here later to tell Alys that he was going to marry Eleanor. That had been a winter day, rain spattering the window. She had been putting up her hair after changing for dinner. She had always had beautiful hair.

He forced his mind to the present.

“Is there anything gone?” he said aloud.

“I don’t think so.” Matthew did not move to go in yet. “But there might be, because it’s different somehow.”

“Are you certain?” It was a stupid question, because he knew Matthew was not certain. He simply wanted to deny the reality settling more and more firmly in his mind with each second. “I don’t see anything,” he added.

“Wait a minute.” Matthew put up his hand as if to stop Joseph from passing him, although Joseph had not moved. “There is something . . . I just can’t put my finger on it. It’s . . . tidy. It doesn’t look as if someone just left it.”

“Mrs. Appleton?” Joseph queried.

“No. She won’t come in here yet. It still feels like an intrusion, as if she were doing it behind Mother’s back.”

“Judith? Or Hannah?”

“No.” He sounded quite certain. “Hannah might look, but she wouldn’t touch anything, not yet. And Judith won’t come in here at all. At least . . . I’ll ask, but I don’t think so.” He drew in a deep breath. “It’s the pillows. That’s not how Mother had them, and no one here would rearrange them that way.”

“Isn’t that how most people have them?” Joseph looked over at the big bed with its handmade coverlet and the matching pillow shams just touching. It all looked completely ordinary, like anyone’s room. Then a tiny memory prickled as he deliberately brought back the image of telling his mother that Eleanor was expecting their first child. She had been so happy. He pictured her face, and the bed behind her, with the pillows at an angle, one overlapping the other. It looked comfortable, casual, not formal like this.

“Someone has been in here,” he agreed, his heart beating so hard he felt out of breath. “They must have searched the house while we were all at the funeral.” His pulse was knocking in his ears. “For the document—just as we did?”

“Yes,” Matthew replied. “Which means it’s real. Father was right—he really did have something.” His voice was bright and hard, shaking a little, as if he were expecting to be contradicted. “And they didn’t get it from him.”

Joseph swallowed, aware of all the multitude of meaning that lay beyond that statement. “They still didn’t, because it wasn’t here. We searched everywhere. So where is it?”

“I don’t know!” Matthew looked oddly blank. Now his mind was racing past his words. “I don’t know what he did with it, but they don’t have it, or they wouldn’t be still searching.”

“Who are they?” Joseph demanded.

Matthew looked back at him, puzzled, still charged with emotion. “I have no idea. I’ve told you everything he said to me.”

The sound of voices drifted up the stairs. Somewhere toward the kitchen a door closed with a bang. He and Matthew should be down with the guests as well. It was unfair to leave Judith and Hannah to do all the receiving, the thanking, the accepting of condolences. He half turned.

“Joe!”

He looked back. Matthew was staring at him, his eyes dark and fixed, his face gaunt in spite of the high cheekbones so like his own.

“It isn’t only what happened to it and what it’s about,” he said quietly, as if he was concerned someone in the hall below could overhear them. “It’s whom it implicates. Where did Father get it? Obviously whoever they are, they know he had it, or they wouldn’t have been here searching.” He let the words hang between them, his white-knuckled hand on the door frame.

The thought came to Joseph only slowly. It was too vast and too ugly to recognize at once. Then when he knew it, it could not be denied. His mouth was dry. “Was it an accident?”

Matthew did not move; he scarcely seemed to be breathing.

“I don’t know. If the document was all he said it was, and whoever he took it from knew he was coming to me with it, then probably not.”

There was a footstep at the bottom of the stairs.

Joseph swiveled around. Hannah was standing with her hand on the newel, her face white, struggling to keep her composure. “What’s the matter?” she said abruptly. “People are beginning to ask where you are! You’ve got to talk to them, you can’t just run away. We all feel like—”

“We’re not,” Joseph cut across her, beginning to come down the stairs. There was no point in frightening her with the truth, certainly not now. “Matthew lost something, but he’s remembered where he put it.”

“You must speak to people,” she said as he reached her. “They’ll expect us all to. You don’t live here anymore, but they were Mother’s neighbors, and they loved her.”

He slipped his arm lightly around her shoulder. “Yes, of course they did. I know that.”

She smiled, but there was still anger and frustration in her face, and too much pain to be held within. Today she had stepped into her mother’s shoes, and she hated everything that it meant.

Joseph did not see Matthew alone again until just before dinner. Joseph took Henry into the garden, in the waning light, watching it fade and deepen to gold on the tops of the trees. He stared upward at the massed starlings that swirled like dry leaves, high and wide across the luminous sky, so many dark flecks, storm-tossed on an unseen wind.

He did not hear Matthew come silently over the grass behind him, and was startled when the dog turned, tail wagging.

“I’m going to take Hannah to the station tomorrow morning,” Matthew said. “She’ll catch the ten-fifteen. That’ll get her to Portsmouth comfortably before teatime. There’s a good connection.”

“I suppose I should get back to Cambridge,” Joseph responded. “There’s nothing else to do here. Pettigrew will call us if he needs anything. Judith’s going to stay on in the house. I expect she told you. Anyway, Mrs. Appleton’s got to have someone to look after.” He said the last part wryly. He was concerned for Judith, as John and Alys had been. She showed no inclination to settle to anything, and seemed to be largely wasting her time. Now that her parents were no longer here, circumstances would force her to address her own future, but it was too early now to say so to her.

“How long can she run the house on the finances there are before the will is probated?” Matthew asked, pushing his hands into his pockets and following Joseph’s gaze across the fields to the copse outlined against the sky.

They were both avoiding saying what they really thought. How would she deal with the hurt? Whom would she rebel against now that Alys was not here? Who would see that she did not let her wild side run out of control until she hurt herself irretrievably? How well did they know each other, to begin the love, the patience, the guiding that suddenly was their responsibility?

It was too soon, all much too soon. None of them was ready for it yet.

“From what Pettigrew said, about a year,” Joseph replied. “More, if necessary. But she needs to do something other than spend time with her friends and drive around the countryside in that car of hers. I don’t know if Father had any idea where she goes, or how fast!”

“Of course he knew!” Matthew retorted. “Actually, he was rather proud of her skill . . . and the fact that she is a better mechanic than Albert. I’ll wager she’ll use some of her inheritance to buy a new car,” he added with a shrug. “Faster and smarter than the Model T. Just as long as she doesn’t go for a racer!”

Joseph held out his hand. “What will you bet on it?”

“Nothing I can’t afford to lose!” Matthew responded drily. “I don’t suppose we can stop her?”

“How?” Joseph asked. “She’s twenty-three. She’ll do what she wants.”

“She always did what she wanted,” Matthew retorted. “Just as long as she understands the realities! The financial ones, I mean.” It was not what he meant, and both of them knew it. It was about far more than money. She needed purpose, something to manage grief.

Joseph raised his eyebrows. “Is that a backward way of saying it is my responsibility to tell her that?” Of course it was his. He was the eldest, the one to take their father’s place, quite apart from the fact that he lived in Cambridge, only three or four miles away, and Matthew was in London. He resented it because he was unprepared. There was a well of anger inside him he dared not even touch, a hurt that frightened him.

Matthew was grinning at him. “That’s right!” he agreed. Then his smile faded and the darkness in him came through. “But there’s something we have to do before you go. We should have done it before.”

Joseph knew what he was going to say the instant before he did.

“The accident.” Matthew used the word loosely. Half of his face was like bronze in the dying light, the other too shadowed to see. “I don’t know if we can tell anything now, but we need to try. There’s been no rain since it happened. Actually, it’s the best summer I can remember.”

“Me too.” Joseph looked away. “Wimbledon finals were today. No interruptions for weather. Norman Brookes and Anthony Wilding.” He could think of nothing that mattered less, but it was easy to say, a skittering away from pain.

“Shearing telephoned me,” Matthew answered. “He said Brookes won, and Dorothea Chambers won the women’s.”

“Thought she would. Who’s Shearing?” He was trying to place a family friend, someone calling with apologies for not being here. He ran his hand gently over the dog’s head.

“Calder Shearing,” Matthew replied. “My boss at Intelligence. Just condolences, and of course he needs to know when I’ll be back.”

Joseph looked at him again. “And when will you?”

Matthew’s eyes were steady. “Tomorrow, after we’ve been to the Hauxton Road. We can’t stay here indefinitely. We all have to go on, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be.”

The thought of such violence being deliberate was horrible. He could not bear to imagine someone planning and carrying out the murder of his parents. Yet the alternative was that John Reavley’s sharp and logical mind had slipped out of his control and sent him running from a threat that was not real, dreaming up horrors. That was worse. Joseph refused to believe it.

“And if it wasn’t an accident?” Why was it so difficult to say that?

Matthew stared at the last light as the sun kindled fire in the clouds on the horizon, vermilion and amber, tree shadows elongated across the fields. The smell of the twilight wind was heavy with hay, dry earth, and the sweetness of mown grass. It was almost harvest time. There were a handful of scarlet poppies like a graze of blood through the darkening gold. The hawthorn petals were all blown from the hedgerows, and in a few months there would be berries.

“I don’t know,” Matthew answered. “That’s the thing! There’s nobody to take it to, because we have no idea whom to trust. Father didn’t trust the police with this, or he wouldn’t have been bringing it to London. But I still have to look at it. Don’t you?”

Joseph thought for a moment. “Yes,” he admitted. “Yes. I have to know.”

The following afternoon, July 3, Matthew and Joseph stopped by the police station at Great Shelford again and asked if they could be shown on the map exactly where the accident had occurred. Reluctantly the sergeant told them.

“You don’t want to go looking at that,” he said sadly. “Course you want to understand, but there ain’t nothing to see. Weren’t no one else there, no brangle, no buck-fisted young feller drunk too much an’ going faster than he ought. Let it go, sir, that’s moi advoice.”

“Thank you,” Matthew replied with a forced smile. “Just like to see it. There, you said?” He put his finger on the map.

“That’s right, sir. Going south.”

“Had accidents there before?”

“Not as Oi know of, sir.” The sergeant frowned. “Can’t say what happened. But then sometimes that’s just how it is. Them Lanchesters is good cars. Get up quite a bit of speed with them. Fifty miles an hour, Oi shouldn’t wonder. A sudden puncture could send you off the road. Would do anyone.”

“Thank you,” Joseph said briskly. He wanted to end this and face looking at the scene. Get it over with. He dreaded it. Whatever they found, his mind would create a picture of what had happened there. The reality of it was the same, regardless of the cause. He turned away and walked out of the police station into the humid air. Clouds were massing in the west, and there were tiny flies settling on his skin, black pinpricks—thunder flies.

He walked to the car and climbed in, waiting for Matthew to follow.

They drove west through Little Shelford and Hauxton and on toward the London road, then turned north to the mill bridge. It was only a matter of three or four miles altogether. Matthew held his foot on the accelerator, trying to race the storm. He did not bother to explain; Joseph understood.

It was only a matter of minutes before they were over the bridge. Matthew was obliged to brake with more force than he had intended in order not to overshoot the place on the map. He pulled in to the side of the road, sending a spray of gravel up from the tires.

“Sorry,” he said absently. “We’d better hurry. It’s going to rain any minute.” He swung out and left Joseph to go after him.

It was only twenty yards, and he could see already the long gouge out of the grass where the car had plowed off the paved road, over the verge and the wide margin, crushing the wild foxgloves and the broom plants. It had torn up a sapling as well and scattered a few stones before crashing into a clump of birch trees, scarring the trunks and tearing off a hanging branch, which lay a few yards further on, its leaves beginning to wither.

