Frost lay thick on the hedgerows that morning, white as lint pulled from a surgeon's cloth. Susanna Pell stood at her parlour window and watched her breath fog the glass in small, deliberate bursts. Below, the lane held the particular quiet of a Suffolk dawn in late October, the kind of cold that finds the gaps between shirt and waistcoat, between thought and intention.
A knock came at the front door, three measured raps that told her who waited without need of sight.
Edmund Halloran stood on the step with his surveyor's chain coiled over one shoulder and a leather case tucked beneath his arm. His face bore the greyish pallor of a man who had slept poorly, and his eyes carried the distant focus of someone still arranging measurements in his head. He lifted his hat, and the gesture carried more apology than greeting.
"Mistress Pell," he said. "I am sorry to call on you so early."
"Rench sent word." She did not frame it as a question. "About the boundary at Marsh Bottom."
"He did." Edmund's mouth worked a moment before the words came. "Constable says the stones have been moved. Both of them. He measured the line yesterday afternoon with old Croft from the tax office, and this morning the markers sit a full rod apart from where they stood."
Susanna studied him. She had known Edmund Halloran for eleven years, ever since he had come down from the north with his peculiar instruments and his graveyard commissions and his habit of addressing the dead by their Christian names when he mapped their plots. She had learned to read the weather of his moods the way a sailor reads the sky: the set of his jaw when he was uncertain, the way his fingers found the brass fittings of his theodolite when he wished to be elsewhere.
"Will you take tea first?" she asked.
"I would not refuse it."
She stepped aside and let him into the hall. The house smelled of yesterday's fire and the polish she laid on the wainscot every Saturday without fail. Her servant had been dismissed three winters past and not replaced; Susanna preferred the silence and the economy. She moved towards the kitchen with Edmund trailing behind, his boots leaving pale prints of frost on the floorboards.
She set the kettle on the hob and reached for the canister of Lapsang. The leaves gave off their sharp, smoke-bitten scent as she measured them into the pot.
"You have not eaten," she observed.
"I had bread."
"Bread is not breakfast, Mr. Halloran."
"No, ma'am." He set the leather case on the scrubbed wood of the kitchen table and clicked open the brass clasps. Inside lay his instruments: a circumferentor in its fitted cradle, a steel tape worn thin at the ends, a notebook bound in marbled board, and three pencils sharpened to fine points. He arranged them with the care of a man handling relics.
Susanna poured the water and watched the steam rise. The kitchen filled with the resinous perfume of the tea, and she felt the cold begin to retreat from her fingers.
"Who stands on the other side of the disputed ground?" she asked, though she knew the answer. She wanted to hear him say it.
"Widow Munn." Edmund's voice carried the particular flatness he used when naming someone he did not wish to involve. "She has held the south parcel since her husband's burying. Josiah Tarr holds the north, and he is the one complaining. Claims she has been stealing his pasture by the yard every winter for nine years running."
"And the constable wants a man of letters to settle it."
"Rench wants someone who knows how to read a chain." Edmund picked up one of the pencils and turned it between his fingers. "He knows I am without a parish or a wife and therefore possessed of empty mornings."
Susanna set a cup before him and took her own to the table. She sat across from him and folded her hands.
"You will go out there," she said, "and you will find that the stones were not moved by any tenant. You will find that the ground itself has shifted, or that the original survey was wrong, or that someone wished it to appear so."
Edmund looked up.
"I will find what I find," he said. "That is the trouble with the work. It will not flatter my suspicions."
"Then do not bring suspicions. Bring the chain and the level and your honest eye, and let the field speak."
He bowed his head slightly, accepting the instruction as he had learned to accept her instructions over the years, with the patient submission of a man who has learned that the schoolmistress is rarely wrong about the temper of the county.
They finished their tea in the particular silence of two people who had said what needed saying. Susanna rose first and crossed to the window. The lane had begun to stir: a boy led a piebald pony towards the mill, and Mrs. Croft's maid shook a rug from the upper casement of the tax office.
"The frost will hold until noon," Susanna said. "Take your measurements while the ground stays firm."
Edmund rose and gathered his instruments. He paused at the kitchen door.
"Mistress Pell."
"Mr. Halloran."
"There is a thing I have been meaning to ask you. About the churchyard. About the plot you purchased in March."
The cold returned to her fingers, though the kitchen fire still burned.
"Not today," she said. "Today we measure Widow Munn's stones."
