The Bone Garden Inheritance: The Woman in The Window

The fluorescent tube above the microfiche reader had been flickering since Tuesday, casting a stuttering pallor across the laminated table where Eleanor Marsh sat with her gloves folded in her lap. The records office in Ashford kept its older parish archives on spools, and the machine beside her whirred with the particular reluctance of equipment maintained by people who had long since stopped caring whether it worked.

She fed the second reel forward, watching the date stamps tick past: 1985, 1986, 1987. The reader's glass smelled faintly of warm dust and the cleaning spray the volunteer librarian used on Mondays. Somewhere behind her, a radiator ticked and clicked in the way that radiators in municipal buildings always seemed to, as if they were composing messages in a language nobody alive could read.

Eleanor adjusted her reading glasses and leaned closer. She had dressed for this the way she had once dressed for parents' evenings, in a wool coat the colour of dried tobacco and a silk scarf knotted precisely beneath her chin. Her handbag, a sensible brown leather, sat at her feet with its brass clasp catching the intermittent light.

The reel juddered to a stop on the third week of October 1987. The Ashford parish newsletter filled the screen, its typeset columns announcing a harvest supper, a jumble sale at the church hall, and a list of residents who had recently moved into or out of the village.

Her finger, still elegant despite the small brown spots of age, traced down the column of departures.

There it was. Line seven.

Caulfield, Vivienne M., Orchard Cottage, departed 14 October. No forwarding address given. Relocated to family in Canterbury, per parish records.

Eleanor sat very still. The fluorescent tube buzzed through another cycle of failing light, and the records office settled around her the way old buildings do when they have decided, for the moment, to stop leaking.

She had not come to the records office looking for Vivienne Caulfield. She had come looking for any woman who might have lived at Orchard Cottage between 1985 and 1990, a routine query prompted by a photograph she had found the previous week tucked inside her late husband's copy of Crabbe's Borough. The photograph showed a younger Eleanor, laughing on the village green, and behind her, standing at the window of the cottage next to the lychgate, a woman whose face had been scratched out with what appeared to be a coin or a key.

She had recognised the cottage. She had recognised the window.

She had not recognised the hand that had made the scratches, and she had spent three sleepless nights trying to decide whether that mattered.

Now she copied the entry into the small notebook she carried for parish council business, her pen moving in the careful script that had marked a thousand school reports. She noted the date, the cottage, the name. She added, in the margin, the single word: nurse.

The parish newsletter said nothing about nursing. The parish newsletter said nothing about anything, really, beyond the harvest supper and the jumble sale. But Eleanor remembered Vivienne Caulfield in the way one remembers a particular note in a piece of music that has not been heard for thirty years. The woman had come to the school once, in the spring of 1987, to give a talk on first aid to the girls in the upper forms. She had been slim, dark-haired, with the calm hands of someone accustomed to working while being watched.

Eleanor had liked her. She had thought her capable, and she had thought her kind, and she had not given her a second thought until the photograph surfaced.

She set down her pen.

There was a second reel she could request. The Ashford parish council had begun keeping census-style records of all adult residents in 1984, the result of a brief obsession with grant funding that had passed almost as quickly as it had arrived. If Vivienne Caulfield had been listed when she arrived in the village, her occupation and her employer would be noted.

Eleanor raised her hand.

The volunteer librarian came over after a moment, a woman of perhaps sixty with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the quiet, suspicious efficiency of someone who has spent her retirement cataloguing other people's rubbish. Her name, according to the badge on her cardigan, was June.

"Another reel, please," Eleanor said. "October 1984 through March 1985."

June looked at her over the rims of her glasses.

"Research?"

"In a manner of speaking."

June hesitated. Then she went to the cabinet, unlocked it, and produced the requested spool. She did not offer conversation, for which Eleanor was grateful. The less that was said in such places, the better.

The reel threaded into the machine with a small mechanical sigh. The glass warmed beneath her palm as the dates began to march past, the typeset numbers blurring into one another until they resolved, finally, into the first week of November 1984.

She found the entry on the second page.

Caulfield, Vivienne M. (b. 1948, Maidstone). Orchard Cottage. Occupation: District nurse, employed by the Ashford and District Nursing Association since 1972. Relocated from Tenterden.

Eleanor wrote down the details. She added, beneath them: Employed until disappearance. No mention of resignation or dismissal.