Matthew stood beside the broom bushes, staring.

Joseph caught up with him and stopped. Suddenly he felt foolish and more vulnerable with every moment. The police sergeant was right. They should not have come here. It would have been far better to leave it in the imagination. Now he could never forget it.

There was a low rumble of thunder around the western horizon, like the warning growl of some great beast beyond the trees and the breathless fields.

“We can’t learn anything from it,” Joseph said aloud. “The car came off the road. We won’t ever know why.”

Matthew ignored him, still staring at the broken wake of the crash.

Joseph followed his gaze. At least death must have been quick, almost instantaneous, a moment of terror as they realized they were out of control, a sense of insane, destructive speed, and then perhaps the sound of tearing metal and pain—then nothing. All gone in seconds, less time than it took to imagine it.

Matthew turned and walked back to the road, beside the churned-up wake, careful to avoid stepping on it—not that there was anything more than broken plants. The ground was too dry for wheel tracks.

Joseph was on the edge of repeating that there was nothing to see when he realized that Matthew had stopped and was staring at the ground. “What is it?” he said sharply. “What have you found?”

“The car was weaving,” Matthew answered. “Look there!” He pointed to the edge of the road ten yards further on, where there was another clump of foxgloves mown down. “That’s where it came off the road first,” he said. “He tried to get it back on again, but he couldn’t. A puncture wouldn’t do that, not that way. I’ve had one—I know.”

“It was more than one,” Joseph reminded him. “All the tires were ripped.”

“Then there was something on the road that caused it,” Matthew said with conviction. “The possibility of getting four spontaneous punctures at the same moment isn’t even worth considering.” He started to run until he was level with the first broken foxgloves, then he slowed and began to search the ground.

Joseph followed after him, looking from right to left and back again, and then beyond. It was he who first saw the tiny scratches on the tarmacadam surface. He glanced sideways and saw another less than a foot away, and then another beyond that.

“Matthew!”

“Yes, I see them.” Matthew reached the line and bent to his knees. Once he had found them, it was easy to trace the marks right across the road, each less than the width of a car tire from the next. They were only slight scars, except in two places about axle-width apart, where they were deeper, actual gouges in the surface. In the heat of this summer, day after day of sun, the tar would have been softer than usual, more easily marked. In winter there might have been nothing.

“What were they?” Joseph asked, racking his mind for what could have torn tires on a moving car and left this track behind, yet not be here now, nor have been found embedded in the tires themselves. Except, of course, no one had been looking for such things.

Matthew stood up, his face white. “It can’t be nails,” he said. “How could you put nails on a road to stay point upward and catch only the car you wanted, and not leave them in the tires for police to find if they looked?”

“Wait for them,” Joseph answered, his heart knocking in his chest so violently his body shook. A cold, hurting rage engulfed him that anyone could cold-bloodedly place such a weapon across the road, then crouch out of sight, waiting for a car with people in it, and watch it crash. He could hardly breathe as he imagined them walking over to the wreck, ignoring the broken and bleeding bodies, perhaps still alive, and searching for a document. And when they did not find it, they left, simply went away, carefully taking with them whatever had caused the wreck.

He hated them. For a moment the heat of it poured over his skin in sweat. Then he found himself shivering uncontrollably, even though the air was hot and still, damp on the skin. More thunder flies settled on his face and hands.

Matthew had gone back to the side of the road, but opposite from the place where the car had swerved off. On this side there was a deeper ditch, thick with primrose leaves. There was a thin, straight line where they were torn, as if something sharp had ripped through them right from the tarmacadam edge all the way across to the ditch and beyond.

Dizzily, his vision blurred except for a crystal clarity at the center. Through it Joseph saw a birch sapling next to the hedge. A frayed end of rope hung from the trunk, biting into the bark about a foot from the ground. He could imagine the force that had caused that. He could see it—the yellow Lanchester with John Reavley at the wheel and Alys beside him, possibly at something like fifty miles an hour, striking it . . . striking what?

He turned to Matthew, willing him to deny it, wipe away what he imagined.

“Caltrops,” Matthew said softly, shaking his head as if he could rid himself of the idea.

“Caltrops?” Joseph asked, puzzled.

“Twists of iron prong,” Matthew replied, hooking his fingers together to demonstrate. “Like the things they put in barbed wire, only bigger. They used them in the Middle Ages to bring down knights on horseback.”

Thunder rumbled again, closer to them. The air was almost too clammy to breathe.

“On a rope,” Matthew went on. He did not look at Joseph, as if he could not bear to. “They must have waited here until they heard the car coming. Then when they knew it was the Lanchester, they sprinted across the road to the far side, and pulled it tight.” He bowed his head for a moment. “Even if Father saw it,” he said hoarsely, “there would be no way to avoid it.” He hesitated a moment, taking a deep breath. “Then afterward they cut the rope—hacked it, by the look of it—and took the whole thing away with them.”

It was all clear. Joseph said nothing. It was hideously real now, no more possibility of doubt. John and Alys Reavley had been murdered—he to silence him and retrieve the document, she because she happened to be with him. It was brutal, monstrous! Pain ran through him like fire inside his head. He could see the terror in his mother’s face, his father struggling desperately to control the car and knowing he couldn’t, the physical destruction, the helplessness. Had they had time to know it was death and they could do nothing for each other, not even time for a touch, a word?

And he could do nothing. It was over, complete, beyond his reach. There was nothing left but blind, bright red fury. They would find whoever had done this. It was his father, his mother, it had happened to. People who were precious and good had been destroyed, taken from him. Who had done it? What kind of people—and why?

They must find them, stop them. This must never happen again.

He would do what he should. He would be kind, obedient, honorable—but never hurt like this again. He could not endure it.

“Is Judith safe?” he said abruptly. “What if they go back to the house?” The thought of having to tell her the truth was ugly, but how could they avoid it?

“They won’t go back.” Matthew straightened up unsteadily. “They know it’s not there. But where the hell is it? I’m damned if I know!” His voice was breaking, threatening to go out of control. He stared at Joseph, willing him to help, to find an answer where he could not.

Thunder cracked across the sky above them, and the first heavy spots of rain fell, splashing large and warm on them and on the road.

Joseph seized Matthew’s arm and they turned and ran to the car, sprinting the last few paces and scrambling in, struggling with the roof as the heavens opened and torrential rain swirled across the fields and hedges, blinding the windscreen and drumming on the metal of the car body. Lightning blazed and vanished.

Matthew started the engine, and it was a relief to hear it roar to life. He put the car into gear and inched out onto the swimming road. Neither of them spoke.

When the cloudburst had passed and they could open the windows, the air was filled with the perfume of fresh rain on parched earth. It was a fragrance like no other, so sharp and clean they could hardly draw enough of it. The sun returned, gleaming on wet roads and dripping hedges, every leaf bright.

“What did Father say, exactly?” Joseph asked when at last he had control of himself enough to speak almost levelly.

“I’ve gone over and over it so many times I’m not sure anymore,” Matthew answered, his eyes ahead on the road. “I thought he said he was bringing it, but now I’m not certain. And since they didn’t find it, and they must have looked, and so did we, the only alternative seems to be that he hid it somewhere.” He was almost calm, addressing it as though it were an intellectual problem he had to solve, and the passion of the reality had never existed.

“We have to tell Judith,” Joseph said, watching his face for his reaction. “Apart from keeping the house locked if she’s ever in it alone, she has a right to know. And Hannah . . . but perhaps not yet.”

Matthew was silent. There was another flare of lightning far away, and then thunder off in the distance to the south.

Joseph was about to repeat what he had said, but finally Matthew spoke.

“I suppose we must, but let me do it.”

Joseph did not argue. If Matthew imagined Judith would allow him to evade any of the issues, then he did not know his sister as well as Joseph did.

When they reached St. Giles it started to rain again. They were both glad to leave the car and use getting soaked as an excuse to avoid immediate conversation. It was emotional enough saying goodbye to Hannah as Albert put her luggage into the Ford. She did not want anyone to go to the station with her.

“I’d rather not!” she said quickly. “If I’m going to burst into tears, at least let me do it here, not on the platform!”

No one argued with her. Perhaps they preferred it this way, too. She hugged each of them, not able to find words, or a steady voice to say anything. Then, holding her head so high she all but tripped on the step—even though it had been there all her life—she followed Albert out to the car. Joseph, Matthew, and Judith stood in the doorway watching her until the car was out of sight. Then Joseph walked over the grass to close the gate.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Judith retorted defensively when they were sitting in the dining room after dinner, Henry asleep on the floor. It was barely dark outside and clear again, the storm long since passed.

“I don’t think you do.” Matthew set his coffee cup down and regarded her gravely.

She looked at Joseph. “Shouldn’t you be the one doing this?” she challenged, anger hard in her voice and her eyes. “Why aren’t you telling me what to do? Haven’t you the stomach for it? Or do you know it’s a waste of time? You’re a priest! It’s cowardly not even to try! Father always tried!”

It was an accusation that he was not Father, not wise enough, not patient or persistent enough. He knew it already. It was a deep ache inside him and, as with her, an anger, because no one had equipped him to do this. John Reavley had gone leaving a task half done and no one to replace him, as if he did not care.

“Judith . . . ,” Matthew began.

“I know!” She swung round to face him, cutting across his words. “The house is Joseph’s, but I can live here as long as he doesn’t need it, and he doesn’t. We’ve already discussed that. But I can’t go on wasting my time. That’s a condition. I’ve either got to get married or find something useful to do, preferably something that pays me enough to at least feed and clothe myself.” Her eyes were red-rimmed, full of tears. “Why haven’t you the courage to say that to me? Father would have! And I don’t need a gardener, a cook, a manservant, and a housemaid to look after me.” She stared at him furiously. “I worked that out for myself.” She flicked a glance sideways at Joseph, contempt in it.

Joseph felt the sting, but he had no defense. It was true.

“Actually, I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort,” Matthew said to her tartly. “Joseph told me you were perfectly aware of the situation. I was going to tell you why Father was coming to see me on the day he was killed, and what we have learned since then. I would rather have protected you from it, but I don’t think we can afford to do that, and Joseph thinks you have a right to know anyway.”

Apology flashed across her face, then fear. She bit her lip. “Know what?” she said huskily.

Briefly Matthew told her about John Reavley’s call on the telephone, admitting that he was uncertain now of the exact words. “And when we were at the funeral, someone searched the house,” he finished. “That is why Joseph and I were late into the dining room.”

“Well, where is it?” she said, looking at one, then the other, her anger added to by confusion and the beginning of sick, urgent fear.

“We don’t know,” Matthew answered. “We’ve looked everywhere we can think of. I even tried the laundry, the gun room, and the apple shed this morning, but we haven’t found anything.”

“Then who has it?” She turned to Joseph. “It is real, isn’t it?”

It was a question he was not prepared to face. It challenged too much of the belief in his father, and he refused to be without that. “Yes, it’s real,” he said with biting certainty. He saw the doubt in her eyes, her struggle to believe and understand it, far more than he was willing to admit. “We went to the stretch of road where it happened,” he said in harsh, measured words, like incisions. “We saw where the car began to swerve, and where it finally plowed over the verge and into the trees. . . .”

Matthew started to speak but stopped, blinking rapidly. He turned away.

Judith stared at Joseph, waiting for him to justify what he was telling her.

“Once we understood what had happened, it was quite clear,” Joseph continued. “Someone had used a kind of barb, tied to a rope . . . the end of it was still knotted around a sapling trunk . . . and stretched it across the road deliberately. The marks were there in the tarmacadam.”

He saw the incredulity in her face. “But that’s murder!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, it is.”