He nodded, accepting the dismissal with the grace of a man accustomed to them. She heard his boots on the tiles of the hallway, the creak of the front door, and then the brighter sound of the morning swallowing his footsteps.
Susanna stood alone in the kitchen and pressed her thumb against the rim of her cup where the heat had gathered. The churchyard plot she had purchased in March lay in the far corner of St. Edmund's, beneath the yew whose roots had begun to lift the surrounding stones. No one in the village knew whose grave she had bought, or why. No one in the village knew that she visited it every Thursday after the children had gone home.
She washed the cups and set them to dry.
The lane to Marsh Bottom ran south from the village, past the blacksmith's forge and the shuttered malthouse, then turned west along the river where the willows grew thick and the ground stayed soft even in summer. Susanna did not walk that way often; her duties lay in the schoolroom and the vestry and the houses of those who required her particular attention. But she pulled on her bonnet and her heavy cloak and followed Edmund's prints in the frost, because the constable had asked her to keep the peace, and because she wished to see for herself what the field remembered.
The sky had the washed quality of old linen, pale and close. Her boots crunched on the frozen ruts, and she could taste the cold at the back of her throat, mineral and thin. From the direction of the forge came the ringing of the hammer on the anvil, a sound she had learned to associate with the rhythm of village life: steady, repetitive, occasionally violent.
Edmund walked ahead of her with his chain over his shoulder and his eyes on the ground. He moved the way a man moves who is listening to something beneath his feet. Constable Rench met them at the stile where the common land gave way to the disputed parcels. Tobias Rench was a large man with a red beard and a policeman's methodical patience; he had held the parish beat for nineteen years and knew every ditch and footbridge between here and the coast.
"Mistress Pell," he said, touching his hat. "I did not ask you to come."
"You did not. I came."
Rench grunted and looked at Edmund. "The south marker stands where I left it yesterday. The north marker has been pulled twelve feet into Tarr's ground. I paced it twice."
Edmund set his case on the stile and crouched to examine the post. It was a stone of weathered limestone, roughly dressed, with a notch cut into its upper face to receive the chain. Frost had gathered in the notch and along the base where the stone met the soil.
"The notch faces north," Edmund murmured. "It should face the opposing marker. It still does, but the stone itself has been dragged."
"You can see the gouge in the turf," Rench said. "Where the corner caught and tore."
Susanna stood back and let them work. She watched Edmund unspool his chain and lay the links along the frozen grass, watched him call the measurements to Rench in the clear, deliberate voice he used when he wished to be heard and recorded. She watched him kneel and press his palm flat against the earth as though taking a pulse.
"Widow Munn," Edmund said, without looking up. "Where is she?"
"Gone to her sister's at Ipswich. She will not return until Saturday."
"And Tarr?"
"At the market. He will be home by dark."
Edmund rose and brushed the frost from his knees. He stood very still for a moment, his head cocked, his eyes moving across the field the way a man reads a printed page.
"The ground is wrong here," he said quietly. "Not the stones. The ground."
Rench frowned. "What do you mean, wrong?"
"I mean the soil has been turned. Recently. Beneath the frost line. Someone has dug this parcel and filled it again, and not for any agricultural purpose I can recognise."
Susanna stepped forward. "Show me."
Edmund pointed to a stretch of pasture perhaps twenty feet square. The frost lay even across it, but where the morning light struck at a low angle, she could see what he had seen: a faint undulation in the turf, the suggestion of a rectangle pressed up from beneath.
"New earth," Edmund said. "Settled unevenly. It will pass for a cow's wallow until spring, but the line is too straight. Someone has been thorough."
Rench's face had gone the colour of old brick. "Buried something," he said.
"Or unearthed something," Edmund replied. "The displacement runs both ways."
The three of them stood in the cold field and listened to the wind move through the willows at the river's edge. Somewhere a rook called, and the sound was answered from the far side of the marsh. The hammer at the forge had stopped, and in its absence the silence felt heavier than it ought.
Susanna drew her cloak tighter. The air carried the wet-stone smell of the river and the sharper note of hoar frost burning off in the first thin sun. Beneath her boots the ground felt harder than it should have, as though the frost had found a second skin to grip.
"We measure what we came to measure," she said. "We record the positions of both markers. We speak to Widow Munn and to Tarr separately before we speak to either of them together. And we do not mention the turned ground until we understand what has been turned, and why, and by whose hand."
Rench looked at Edmund. Edmund looked at the field.
"Mistress Pell," Rench said carefully, "this began as a dispute about a fence."
