The brass knocker struck oak at half past nine, its green-tinged face grinning back at Reverend Silas Black through the morning drizzle. Inside Ashworth Hall, the echo rang hollow, rolling through a foyer that smelled of furniture polish and something older, something that clung to the wisteria-draped walls like mildew on forgotten hymnals. Silas removed his hat, water pooling in the brim, and waited.
The door opened onto a woman of perhaps sixty years, her face a topography of small disappointments mapped in fine lines. Her apron bore a starched severity that matched the pinned severity of her grey hair. She regarded him with eyes the colour of weak tea and showed no surprise at a clergyman calling unannounced.
"Reverend Black." Not a question. "We've been expecting word from the diocese. Though I confess we expected it sooner, given the circumstances."
"You know why I'm here, then."
"I know what the village says. The village says many things." She stepped aside without warmth. "Mrs. Pemberton. I keep house here. You'll want the morning room, I expect. It's the warmest, with this weather. Though I cannot promise it will be comfortable for the sort of conversation you're anticipating."
"I appreciate your candour."
"I have not begun to be candid, Reverend. I have begun to be polite. The two are not the same." She led him down a corridor papered in scenes of Arcadian shepherds, each one watching over sheep with expressions that suggested profound moral uncertainty. "The master, Professor Cole, has been dead three weeks yesterday. The police came and went. The constable was a young man who apologised more than he investigated. I gave my statement. The cook gave hers. The groundsman gave his. Then we all returned to our duties, as one does when one is in service."
She pushed open a door, and the morning room received them with the cautious warmth of a space rarely used. A fire burned low in the grate. Beyond the tall windows, the wisteria pressed against the glass, its purple racemes heavy with rain.
"Sit, Reverend. I'll call the others. You may find them forthcoming. You may find them otherwise. I make no promises either way."
Silas took the chair nearest the fire, its upholstery faded to the colour of old parchment. The room held the particular silence of houses where grief has been folded away into drawers, neat and hidden but never quite gone. A portrait dominated the eastern wall, a man in academic robes with a face that seemed to lean forward from the canvas, listening.
Mrs. Pemberton returned with three others in tow, herding them into the room with the efficiency of a woman accustomed to managing livestock. The first was a young woman with callused hands and hair tucked beneath a cap, her eyes fixed on the carpet as though studying its weave for salvation. The second was a man of broad, weathered frame, his knuckles scarred from work that involved either soil or violence. The third was older, thinner, with a cleanliness that bordered on the surgical.
"Mrs. Pemberton, you will introduce us properly," the older man said, his voice carrying the clipped precision of someone accustomed to being obeyed.
"Mrs. Clack. Mr. Groves. And this is Dr. Whitford, who attended the Professor in his final hours." She paused, letting each name settle. "Reverend Silas Black has called to discuss matters of a spiritual and investigative nature concerning Professor Cole's death. I have told him nothing. I leave that to your consciences."
She withdrew, and the door closed with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.
Dr. Whitford seated himself with the deliberate grace of a man conserving energy. "Reverend. I trust this is not to be an interrogation. I am a man of science. My conscience, as Mrs. Pemberton so quaintly phrases it, operates according to empirical principles."
"I am here to listen, Doctor. To understand. Professor Cole was a man of God in his own way, a seeker. His death deserves more than a constable's apology."
The doctor inclined his head. "A fair point. What would you have me tell you?"
"Where were you on the evening of his death?"
"I was here. In the east wing. The Professor had been indisposed for several days. A weakness of the heart, nothing more dramatic. I had administered a restorative draught that evening, a tincture of digitalis and gentian, and retired to write my notes. I heard nothing unusual. At half past two in the morning, Mrs. Clack roused me. The Professor had passed. Peacefully, I should say. There were no signs of struggle, no marks of violence. His face wore an expression of perfect serenity."
"You examined him?"
"I examined him. Thoroughly. As was my professional duty." Whitford's hands folded in his lap, the knuckles whitening slightly. "I can provide documentation if the diocese requires it."