She started to shake her head, and he thought for a moment she was not going to get her breath. He put out his hand, and she gripped it so hard it bruised the flesh.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “You are going to do something, aren’t you?”

“Of course!” Matthew jerked up his head. “Of course we are. But we don’t know where to start yet. We can’t find the document, and we don’t know what’s in it.”

“Where did he get it?” she said, trying to steady her voice and sound in control. “Whoever gave it to him would know what it was about.”

Matthew gave a gesture of helplessness. “No idea! It could be almost anything: government corruption, a financial scandal, even a royal scandal, for that matter. It might be political or diplomatic. It could be some dishonorable solution to the Irish Question.”

“There is no solution to the Irish Question, honorable or not,” she replied with an edge of hysteria to her voice. “But Father still kept up with quite a few of his old parliamentary colleagues. Maybe one of them gave it to him?”

Matthew leaned forward a little. “Did he? Do you know anyone he was in touch with recently? He’d only had it a few hours when he called me.”

“Are you certain?” Joseph asked. “If you are, then that would mean he got it on the Saturday before he died. But if he thought about it a while before calling you, it could have been Friday, or even Thursday.”

“Let’s start with Saturday,” Matthew directed, looking back to Judith. “Do you know what he did on Saturday? Was he here? Did he go out, or did anyone come to see him?”

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I was in and out myself. I can hardly remember now. Albert was supposed to be doing something in the orchard. The only one who would know would be . . . Mother.” She swallowed and took a ragged breath. She was still clinging onto Joseph’s hand, her knuckles white with the strength of her grip. “But you can’t let it go! You’re going to do something? If you aren’t, then I will! They can’t get away with it!”

“Yes, of course I am,” Matthew assured her. “Nobody’s going to get away with it! But Father said it was a conspiracy. That means several people are involved, and we have no idea whom.”

“But . . . ,” she started, then stopped. Her voice dropped very low. “I was going to say it couldn’t be anyone we know, but that’s not true, is it? The opposite is! It had to have been someone who trusted him, or they wouldn’t have given him the document in the first place.”

He did not answer.

Her rage and misery exploded. “You are in the Secret Intelligence Service! Isn’t this the sort of thing you do? What damn use are you if you can’t catch the people who killed our family?” She glared at Joseph. “And if you tell me to forgive them, I swear to God I’ll hit you!”

“You won’t have to,” he promised. “I wouldn’t tell you to do something I can’t do myself.”

She searched his face as if seeing him more clearly than ever before. “I’ve never heard you say that in the past, no matter how hard it’s been.” She leaned forward and buried her head in his shoulder. “Joe! What’s happening to us? How can this be?”

He put his arms around her. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know.”

Matthew rubbed his eyes, pushing his hair back savagely. “Of course I’m going to do something!” he repeated. “That’s why he was bringing it to me.” There was pride and anger in his voice. His face was pinched with loss of what was irretrievable now. He was still struggling to be reasonable. “If it were something the police could deal with, he’d have taken it to them.” He looked at Joseph. “We dare not trust anyone,” he warned them both. “Judith, you must make sure the house is locked every night, and anytime you and the servants are all out—just as a precaution. I don’t think they’ll come back, because they’ve already looked here, and they know we haven’t got it. But if you’d rather go and stay—”

“With a friend? No, I wouldn’t!” she said quickly.

“Judith . . .”

“If I change my mind, I’ll go to the Mannings’,” she snapped. “I’ll say I’m lonely. They’ll understand. I promise! Just don’t push me. I’ll do what I want.”

“There’s a novelty!” Matthew said with a sudden, bleary smile, as if he needed to break the taut thread of tension.

She looked at him sharply, then her face softened and her eyes filled with tears.

“I’ll find them,” he promised, his voice choking. “Not only because they killed Mother and Father, but to stop them doing whatever it was in the document—if we can.”

“I’m glad you said we.” She answered his smile now. “Tell me what I can do.”

“When there is anything, I will,” he said. “I promise. But call me if there’s anything at all! Or Joseph—just to talk if you want. You must do that!”

“Stop telling me what to do!” But there was relief in her voice. A shred of safety had returned, something familiar, even if it was a restriction to fight against. “But of course I will.” She reached out to touch him. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER

THREE

Joseph found his first day back at St. John’s even more difficult than he had anticipated. The ancient beauty of the buildings, mellow brick with castellated front and stone-trimmed windows, soothed his mind. Its calm was indestructible, its dignity timeless. His rooms closed around him like well-fitting armor. He looked with pleasure at the light reflected unevenly on the old glass of the bookcases, knowing intimately every volume within, the thoughts and dreams of great men down the ages. On the wall between the windows overlooking the quadrangle were paintings of Florence and Verona. He remembered choosing them to keep in his heart those streets worn smooth by the footsteps of his heroes. And of course there was the bust of Dante on the shelf, that genius of poetry, imagination, the art of the story, and above all the understanding of the nature of good and evil.

He had been away for long enough for an amount of work to have collected, and the concentration needed to catch up was also a kind of healing. The languages of the Bible were subtle and different from modern speech. Their very nature necessitated that they refer to everyday things common to all mankind: seed time and harvest, the water of physical and spiritual life. The rhythms had time to repeat themselves and let the meaning sink deep into the mind; the flavor and the music of it removed him from the present, and so from his own reality.

It was friends who brought him the sharp reminder of loss. He saw the sympathy in their eyes, the uncertainty whether to speak of it or not, what to say that was not clumsy. Every student seemed to know at least of the deaths, if not the details.

The master, Aidan Thyer, had been very considerate, asking Joseph if he was sure he was ready to come back so soon. He was valued, of course, and irreplaceable, but nevertheless he must take more time if he needed it.

Joseph answered him that he did not. Everything had been done that was required, and his responsibilities to work were a blessing, not a burden. He thanked him and promised to take his first tutorial the following morning.

It was difficult picking up the threads after an absence of almost two weeks, and it required all his effort of mind to make an acceptable job of it. He was exhausted by the end of the day, and happy after dinner to leave the dining hall, the stained-glass windows scattered with the coats of arms of benefactors dating back to the early 1500s, the magnificent timbered ceiling with its carved hammer beams touched with gold, the oak-paneled walls carved in linen-fold, and above all its chattering, well-meaning people. He longed to escape toward the river.

He started across the narrow arch of the Bridge of Sighs with its stone fretwork like frozen lace, a windowed passageway to the fields beyond. He would walk across the smooth grass of the Backs, stretching all the way from Magdalene Bridge past St. John’s, Trinity, Gonville and Caius, Clare, and King’s College Chapel toward Queen’s and the Mathematical Bridge. Perhaps he would go as far as the millpond beyond, and over the causeway to Lammas Land. It was still warm. The long, slow sunset and twilight would last another hour and a half yet, perhaps more.

He was on the slow rise of the bridge, glancing out through the open lattice at the reflections on the water below, when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see a young man in his early twenties. His face was beautiful, strong-boned, clear-eyed, his brown hair bleached gold across the top by the long summer.

“Sebastian!” Joseph said with pleasure.

“Dr. Reavley! I . . .” Sebastian Allard stopped, his fair skin a little flushed with consciousness of his inadequacy to say anything that matched the situation, and perhaps also that he had missed the funeral. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how bad I feel.”

“You don’t have to,” Joseph said quickly. “I would far rather talk about something else.”

Sebastian hesitated, indecision clear in his half-turned shoulder.

Joseph did not want to press him, yet he felt Sebastian had something to say, and he could not rebuff him. Their families had lived in neighboring villages for years, and it was Joseph who had seen the promise in young Sebastian and encouraged him to pursue it. He had been his mentor for the last year while they had both been at St. John’s. It had become one of those friendships that blossomed so naturally he could not believe there was ever a possibility it would not have happened.

“I’m going for a walk along the Backs,” Joseph said. “If you want to join me, you are welcome.” He smiled and began to turn away, so as not to place an obligation on the younger man, as if it were a request.

There were a few moments of silence, then he heard the footsteps quickly and lightly on the bridge after him, and he and Sebastian emerged into the sunlight, almost side by side. The air was still warm, and the smell of cut grass drifted on the slight breeze. The river was flat calm, barely disturbed by three or four punts along the stretch past St. John’s and Trinity. In the nearest one a young man in gray flannel trousers and a white shirt stood leaning on the pole with effortless grace, his back to the sun, casting his features into shadow and making an aureole around his head.

A girl with red hair sat in the back looking up at him and laughing. Her muslin dress looked primrose-colored in the fading glow, but in the daylight it could have been ivory, or even white. Her skin was amber where she had defied convention and allowed the long, hot season to touch her with its fire. She was eating from a basket of cherries and dropping the stones into the water one after another.

The young man waved and called out a greeting.

Joseph waved back, and Sebastian answered as well.

“He’s a good fellow,” Sebastian said a moment later. “He’s at Caius, reading physics. All terribly practical.” He sounded as if he were about to say something more, then he pushed his hands into his pockets and walked silently on the grass.

Joseph felt no need for speech. The slight splash of punt poles and the current of the river slurping against their wooden sides, the occasional burst of laughter, were a wordless communication. Even grief could not entirely mar its timeless peace.

“We have to protect this!” Sebastian said suddenly and with fierce emotion. His voice was thick, his shoulders tense as he half turned to stare across the shining water at the buildings beyond. “All of it! The ideas, the beauty, the knowledge . . . the freedom to think.” He drew in his breath. “To discover the things of the mind. We are accountable to humanity for what we have. To the future.”

Joseph was startled. He had been letting himself sink into a sort of vacancy of thought, where emotion was sufficient to carry him. There was a glory here like the best music, filling everything. Now he was jerked back by Sebastian’s words. He deserved a considered answer, and it was apparent from the passion in his face that he needed one.

“You mean Cambridge specifically? What do you think endangers it?” Joseph asked, puzzled by the heat in him. “It’s been here for over half a millennium, and it seems to be growing stronger rather than weaker.”

Sebastian’s eyes were grave. His fair skin had been caught by the sun, and in the burning amber light now he looked almost made of gold. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to read the news,” he answered. “Or the inclination, for that matter.” He turned his head away, not wanting to intrude into Joseph’s feelings, or else hiding his own.

“Not much,” Joseph agreed. “But I know about the assassinations in Sarajevo, and that Vienna is unhappy about it. They want some sort of reparation from the Serbs. I suppose it was to be expected.”

“If you occupy somebody else’s country, it is to be expected that they won’t like it!” Sebastian responded savagely. “All sorts of things come to be expected.” He repeated the word with sarcastic emphasis. “Strike and counterstrike, revenge for this or that—justice, from the other point of view. Isn’t it the responsibility of thinking men to stop the cycle and reach for something better?” He swung his arms wide, gesturing toward the exquisite buildings on the farther bank, their western facades glowing pale in the light, the shadows deepening to the east. “Isn’t that what all this is for, to teach us something better than ‘you hurt me, so I’ll hurt you back’? Aren’t we supposed to be leading the way toward a higher morality?”

There could be no argument. It was the aim not only of philosophy, but of Christianity as well, and Sebastian knew Joseph would not deny that.

“Yes,” he agreed. He sought the supreme comfort of reason. “But there have always been conquests, injustices, and rebellions—or revolutions, if you prefer. They have never endangered the heart of learning.”

Sebastian stopped. A burst of laughter came up from the river where two punts almost collided as young men drinking champagne tried to reach across and touch glasses in a toast. One of the boys nearly overbalanced and was perilously close to falling in. His companion grasped him by the back of his shirt, and all he lost was his straw boater, which floated for a moment or two on the shining surface before someone from the other punt caught it on the end of his pole. He presented it to its owner, who took it, dripping wet, and put it back on his head, to shouts of approval and a loud and hilarious guffaw.

