She said this as though it were a perfectly normal thing to say. She must have been reading my mind, for she went on to explain: “There is only one reason that Patrick Ive’s gravestone has not been dug out of the ground, Mr. Catchpool, and it is this: everybody knows I am watching.” She advanced upon me without warning and held out her hand. I shook it. “Margaret Ernst,” she said. “You may call me Margaret.”

“Do you mean . . . Are you saying that there are people in the village who would wish to disturb Patrick and Frances Ive’s grave?”

“Yes. I used to lay flowers by it, but it soon became apparent that there was little point. Flowers are easy to destroy, easier than a slab of stone. When I stopped leaving the flowers, there was nothing for them to destroy apart from the gravestone itself, but I was in the cottage by then. Watching.”

“How appalling that anybody would do such a thing to another person’s resting place,” I said.

“Well, people are appalling, aren’t they? Did you read the poem?”

“I started to and then you appeared.”

“Read it now,” she ordered.

I turned back to the stone and read the sonnet in its entirety.

That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,

For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;

The ornament of beauty is suspect,

A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.

So thou be good, slander doth but approve

Thy worth the greater, being wooed of time;

For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,

And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.

Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days

Either not assailed, or victor being charged;

Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,

To tie up envy, evermore enlarged,

If some suspect of ill masked not thy show,

Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.

“Well, Mr. Catchpool?”

“It’s a peculiar poem to fetch up on a gravestone.”

“Do you think so?”

“Slander’s a strong word. The poem suggests that—well, unless I’m mistaken—that there were attacks upon Patrick and Frances Ive’s characters?”

“There were. Hence the sonnet. I chose it. I was advised that it would prove too costly to engrave the whole poem, and that I should content myself with the first two lines—as if cost were the most important consideration. People are such brutes!” Margaret Ernst gave a disgusted snort. She rested the palm of her hand on the stone, as if it were the top of a beloved child’s head instead of a grave. “Patrick and Frances Ive were kind people who would never willingly have hurt anybody. About how many can one say that, truly?”

“Oh. Well—”