Again he read her eyes, ignoring her words. “But you aren’t sure of that, are you? If he often slept here, in this bed, or worked long hours in this wing, how could you be sure? Where he went—or when—or for how long! During the day or in the night.”

Aurore bit her lip. “The house—with Elizabeth Napier here, moving between the house and the museum, he must feel—I don’t know. Caught”

“But he was proposing to hire an assistant. She would have been in the house and the museum day after day.”

She said angrily, “I don’t know! Explain it however you will!”

“Do you want to come with me?”

Aurore shook her head. “No. I’ll stay. In the event …” She let the sentence run into silence again. In the event he returns of his own accord… and needs me.

He walked past her, near enough to smell the fragrance of her hair and perfume. Lily of the valley … But she didn’t turn, she didn’t say anything more.

At first he quartered Charlbury, down toward the inn, up toward the church. He saw Elizabeth Napier speaking to someone by the church door and thought it might be Joanna Daulton. Nothing.

He went on to the motorcar and began to drive toward the farm, thinking that it was a logical place for Wyatt to escape to if he wanted peace from the two women who drew him first this way and then that.

Jimson had seen him in the night—it has happened before. Rutledge didn’t need Hamish to tell him. He had already gotten there on his own.

For some reason the old man must have thought the ghosts of the Wyatts were walking their farmland again, unable to rest in peace. Peering out a window in the night, seeing the shadowy figure crossing the moonlit yard, he wouldn’t have questioned it, he would have accepted its right to be there.

The farmhouse was dark, save for a single light—a lamp—in a back room that must mark Jimson’s bedchamber. The barn too was empty save for the animals that belonged there. No one challenged Rutledge as he moved about. And the only sounds were those that belonged to the night, not to restless spirits.

Turning the other way, back toward Charlbury, he drove through the town and slowed, peering beyond his lights into the fields, trying to pin any tall, manlike shadow against the sky. He’d been good at that, in the war, as Hamish reminded him. Spotting scouts or the first wave of a silent attack coming across no-man’s-land. Swift vision sometimes made the difference in surprise….