It was so good-natured, a celebration of life, that Joseph found himself smiling. The sun was warm on his face, and the smells of the earth and grass were sweet.

“It’s not easy to imagine, is it?” Sebastian replied.

“What?”

“Destruction . . . war,” Sebastian answered, looking away from the river and back at Joseph, his eyes dark with the weight of his thoughts.

Joseph hesitated. He had not realized Sebastian was so deeply troubled.

“You don’t think so?” Sebastian said. “You’re mourning a loss, sir, and I am truly sorry for it. But if we get drawn into a European war, every family in England will be mourning, not just for those we loved, but for the whole way of life we’ve cherished and nurtured for a thousand years. If we let that happen, we would be the true barbarians! And we would be to blame for more than the Goths or the Vandals who sacked Rome. They didn’t know any better. We do!” His voice was savage, almost on the point of tears.

Joseph was frightened by the note of hysteria in him. “There was revolution all over Europe in 1848,” he said gently, choosing his words with care and unarguable truth. “It didn’t destroy civilization. In fact, it didn’t even destroy the despotism it was supposed to.” This was reason, calm history of fact. “Everything went back to normal within a year.”

“You’re not saying that was good?” Sebastian challenged him, his eyes bright, assured at least of that. He knew Joseph far too well to suppose he did.

“No, of course not. I’m saying that the order of things is set in very deep foundations, and it will take far more than the assassination of an archduke and his duchess, brutal as it was, to cause any radical change.”

Sebastian bent and picked up a twig and hurled it toward the river, but it was too light and fell short. “Do you think so?”

“Yes,” Joseph replied with certainty. Private griefs might shake his personal world, tear out the heart of it, but the beauty and the reason of civilization continued, immeasurably greater than the individual.

Sebastian stared across the river, but unseeingly, his eyes clouded by his vision within. “That’s what Morel said, too, and Foubister. They think the world won’t ever change, or not more than an inch at a time. There are others, like Elwyn, who think that even if there is war, it will all be quick and noble, a rather more dramatic version of a good Rider Haggard story, or Anthony Hope. You know The Prisoner of Zenda and that sort of thing? All high honor and clean death at the point of a sword. Do you know much of the truth about the Boer War, sir? What we really did there?”

“A little,” Joseph acknowledged. He knew it had been ruthless, and there was a great deal for Britain to be ashamed of. But perhaps there was for the Boers, too. “That was Africa, though,” he said aloud. “And perhaps we’ve learned from it. Europe would be different. But there’s no reason to think there’ll be war, unless there’s more trouble in Ireland and we let it get completely out of hand.”

Sebastian said nothing.

“Sarajevo was the isolated act of a group of assassins,” Joseph went on. “Europe is hardly going to go to war over it. It was a crime, not an—”

Sebastian turned to him, his eyes astonishingly clear in the waning light. “Not an act of war?” he interrupted. “Are you sure, sir? I’m not. The kaiser restated his alliance with Austria-Hungary last Sunday, you know.”

The twilight breeze rippled faintly across the surface of the river. It was still warm, like a soft touch to the skin.

“And Serbia is on Russia’s back doorstep,” Sebastian continued. “If Austria demands too much reparation, they could get drawn in. And there’s always the old enmity between France and Germany. The men who fought the Franco-Prussian War are still alive, and still bitter.” He started to walk again, perhaps to avoid the group of students coming toward them across the grass. It was clear he did not want to be caught up in their conversation and interrupted in his infinitely more serious thoughts.

Joseph kept pace with him, moving into the shadow of the trees, their leaves whispering faintly above them. “There may be an unjust suppression of the Serbs,” he said, trying to return to the safety of reason. “And the people in general may be punished for the violent acts of a few, which is wrong—of course it is. But it is not the catastrophe for civilization that you are suggesting.” He, too, spread his hands to encompass the fading scene in front of them, with its sudden dashes of silver and blue on the water. “All this is safe.” He said it with unquestioning certainty. It was a thousand years of unbroken progress toward even greater humanity. “We shall still be here, learning, exploring, creating our own beauty, adding to the richness of mankind.”

Sebastian studied him, his face torn with conflicting rage and pity, almost tenderness. “You believe that, don’t you?” he said with incredulity verging on despair. Then he continued to walk again without waiting for the answer. Somehow the movement suggested a kind of dismissal.

“What is it you think will happen?” Joseph asked firmly.

“Darkness,” Sebastian answered. “Complacency without the vision to see, or the courage to act. And it takes courage! You have to see beyond the obvious, the comfortable morality everyone else agrees with, and understand that at times, terrible times, the end justifies the means.” His voice dropped. “Even when the cost is high. Otherwise they’ll lead us blindly down the path to a war like nothing we’ve ever even imagined before.” His words were cutting, and without the slightest hesitation. “It won’t be a few cavalry charges here and there, a few brave men killed or injured. It’ll be everyone—the ordinary man in the street sucked into endless mind- and body-breaking bombardment by even bigger guns. It’ll be hunger and fear and hatred until that’s all we know.” He squinted a little as the sun blazed level with the treetops to the west and painted fire on the top of the walls of Trinity and Caius. “Think of the towns and villages you know—St. Giles, Haslingfield, Grantchester, all the rest—with black on every window, no marriages, no christenings, only deaths.” His voice dropped and was filled with a hurting tenderness. “Think of the countryside, the fields with no men to plant them or to reap. Think of the woods in April with no one to see the blossom. Schoolboys won’t dream of this.” He gestured toward the rooftops. “Only of carrying guns. Their only ambition will be to kill and to survive.”

He turned to face Joseph again, his eyes clear as seawater in the long light. “Isn’t it worth any price to save us from that? Isn’t it what human beings are here for, to nourish and protect what we’ve been given, and add to it before we pass it on? Look at it!” he demanded. “Don’t you love it almost more than you can bear?”

Joseph did not need to look to know his answer. “Yes, I do,” he said with the same depth of absolute knowledge. “It is the ultimate sanity of life. In the end, it is all there is to hold on to.”

Sebastian winced, his face looking suddenly bruised and hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said in a whisper. He moved his hand as if to touch Joseph’s arm, then withdrew. “But this is a universal sanity, isn’t it? Bigger than any one of us, a purpose, a healing for mankind?” His voice was urgent, begging for assurance.

“Yes, it is,” Joseph agreed gently. He meant it more profoundly than he had imagined he would, but as had happened so many times in their friendship, Sebastian put it in exactly the words that framed his own belief. “And yes, it is the duty of those who have seen it and become part of it to protect it with all our power.”

Sebastian smiled very slightly and turned away as they started back again. “But you don’t fear war, do you, sir? I mean real, literal war.”

“I would fear it horribly if I considered it a real danger,” Joseph assured him. “But I don’t think it is. We’ve had many wars before, and we’ve lost many men. We’ve faced invasion more than once and beaten it off. It hasn’t broken us irreparably; if anything, it’s made us stronger.”

“Not this time,” Sebastian said bitterly. “If it happens, it’ll be pure, blind destruction.”

Joseph looked sideways at him. He could see in Sebastian’s face the love for all that was precious and vulnerable, all that could be broken by the unthinking. There was a pain in him that was naked in this strange, fierce light of dusk, which cast such black shadows.

Time and again they had talked of all manner of things, no boundaries of time or place had held them: the men half human, half divine in the epic legends of Egypt and Babylon; the God of the Old Testament, who was the creator of worlds, yet spoke face-to-face with Moses, as one man talks with another. They had basked in the lean, golden classicism of Greece, the teeming magnificence of Rome, the intricate glories of Byzantium, the sophistication of Persia. All had been the furniture of their dreams. Wherever Joseph had led, Sebastian had followed eagerly, grasping after each new experience with insatiable joy.

The light was almost gone. The color burned only on the horizon, the shadows dense on the Backs. The water was pale and polished like old silver, indigo under the bridges.

“We could disappear into the ruins of time if there’s war,” Sebastian resumed. “In a thousand years’ time, scholars from cultures we haven’t even imagined, young and curious, could dig up what’s left of us, and from a few shards, scraps of writing, try to work out what we were really like. And get it wrong,” he added bitterly.

“English would become a dead language, lost, like Aramaic or Etruscan,” Sebastian went on with quiet misery. “No more wit of Oscar Wilde, or grandeur of Shakespeare, no more thunder of Milton, music of Keats, or . . . God knows how many more . . . and worst of all, the future culled. All that this generation might do. We have to prevent that—whatever it costs!”

“It is impossible to care too much,” Joseph said gently. “It is all infinitely precious.” He must bring back reason, ground this fear in the lasting realities.

“There is nothing you or I can do to affect the quarrels of Austria and Serbia,” he went on. “There will always be fighting somewhere, from time to time. And as inventions like telephones and wireless get better, we will know of them sooner. A hundred years ago it would have taken weeks for us to learn about it, if we did at all. And by that time it would all have been over. Now we read about it the day after, so we feel it to be more immediate, but it’s only a perception. Hold on to the certainties that endure.”

Sebastian looked at him, his back to the last of the light, so Joseph could not make out his expression. His voice was rough-edged. “You don’t think this is different? A hundred years ago we were nearly conquered by Napoleon.”

Joseph realized he had made a tactical error in choosing a hundred years as an example. “Yes, but we weren’t,” he said confidently. “No French soldier set foot in England, except as a prisoner.”

“As you said, sir, things have changed in a hundred years,” Sebastian pointed out. “We have steamships, airplanes, guns that can shoot further and destroy more than ever before. A west wind won’t keep the navies of Europe locked in harbor now.”

“You’re allowing your fears to run away with your reason,” Joseph chided him. “We have had far more desperate times, but we have always prevailed. And we have grown stronger since the Napoleonic Wars, not weaker. You must have faith in us . . . and in God.”

Sebastian gave a little grunt, ironic and dismissive, as if there were some deeper fear he could not explain, one that Joseph seemed to refuse or to be incapable of understanding. “Why?” he said bitterly. “The Israelites were the chosen people, and where are they now? We study their language as a curiosity. It matters only because it is the language of Christ, whom they denied and crucified. If the Bible didn’t speak of Him, we wouldn’t care about Hebrew. We can’t say that of English. Why should anyone remember it if we were conquered? For Shakespeare? We don’t remember the language of Aristotle, Homer, Aeschylus. It’s taught in the best schools, to the privileged few, as a relic of a great civilization of the past.” His voice choked with sudden, uncontrollable anger and his face was twisted with pain. “I don’t want to become a relic! I want people a thousand years from now to speak the same tongue that I do, to love the same beauty, to understand my dreams and how they mattered to me. I want to write something, or even do something, that preserves the soul of who we are.”

The last of the light was now only a pale wash low across the horizon. “War changes us, even if we win.” He turned away from Joseph, as if to hide a nakedness within. “Too many of us become barbarians of the heart. Have you any idea how many could die? How many of those left would be consumed by hate, all over Europe? Everything that was good in them eaten away by the things they had seen and, worse, the things they had been forced to do?”

“It won’t happen!” Joseph responded, and the moment the words were gone from his lips he wondered if they were true. “If you can’t have faith in people, the leaders of nations, then have faith that God will not allow the world to plunge into the kind of destruction you are thinking of,” he said. “What purpose of His could it serve?”

Sebastian’s lip curled in a tiny smile. “I’ve no idea! I don’t know the purposes of God! Do you, sir?” The softness of his voice, and the sir on the end, robbed it of offense.

