“Do be quiet, Cesca! We’re hiding from the Boers— you’ll give us away!

But The Murder Stone is still there, at the bottom of my Grandfather’s garden, where it has always been.

And the house above the garden is mine. I’ve inherited it by default, because all the fair haired boys are dead, gone to be real soldiers at last and mown down with their dreams of glory.

2

IT SEEMED QUITE STRANGE TO BE SITTING HERE— alone—in the solicitor’s office, without her grandfather beside her.

Francis Hatton had always had a powerful presence. An impressive man physicially as well: tall, strongly built, with broad shoulders and an air of good breeding. Someone to be reckoned with. Women had found him attractive. Even in age.

He had carried his years well, in fact, his face lean and handsome, his voice deep and resonant, his hair a distinguished silver gray.

Until 1915.

1915 was when the first of the cousins begain to die in France. It was then that he slowly became someone else. Someone Francesca wasn’t quite sure she knew— or wanted to know.

She stirred in her chair. Mr Branscombe, pressing fifty, had always toadied to Francis Hatton. He was fussing with the papers before him now, as if hoping to delay matters until his client arrived. Reluctant somehow to begin this last duty.

And had she failed in her own duty to her grandfather? She had hated the change in him, that slow withdrawal into himself, leaving her behind. For the first time in her life she had felt shut out of his love. Instead of mourning together, they had grown apart. By the time Harry died, in the late summer of 1916, a bare month ago, she had watched the fall of a Colossus.

There had been days she had prayed silently for his death, and at night, walking the passages in restless repudiation of death coming nearer, she had wished she could hasten it, and be done with it at last.

A surge of guilt pressed in on her.

Mr. Branscombe cleared his throat, an announcement that he was ready to begin the Reading of the Will. Ceremony duly noted . . .

The servants—the older ones, the younger ones having gone off one by one either to fight or to work in the factories—were in an anteroom, waiting to be invited into the inner sanctum at the proper moment.

“I, Charles Francis Stewart Hatton, being of Sound Mind and Body, do hereby set my Hand to this my Last Will and Testament . . .”

The Devon voice was sonorously launched on its charge.

Francesca found it difficult to concentrate.

My grandfather is only just dead, she wanted to cry. This smacks of sacrilege, to be dividing up his goods and chattels before he’s quite cold . . . I haven’t earned the right to sit here. Oh God.