It was too close to the mark. Only that morning Walter had received a letter from the Alcock Missionary Society, wanting to know when he would be ready to return to the field. That, and Harry, had haunted him all day.

Jenny called from the house, saving Walter from having to answer his brother.

“Yes, coming,” he replied, and then to his brother he said, “I’ll just put these candles out. Why don’t you go on up to bed? You aren’t going to find any peace until you do.”

Peter reached for his cane and struggled to his feet. Walter caught one of the chairs he’d been using as it almost tipped over. Peter swore at his own clumsiness. Leaning heavily on his cane, he made his way across the lawn toward the house. And halfway there, he turned and said to his brother, “Things will look better tomorrow.”

Walter nodded, then set about reaching into the colorful paper cages and pinching out the flame of each candle. As he came to the last of them, he stopped.

It was too bad, he thought, that life couldn’t be snuffed out as easily as a candle flame.

Could a man will himself to die? He’d seen it happen more than once in West Africa but never really believed in it.

Now he wished he could.

His sister, Leticia, would call that arrant nonsense. After all, he didn’t suffer in the same way that his brothers did. Not physical pain.

He could have borne that.

It was not knowing what to do that haunted him.

Chapter 3

London, Late May, 1920

Before leaving the next morning to give evidence in a court case in Sheffield, Ian Rutledge had taken his sister, Frances, to dine at a new and popular restaurant. There they encountered friends just arriving as well and on the point of being shown to a table. They were invited to join the other party, and as new arrangements were made, Rutledge made certain that his own chair remained at what had become the head of a larger table. His claustrophobia after being buried alive when a shell blew up his salient in 1916 had never faded. Even four years later, he couldn’t abide a crowded room or train, and something as ordinary as a chair in a corner, with others—even good friends—between him and the door could leave him shaken. Frances, unaware of her brother’s irrational fear, was already enjoying herself, and he watched her flirt with Maryanne Browning’s cousin, an attractive man named Geoffrey Blake. She had met him before, and as they caught up on events and old friends, Rutledge heard someone mention Meredith Channing. He himself had called on Mrs. Channing not ten days earlier, to thank her for a recent kindness, only to find that she was away.

Now Blake was saying, “She’s in Wales, I think.”

And Barbara Westin turned to him, surprised. “Wales? I’d understood she was on her way to Norfolk.”

Someone at the other end of the table put in, “Was it Norfolk?”