“To save the souls of men,” Joseph replied without hesitation.

“And what does that mean?” Sebastian turned back to face him. “Do you suppose He sees it the same way I do?” Again the smile touched his lips, this time self-mocking.

Joseph was obliged to smile in answer, although the sadness jolted him as if the fading of the light were in some terrible way a permanent thing. “Not necessarily,” he conceded. “But He is more likely to be right.”

Sebastian did not reply, and they walked slowly along the grass as the breeze rose a little. All the punts were gone to their moorings, and the spires of stone in the arched top of the Bridge of Sighs were barely darker than the sky beyond.

Matthew returned to London, going first to his flat. It was exactly as he had left it, except that the maid had tidied it, but it felt different. It should have had the comfort of home. It was where he had lived for the last five years, ever since he had left university and begun working for the Intelligence Service. It was full of the books, drawings, and paintings he had collected. His favorite painting, hanging over the fire, was of cows in the corner of the field. For him their gentle rumination, calm eyes, and slow generosity seemed the ultimate sanity in the world. On the mantel was a silver vase his mother had given him one Christmas, and a Turkish dagger with a highly ornamental scabbard.

But the flat was oddly empty. He felt as if he were returning not to the present but to the past. When he had last sat in the worn leather armchair or eaten at this table, his family was whole, and he knew of no vanishing document that was at the heart of conspiracy, violence, and secrets that brought death. The world had not been exactly safe, but whatever dangers there were lay in places far distant, and only the periphery of them touched England, or Matthew himself.

He spent a long evening deep in thought. It was the first time he had been alone more than to sleep since he had walked across the grass at Fenner’s Field to break the news to Joseph. Questions crowded his mind.

John Reavley had called him on Saturday evening, not here at his flat, but at his office in the Intelligence Services. He had been working late, on the Irish problems, as usual. The Liberal government had been trying to pass a Home Rule bill to give Ireland autonomy since the middle of the previous century, and time after time the Protestants of Ulster had blocked it, refusing absolutely to be forcibly separated from Britain and placed in Catholic Ireland. They believed that both their religious freedom and their economic survival depended upon remaining free from such a forced integration, and ultimately subjection.

Government after government had fallen on the issue, and now Arquill’s personal Liberal Party required the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party in order to retain power.

Shearing, Matthew’s superior, shared the view of many others that there was a great deal of political maneuvering in London behind the mutiny of British troops stationed in the Curragh. When the men of Ulster, solidly backed by their women, had threatened armed rebellion against the Home Rule bill, the British troops had refused to take up arms against them. General Gough had resigned, with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, chief of the General Staff in London, had resigned also, immediately followed by Sir John Seely, secretary for war in the Cabinet.

Little wonder Shearing and his men worked late. The situation threatened to become a crisis as grave as any in the last three hundred years.

Matthew had been in his office when the call came from John Reavley telling him of the document and that he was going to drive to London with it the following day, expecting to arrive between half past one and two o’clock. He would bring Alys with him, ostensibly for an afternoon in the city, but in order to make his trip unremarkable.

How had anyone else known that he even had the document, let alone that he was taking it to Matthew, and the time of his journey? If he came by car, the route was obvious. There was only one main road from St. Giles to London.

Matthew cast his mind back to that evening, the offices almost silent, hardly anyone there, just half a dozen men, perhaps a couple of clerks. He remembered standing at his desk with the telephone in his hand, the disbelief at what his father had said. Matthew had repeated what his father had said, to make certain he had heard correctly.

The cold ran through him. Was that it? In the quiet office someone had overheard him? That had been enough. Who? He tried to recall who else had been there, but one late night blended into another. He had heard footsteps, voices deliberately kept low so as not to disturb others. He might not have recognized them then; he certainly could not now.

But he could find out, discreetly. He could at least trace the possibly treasonous behavior among his own colleagues—when even a week ago he would have trusted them all without hesitation.

When he arrived in the morning everything was familiar: the cramped spaces, the echoing wooden floor, the black telephones, the dust motes in the air, the worn surfaces, and the harsh desk lamps, unnecessary now in the sunlight through the windows. Clerks bustled back and forth, shirtsleeves grimy from endless papers and ink, collars stiff and often a trifle crooked.

They wished him good morning and offered their condolences, shy and awkward and, for all he could see, intensely sincere. He thanked them and went to his own small room, where books were wedged into too small a case and papers were locked in drawers. The inkwell and blotting papers were just as usual, not quite straight on his desk, two pens lying beside them. The blotting paper was clean. He never left anything that might be decipherable.

He fished for his keys to unlock the top drawer. At first it did not slide in easily, but took a moment of fiddling. He bent to look more closely, and that was when he saw the finest of scratches on the metal around the keyhole. It had not been there when he left. So someone had searched here, too.

He sat down, his thoughts racing, clouded and skewed by guilt. There was no doubt left in him that it was his words overheard that had sent the assassin after John and Alys Reavley.

His desk was piled with more and more information on the Curragh Mutiny. It was Thursday, July 9, before Calder Shearing sent for him and Matthew reported to his office a little after four o’clock. Like all rooms in the Intelligence Service, it was sparsely furnished, nothing more than the necessities, and those as cheap as possible, but Shearing had added nothing of his own, no family pictures, no personal books or mementos. His papers and volumes for work were untidily stacked, but he knew the precise place of every one of them.

Shearing was not a tall man, but he had a presence more commanding than mere size. His black hair was receding considerably, but one barely noticed it because his brows were heavy and expressive and his eyes were dark and thick-lashed. His jutting nose was a perfect curve and his mouth sensitive, if unsmiling.

He regarded Matthew, assessing his recovery from bereavement and hence his fitness for duty. His question was only a matter of courtesy.

“How are you, Reavley? All matters taken care of?”

“For the time being, sir,” Matthew answered, standing to attention.

“Again, are you all right?” Shearing repeated.

“Yes, sir, thank you.”

Shearing looked at him a moment longer, then was apparently satisfied. “Good. Sit down. I expect you have caught up with the news? The king of the Belgians is on a state visit to Switzerland, which might be of significance but is more probably a routine affair. Yesterday the government said it might accept the House of Lords’ amendment to the Home Rule bill, excluding Ulster.”

Matthew had heard the news, but no details. “Peace in Ireland?” he asked, slightly sarcastically.

Shearing looked up at him, his expression incredulous. “If that’s what you think, you’d better take more leave. You’re obviously not fit for work!”

“Well, a step in the right direction?” Matthew amended.

Shearing pulled his mouth into a thin line. “God knows! I can’t see a partition in Ireland helping anyone. But neither will anything else.”

Matthew’s mind raced. Was that what the conspiracy document concerned—dividing Ireland into two countries, one independent Catholic, the other Protestant and still part of Britain? Even the suggestion of it had already brought British troops to mutiny, robbed the army of its commander in chief, the Cabinet of its secretary of war, and taken Ulster itself to the brink of armed rebellion and civil war. Was that not the perfect ground in which to sow a plot to lead England to ruin and dishonor?

But it was now July and there had been relative peace for weeks. The House of Lords was on the verge of accepting the exclusion of Ulster from the Home Rule bill, and the Ulstermen would be permitted to remain a part of Britain, a right for which they were apparently prepared not only to die themselves but to take with them all the rest of Ireland, not to mention the British army stationed there.

“Reavley!” Shearing snapped, startling Matthew back to the present. “For God’s sake, man, if you need more time, take it! You’re no use to me off in a daydream!”

“No, sir,” Matthew said tartly, feeling his body stiffen, the blood rush warm in his face. “I was thinking about the Irish situation and what difference it will make whether the government accepts the amendment or not. It’s an issue that arouses passion far beyond reason.”

Shearing’s black eyes widened. “I don’t need you to tell me that, Reavley. Every Englishman with even half his wits has known that for the last three hundred years.” He was watching Matthew intently, trying to judge if his words could possibly be as empty as they sounded. “Do you know something that I don’t?” he asked.

Matthew had kept silent on a few occasions, but he had never lied to Shearing. He believed it would be dangerous conduct. Now, for the first time, he considered being deceptive. He had no idea who was involved in the conspiracy, though certainly at least one person here in his office. But he could not tell Shearing that until he had proof. Perhaps not even then.

Who was Catholic? Who was Anglo-Irish? Who had loyalties or vested interests one way or the other? Rebellion in Ireland would hardly change the world, but perhaps John Reavley had felt it was his world. And England’s honor would affect the empire, which would be the world, as far as he was concerned. Perhaps he was not so far wrong. And of course there were tens of thousands of Irish men and women in the United States who still felt passionate loyalty to the land of their heritage. Other Celtic peoples—in Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall—might also sympathize. It could tear Britain apart and spread to other colonies around the world.

“No, sir,” he said aloud, judging his words carefully. “But I hear whispers from time to time, and it helps to know the issues and where loyalties lie. I’m always hearing mention of conspiracies. . . .” He watched for any shadow of change in Shearing’s eyes.

“To do what?” Shearing’s voice was low and very careful.

Matthew was on dangerous ground. How far dared he go? If Shearing was aware of the conspiracy, even sympathetic to it, then one slip would mean that Matthew had betrayed himself. The thought struck him with an ugliness that cut deeper than he had expected. He was uniquely alone. Joseph would not be able to help him, and he could not trust Shearing or anyone else in SIS.

“To unite Ireland,” he answered boldly. That was certainly radical enough. Considering the Curragh circumstances, it would rip Britain apart, and possibly sacrifice both army and government in the process, which would provide an interesting opportunity for all Britain’s enemies everywhere else—Europe or Asia or Africa. Perhaps John Reavley was not exaggerating after all. It could be the first domino to topple many, the beginning of the disintegration of the empire, which would unquestionably affect all the world.

“What have you heard?” Shearing demanded. “Precisely.”

Better to avoid mentioning his father at all, but he could still be accurate about the details. “Odd words about a conspiracy,” he said, trying to pitch his tone to exactly the right mixture of caution and concern. “No details, only that it would have very wide effects all over the world—which might be an exaggeration—and that it would ruin England’s honor.”

“From whom?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to be honest. If he said it was his own father, that would explain so easily and naturally why he had been unable to pursue it any further. But it would also take it a step too close to the truth if Shearing could not be trusted. He would then wonder what else Matthew knew. Far wiser to keep that back. “Overheard it in a club,” he lied. It was the first time he had deliberately misled Shearing, and he found it extraordinarily uncomfortable, not only for the deceit to a man he respected, but also because it was dangerous. Shearing was not someone to treat lightly. He had a powerful, incisive mind, an imagination that leaped from one conclusion to another as fast and as easily as his instinct drove it. He forgot almost nothing and forgave very little.

“Said by whom?” Shearing repeated.

Matthew knew that if he gave an unsatisfactory answer or pled ignorance, Shearing would be certain he was lying. It would be the beginning of distrust. Eventually it would lead to his losing his job. Since he actually was lying, his story would have to be very good indeed. Was he equal to that? Would he ever know if he had succeeded or failed? The answer came even before the question was finished in his mind. No—he would not. Shearing would betray nothing in his demeanor.

“An army officer, a Major Trenton.” Matthew named a man from whom he had actually obtained information some weeks ago and who did occasionally attend the same club.

Shearing was silent for several moments. “Could be anything,” he said at last. “There are always Irish conspiracies. It’s a society divided by religion. If there is a solution to it, we haven’t found it in three hundred years, and God help us, we’ve never stopped trying. But if there is anything specific at the moment, I think it is more likely to lie in politics than any personal plot. And something personal would not dishonor the nation.”