"The diocese requires only the truth, Doctor."
A pause, and in it the fire popped, sending a spark against the iron guard.
"Then the truth is yours. The Professor died as old men often die, of a heart that simply stopped. What mystery you imagine, Reverend, exists only in the village imagination."
Silas turned his attention to Mrs. Clack. She stood near the window, her back rigid, her gaze fixed on some middle distance where memory and regret held equal territory.
"Mrs. Clack. You were the one who found him."
"Yes, sir." Her voice was small, almost swallowed by the room. "I brought his evening tea. He had asked for it at half past one, said he wished to sit up a while longer. When I returned at half past two, the cup was full, untouched, and he was... gone. His hands were folded across his chest. The candle on his desk had burned down to a stub."
"Had he been writing?"
"I cannot say, sir. The paper on his desk was turned face down. I did not think to look. It seemed intrusive."
"And before you brought the tea? Where were you?"
"In the kitchen, sir. With Cook. We were preparing the morning's baking. There was bread to be set."
"Who else was in the house that night?"
A hesitation, barely perceptible, but Silas had spent twenty years reading the silences between confessions. "Mr. Groves, the groundsman. He had returned from the village that evening. Dr. Whitford was in the east wing. And Mrs. Pemberton was in her quarters above the kitchen. The Professor had dismissed the other staff for the night. He preferred quiet when he was working."
"Working on what?"
Mrs. Clack's composure cracked, just slightly, around the edges of her mouth. "I do not know, sir. None of us did. The Professor kept his own counsel. He had a study in the tower, locked always. He would spend hours there. Sometimes we heard sounds from it, but he said it was his music. He played the violin badly, but with great enthusiasm."
Dr. Whitford smiled, a small, professional smile. "The Professor had many interests. Antiquarian pursuits. He was attempting to write a history of the region. A history of the Ashworth lands and the families connected to them. He believed there were truths in the soil, buried truths. He meant to excavate them, metaphorically speaking."
"And literally?"
The smile vanished. "I cannot say what you mean, Reverend."
"I think you can, Doctor. The village talks of bones. Of a garden. Of things buried that ought not to be."
The room contracted around the words. Mrs. Clack's hands found each other, fingers intertwining. Mr. Groves shifted his weight, the floorboards groaning beneath him.
"I know nothing of bones," Whitford said, and now his voice carried the faintest edge of frost. "The Professor's interests were historical. The Ashworth family has occupied these lands for centuries. One expects to find remnants of earlier eras. Pottery. Tools. The occasional coin. Archaeology is not graverobbing, whatever the village may believe."
"The village believes you attended more than his heart, Doctor."
A silence, long and brittle.
"You are welcome to inspect my notes, Reverend. They are kept at my surgery in the village. Every remedy I prescribed, every examination I conducted. I have nothing to hide."
"Then you will not object if I review them."
"I have no objection. I simply do not see what they will reveal that the constable did not."
The fire settled lower. Outside, the wisteria tapped against the glass with patient fingers.
Silas turned to Mr. Groves. The man had the stillness of someone accustomed to waiting, to watching things grow or fail according to forces beyond his control.
"You are the groundsman, Mr. Groves. The gardens here are extensive."
"Aye, sir. They are."
"You would know the grounds better than anyone. Every path, every hedgerow, every corner where something might be hidden."
"I would, sir. And I tell you plainly, I have seen nothing buried that ought not to be buried. The Professor asked me to dig in certain places. He had theories about where an old chapel might have stood. I dug. I found stones. I found old bricks. Once I found a bone that might have been a sheep's. He took it away and was pleased with it."
"And where did he take it?"
"To his study. In the tower. He was most particular about that study. None of us were to enter. Even Mrs. Pemberton, who enters everywhere, was forbidden."
Mrs. Pemberton's voice came from the doorway, sudden and dry as autumn leaves. "Forgiven is not the same as forbidden, Mr. Groves. I chose not to enter. There is a difference."
