“Harriet used to have a sweet nature, according to the overflowing archive of village legend,” said Margaret. “Kind, generous, always a smile on her face, forever laughing and offering to help friends and neighbors, never once thinking of herself—positively saintly. Determined to think well of all she met, to see everything in the best possible light. Naïvely trusting, some said. I’m not sure if I believe all of it. No one could be as perfect as Harriet-Before-She-Changed is painted as being. I wonder if it’s the contrast with what she became . . .” Margaret frowned. “Perhaps it wasn’t, in strictest truth, a case of her going from one extreme to the other, but when one is telling a story, one always wants to make it as dramatic as possible, doesn’t one? And I suppose losing a husband so young could turn even the sunniest nature. Harriet was devoted to her George, so they say, and he to her. He died in 1911 at the age of twenty-seven—dropped down dead one day in the street, having always been the picture of health. A blood clot in his brain. Harriet was a widow at twenty-five.”

“What a blow that must have been for her,” I said.

“Yes,” Margaret agreed. “A loss of that magnitude might have a terrible effect upon a person. It’s interesting that some describe her as having been naïve.”

“Why do you say that?”

“ ‘Naïve’ suggests a falsely rosy conception of life. If one believed in a wholly benign world and then tragedy of the worst kind struck, one might feel anger and resentment as well as sadness, as if one had been duped. And of course, when we suffer greatly ourselves, it becomes so much easier to blame and persecute others.”

I was attempting to conceal my strenuous disagreement when she added, “For some, I should say. Not for all. I expect you find it easier to persecute yourself, don’t you, Mr. Catchpool?”

“I hope I don’t persecute anybody,” I said, bemused. “So am I to take it that the loss of her husband had an unfortunate effect upon Harriet Sippel’s character?”