“If not Ireland, then what?” Matthew asked. He could not let go. His father had died, broken and bleeding, trying to prevent the tragedy he foresaw.

Shearing stared back at him. “The shootings in Sarajevo,” he replied thoughtfully. “Was this before then, or after? You didn’t say.”

It was like a shaft of light cutting the darkness. “Before,” Matthew said, surprised to find his voice a little husky. Was it conceivable his father had somehow got word of that, too late? He must have been killed himself just as it happened. “But that doesn’t affect England!” he said, almost before he had weighed the meaning of it. His throat tightened. “Or is there more . . . something else yet to happen that we don’t know of?”

A shadow of dark humor crossed Shearing’s face and vanished. “There’s always more that we don’t know of, Reavley. If you haven’t learned that yet, then there isn’t much hope for you. The kaiser reasserted his alliance with Austro-Hungary four days ago.”

“Yes, I heard.” Matthew waited, knowing Shearing would go on.

“What do you know about the All-Highest?” Shearing asked, a faint flicker of light dancing in his eyes.

Matthew was lost for words. “I beg your pardon?”

“The kaiser, Reavley! What do you know about Kaiser Wilhelm II of the German Empire?”

“Is that what he is calling himself?” Matthew asked incredulously, scrambling together his thoughts, stories he could repeat about the kaiser’s tantrums, his delusions that first his uncle Edward VII and now his cousin George V were deliberately snubbing him, ridiculing and belittling him. There were a great many it might be unwise to retell.

“He’s the king’s cousin and the czar’s,” Matthew began, and instantly saw the impatience in Shearing’s face. “He’s been writing to the czar for some time, and they have become confidants,” he went on more boldly. “But he hated King Edward and was convinced he was plotting against him, that he despised him for some reason, and he has transferred that feeling to the present king. He’s a temperamental man, very proud and always looking for slights. And he has a withered arm, which is possibly why he is rather bad on horseback. No balance.” He waited for Shearing to respond.

Shearing’s mouth flickered, as if he thought of smiling and decided against it. “His relationship with France?” he prompted.

Matthew knew what Shearing was expecting. He had read the reports. “Bad,” he replied. “He has always wanted to go to Paris, but the French president has never invited him, and it rankles with him. He’s . . .” He stopped again. He had been going to say “surrounded by awkward relationships,” but perhaps that was a bit presumptuous. He was uncertain of Shearing’s regard for royalty, even foreign. The kaiser was closely related to George V.

“More importantly,” Shearing pointed out, “he perceives himself to be surrounded by enemies.”

Matthew let the weight of that observation sink into his mind. He saw the reflection of it in Shearing’s face. “A conspiracy to start a war, beginning in Serbia?” he asked tentatively.

“God knows,” Shearing replied. “There are Serbian nationalists who will do anything for freedom, including assassinate an Austrian archduke—obviously—but there are radical socialists all over Europe as well.”

“Against war,” Matthew cut in. “At least international war. They are all for class war. Surely that couldn’t be . . .” He stopped.

“You overheard the remark, Reavley! Could it or not?” Shearing asked tartly. “What about a pan-European socialist revolution? The whole continent is seething with plots and counterplots—Victor Adler in Vienna, Jean Jaurès in France, Rosa Luxemburg everywhere, and God knows who in Russia. Austria is spoiling for a fight and only wants the excuse, France is afraid of Germany, and the Kaiser is afraid of everyone. And the czar doesn’t know a damn thing about any of it. Take your pick.”

Matthew looked at Shearing’s dark, enigmatic face, filled with a kind of despairing humor, and realized that he had worked with him for over a year but knew almost nothing about him. He knew his intellect and his skills, but his passions he had not even guessed at. He had no idea where he came from, nothing about his family or his education, his tastes or his dreams. He was an intensely private man, but he guarded his inner self so well no one was aware he was doing it. One thought of him only in connection with his work, as if he walked out of the entrance of the building and ceased to exist.

“Perhaps I had better forget it unless something else develops,” Matthew said, aware that he had learned nothing and very possibly made himself look incompetent to Shearing. “It doesn’t seem to tie in with anything.”

“On the contrary, it ties in with everything,” Shearing answered. “The air is full of conspiracies, fortunately most of them have nothing to do with us. But go on listening, and advise me if you hear anything that makes sense.”

“Yes, sir.”

They discussed other projects for a further twenty minutes, particularly who might replace the minister of war, who had resigned over the mutiny. There were two primary candidates, one in favor of peace, even at a high price, the other more belligerent.

“Details,” Shearing said pointedly. “All the details you can, Reavley. Weaknesses. Where is Blunden vulnerable? It’s our job to know. You can’t protect a man until you know where he can be hurt.”

“Yes, sir,” Matthew agreed. “I know that.”

He left, forgetting the minister of war for a moment and pondering what Shearing had said about conspiracy. It seemed as if he did not believe that John Reavley had found anything that was of concern to England.

Matthew walked the long, quiet corridors back to his own office, nodding to this person, wishing a good evening to that one. He felt extraordinarily alone because he realized suddenly that he was profoundly angry. Shearing had in effect damned John Reavley’s perception of truth. If Shearing was right, then Matthew’s father had misinterpreted a piece of paper, and he had died horribly for nothing. Matthew was so fiercely defensive of the suggestion that his father was incompetent that his fists were clenched, and he deliberately had to loosen them in order to open the door of his office.

But John Reavley was dead! And there had been the rope on the tree and marks on the road, scars where a row of caltrops had ripped all four tires and sent the car veering one way and then the other until it crashed into the copse. Where did one buy caltrops in the modern world? Or had they been homemade? It might be simple enough, with strong fence wire, wire cutters, and pliers. Any man could do it with a few hours to spare and a knack with his hands.

Someone had searched the house in St. Giles, and his office.

But he could not prove it. The crushed foxgloves would grow back; the marks would be obliterated by rain and dust and other traffic. The rope end tied to the tree could have been put there for any of a dozen reasons. And no one else could say whether objects in the study or the bedroom had been moved or not. The evidence was in remembered details, a sense of disturbance, minute things not as they should be, marks on a lock that he could have made himself.

They would say that John Reavley was a man out of office and out of touch, who dreamed up conspiracies. Matthew and Joseph were deluded by grief. Surely the violent loss of both parents was enough to cause, and to excuse, disjunction of reason in anyone?

It was all true. And the anger inside him turned to a dull, inward ache of confusion. In his mind’s eye so clearly he could see his father’s keen face. He was an eminently reasonable man, his mind so quick, so very sane. He was the one who curbed Judith’s excesses, who was patient with Hannah’s being less fluent at expressing herself, who hid his disappointment that neither of his sons had followed the career he so longed for them to embrace.

He had loved the quaint and eccentric things in life. He was endlessly tolerant of difference—and lost his temper with arrogance, and too often with fools who stifled others with petty authority. The real fools, the simple-minded, he could forgive in an instant.

It hurt almost beyond intolerably to believe that his father had utterly misinterpreted one stupid, minor endeavor that would make not even a mark in history, never mind turn the tide of it to ruin a nation and alter the world!

The irony was that he would not have found it as hard to be wrong as Matthew found it for him. Matthew knew that, and it did not help. He stood in the center of his office and had to fight to stop himself from weeping.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Joseph slipped back into the routine of teaching again and found the old pleasure in knowledge easing a little of the pain inside him. The music of words closed out the past, creating their own immediate world.

He stood in the lecture room and saw the earnest faces in front of him, different in features and coloring, but all touched with the shadows of anxiety. Only Sebastian had voiced his fear concerning the possibility of war in Europe, but Joseph heard the echoes of it in them all. There were reports of a French airship making reconnaissance flights over Germany, speculation as to what reparation Austro-Hungary would demand of Serbia, and even discussion of who might be assassinated next.

Joseph had spoken once or twice on the subject to the other students. He had no knowledge beyond the newspaper reports available to everyone else, but since the dean was on a short sabbatical and therefore unavailable, he felt that he should fill his place with the spiritual resources that would have met just such a need as this. There was nothing better than reason with which to answer fear. There was no cause to believe that there would be a conflict involving England. These young men would not be asked to fight, and perhaps to die.

They listened to him politely, waiting for him to answer their needs for assurance, and he knew from their eyes, the tension still there in their voices, that the old power to comfort was not enough.

On Saturday evening he called by at Harry Beecher’s rooms and found his colleague reclining in his armchair and reading the current edition of the Illustrated London News. Beecher looked up, laying the paper flat immediately. Joseph could see, even upside down, a picture of a theater stage.

Beecher glanced at it and smiled. “Eugene Onegin,” he explained.

Joseph was surprised. “Here?”

“No, St. Petersburg. The world is smaller than you think, isn’t it! And Carmen.” Beecher indicated the picture at the bottom of the page. “But apparently they’ve revived Boito’s Mefistofele at Covent Garden, and they say it’s very good. The Russian Ballet has Daphnis and Chloe at Drury Lane. Not really my kind of thing.”

Joseph smiled. “Nor mine,” he agreed. “How about a sandwich or a pie and a glass of cider at the Pickerel?” It was the oldest public house in Cambridge, just a few yards along the street, across the Magdalene Bridge. They could sit outside in the fading light and watch the river, as Samuel Pepys might have done when he was a student here in the seventeenth century, or anyone else over the last six hundred years.

“Good idea,” Beecher agreed immediately, rising to his feet. The room was a pleasant clutter of books. Latin was his subject, but his interest lay in the icons of faith. He and Joseph had spent many hours positing theory after theory—serious, passionate, or funny—as to what was the concept of holiness. Where did it move from being an aid to concentration, a reminder of faith, into being the object of reverence itself, imbued with miraculous powers?

Beecher picked up his jacket from the back of the old leather chair and followed Joseph out, closing the door behind them. They went down the steps and across the quad to the massive front gate with its smaller door inset, and then out into St. John’s Street, and left to the Magdalene Bridge.

The terrace outside the Pickerel was crowded. As usual, there were punts on the river, drifting along toward the bridge, silhouetted for a moment beneath its arch, then gone as they turned and followed the stream.

Joseph ordered cider and cold game pie for both of them, then carried the provisions to a table and sat down.

Beecher regarded him steadily for a moment or two. “Are you all right, Joseph?” he asked gently. “If you need a little more time, I can take some of your work. Really—”

Joseph smiled. “I’m better working, thank you.”

Beecher was still watching him. “But?” he questioned.

“Is it so obvious?”

“To someone who knows you, yes.” Beecher took a long draft of his cider, then set the glass down. He did not press for an answer. They had been friends since their own student years here, and spent many holidays walking together in the Lake District or along the ancient Roman wall that stretched across Northumberland and Cumbria from the North Sea to the Atlantic. They had imagined the legionaries of the Caesars who had manned it when it was the outer edge of empire against the barbarian.

They had tramped for miles, and sat in the sun staring over the moors in the light and shadow, eaten crusty bread and cheese, and drunk cheap red wine. And they had talked of everything and nothing, and told endless jokes, and laughed.

Joseph wondered whether to say anything to Beecher about his father’s death and the fear of a conspiracy of the magnitude he had suggested, but he and Matthew had agreed not to speak of it, even to their closest friends.

“I was contemplating the ugly situation in Europe,” he said aloud, “and wondering what sort of future lies ahead for the men who graduate this year. Darker than for us.” He looked at his cider, sparkling a little in the long amber light. “When I graduated, the Boer War was over, and the world had all the excitement of a new century. It looked as if nothing would ever change except for the better—greater wisdom, more liberal laws, travel, new art.”

Beecher’s slightly crooked face was grave. “There are shifts of power all the time, and socialism is a rising force—I don’t think anything can stop it,” he said.