She had returned without sound, a habit of long service, and now stood with a tray bearing a tea service that glinted in the firelight.
"The Reverend will want tea, I thought. We are English, after all. Even in the midst of death and suspicion, we take tea."
She poured with the economy of motion that comes from a thousand repetitions, the liquid steaming in the cool room. Her eyes never left Silas's face.
"The Professor's study, Reverend. You are wondering about it. Everyone wonders about it. The constable wondered. The magistrate wondered. But no one has entered it. It remains locked. The key was on his person when he died, and it remains there still, sewn into his shroud by the undertaker, who is a godly man and respects such things. Until that key is removed, that room holds its secrets."
"And you, Mrs. Pemberton? What secrets do you hold?"
The question hung between them. She set down the pot with a sound like a gavel.
"None, Reverend. I am a woman who has outlived her usefulness to her own family and found a second usefulness here. I keep the house. I keep the peace. I keep my own counsel. That is all."
"You keep many things, I think."
"Everyone keeps something, Reverend. Even clergymen. Especially clergymen. I have read your sermons. They are full of mercy for others and none for yourself. A man who cannot forgive himself is a dangerous creature, I think. He seeks out the sins of others to distract from his own."
The fire popped again. The wisteria tapped. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed the quarter hour, its tone muffled by walls and secrets.
"I would like to see the study," Silas said. "The tower room."
Mrs. Pemberton's hand paused, the teapot tilted.
"You would need the key."
"I know."
"It is sewn into the shroud. Of a man three weeks dead. To open that shroud would be..." She searched for the word. "It would be a desecration, Reverend. A violation of Christian burial. Are you prepared to bear that weight?"
"Are you prepared to bear the weight of what that room might contain?"
The question landed. She set down the pot.
"I will fetch the others. We shall discuss this among ourselves, as is proper. You may wait here. The fire will hold. The tea will not improve with waiting, but it will serve."
Mrs. Pemberton withdrew from the parlor with the careful steps of a woman who had long practiced the art of dignified retreat. The door closed behind her not with a slam but with a soft, deliberate click, the sound of authority reasserting itself. Reverend Silas Black sat alone with the dying fire and the cold tea and the weight of what had just been offered to him, or demanded of him, or both.
He did not touch the cup.
Instead he studied the room with the eyes of a man who had learned to read spaces the way others read books. The wisteria pressed against the window glass in clusters of pale bloom, each petal catching the last of the afternoon light until the whole vine seemed to pulse with a faint, internal phosphorescence. He had seen wisteria before, in gardens tended by women who believed in the civilizing influence of horticulture, but this growth was different. It clung too tightly to the stone. It climbed too high. There was a hunger in its architecture, a quality of patience that suggested it had been waiting for something specific, and for a very long time.
The clock in the hallway chimed the half hour. He counted the strikes without meaning to, an old habit from his years of preaching to congregations who arrived late and left early.
When the door opened again, it was not Mrs. Pemberton who entered first.
A man came through the doorway with the cautious gait of someone negotiating unfamiliar terrain, his right hand trailing along the wallpaper as though he required constant confirmation that the wall was still there. He was perhaps sixty years old, though the years had arranged themselves on his face in a pattern that made precision difficult. His hair was the color of old iron, swept back from a high forehead, and his eyes were the pale, watery blue of a winter sky threatening snow. He wore a tweed suit that had been fashionable sometime during the previous century, and he moved with the particular stiffness of a man whose joints had begun to lodge formal complaints.
"Reverend Black." The man's voice was smooth, almost frictionless, with the vowels of Received Pronunciation stretched thin over something that sounded, beneath the polish, like a persistent whine. "Arthur Penwick, land agent to the Ashworth estate. Mrs. Pemberton has informed me of your, ah, request. Most irregular. Most irregular indeed. But then, the circumstances themselves are irregular, are they not? The poor Professor. Such a loss. Such a shock to us all."
