“Yes, well, he might have been vacillating,” Fielding said. “I didn’t know the senior Teller very well. Walter’s father. But he was a martinet, you know. Planning his children’s lives without a thought to what they might like or might choose to do with themselves. Walter is a stickler for doing what’s right. And it may have been more difficult than he imagined to step away from the path he’d been intended to follow all his life.”

“How do I view this death?” Rutledge asked.

“I expect, like the Captain’s, a tragedy that shouldn’t have happened.”

Rutledge nodded. And yet he wasn’t satisfied. Not yet.

And he heard Hamish saying in his ear, “She doesna’ look as peaceful as the other lass . . .”

Fielding turned to the door. “I’ll let Teller come back. Then I’ll see to it that he has something to carry him on. There’s his brother’s funeral. And now this. I understand he’s not delivering the eulogy for his brother. Susannah Teller was adamant that it be the eldest brother. Edwin. Now we must concentrate on the living. The husband. The child. Someone ought to notify the family. I don’t think Teller is up to it.”

“I’ll see to the family.” Rutledge followed the doctor to the door and then went back into the room to look down on the woman lying on her pillow, her face pale and already losing that quality that made people real.

There was a glass on the bedside table. Milk, he thought. And a bottle that had come from a doctor’s dispensary. There was no label on it.

He walked to the only other door in the room and opened it.

A dressing room, and then on the other side, as Dr. Fielding had said, the door into what must be the master bedroom. He crossed to open it, then looked back into the room where Jenny Teller lay.

“Why was she sleeping in there tonight?”

But Hamish had no answer for him.

Walter Teller’s bedchamber was high-ceilinged and spacious, handsomely furnished, and with a newer bed, more modern in style than the four-poster, and a low bookcase beneath the double windows that faced the front of the house. A part of the original building, it had the wider floorboards and a prie-dieu against one wall that looked very old, a vestige of the Catholic owners before the Reformation. Someone had kept it for its beautiful lines and decorations, and it was well suited to the room.

Walking back to where Jenny lay, he closed the dressing room door. And at almost the same moment, Fielding returned with Walter Teller.

Teller crossed the room, looked down at his wife, and collapsed to his knees beside the bed, taking one of her hands in his and burying his face in it.