“Nor should it. We’re moving to a real enlightenment, even votes for women in time.”

“I was thinking more of the crisis in the Balkans,” Joseph said, taking another bite of his pie and talking with his mouth full. “That’s what many of our students are worried about.” He said many, but he was thinking primarily of Sebastian.

“I can’t see any of our students joining the army.” Beecher spoke just before swallowing the last mouthful of his pastry. “And no matter how heated it gets between Austria and Serbia, it’s a long way from us. It’s not our concern unless we want to make it so. Young men always worry before leaving university and stepping out into the world.” He smiled broadly. “In spite of the competition, there is safety here, and a multitude of distractions. The college is a hotbed of ideas most of them have never even imagined, and of the first temptations of adulthood—but the only real yardstick is your own ability. You may not get a first, but the only person who can prevent you succeeding is yourself. Outside it’s different. It’s a colder world. The best of them know that.” He finished his cider. “Let them worry, Joseph. It’s part of growing up.”

Again Joseph thought of Sebastian’s tortured face as he had stared with such intensity across the burnished water toward the dark outlines of the college. “It wasn’t anxiety for himself. It was for what war in Europe would do to civilization in general.”

Beecher’s face split into a good-natured grin. “Too much poring over dead languages, Joseph. There’s always something ineffably sad about a culture whose people have vanished when an echo of their beauty remains, especially if it is part of the music of our own.”

“He was thinking of our language being overtaken and our way of thought lost,” Joseph told him.

“He?” Beecher’s eyebrows rose. “You have someone particular in mind?”

“Sebastian Allard.” Joseph had barely finished speaking when he saw a shadow in Beecher’s eyes. The still evening light was unchanged. The sound of laughter from a group of young men drifted on the twilight breeze from the green swath of the Backs, but inexplicably the air seemed colder. “He’s more aware than the others,” he explained.

“He’s got a better intellect,” Beecher agreed, but he did not look at Joseph.

“It’s more than intellect.” Joseph felt the need to defend himself, and perhaps Sebastian. “You can have a brilliant brain without delicacy, fire, vision. . . .” He had used the same word again, but there was no other to describe what he knew in Sebastian. In his translations the young man had caught the music and understood not only what the poets and philosophers of the past had written, but the whole regions of passion and dream that lay beyond it. To teach such a mind as his was the wish of all those who wanted to pass on the beauty they themselves had seen. “You know that!” he said with more force than he had intended.

“We’re not in any danger of going the way of Carthage or Etruria.” Beecher smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. “There are no barbarians at the gates. If they exist, then they are here among us.” He looked at his empty glass but did not bother to catch the barman’s eye. “I think we are equal to keeping them at bay, at least most of the time.”

Joseph heard a note of pain in his voice and knew that it was real, the tip of something he had not seen before. “Not all the time?” he asked gently.

Then into his mind burst back the crushed foxgloves on the verge of the road, the scars of the caltrops on the tarmacadam, the screaming of metal in his imagination, and the blood. And he understood violence and rage completely, and fear.

“Of course not all of it,” Beecher replied, his gaze beyond Joseph’s head, unaware of the emotion all but drowning his friend. “They are young minds full of energy and promise, but they are also morally undisciplined now and then. They are on the edge of learning about the world, and about themselves. They have the privilege of education in the best school there is, and of being taught—forgive the immodesty—by some of the best mentors in the English language. They live in one of the most subtle and tolerant cultures in Europe. And they have the intellect and the ambition, the drive and the fire to make something of it. At least most of them have.”

He turned to meet Joseph’s eyes. “It’s our job to civilize them as well, Joseph. Teach them forbearance, compassion, how to accept failure as well as success, not to blame others, nor blame themselves too much, but go on and try again, and pretend it didn’t hurt. It will happen many times in life. It’s necessary to get used to it and put it in its place. That’s hard when you are young. They are very proud, and they haven’t much sense of proportion yet.”

“But they have courage,” Joseph said quickly. “And they care—intensely!”

Beecher looked at his hands on the table. “Of course they do. Good God, if the young don’t care, there isn’t much hope for the rest of us! But they’re still selfish at times. More, I think, than you want to believe.”

“I know! But it’s innocent,” Joseph argued, leaning forward a little. “Their generosity is just as powerful, and their idealism. They are discovering the world and it’s desperately precious to them! Right now they are frightened they’re going to lose it. What can I tell them?” he pleaded. “How can I make that fear bearable?”

“You can’t.” Beecher shook his head. “You can’t carry the world, and you’d only rip a muscle trying—and still probably drop it. Leave it to Atlas!” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Do you want another cider?” And without waiting for an answer, he took Joseph’s glass as well and walked away.

Joseph sat surrounded by murmuring voices, the clink of glass, and the occasional burst of laughter, and he felt alone. He had never realized before that Beecher did not like Sebastian. It was not only the dismissive words; it was the coldness in his face as he said them. Joseph felt distanced by it, cut off from a warmth he had expected.

He did not stay long after that, but excused himself and walked slowly back through the near darkness to St. John’s.

Joseph was tired, but he did not sleep well. He rose a little before six and dressed in old clothes, then went outside and down to the river. It was a breathless morning; even the topmost leaves of the trees were still against the blue of the sky. The clear, pale light was so sharp every blade of grass shone with the dew, and there was no mark at all on the shining surface of the water.

He untied one of the small boats and got into it, unlashed the oars, and rowed out past Trinity and on eastward into the spreading light, feeling the warmth on his back. He threw his weight into it, pulling steadily. The rhythm was soothing, and he picked up speed all the way to the Mathematical Bridge before turning to come back. His mind was empty of every thought but the sheer physical pleasure of the effort.

He was back in his rooms, stripped to the waist and shaving, when there was an urgent, almost hysterical banging on his door. He padded over barefoot and opened it wide.

Elwyn Allard was standing on the threshold, his face contorted, his hair flopped over his brow, his right hand raised in a fist ready to hammer on the closed wood again.

“Elwyn!” Joseph was horrified. “Whatever’s happened? Come in.” He stepped back to make room for him. “You look terrible. What is it?”

Elwyn’s body was shuddering. He gasped for breath and started speaking twice before managing to get the words out coherently.

“Sebastian’s been shot! He’s dead! I’m sure he’s dead. You’ve got to help!”

It took a moment for Joseph to absorb the meaning of the words.

“Help me!” Elwyn begged. He was leaning on the doorpost, needing it to support himself.

“Of course.” Joseph reached for his dressing gown from the back of the door and ignored his slippers. To think of bothering with clothes would have been ridiculous. Elwyn must be wrong. There might be time to salvage something—everything. Sebastian was probably ill, or . . . or what? Elwyn had said he had been shot. People did not shoot each other in Cambridge. Nobody had guns! It was unthinkable.

He ran down the steps behind Elwyn and across the silent courtyard, the dew on the grass nearly dry except where the buildings shadowed it. They went in at another door, and Elwyn started to scramble up the stairs, lurching from side to side. At the top he turned right and at the second door hurled his shoulder at it as if he could not turn the handle, although his hands grasped after it.

Joseph passed him and opened it properly.

The curtains were drawn back and the scene was bathed in the hard, clear light of the early sun. Sebastian sat in his chair, leaning back a little. The low table beside him was spread with books, not littered but lying carefully piled on top of each other in a neat stack, here and there a slip of paper in to mark a place. One book was open in his lap and his hands, slender and strong, brown from the sun, lay loosely on top of it. His head was fallen back, his face perfectly calm, no fear or pain in it. There were a couple of deep scratches on one of them. His eyes were closed. His fair hair seemed barely disturbed. He could have been asleep but for the scarlet wound on his right temple and the blood splattered on the chair arm and floor beyond from the gaping hole at the other side. Elwyn was right. With an injury like that, Sebastian had to be dead.

Joseph went over to the young man, as if even the futile gesture of help were in some way still necessary. Then he stood still, the cold seeping through his body as he stared in sick dismay at the third person he had cared for shatteringly destroyed within the space of two weeks. It was as if he had awakened from one nightmare only to plunge into another.

He reached down and touched Sebastian’s cheek. It was colder than life but not yet chill.

A choked gasp from Elwyn tore Joseph out of his stupor. With an intense effort he submerged his own horror and turned to look at the younger man. He was ashen-skinned, the sweat standing out on his lip and brow, his eyes hollow with shock. His whole body trembled, and his breath came raggedly as he struggled to retain some control.

“There’s nothing you can do to help him,” Joseph said, surprised at how steady his voice sounded in the silence of the room. There was still no one down in the quad, no feet on the stairs outside. “Go and fetch the porter.”

Elwyn stood still. “Who . . . who could have done this?” he said, gulping air. “Who would . . . ?” He stopped, his eyes filling with tears.

“I don’t know. But we must find out,” Joseph replied. There was no gun in Sebastian’s hand, nor did one lie on the floor where it would have slipped from his fingers. “Go and fetch the porter,” he repeated. “Don’t speak to anyone else.” He glanced around the room. His mind was beginning to regain some clarity. The clock on the mantel said three minutes to seven. They were one floor up from the ground. The windows were closed and locked, every pane whole. Nothing was forced or broken, nor had the door any marks on it. Already the hideous knowledge was on the edge of Joseph’s mind: This had been done by someone inside the college, someone Sebastian knew, and he must have let the person in.

“Yes,” Elwyn said obediently. “Yes . . .” Then he turned on his heel and stumbled out, leaving the door open behind him, and Joseph heard his feet loud and clumsy going down.

Joseph went over and closed the door, then turned and stared at Sebastian. His face was peaceful but very tired, as though he had at last shed some terrible burden and allowed sleep to overtake him. Whoever had stood there with a gun in his hand, Sebastian had not had time to realize what he was going to do, or perhaps to believe that he meant it.

Pain was too crippling for anger yet. His mind could not accept it. Who would do such a thing? And why?

Young men were intense, just at the beginning of life and everything was larger to them, more acute: first real love, the brink of ambition realized, triumph and heartbreak so sharp, the power of dreams incalculable, the soaring mind tasting the joy of flight. Passion of all kinds was coming into its own, but violence was only the occasional fistfight, a brawl when someone had had too much to drink.

This had a darkness to it that was alien to everything Joseph knew and loved of Cambridge, to the whole of life here and all it meant. Like a blow, he remembered what Sebastian had said about the heart being changed by war, the beauty and the light of it being destroyed by those who did not understand. It was as if he had in those brief words written his own epitaph.

The door opened behind him, and he turned to see the porter standing in the entrance, his hair ruffled and his face puckered with alarm. He glanced at Joseph, then stared past him at Sebastian, and the color drained from his skin. A gagging sound issued from his throat.

“Mitchell, will you please lock the room here, then take Mr. Allard”—he nodded to indicate Elwyn, a couple of steps behind him on the landing—“and get him a cup of hot tea with a good stiff drop of brandy. Look after him.” He took a shivering breath. “We’ll have to call the police, so no one else should go up or down this stair, for the time being. Will you tell the other gentlemen who use this way to remain in their rooms until informed otherwise. Tell them there’s been an accident. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Dr. Reavley . . . I . . .” Mitchell was a good man who had served at St. John’s for over twenty years and was up to meeting most crises appropriately—from drunken brawls and the odd dislocated or broken bone to the occasional overzealous student stuck up on the roof. But the worst crimes had been the theft of a few pounds and, once, cheating at an examination. This was of a different nature, something intruding from outside his world.

“Thank you,” Joseph said, stepping onto the landing himself. He looked beyond Mitchell to Elwyn. “I’ll go see the master and do everything else that’s necessary. You go with Mitchell, stay with him.”

