“He did when he went through his son’s clothes and such, after. I think the house holds too many memories now, and business doesn’t often bring him this way. I’ve a mind to make an offer for it if my niece settles down. I’m not as young as I used to be, and it will be a comfort to have her next door.”

“But not in the same house,” Hamish said, interpreting the tone of voice.

“I’d hoped she might marry the Captain. But then he went and got himself engaged to someone else. A pity. Still, she died of appendicitis, Julia did. If he’d come home from the war fancy-free, I’d have tried my hand at matchmaking.”

They went out the way they’d come in, and while Mrs. Raeburn locked the garden door, Rutledge walked toward the garden.

“It was once quite lovely,” Mrs. Raeburn told him, following down the path among the beds. “Now the gardener keeps it up but doesn’t go out of his way. But then, who’s to see it, I ask you!”

She turned around, a broad hint that it was time for him to accompany her back through the gate.

He went on, ignoring her. It was in fact a lovely garden— peaceful and secluded. A high wall marked the end.

It was Hamish who noticed the bench.

It had been dragged from its low stone dais by the wall and set in the midst of a bed of annuals. It looked out of place here, like a whale stranded on a foreign beach. The dimensions were somehow wrong, and the plants set in around it lacked the symmetry of other beds, as if having to compensate for the awkwardness of the bench.

The gardener’s doing—or someone else’s?

Mrs. Raeburn, complaining of her legs, had stopped by the sundial. Rutledge called to her, “How long has this bench been set here? It appears to belong over there by the wall.”

“How should I know? I never come that far—my legs, you know.”

Rutledge squatted on the grass and looked at the soil of the bed. It was loose, friable. As if it had been dug up each spring and restocked with plants that would grow contentedly in this corner shaded by the wall. There were forget-me-nots and pansies and a pair of small ferns set in a half-moon around the bench. But nothing was planted under the bench.

You wouldn’t plant under the bench. . . .

He went to the shed to find a trowel, and Mrs. Raeburn called plaintively, “Have you finished, young man?”

“I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” he replied. “If you wish to go back through the hedge, I’ll come across in five minutes.”

She was mumbling something about taking advantage; he could hear her voice retreating even as she did.