"It began as a dispute about a fence," Susanna agreed. "It has become a survey of a different sort. We will see what the survey finds."
Edmund knelt again and opened his notebook. He wrote the date at the top of the page in his small, exact hand, and below it the weather and the names of those present. The pencil moved without hesitation. Susanna watched him work and thought, as she often thought when she watched him, of the men she had known who measured things for a living and what their measurements had ultimately cost them. Her husband's compass had been lost in a marsh in County Cork. Her brother's chain had snapped during a railway survey in Lancashire. Her father's theodolite had been sold, after his death, to pay the undertaker.
She folded her hands and waited for Edmund to finish his first page.
A figure appeared at the far stile, walking slowly, leaning on a stick. Reverend Hollis had come out from the village without his hat, and his white hair caught the thin light like a signal. He stood for a moment at the boundary of the common land and looked across the disputed parcels with the careful, unhurried gaze of a man who had learned to read parishes the way Edmund read fields.
He did not call out. He simply stood, and waited, and watched them work.
Reverend Hollis crossed the stile with the slow, deliberate care of a man whose knees no longer trusted the weather. Each step on the muddy ground released a faint suction, and his boots left clean prints that the rain would soon soften back into the common clay. He did not speak as he approached. He simply took his place three paces behind Susanna, set the brass ferrule of his walking stick into the earth as though planting a standard, and folded his hands upon its crook.
"Good morning, Reverend," Edmund said, without looking up from his notebook.
"Good morning, Edmund."
"Fair out, for the season."
"It will not last."
"No," Edmund agreed. "It will not."
Susanna felt the clergyman's arrival settle into her like a warmth she had not asked for. He smelled faintly of damp wool and the cassock soap the verger made in the church kitchen, a scent that had lodged itself in her childhood and returned to her now whenever a man of the cloth stood near enough to be trusted. She did not turn. She kept her eyes on the disputed boundary, where a strand of old wire sagged between two posts and a spray of hawthorn leaned into it like a sleeper dreaming of the orchard it had once been part of.
Rench, who had been arranging his evidence into a small cairn of papers on the drystone wall, glanced up at the rector and seemed to consider whether the arrival of a fourth witness strengthened or weakened his position. He settled, with the resignation of a man accustomed to losing by inches, on the conclusion that it strengthened the legitimacy of whatever was about to happen.
"I shall require every word recorded," Susanna said, and the rector gave the smallest nod.
Edmund finished his first page, tore it free with a practiced rip, and folded it once into the breast pocket of his coat. The gesture was small, private, almost clerical. Susanna watched the white rectangle disappear into the dark wool and understood that what she had just witnessed was not merely a habit but a kind of devotion. Men who trusted paper, in her experience, were men who had learned not to trust anything else.
He turned to the next page. His pencil hovered.
"Mistress Pell," he said, "I must ask you to walk me to the eastern edge of your claim. I would like to see the ditch you mentioned, and the place where the wire was cut, and the line of the old elm."
"Of course," Susanna said. "Tobias, you will remain here with Reverend Hollis."
"I had rather come with you."
"You will remain."
Rench's jaw set, but he did not argue. He had learned, over the years of his quiet war with Susanna Pell, that the surest way to lose a position was to insist upon it twice. He took up his papers from the wall and retreated to the stile, where he sat with the stiff dignity of a man determined to be on his way out of the conversation before it had ended.
Susanna set off across the field, and Edmund fell into step beside her. The rector stayed where he was, planted like a boundary stone of his own, and watched them go.
The marsh lay to the east. They did not speak for the first hundred yards, and Susanna was grateful for the silence. The grass was wet and shone in the pale light like brushed pewter. A snipe rose somewhere ahead of them with a sharp, scraping cry and curved away over the alders. The air tasted of iron and rotting root, and beneath that, faintly, the green mineral smell of standing water.
"Mistress Pell," Edmund said at last, "I have a question I must put to you, and I would rather put it now while we are alone."
"Then put it."
"Was your husband a surveyor?"
The field tilted under Susanna's feet. She did not fall. She had not fallen in fourteen years, and she was not going to begin now. She kept walking, and her stride did not alter, and her hands, clasped behind her back, tightened until the knuckles went white.
"Who told you that?"
"No one told me. I have been making inquiries in the village since yesterday evening. I spoke with Mr. Croft at the post office. I spoke with the landlord of the Bell. I spoke with the verger, who was polishing the brass when I came in and who has known your family since before you were born."
"And what did these worthies tell you?"