She sat with the notebook open on the table, her pen motionless, and let the reel spin idly on its spindle. The records office had grown quieter. Somewhere a clock, an actual mechanical clock rather than a digital one, was marking out the slow quarter hours in the way that such clocks always do in places where time has begun to seem optional.

She thought of the photograph, and of the scratches.

She thought of Vivienne Caulfield's hands, steady on the demonstration dummy in the school hall, and of the calm way she had spoken to the girls about tourniquets and pressure points. She had not thought about that talk in decades. It had surfaced now with the disorienting clarity of a word one has been trying to remember all morning.

She thought of her husband.

She did not think about him for very long. That had been the arrangement, the only arrangement that had made the marriage bearable. Some things one does not think about, and some things one thinks about only in the smallest hours of the morning, when the house has settled and the only sound is the faint creak of the elm outside her bedroom window.

The fluorescent tube gave up its struggle and went out altogether. The records office dimmed to the grey light of a wet October afternoon filtering through high, uncleaned panes.

Eleanor closed the notebook, slid it into her handbag beside her gloves, and rose. She smoothed the wool of her coat, adjusted the silk at her throat, and walked over to the issue desk, where June was stamping returns with the air of a woman who considered the day successfully concluded.

"I shall need to come back," Eleanor said. "For the medical records, if they have been preserved."

June looked up. "Medical records are not kept here. Those would be at the health authority archives in Maidstone. Assuming they were ever transferred from the original employer."

"And if the employer no longer exists?"

"Then the records may be at the county archive," June said. "Or they may be in a skip somewhere. Depends who threw them out."

Eleanor thanked her, buttoned her coat, and stepped out into the close, salt-tinged air of the car park. The rain had stopped but the sky had not committed to brightness. A blackbird was working over the hedge at the far end of the gravel, its movements quick and purposeful.

She unlocked the car, sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, and allowed herself the indulgence of being unsettled.

Vivienne Caulfield. District nurse. Disappeared in October 1987. Cottage next to the lychgate. Window facing the green. And someone, at some point, had taken a coin or a key and scratched her out of a photograph as thoroughly as if she had never existed.

Eleanor started the engine. The heater groaned, then settled into a grudging warmth. She pulled out of the car park and turned left, towards the village, because there was nowhere else to go and because the cottage still stood where it had always stood, at the edge of the green, and she meant to look at it properly this time.

The drive took seven minutes. The village looked much as it always had, which was to say, much as it had looked since the late eighteenth century when the last of the great houses had been broken up into sensible residences for the clergy and the better sort of tenant farmers. The green was empty except for the war memorial and a single tabby cat that regarded her passage with the regal disinterest of an animal that owned the entire parish.

She parked outside the church, cut the engine, and sat.

The cottage was there.

It had been painted since she had last looked at it directly, the old whitewash replaced with a soft, expensive grey that spoke of a recent and probably contentious planning application. The window facing the green had been replaced with a sympathetic wooden frame, and the sill held a row of potted herbs in battered terracotta. The curtain behind the glass was a thick cream linen, half drawn.

Eleanor watched it for a long moment.

There was no movement. There was no figure. There was nothing at all, really, except a well-kept cottage and the slow drift of an autumn afternoon across a village that had long since stopped expecting anything of consequence to happen within its boundaries.

She thought about going to the door.

She decided, for the moment, not to. The woman who lived there now, a retired teacher from Canterbury named Pryor, had been perfectly pleasant at the last parish council meeting. She had also been, Eleanor recalled, rather pointedly incurious about the history of the property. People who were pointedly incurious about a thing often had good reason to be.

Eleanor took out her notebook and wrote, beneath the details of Vivienne Caulfield: Current occupant, Mrs. Pryor (née Halloran). Needs further investigation.

She put the notebook away.

The tabby cat had moved to the war memorial and was washing itself with the thoroughness of an animal that considered its toilet a matter of public concern.

Eleanor started the car again, and drove the slow loop around the green, past the lychgate, past the cottage, past the place where she had stood in 1987 without knowing that a photograph was being taken, or that a woman she had spoken to for perhaps twenty minutes in a school hall would, within the year, be scratched out of her own history.