Penwick settled himself onto the settee opposite the fireplace with the exaggerated care of a man who wished it understood that he was accustomed to better furniture in better rooms. He produced a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at his temples, though the room was not warm.
Behind him came a woman whose entrance could not have contrasted more sharply with his own. Margaret Holloway crossed the threshold as though she had been expected, as though she had arrived precisely when she intended to arrive, and as though any alternative timeline was the concern of lesser beings. She was tall for a woman of her generation, with the broad shoulders and direct bearing of someone who had spent decades keeping order in a village schoolroom and had no intention of stopping now. Her hair was steel gray, pulled back in a knot so severe it seemed to be holding her thoughts in order as well. Her dress was plain brown wool, well-made, devoid of ornament. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had taught generations of children to write legibly and had suffered no nonsense in the process.
She seated herself beside the window without being invited, her gaze sweeping the room and finding Silas at its center. Her eyes were dark and very steady.
"Mr. Penwick," she said, and the two words conveyed a complete biographical sketch, "is agitated by anything that disrupts the comfortable illusion that he controls his circumstances. You must forgive him. It has been a difficult week."
Penwick's mouth opened, then closed.
"And you must be the schoolmistress," Silas said.
"Margaret Holloway, yes. I teach the children of this village to read, to write, and to keep their conclusions to themselves until they have evidence sufficient to support them. A rare discipline in these times, but a necessary one."
A fourth figure had entered and taken a position near the door. Elias Venn stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his posture that of a man accustomed to waiting in archives and antechambers, a man who understood that patience was a form of currency. He was younger than the others by perhaps a decade, lean and watchful, with the quiet intensity of someone who listened more than he spoke and remembered everything he heard.
Silas regarded the four of them, the household and its keepers, the inheritors of whatever secret pulsed beneath Ashworth Hall. He folded his hands in his lap and waited. In his experience, silence administered itself; one had only to let it.
It was Penwick who broke.
"Reverend, I must say, the matter of the study is one of considerable delicacy. The Professor was a man of, shall we say, particular habits. His research was his own affair. The estate has no wish to see that research, whatever its nature, become the subject of village gossip or, heaven forbid, newspaper speculation. The family reputation, you understand. The family name."
"The family name," Margaret Holloway repeated, "being one the family has done little to deserve the protection of, for several generations now."
"Mrs. Holloway, I must protest."
"You may protest, Mr. Penwick. You frequently do. It changes nothing."
The fire cracked. A coal shifted in the grate and sent a brief fountain of sparks up the chimney. The wisteria at the window seemed to lean closer.
Silas spoke into the small silence that followed. "Mrs. Pemberton has told me there is a key sewn into a burial shroud. A man dead three weeks. I do not yet know his name."
The silence this time was of a different quality. It had weight. It had texture. Penwick's handkerchief, which had been traveling toward his temples again, stopped mid-journey. Margaret Holloway's hands, which had been folded in her lap, tightened almost imperceptibly. Elias Venn, by the door, lifted his chin a fraction of an inch.
"The Professor," Margaret Holloway said at last, "kept a journal. He was a man of methodical habits, despite his other peculiarities. He recorded everything. The weather. His meals. His thoughts on the declining quality of the postmistress's conversation. And, I suspect, far more than that. He kept it in the study, in the tower. He believed it was the one room in this house no one would dare enter."
"And yet you know of its existence."
"I know many things about this house, Reverend. I have lived within sight of it for thirty-seven years. I taught the Professor to read. I taught his father before him, though the father was a quicker student. I have watched the comings and goings, the carriages arriving in the night, the men who came and did not leave, and the men who left and were never seen again. I have recorded, in my own careful way, what I have observed. And I have waited, as one does in villages, for someone to arrive who might be trusted with the reading."
Penwick made a small, strangled sound.
"Arthur," Margaret Holloway said, not turning her head, "if you interrupt me again, I will tell the Reverend about the payments from the London office. The ones that do not appear in the estate ledger."