"That your husband was a man of some learning. That he came here from London with a chest of instruments and a commission he would not discuss. That he walked the marsh every morning for a season. That he was found at the edge of the water with his head broken, and that no one in the village will say what he was measuring or why."
"Mr. Croft will say anything for a sixpence and a glass of something warm."
"Margery Vane will say it for free, which is worse."
Susanna stopped walking. The marsh lay before them, a wide shallow sheet of grey water threaded with reeds and the bleached skeletons of last year's rushes. Somewhere in its centre a moorhen called, once, and was answered from a great distance.
"You spoke with Margery Vane."
"I did. She set my tea down in front of me and told me the entire history of the parish from the Conquest to last Tuesday, with footnotes. She is a remarkable woman."
"She is a menace," Susanna said. "But she is not wrong. My husband was a surveyor. His name was Cornelius Pell. He came here in the spring of 1847 and he died here in the autumn of the same year, and no one in this village has ever had the grace to say so to my face."
She turned to Edmund and looked at him directly. Her eyes, pale grey in the flat light, were steady and absolutely dry.
"He was killed for what he found in the marshland."
Edmund did not speak at once. He looked at the water, and then at her, and then at the water again. His hand went, almost without his noticing, to the breast pocket of his coat where the folded page lay against his heart.
"Tell me what he found."
"I cannot tell you, because I do not know. He would not tell me. He said it was not yet a thing that could be told. He said he had to be certain, and he had to wait until the water was low, and then he would show me on the map."
"And the map."
"The map was in his case. When they found him, the case was open on the bank, and the map was gone."
"Gone."
"Taken. By the hand that broke his head, or by some other hand, I have never been able to discover. The constable who came from the county town asked no questions. The magistrate asked fewer. The inquest was held in the parlour of the Bell, with the door closed, and the verdict was that my husband had fallen and struck his skull upon a stone."
"And you did not believe it."
"I am a woman of limited imagination, Mr. Halloran. I cannot conceive of a man who has walked a marsh every morning for seven months falling, by accident, onto a stone of the precise shape and weight to do that work. And I cannot conceive of his map being taken by a passing fox."
Edmund was very still. The wind moved across the water and stirred the reeds, and somewhere out in the grey sheet a thing moved beneath the surface, a slow, heavy thing that left no wake.
"I am sorry, Mistress Pell," he said, and the words were not automatic. They came out of him with the grain of his voice, as though he had been carrying them already and only now had somewhere to lay them down.
"Do not be sorry. Be useful. That is what I have kept you for."
"You have kept me to measure a fence."
"I have kept you," Susanna said, "to look at what is in front of you. You are a man who looks. You cannot help it. It is in the way you hold your pencil, and in the way you tore that page from your book and folded it into your coat as though it were a sacrament. You will look at this field and you will see the fence. And then you will see what lies beneath the fence. And then I will know whether I have wasted fourteen years of my life on a wrong surmise."
Edmund looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked out across the marsh, where the wind was beginning to lift the surface of the water into a fine, cold mist.
"I will need to come back," he said. "Several times. At different hours."
"Yes."
"I will need to speak with your husband's colleagues, if any survive."
"There is only one. He is in London. He will not see you."
"He will see me."
"He will not."
"He will see me, Mistress Pell, because I will not give him the choice."
Something moved in Susanna's face. It was not a smile. It was the memory of a smile, the place where one had once been and might, under sufficient provocation, be again.
"Then we shall see," she said.
They walked on, side by side, toward the eastern ditch. The mist rose from the marsh like a slow breath, and the rector, far behind them at the stile, lifted his hand once and then let it fall.
The eastern ditch smelled of iron and rotting sedge. Edmund crouched at its lip and let his fingers sink into the soil, turning it over, breathing in the dark mineral scent of it, tasting the salt on the back of his tongue. Susanna stood above him with her hands folded at her waist, watching the methodical way he worked, the way he placed each handful of earth beside the last in a small careful line as though he were laying out evidence at a trial.
"You are thorough," she said.
"I am slow. There is a difference."
"I did not say you were slow. I said you were thorough. I have known slow men. They are no use to me."
He smiled without looking up. "You are very particular about your use, Mistress Pell."
"I am particular about everything. You will find that out."
He worked on in silence for a while, taking out his pencil and the folded sheet of paper from his coat, smoothing it against his knee, and beginning to mark in the small, precise symbols he had invented years ago for things half-seen and less-than-half-believed. The pencil moved with the sureness of long practice, but his hand trembled slightly at the wrist, a fine persistent vibration that had been with him since the marsh at Drogheda, and which he had learned to compensate for by bracing the heel of his palm against the earth.