She did not know yet what had happened to Vivienne Caulfield. She suspected, with the quiet certainty of a woman who had spent sixty years in institutions, that whatever had happened had not been the kind of thing one could sort out with a parish newsletter and a microfiche reader.

She intended, however, to find out.

The car turned out of the village and onto the lane that led, after three miles of hedgerow and badger-set, to Marsh House and to the room her husband had left her, and to the boxes that were waiting, even now, for someone to open them properly.

The lane to Margaret Whitcombe's cottage wound the way all proper English lanes wound, which was to say in a manner suggesting the original surveyor had been either foxed or furious. Eleanor's car nosed through the green tunnel of overhanging hazel, the wipers beating a slow metronome against the drizzle that had settled over the countryside like a damp shawl.

She had telephoned ahead. Margaret, who had once run the village post office with a memory like a filing cabinet and a tongue like a razor wrapped in velvet, had agreed to see her without the slightest demur. They had known one another for forty-seven years, since Eleanor had arrived at the village school as a nervous young mistress and Margaret had been the senior girl who had helped her find the staffroom.

The cottage appeared as the lane straightened, a low stone building with dormer windows and a chimney that smoked in defiance of the weather. A clematis climbed the south wall in purple profusion, and a tabby cat, not the one from the village but a near relation, observed Eleanor's arrival from a windowsill with an expression of professional suspicion.

Margaret opened the door before Eleanor had knocked.

"Darling." Margaret's voice was the same warm contralto it had always been, the vowels rounded, the consonants careful, the diction of a woman who had taught herself elocution from library books and had never seen any reason to unlearn it. She wore a housecoat of faded rose, and her silver hair was pinned up in a style that had probably been fashionable around the time of the coronation. "You look dreadful."

"You said that already, on the telephone."

"I meant it twice." Margaret stepped aside. "Come in before you catch your death of something unpleasant."

The interior of the cottage smelled of lavender and furniture polish and the faintly ecclesiastical undertone of old hymn books, of which Margaret possessed a great quantity. The sitting room was small and crowded with the accretions of a long life: a piano against one wall, a wall of framed photographs, a firefly in the grate that crackled with the enthusiasm of a recent lighting. On the mantelpiece sat a row of small china animals, each one commemorating some long-forgotten anniversary.

Eleanor sat in the chair that was always offered to her, the one by the window that looked out onto the lane. Margaret took the opposite chair, drew her housecoat around her knees, and fixed Eleanor with the bright, birdlike attention that had once made her the terror of the post office queue.

"Now," Margaret said. "Vivienne."

Eleanor blinked. "I had not yet mentioned the name."

"No, but I read the papers this week, and I saw the photograph in the local rag, and I have been waiting for you to arrive for the better part of forty years." Margaret's smile was small and sharp. "I assume you have come about the letters."

Eleanor felt the floor of her certainty shift beneath her. "What letters?"

Margaret rose, went to a bureau that stood against the wall, and opened a drawer with a key she wore on a ribbon about her neck. From it she withdrew a bundle of envelopes, pale blue, tied with a ribbon of darker blue. She brought them across and set them on Eleanor's lap with the care of one handling ecclesiastical plate.

"They arrived at the post office, addressed to Vivienne Caulfield, care of the Rectory, in the spring of 1987. There were seven of them, over three weeks. I should not have kept them, of course. Royal Mail regulations are quite explicit on the matter of undeliverable correspondence."

"Margaret."

"I was the postmistress. I knew every item that passed through that office. When letters for a young woman at the Rectory began arriving from a London firm of solicitors, marked Private and Confidential, and when that young woman stopped coming to collect them, and when, eventually, she disappeared altogether, I did what any sensible person would do." Margaret's voice was quite steady. "I kept them."

Eleanor looked down at the bundle. The ribbon was faded, the envelopes softened by age, but the handwriting on the topmost was clear: a clerk's copperplate, the postmark London W1, the date 23 May 1987.

"Why did you not tell me?" Eleanor asked.

"Because you were not yet ready to be told." Margaret's gaze was unwavering. "And because, my darling, I had taken an oath."

"Whose oath?"

"My own. That I would keep what I knew until such time as the keeping became a greater sin than the telling." She reached across and patted Eleanor's hand once, briefly. "I rather think that time has come."