Penwick went very still.
Margaret Holloway continued, her voice warming slightly, taking on the cadence of a woman who had decided to trust and saw no reason to dress the decision in coyness. "The Professor began his strangeness in the autumn of 1947. Before that, he had been a quiet man, a reader, a man who preferred his books to his neighbors. After that autumn, he became something else. He stopped attending church, though he had been a regular congregation member for years. He stopped walking in the village. He took his meals in his study. And he began receiving visitors."
"Visitors," Silas said.
"Men from the county asylum at first. Then men from London, men who arrived in motorcars with blackened windows and departed before dawn. He corresponded with a man named Quartermaine, a physician whose name I had cause to investigate after the war. He was not a physician in the ordinary sense. He had been removed from his position under circumstances that were never made public. The Professor sought him out regardless."
"And what did they discuss?"
"That, Reverend, is the question I have waited three years to have answered. The journal will tell us. But the key is in the shroud of a man named Edmund Thorne, a vagrant who died at the workhouse and whose body the Professor claimed for reasons he did not disclose. The key to the tower room was sewn into the dead man's winding sheet before burial."
The room was very quiet. The fire had burned down to a low, persistent glow, and the shadows it cast seemed to lean toward Margaret Holloway as she spoke, as though the house itself was listening.
"You are asking me," Silas said slowly, "to authorize the exhumation of a corpse to recover a key."
"I am asking you, Reverend, to consider what is sealed in that room, and what price ought to be paid to open it. The Professor is dead. He was murdered. Whatever he kept in that room may tell us who killed him and why. A vagrant's grave, disturbed for one night, may save another grave from being filled. That is the calculation."
"It is not my calculation to make."
"It is precisely your calculation. You are the parish priest. The workhouse burial ground falls within your pastoral responsibility. No one else can give the authorization. No one else has the standing."
Elias Venn spoke for the first time, his voice smooth and unhurried, the voice of a man who had spent years handling old books and had learned to modulate his tones with care. "There is also the matter of the bone garden, Reverend."
Silas turned to look at him.
"I found a reference to it in a map of the parish drawn in 1843. A surveyor named Harwell made notes in the margin. He referred to a 'plantation' on the eastern boundary of the Ashworth estate, marked with a symbol I have not encountered in any other cartographic record. The Professor acquired that map at an auction in Whitby some years ago. I have seen his bookplate in it. If the journal in the tower describes the same symbol, then we may at last understand what has been done in that plantation, and to whom."
Penwick rose from the settee with the abruptness of a man who could no longer contain himself within the bounds of upholstery. "This is intolerable," he said. "We are discussing the violation of a grave on the basis of a schoolmistress's intuitions and a bookseller's hobby. I will not be party to it. The estate will not be party to it. I shall write to the Bishop. I shall write to Lord Ashworth. I shall, by God, write to the Times."
"Sit down, Arthur," Margaret Holloway said, without raising her voice.
Penwick did not sit.
Mrs. Pemberton, who had been standing in the doorway throughout, stepped forward and placed one hand on the land agent's arm. The gesture was so gentle, so perfectly calibrated, that Penwick sat as though his legs had simply made the decision without consulting him.
"The key," Mrs. Pemberton said, "is in the shroud. The shroud is in the ground. The ground is under your care, Reverend. Whatever you decide, decide knowing that we have waited a long time for someone willing to decide."
The key is in the shroud. The shroud is in the ground. The ground is under your care, Reverend. Whatever you decide, decide knowing that we have waited a long time for someone willing to decide."
Reverend Silas Black felt the words settle into him like stones dropped into still water. He stood very still in the center of the drawing room, and the faces of the others arranged themselves around him in his vision like figures in a Dutch painting: Elias Venn pale and watchful beside the window, Margaret Holloway composed near the door, Arthur Penwick rigid on the settee, Mrs. Pemberton standing apart with her hands folded as though she had already delivered her testimony and now awaited only the verdict.