When he had finished the first survey, he sat back on his heels and looked up at her. The light was going. The mist had thickened to a low grey curtain that moved slowly inland off the sea, and somewhere in it a curlew was calling, two notes repeated and answered, the loneliest sound he knew.
"There is something here," he said.
"I know there is something here. I did not bring you all this way to tell me the field is empty."
"There is something here," he repeated, "and I do not yet know what it is. I will need to come back at first light. And at dusk. And at the hour you call noon, if you still remember what that is in this place."
"I remember what noon is. I have simply lost patience with it."
He folded the paper away again, carefully, along the same creases, and stood. His knees cracked. He was older than he had been that morning, and the day was not yet done.
---
Margery Vane was waiting for them at the gate of the Hall. She stood with her arms folded and her chin lifted and a small clay pipe clamped between her teeth that she did not light, because she had given up smoking three years ago and refused to give up the appearance of it. She wore a man's wool coat over her printed cotton dress, and her boots were mud to the ankle. She had the look of a woman who had been waiting for some time and had used the waiting to compose a series of remarks, any one of which would have withered a weaker soul.
"Well," she said, as they came up the path. "And what have you found, Mister Halloran? The body of a king? The bones of a saint? Another rector, perhaps, to replace the one we have just lost to his own enthusiasm?"
Edmund removed his hat. "Mistress Vane. I did not know you were expecting me."
"I was not expecting you. I was expecting the peace of my own house and a quiet evening with my proofs. Instead I have a cold hearth, a kitchen full of mud, and a surveyor who has been dragging my husband across the county without so much as a by-your-leave."
"Your husband," Susanna said, "is not at home."
"My husband," said Margery, "has not been at home for fourteen years. But his maps are. And I will not have them touched."
She turned on her heel and walked toward the house. After a moment, they followed.
---
The kitchen of the Hall was built for a larger family than the one that now lived in it. A long oak table ran down the center, scarred with the ghosts of a hundred meals, and at one end of it Margery's printing press crouched under a canvas cover, its iron screw and tympan visible at the corners like the limbs of some dormant animal. The room smelled of lamp oil and old ink and the faintly metallic tang of type-metal, and on the dresser a row of small lead soldiers stood in crooked formation, their paint worn to ghosts of red and blue.
Edmund stopped in the doorway. He had been here once before, years ago, when the Hall was still full of children and the table ran with argument and laughter, and he was startled by the way the room had contracted around its single occupant. The high ceiling seemed lower. The light from the fire found the walls and stopped, as though it could not bear to leave.
"Well?" said Margery. She had taken a kettle onto the hearth and was filling it from a stone jar. "Sit down, both of you. I am not running an inn, but I can manage a pot of tea, and you have the look of men who have been standing in ditches all day. You too, Mistress Pell, though I dare say you have only been standing at the edge of one and issuing instructions."
"I do not issue instructions," Susanna said. "I make requests. They are very often mistaken for instructions. I cannot help that."
Margery set out three cups. Her hands were quick and competent, and there was a streak of ink on the side of her thumb that she did not bother to wipe away. She poured the tea strong and dark and passed it without ceremony.
"I knew your husband," Edmund said, when he had warmed his hands around the cup. "Not well. But I knew him. He wrote to me once, when I was working in the west. He had heard that I had a way of finding what was hidden in the ground."
"I am aware of that," Margery said. "He wrote to a great many people. It is what journalists do. They write to people and they wait for the people to disappoint them."
"He said you would say something like that."
"Did he." It was not a question. "And what else did my husband say about me, in his letters to strangers?"
Edmund looked into his tea. "He said you were the best reader he had ever known. That you could take a page of his worst writing and find the one true sentence in it, and hold it up to him, and make him see what he had meant to say."
The kitchen was very quiet. The fire settled on the hearth with a small collapse of ash. Somewhere outside, the wind had dropped, and the only sound was the faint ticking of the clock on the stair.
"He said that," Margery repeated, in a different voice.
"He said that."
"Then he should have said it to me." She set down her cup with a care that was, in its way, more violent than any throwing would have been. "He should have said it to me, and not to you, and not in a letter. But that was your husband too, was it not, Mistress Pell. A man who would rather write a truth across a hundred miles than speak it across a table."