Eleanor untied the ribbon. The letters fell open with the dry whisper of paper that had not been disturbed in decades. She read the first quickly, scanning the formal phrasing, the legal jargon, the references to a Will and Testament, to bequests, to a property in the county of, to the parish of. Her heart, trained by sixty years of concealing reaction in the presence of girls who would leap upon any crack in the armour, did not so much as quicken.

The second letter was longer. The third was longer still.

The fourth contained a single sheet of paper on which was set out, in the same clerk's hand, a list of items found in a sealed compartment of a desk that had been, according to the letter, the property of one Harlan Marsh, late of this parish, deceased.

Eleanor set the letter down.

"Harlan," she said, and her voice was very quiet.

Margaret, who had been watching her with the attentiveness of a woman who had spent her life reading the faces of customers across a counter, nodded slowly.

"I am sorry, darling."

"I thought, when I married him, that I knew him. I thought, for forty years, that I knew the worst of what there was to know." Eleanor's fingers rested on the envelope. "It appears I was a poorer judge of character than I had supposed."

"You were in love with him. Love is not, in my experience, a reliable instrument for the perception of truth." Margaret leaned forward. "But the letters tell a story, Eleanor. They tell of a young woman who became his confidante, perhaps more than his confidante, and who discovered, among the papers he had left behind, something that brought her, one evening in June of that year, to my door."

Eleanor's breath caught. "Vivienne came to you?"

"She came to the post office, just before closing. I remember it well, because it was the day of the fête, and the village was full of strangers. She was agitated. I asked her, as I asked all my customers, whether there was anything I could do for her. She said that there was, and that I must not tell a soul." Margaret's voice faltered for the first time. "She said that there were letters in the Rectory which ought not to be there, and that when she had confronted the master of the house, he had laughed at her. She said that she was frightened."

"Frightened of whom?"

"Of him. Of your husband."

The firefly in the grate cracked and spat. Outside, the drizzle had thickened into a steady rain, and the lane had become a river of beaten silver.

"I gave her my word," Margaret continued, "that I would not speak of this until the time was right. I gave her my address, in case she needed to reach me. She took it, and thanked me, and left. I never saw her again."

Eleanor sat very still. The letters lay in her lap like the evidence of a crime she had not known had been committed.

"The day after she disappeared," Margaret said, "the Rector of the parish, the new one, you understand, the one who came after, he came to the post office to collect his correspondence, and he mentioned, in passing, that a young woman who had been staying at the Rectory had gone away. He said it as though it were a thing of no account. I thought, at the time, that he was a careless man. Now I think he was a frightened one."

Eleanor looked up. "You think the Rector knew."

"I think the Rector had been given to understand that certain subjects were not to be discussed, by a man who had the means to make such understandings stick." Margaret's hands were folded in her lap, the knuckles white. "Harlan Marsh, darling, was not a man who tolerated impertinence."

The room was quiet save for the ticking of a clock and the sound of the rain. Eleanor gathered the letters carefully, replaced the ribbon, and set them on the table between them.

"I shall need to take these with me, Margaret."

"I know you will."

"And I shall need you to tell me, in writing, what you have told me now. A statement, properly witnessed, in case it should ever be required."

Margaret nodded. "I have had it prepared for some years. It is in the bureau, in the drawer with my will."

Eleanor looked at her old friend, at the lined face and the bright eyes and the hands that had sorted and delivered and kept, for forty years, the secrets of a village that had not deserved such constancy.

"Thank you," she said, and her voice was thick.

"Thank you for coming, my darling. I have been so tired of keeping it." Margaret reached across and squeezed her hand. "Will you stay for tea? I have a Dundee cake."

Eleanor stayed for tea. The rain continued. The tabby on the windowsill had fallen asleep.

And when, at last, Eleanor drove away down the silver river of the road, with the letters on the passenger seat beside her and the weight of a forty-year silence in her chest, she did not turn toward home. She turned, instead, toward the lane that led to the village, to the church, to the graveyard where a headstone recorded the virtues of a man whose virtues had been, she now suspected, largely fictitious.

She intended, before the day was out, to pay a visit to the grave of Harlan Marsh. And she intended, whatever she found there, to open the boxes that were waiting in the room her husband had left her.

She had, at last, a proper reason to do so.