He thought of the iron key in his study. He thought of the shrouded figure in the tower. He thought of the parish register with its unexplained gaps, and of the map in Elias Venn's satchel, and of the fact that for fifteen years he had buried his dead in consecrated ground without once asking whether the ground beneath the consecrated layer was itself consecrated, or whether the bones already there had consented to receive the new arrivals.
He had not asked. He had not wished to ask. The not-wishing had been the greater sin.
"I will go to the plantation tonight," he said.
The silence that followed was not silence at all. It was the sound of four people exhaling at four different tempos, a small orchestral exhalation, and beneath it the faint creak of the house settling against the dusk.
"Reverend," Margaret Holloway said, and he heard in her voice the question she would not ask: are you certain.
"I am not certain of anything," he said, answering the question she had not voiced. "I am certain that a key has been left for me to find. I am certain that a shrouded figure has been placed in the tower. I am certain that the figure is not alive, and that the key is meant to open something, and that the something is in the plantation on the eastern boundary of the Ashworth estate. Beyond that, I am a man walking in fog."
"Then walk carefully," Margaret said.
Mrs. Pemberton moved toward the door. "I will send word to The Shepherd," she said. "He will be watching."
Reverend Black inclined his head. He did not ask her how she would send word. He did not ask how The Shepherd would know. The Shepherdess had said only that she would be in the church at midnight, and he understood now that the church at midnight was a waystation on a route he could not yet see.
Penwick stood again, this time without the explosive quality of his earlier rising. He stood like a man who has just been told that the building he is in is on fire and that the fire has been burning for some time. "Reverend," he said, and his voice had lost its oily smoothness and was now merely thin. "If you go to the plantation, I must inform you that the gate is locked. The padlock is my responsibility. I hold the key."
"I know," Reverend Black said.
"I did not know you knew."
"I have observed you, Mr. Penwick. I have observed you for fifteen years. I have observed which of the parishioners receive preference in the hiring of day labor. I have observed which farms are favored in the matter of drainage grants. I have observed that your books are kept in a manner that would not survive the scrutiny of an auditor from Lord Ashworth's estate office."
Penwick's face underwent a series of rapid transformations, like a sky in which several weather systems are contending for dominance. "That is a slander," he said, but he did not say it with conviction.
"It is an observation," Reverend Black said. "I will not act upon it tonight. I will not act upon it at all, unless it becomes my pastoral duty to do so. But I will ask you, as a Christian man asks another Christian man, to give me the key to the plantation gate."
The room held its breath.
Penwick looked at Margaret Holloway. He looked at Mrs. Pemberton. He looked at Elias Venn, who returned his gaze with the steady mildness of a man who has already catalogued him and found him wanting. He looked at the door, and then at the window, and then at his own hands, which were trembling slightly.
"Very well," he said. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a small iron key on a leather fob. He held it out at arm's length, as though he were handing Reverend Black a dead mouse rather than a key. "I wash my hands of the consequences."
"We shall all wash our hands tonight," Reverend Black said, taking the key. "In more senses than one."
Elias Venn stepped forward from the window. "I will accompany you to the plantation, Reverend."
"That is not necessary."
"It is necessary," Elias said. "I have the map. I have read the cartographer's notes. I know the location of the surveyor Harwell's symbol, and I know its approximate position relative to the gate. Without me you will wander in the dark among the trees."
"I have wandered in the dark among worse things," Reverend Black said, but he did not refuse the offer. He was learning, in this long evening, that refusal was a luxury he could no longer afford.
Margaret Holloway buttoned her coat. "I will come as well."
"Margaret."
"I am the one who first observed the gatherings at the hall. I am the one who noticed that the soil on the heels of the gentlemen's boots was a different color from the soil of the estate. I will not sit in my cottage tonight and wonder what is being uncovered."
"You are a woman alone," Reverend Black said.
"I am a woman who has buried a husband and taught thirty children to read and walked the lanes of this parish at every hour of the day and night without fear," Margaret said. "I am not a woman alone. I am a woman who knows exactly who she is and what she is about."