Susanna said nothing. She held her cup in both hands, and her face in the firelight was the face of a woman who had heard a great many true things said about a man she had loved and lost, and who had learned to bear them by not answering.
---
After a while, Margery rose and lit a candle and led them down a narrow passage to the office. Edmund had not been in this room. He had not been invited. The door was heavy, oak, and it stuck slightly in its frame, and when it opened, the smell that came out was the smell he had been chasing for fourteen years: paper and dust and the faint, dry, sweetish undertone of old ink, and beneath it something else, something darker, that he could not name.
The office was small and low-ceilinged and entirely given over to the work of a single obsessed man. Maps covered the walls. They were pinned and taped and tacked in overlapping layers, so that no part of the plaster was visible, and in the light of the single candle they seemed to breathe, to shift, as though the room itself were a living thing covered in its own skin. Edmund stood in the doorway and did not move.
"You may look," Margery said. "You may not touch. There is a difference. I will not have you taking my husband's work apart. I will not have you pulling pins. I will not have you taking notes. You may look, and then you will leave, and I will lock the door behind you."
"I only want to see," Edmund said.
"Everyone only wants to see. That is how it begins."
He stepped inside. The maps were of every kind. Some were printed, crisp and clear, the work of the Ordnance Survey. Some were drawn in ink, in a hand he recognized from the letters. Some were scratched in pencil on the backs of envelopes and the margins of proofs. Some were on tracing paper so thin the candle flame showed through them and made the ink glow like embers. And some, in the corners, in the spaces where the walls met the ceiling, were on the backs of photographs, and the photographs showed faces, and the faces were of men he had known.
He stopped in front of one. It was a small snapshot, creased and faded, of a group of men standing in front of a low stone building. They were smiling. They were young. One of them, at the edge of the frame, was half-turned away, as though someone had called his name at the moment the shutter fell. Edmund knew the face. He had drawn it himself, in his own book, on the page he had torn out and folded into his coat.
"I knew him," he said.
"Yes," Margery said. "You did."
She did not ask how. She did not need to. The room was full of such knowledge, and it hung in the air between them like the dust that rose, slow and glittering, in the candlelight.
Then her eye fell on the locked drawer.
It was a shallow drawer set into the desk beneath the window, and it was the only part of the office that was not covered in paper. It was bare oak, with a brass plate, and a small keyhole, and the wood around the keyhole was dark with the oil of a hand that had often turned the key. Margery stepped in front of it.
"Not that," she said. "You do not touch that. You do not look at that. You do not even think about that, Mister Halloran, or you will find yourself out of this house and out of this village and back in whatever ditch you came from."
"Mistress Vane," Edmund said. "If I am to help your husband, I will need to see everything."
"You will need to see what I choose to show you. And I choose to show you nothing. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Perhaps not ever. He is my husband. They are his maps. They are his secrets. And I will not have a stranger come into his house and take them apart because a schoolmistress from the marsh has taken it into her head that there is something to be found."
She took the candle from the desk and held it up so that her face was in shadow and only her voice was clear.
"You will go now," she said. "You will go back to the Rectory. You will eat your supper. You will sleep, if you can. Tomorrow you will come back here at the hour I name, and you will do what I allow, and no more. Is that understood?"
Edmund looked at her. He looked at the drawer. He looked at Susanna, who stood in the doorway with her hands folded and her face giving away nothing.
"It is understood," he said.
"Then goodnight."
She walked them to the door. At the threshold she paused, and her hand on the latch was not steady.
"You were kind to him," she said, to Edmund, in a voice that was no longer commanding. "In the letters. You were one of the few who answered. I would have you know that."
Then she closed the door, and the latch caught, and they were out in the cold air of the passage, and the candle had gone out, and the dark was very complete.
---
They walked back to the Rectory in silence. The mist had lifted a little, and through it they could see a few stars, pale and uncertain, and the single lamp in the window of the Hall, which Margery had lit, and which burned on long after they had turned into the lane. Susanna stopped at the gate.
"She will not show us the drawer," she said.
"No."
"She is afraid of what is in it."
"Yes."
"And so are you."
Edmund did not answer. He stood with his hand on the gate and looked back at the lit window, and the mist moved between them like a veil, and somewhere in the dark a curlew called again, two notes repeated and answered, and there was no answer now, and there would be none until morning.
"Then we begin again," Susanna said, "in the morning."
"In the morning," he said.
And they went in, and shut the door, and the night came down over the marsh, and the lamp in the Hall burned on, and no one slept.