The lane to the village curved through a copse of ash and beech, their summer leaves still heavy with the afternoon's rain. Eleanor drove slowly, her headlights cutting a pale corridor through the greyness, and the wipers beat their steady measure against the windscreen. The letters sat in their cardboard box on the passenger seat, a weight that had nothing to do with paper.

She had not been to the churchyard at St. Michael and All Angels since the funeral. There had been no reason. Harlan had been lowered into the ground with all the ceremony the village could muster, and the headstone she had chosen had recorded, in its quiet, stony way, that he had been a beloved husband and a faithful parishioner and a man who had loved the gardens of this place. She had stood at the graveside with the rain falling and the vicar intoning and Margaret holding her arm, and she had carried home the leftover sandwiches and the sympathy cards and the terrible knowledge that everything the vicar had said, however beautiful, had been a lie.

The lych-gate stood open. She drove through it and parked on the gravel before the porch, and she sat for a long moment with her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the stone tower rising against the lowering sky.

Then she got out.

The grass was wet. The headstones tilted at their various angles, the older ones leaning with the patience of centuries, the newer ones still upright and offended by the disorder of the earth around them. She knew where she was going. The Marsh plot lay at the eastern edge, beneath the yew whose roots had been disturbing the older graves for a hundred years.

Harlan's stone was of grey granite, modest, unshowy. The inscription was brief.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF HARLAN EDGAR MARSH BELOVED HUSBAND OF ELEANOR 1912 – 1987 AT REST IN THE GARDEN OF HIS LORD

Eleanor stood before it for a long time. The rain had stopped, but the air was thick with it, and the yew dripped onto the gravel path. Somewhere in the village a dog was barking, and a tractor coughed in a distant field.

"Good afternoon, Eleanor."

She turned. The Reverend Thomas Armitage was standing a few paces away, in his shirt sleeves and his old corduroy trousers, a pair of secateurs in his hand. He had been tending the roses, evidently, for there was a smear of green on his cheek and a thorn-prick on his thumb.

"Good afternoon, Thomas."

"It is a while since we have seen you here." He said it without reproach, but with a certain gentle inquiry.

"Yes." She did not explain herself.

He glanced at the headstone, then back at her. "I heard there had been a visitor. Last Wednesday. He came to see me in the afternoon. He had questions about the parish records."

Eleanor's attention sharpened. "What manner of questions?"

"He wished to know when Harlan had been buried. Whether there had been any other interments in the plot. Whether I had ever known of a memorial marker of any kind, other than the present stone." Armitage paused. "I told him what I knew, which was very little. I told him I had only been here since eighty-nine, and that the records before that date were kept by my predecessor, who is now in a nursing home in Shrewsbury. I gave him the address. He thanked me and went away."

"Did he say who he was?"

"He said he was a retired officer of the law. A Detective Chief Inspector, I think he said. He had a card. Burrows. A plain man, very plain, but with good manners. He seemed, if I may say so, a man with a mission."

Eleanor looked down at the headstone. She could feel the weight of the letters in the box on the passenger seat of the car, and the weight of Margaret's statement in its envelope on top of them.

"He is investigating the death of a young woman," she said. "A girl who was a pupil of mine, many years ago. He has reason to believe that my husband may have been connected to her death."

Armitage did not speak at once. He stood very quietly among the dripping yews, the secateurs hanging loose at his side.

"I am sorry to hear it," he said at last.

"So am I, Thomas."

"Will you be all right, my dear?"

She looked at him, at his kind weathered face and his old corduroys and the green smear on his cheek.

"I shall try," she said.

She left him there among his roses and walked back through the lych-gate to her car. The evening was drawing in. The sky had taken on that peculiar bruised violet that precedes a summer dusk in the Midlands, and the first of the moths was beginning to blunder against the car headlights as she sat for a moment with the engine off.

She thought of Hugh Pendleton. She had not seen him since the morning he had called at the house, almost a week ago now. He had asked his questions with great care and left with his face as unreadable as a closed book. She wondered what he had found at the cottage. She wondered if he had found it at all.

She started the engine and turned, not toward Marsh House, but toward the village high street, and then out along the road toward the cottage.

It was full dark by the time she reached the lane. The cottage was visible only as a darker shape against the dark of the trees, and the gate she had latched that morning was now standing wide. She frowned, cut the engine, and sat for a moment with the window down, listening.

There was no sound. There was, instead, a smell.

Smoke.