Reverend Black looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded.
Mrs. Pemberton, who had remained standing apart, spoke for the first time since her pronouncement about the key. "I will remain here," she said. "When you return, I will be waiting. I will have tea. I will have bread. I will have whatever else a traveler needs after a long road."
She said it simply, as a hostess speaks of preparations for expected guests. Reverend Black understood that she was offering him a reason to return.
He tucked the padlock key into his pocket. Elias Venn produced a small lantern from his satchel, one of the new incandescent kind that threw a steady white beam rather than the guttering orange of an oil lamp. Margaret Holloway took down from the hall stand a dark lantern that had belonged to her husband, and that she had kept, she said, because it was a good lantern and because she had not yet had the heart to throw it away.
They left the rectory by the back door, descending the stone steps into the kitchen garden. The night had closed fully now. The moon had not yet risen. The sky was a deep indigo at the western horizon, fading to absolute black above the rooftops of the village. The air was cool and still, and carried the faint mineral smell of approaching autumn, of leaves beginning to think about letting go.
Reverend Black led them through the kitchen garden and over the low wall at its eastern end. From there they crossed the lower paddock, where the church's two old cows stood regarding them with the philosophical indifference of ruminants. They passed through the lych gate, and the churchyard lay before them, a dim geometry of headstones and yew trees. The tower rose at the far end, and in the vestry window a faint light was moving, as though someone were pacing within.
They did not stop at the church. They did not speak of the tower. They went on, past the churchyard wall and into the lane that led east toward the Ashworth estate.
The lane was bordered by hawthorn hedges that had grown tall and tangled in the late summer. The footsteps of the three of them made a soft crunch on the gravel. Elias Venn's lantern threw their shadows long behind them, and ahead of them the shadows of the hedgerow trees shifted and rearranged themselves like figures in a procession.
Reverork Black walked in silence, aware that he was carrying in his pocket two keys: the iron key from his study, and the padlock key from Penwick. Two keys. Two locks. He wondered how many locks there were between this moment and whatever truth lay at the end of this road.
Margaret Holloway walked beside him. After a time she spoke, quietly, so that Elias, who was slightly ahead with the lantern, would not hear.
"Silas."
"Yes."
"I knew your wife."
He did not answer at once. His footfalls continued on the gravel, and the hedgerow continued to breathe its cool mineral breath.
"I knew her before you did," Margaret said. "She came to the village school as a pupil teacher. I taught her. She was the brightest girl I ever taught, and the most stubborn. She argued with me about the nature of the sacraments when she was sixteen. She won the argument."
"I did not know that," Reverend Black said.
"She never told you. She thought you would think it improper for her to have bested her teacher."
"I would have been proud of her."
"Yes," Margaret said. "That is why she did not tell you."
He let the words settle. They did not wound him. They were spoken with such evident care that they passed through him like light through glass.
They reached the eastern boundary of the Ashworth estate. The lane narrowed and curved around a thicket of blackthorn, and at the curve a gate appeared in the hedge, set between two stone pillars that were crowned with finials in the shape of pinecones. The gate was of wrought iron, and across it a chain was looped, and at the center of the chain hung a heavy padlock.
Reverend Black produced Penwick's key. The padlock yielded with a click that sounded, in the stillness, like the closing of a book.
They passed through the gate.
The plantation of which Elias Venn had spoken lay before them. It was, in the white beam of the incandescent lantern, a dense wood of mature trees: oaks and beeches and, most prominently, the pale traceries of wisteria, which had climbed so high into the canopy that their long pendulous racemes hung like ghostly chandeliers among the leaves. The wisteria was in bloom, though late in the season, and the air was heavy with its scent, sweet and faintly bitter, like the memory of a perfume once worn by someone now gone.
Elias Venn stopped and consulted the map. "Harwell's symbol is set against a feature he describes as a clearing, near what he calls the 'old well.' The well is marked on the Ordnance Survey of 1856, though it is not named. The clearing should be approximately four hundred yards to the northeast, on the far side of that rise."