“Yes . . . yes . . .” Elwyn’s voice tailed off, and he remained motionless until Mitchell locked the door. Then Joseph took him by the arm gently, forcing him to turn away, guiding him to the stairs and down them a step at a time.

Once outside in the quad, Joseph walked briskly across the path to the next quad, which was smaller and quieter, with one slender tree asymmetrically planted to the left. At the farther side was the wrought-iron gate leading through to the Fellows’ Garden. At this hour it would be locked, as usual. The master’s lodgings had two doors, one from the Fellows’ Garden, one from this quad.

He passed into the shadow where the dew was still wet, and suddenly remembered he was barefoot. His feet were cold. He had not even thought to go back to his own room for slippers. It was too late to matter now.

He knocked on the door and ran his fingers through his hair to push it back off his face, suddenly conscious of how he looked if Connie Thyer should answer, not the master himself.

As it was, he had to knock twice more before he heard footsteps. Then the lock turned, and Aidan Thyer stood blinking at him.

“Good God, Reavley! Do you know what time it is?” he demanded. His long, pale face was still dazed with sleep, and his fair hair flopped forward over his brow. He looked at Joseph’s dressing gown and his bare feet, then up again quickly, a flicker of alarm shadowing his eyes. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Sebastian Allard has been shot dead,” Joseph replied. The words somehow gave the nightmare a sickening reality. The very act of sharing it increased the number of those for whom it was true. He saw from Thyer’s confusion that he had not grasped that Joseph meant violence of the mind as well as of the hand. Joseph had not used the word murder, but it was what he meant. “Elwyn just came and told me,” he added. “I need to come in.”

“Oh!” Thyer jerked to attention, embarrassed. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry.” He pulled the door wide and moved back.

Joseph followed him, relieved to step onto carpet after the cold stone of the pathway. He had not realized it, but he was shivering.

“Come into the study.” Thyer led the way.

Joseph closed the front door and followed. He sat down in one of the big chairs while Thyer poured him a stiff brandy from the tantalus on the sideboard and passed it to him, then turned back and poured a second one for himself.

“Tell me what happened,” he directed. “Where were they?” He glanced at the mahogany clock on the mantel. It was quarter past seven. “Poor Elwyn must be in a state. What about the others who were there?” He shut his eyes for a second. “For God’s sake, how did they manage to shoot anyone?”

Joseph was not sure what he was imagining—target practice, a tragic piece of carelessness?

“In his room,” he answered. “He must have got up very early to study. He’s . . . he was one of my best students.” He tried to steady himself. “He was in his chair, alone, apart from whoever shot him. The windows were closed and locked, and there are no marks of forced entry on the door. It was just one shot, to the side of the head, but the gun is not there.”

Thyer’s face stiffened and his hands clasped the arm of his chair. He sat a little forward. “What are you saying, Joseph?” Unconsciously he slipped into familiarity.

“That someone else shot him and then left, taking the gun with him,” Joseph answered. “I can’t think of any way to explain it except that.” How had he come in the space of two weeks to speak of murder as if he understood it?

Thyer sat without moving for several moments. There was a rustle behind him, and Joseph turned to see Connie standing in the open doorway, her dark hair loose around her shoulders and a pale satin wrap covering her from neck to foot.

Both men rose to their feet.

“What is it?” she said quietly. Her face was full of concern, making her look younger and far more vulnerable than the beautiful, self-assured woman she usually was. It was the first time Joseph had seen her when she was not aware, before anything else, of being the master’s wife.

“Dr. Reavley, are you all right?” she asked anxiously. “You don’t look well. I’m afraid this has been a terrible time for you.” She came into the room, ignoring the fact that she was really not dressed suitably to greet anyone. “If I am intruding, please tell me. But if there is anything I can do to help . . . at all?”

Joseph was conscious of the warmth of her—not just her physical nearness, the slight perfume of her hair and skin and the slither of silk as she moved, but of a softness in her face, an understanding of what it is to be hurt.

“Thank you, Mrs. Thyer,” Joseph said with an attempt at a smile that failed. “I am afraid something dreadful has happened. I—”

“There is nothing you can do, my dear,” Thyer cut in, leaving Joseph feeling as if he had been clumsy. And yet there was no point in protecting her from it. Within a few hours everyone in St. John’s would have to know.

“Nonsense!” she said abruptly. “There are always things to do, even if it is only seeing that the domestic arrangements continue. What is it that has happened?”

Thyer’s face tightened. “Sebastian Allard has been killed. Apparently it could not have been an accident.” He looked at her apologetically, seeing the color drain from her skin.

Joseph stepped toward her, all but losing his own balance as he put out his hands to steady her, and felt the muscles in her arms lock with surprising strength.

“Thank you, Dr. Reavley,” she said very quietly but with almost complete control. “I am quite all right. How very dreadful. Do you know who was responsible?”

Thyer moved toward her as well but stopped short of touching her. “No. That is rather what Joseph expects us to do, I imagine—call the police? Isn’t it?”

“It is unavoidable, Master,” Joseph answered, dropping his hands to his sides. “And if you will excuse me, I must go and see what I can do to help Elwyn. The dean . . .” He did not finish.

Thyer walked from the room to the hall, where there was a telephone on the small table. He lifted it, and Joseph heard him asking the operator to ring the police station for him.

Connie looked at Joseph, her dark eyes searching his, trying to find some answer to the fear that he could see was already beginning inside her.

“I . . . ,” he began, and realized he had no idea how to go on. She was expecting him, as a man professing a faith in God, to explain it to her in some terms that at least made sense to him. Idiotic phrases came into his mind that people had said to him after Eleanor’s death—things about God’s will being beyond the human mind to grasp, that obedience lay in accepting. They had been meaningless to him then, and were even more so now when the violence was deliberate and personal.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He saw the confusion in her face. That was not good enough. “You are right.” He forced himself to sound certain. “We need to do the ordinary things to help each other. I appreciate your good sense. The students who are here are going to be distressed. We shall need to keep our heads, for their sake. It will be unpleasant having the police here asking questions, but we must endure it with as much dignity as we can.”

Her face ironed out, and she smiled very slightly. “Of course. If such a hideous thing had to happen, I am so glad you were here. You always grasp the core of things. Other people only ever seem to touch the edges.”

He was embarrassed. She saw more in him than was there. But if it comforted her, he would not indulge in the honesty of denying it at her expense.

“It is good to have something to do, isn’t it?” she said wryly. “How wise you are. It will at least get us through the worst of it with some kind of honor. I had better get dressed. I dare say the police will be here almost immediately. The master will inform the poor young man’s family, but I should prepare their accommodation here in college, in case that is what they would like. Fortunately at this time of year there are plenty of rooms.” She gave a choking little laugh. “The practical and domestic again. I cannot imagine what to say to a woman whose son has been . . . murdered!”

Joseph thought of Mary Allard and how her grief would consume her. No mother can bear the death of her child, but Mary had loved Sebastian with a fierce, all-enveloping pride. She saw in him everything that fed her ambition and her dreams.

He could understand it so easily. Sebastian had possessed an energy of the spirit that lit not only his own vision, but that of others as well. He had touched their lives, whether they wished it or not. It was impossible to believe that his mind did not exist anymore. How could Mary Allard ever bear it?

“Yes,” he said, turning to her with sudden urgency. “You will have to look after them, and not be hurt or dismayed if they are in the kind of pain that unintentionally wounds others carelessly, or even on purpose. Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out—anger is momentarily easier to cope with.” That was hideously true, and yet he was speaking not from his own passion but in the accustomed platitudes he had used for years. He was ashamed of himself, but he did not know what else to say. If he laid open his own feelings, he would allow her to see the rage and confusion inside him, and he could not afford that. She would be repelled by its savagery—and frightened.

“I know.” She smiled with great sweetness. “You don’t need to tell me . . . or to worry about them.” She spoke as if he had answered her need. “Thank you.” He had to escape before he broke the grace of her judgment. “Yes . . . thank you. I must see what else I can do.” And he excused himself and left, still barefoot and now feeling ridiculous in the broad daylight. He had given no answers at all, not from faith. He had simply provided the advice of common sense: Deal with what one can. At least do something.

He went under the archway into his own quad. Two students returning from early exercise stared at him in amusement and smothered laughter. Did they imagine he was coming back in his pajamas after an assignation? At another time he would have corrected them and left them in no doubt, but now the words died on his tongue. It was as if there were two realities, side by side, glittering, bright as shattered glass, one in which death was violent and terrible, the smell of blood was in the throat, and images floated before the eyes, even when they were closed—and another reality in which he merely looked absurd, wandering around in his dressing gown.

He did not trust himself to speak to the students in case he screamed the dreadful truth. He could hear his own voice inside his head, wild and soaring out of control.

He ran awkwardly across the last few yards to the door, then up the stairs, tripping and stumbling, until he threw open the door to his own room and slammed it behind him.

He stood still, breathing heavily. He must get control of himself. There were things to do, duties—duty always helped. First, he should finish shaving and get dressed. He must make himself look respectable. He would feel better. And eat something! Except that his stomach was churning and his throat ached so abominably he would not be able to swallow.

He took off his dressing gown. It was a flat, baking summer in Cambridge, and he was cold. He could smell blood and fear, as if he were coated with them.

Very carefully, because his hands were stiff, he ran hot water and washed himself, then stared at his face in the glass. Black eyes looked back at him above high cheekbones, a strong, slightly aquiline nose, and a highly individual mouth. His flesh looked gray, even beneath the dark stubble of his half-shaved beard. There was something waxen about him.

Even shaving slowly and carefully, he still cut himself. He put on a clean shirt, and his fingers could not find the buttons or get them through the holes.

It was all absurd, idiotic! The students had thought he was off on some amorous encounter. Looking like this? He was a man walking through a nightmare. And yet he had been so aware of Connie Thyer . . . the warmth of her, the sweet smell, her closeness. How could he even think of such a thing now?

Because he was blindingly, desperately alone! He would have given anything at all to have had Eleanor here, to take her in his arms and cling to her, have her hold him, take some of this unbearable loss from him.

His parents were dead, crushed and tossed aside, for a document. And now Sebastian, his brain destroyed, blasted into wreckage by a bullet.

Everything was slipping away, all that was good and precious and gave light and meaning. What was there left that he dared love anymore? When would God smash that and take it away?

This was the last time he was ever going to let it happen. There was going to be no more pain like this! He could not open himself up to it.

Habit told him that it was not God’s fault. How many times had he explained that to other people who were screaming inside because of something they could not bear?

Yes, it was! He could have done something! If He couldn’t manage that, why was He God?

And the ice-cold voice of reason said: There is no God. You are alone.

That was the worst truth of all: alone. The word was a kind of death.

He stood still for several minutes, no coherent thoughts in his head. The coldness didn’t stay. He was too angry. Someone had killed John and Alys Reavley, and he was helpless to find out who or why.

Memories flooded back of pottering quietly in the garden, John telling long, rambling jokes, the smell of lily-of-the-valley, Hannah brushing Alys’s hair, Sunday dinner.

He leaned against the mantel and wept, letting go of the self-control at last and freeing the grief to wash over him and take hold.

By midmorning he was still ashen-faced, but composed. His bedder, the elderly woman who tidied and cared for all the rooms on this stair, had been in, shaking and tearful, but she completed her duty. The police had arrived, led by an Inspector Perth, a man of barely average height with receding hair sprinkled with gray, and crooked teeth, two missing. He spoke quietly, but he moved with unswerving purpose. Although he was gentle with the grieving and severely rattled students, he allowed none of his questions to go unanswered.