She was out of the car before she had properly decided to move, her handbag forgotten on the seat, her feet in their low shoes slipping on the wet grass as she made her way up the path. The smell thickened with every step. Through the front window she could see, in the parlour, a dull red glow.

The door resisted her first push. She put her shoulder to it and felt it give, and a breath of hot air struck her in the face. The hallway was full of smoke, not thick yet but thickening. She put her sleeve across her mouth and pushed through into the parlour.

The fire had started in the hearth. The andiron had been pulled out, and the grate was full of blazing paper. She could see at once that it was not an accident. Someone had lit the fire deliberately, with a bundle of letters. The edges of other letters, scattered on the rug, were already curling and blackening. The carpet had caught. The curtains were beginning to smoulder.

She turned and ran for the bedroom. There was more smoke there, and the bedclothes were smouldering where the fire had been carried through. She grabbed the small travelling case she had brought, the one with her night things in it, and dragged it out into the hallway. The smoke was pouring up the staircase now, and she could hear, somewhere above her, the sound of glass cracking in the heat.

She ran outside. The night air hit her like cold water. She stood in the garden, gulping it in, and watched the orange light grow behind the cottage windows. A curtain went up in a sheet of flame. A window shattered somewhere at the back. She stumbled to the gate and leaned on it, her handbagless, her case at her feet, her hair full of the smell of smoke.

She thought of the notes of the interview. They were in there. The pages on which she had written down, in her clear schoolmistress's hand, what Margaret had told her about the girl in the photograph, and the boy, and the night. All her work, all her evidence, was in there, turning to ash.

She began to run. Not toward the village, but up the lane toward the house, because there was a telephone at Marsh House, and there was a man she could call.

The operator at the exchange put her through to the number she asked for. It rang for a long time. Then a man's voice, cautious, answered.

"Inspector Pendleton."

"It is Eleanor Marsh," she said. Her voice was shaking. "My cottage is on fire. Someone has set fire to it deliberately. There were papers in there. The notes of my interview with Margaret Whitcombe. They are gone."

There was a brief silence on the line. She could hear, distantly, a television.

"Where are you speaking from?" he asked.

"Marsh House."

"Do not leave. I will come to you. Do you understand? Do not leave the house until I arrive."

"The fire," she said. "Someone will have seen it."

"The fire brigade will see to the fire. I am coming to you. Do not touch anything. Do not speak to anyone. I will be with you within the hour."

She put the receiver down. Her hands were trembling, and there was a great roaring in her ears that she recognised, after a moment, as the sound of her own heart.

She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. It was the only thing she could think of to do. The kettle boiled. She made tea. She drank it standing at the window, looking out at the lane, and the sky above the trees was lit, faintly, by the dying glow of a fire that had consumed the last of her careful notes.

At half past nine, headlights swept up the drive.

She went to the door and opened it. Hugh Pendleton was standing on the step, raincoat collar turned up, his face grey in the porch light. Behind him, further down the drive, another car had drawn up, and a second man was getting out. He was taller, broader, with the unmistakable air of a senior officer. She recognised the name from the television. DCI Burrows.

"Eleanor," said Pendleton. "Are you all right?"

"I am not hurt," she said. "The papers are gone."

"I know." He stepped inside, and the second man followed. "This is Detective Chief Inspector Burrows. He has driven down from Shrewsbury. I think you and he have a great deal to talk about."

Burrows inclined his head. He had a lined, patient face, and a notebook already in his hand.

"Mrs Marsh," he said. "I am very sorry to trouble you at this hour. I understand you have been trying, in your own way, to look into the death of a girl named Catherine Roome, who was a pupil of yours at the school in the late nineteen-seventies."

Eleanor looked at him. She felt suddenly very tired.

"Yes," she said. "I have."

"And I understand that your husband, Mr Harlan Marsh, who was at that time a housemaster at the same school, may have had some connection with the events surrounding her disappearance."

"Yes," she said again. "He may."

Burrows opened his notebook to a fresh page.

"Then perhaps, Mrs Marsh," he said, "you might begin at the beginning, and tell us what you have learned."

She looked past him, into the dim warmth of the hall, where the grandfather clock ticked its long, slow measure, and the door to the garden room stood, as it had stood for forty years, very slightly ajar.

"Yes," she said. "I think perhaps I shall."