They moved on into the plantation. The ground underfoot was soft and deep with leaf mold. The lantern threw their shadows about them, and beyond the lantern's reach the wood was absolute in its darkness. Reverend Black felt the wisteria pressing in on all sides, its scent almost too sweet, its pale blossoms like a snowfall of small hands.
After ten minutes of walking, the ground began to rise beneath them, and at the top of the rise the trees thinned and the lantern showed a clearing.
The clearing was perhaps thirty paces across. At its center was a stone wellhead, old and moss-grown, with a wooden cover that had rotted at one corner. Beside the well stood a small stone structure, perhaps a gardener's bothy in some former century, now half collapsed, its roof fallen in, its doorway gaping like a missing tooth.
And around the well, arranged in careful rows, were the mounds.
They were perhaps two dozen in number. Each was low and rounded, and each was marked at its head by a small wooden cross. The crosses were of a piece: rough hewn, of similar size, set at similar angles, as though they had been made by the same hand at the same time.
Reverend Black stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at the mounds. The lantern's white light fell across them and showed that the crosses bore no names. There were no inscriptions on them at all. Each was blank.
"They are children," Margaret Holloway said. She had moved forward and was kneeling beside the nearest mound. Her hand, when she drew it back, came away clean. "The size of the mounds. They are children."
No one answered. There was nothing to answer.
Reverend Black walked to the wellhead and lifted the rotten corner of the cover. He directed Elias to shine the lantern down into the well. The beam descended into the shaft and showed, far below, the glimmer of water, and beside the water, something pale.
"It is a box," Elias said. "A metal box, set on a ledge. I cannot reach it from here."
Reverend Black set down the lantern and lowered himself onto the edge of the wellhead. The stone was cold and damp under his hands. He braced his feet against the side of the wellhead and leaned into the shaft, reaching down with his right hand.
The iron key was in his left hand. He had not planned to use it here. He had planned to use it on whatever lay at the end of this road. But his hand found the box, and the box was secured by a small lock, and the key was in his hand, and so he fitted the key to the lock and turned it.
The lock opened.
He drew up the box and set it on the wellhead. It was a tin document box, of the kind used for the safekeeping of papers. Its surface was spotted with verdigris but intact. He lifted the lid.
Inside lay a sheaf of papers, and a leather-bound notebook. The papers were deeds and letters and a folded plan of the plantation drawn in an unfamiliar hand. The notebook was smaller than the professor's, bound in calfskin rather than morocco, and its pages were written in a cramped and hurried script.
Reverend Black opened the notebook. The first page bore a name: H. Ashworth, 1817.
He did not read further. He closed the notebook and held it in both hands.
"Margaret," he said. "Elias."
They came and stood beside him.
"Take the box," he said. "Carry it back to the rectory. Do not open it. Do not read it. We will read it together, in the drawing room, with Mrs. Pemberton, and we will decide what is to be done."
He looked once more at the mounds, at the nameless crosses, at the pale wisteria blossoms swaying in a wind that had now risen, and seemed to move through the clearing like the passage of something unseen.
He thought of the shrouded figure in the tower. He thought of the key in his pocket. He thought of the fact that the key had opened this box, and that the box contained a name and a date and a record of some long-continued wrong.
He did not yet know the shape of the wrong. He would learn it in the pages of the notebook, in the drawing room of his own house, with the woman who had taught his wife and the bookseller who had carried the map and the lady of the third order who had said she would have tea and bread waiting.
He would learn it, and he would act upon what he learned, because he was a man who had decided, on this night, that the not-deciding was the greater sin.
He turned away from the well and led the others back through the plantation, through the gate, along the lane, past the lych gate and the churchyard where the tower still showed its faint interior light.
When they reached the rectory, Mrs. Pemberton was waiting, as she had promised, with tea and bread and a single candle burning on the hall table.