“So that was Marilynne with the dead bouquet and the vandalism and all the other stuff,” Finn said. He fixed Persis with a stern look. “Did you give her a key to the barn?”

Persis shook her head. “But Charlie had given one to me a while back and it disappeared,” she admitted.

There was silence. Lucy thought of Cleo talking about the masked intruder she’d bumped into. It had never occurred to her that Marilynne was almost as tall as Gabriel and also smoked.

The police, Lucy thought, would no doubt piece it all together in time. They would trace Marilynne’s movements on the day Charlie died just as they would for the previous night when she had had her accident. She wondered whether Marilynne had been in the museum that morning and had seen her looking in the display case for the key. Was that what had triggered her to decide Lucy had to be eliminated as Charlie had been? Since Marilynne herself could no longer explain what had really happened, there would be no arrest or trial but Persis and Gabriel would have to live with what their aunt had done forever.

“When I met you both that day at Chastleton,” she said, “had you gone to collect the book about Robert Catesby on Marilynne’s behalf?”

Gabriel looked puzzled but Persis shook her head. “No. Aunt M had sent us to look for a box that might fit the key she had,” she said. “She was as obsessed as ever—more so I think because she thought you were getting close to the truth, Lucy. I know I was weird when we saw you,” Persis finished sadly. “I mentioned Aunt M straight away because I was feeling guilty and thinking of her. I just wanted the whole thing to go away. Except it’s not so easy, is it?” She dropped her head into her hands. “You can’t just wipe these things from your mind and pretend they never happened, can you? They really do haunt you.”

Twenty-Four

Anne Catesby

Ashby St. Ledgers, Northamptonshire
November 5, 1605

We went home to Ashby via Knightstone. The house that Thomas had bought from Robert after Catherine’s death was shuttered and still. The garden, in those dying days of autumn, was all but lost beneath fallen leaves.

“I have a sacred trust to perform for Sir Thomas Tresham,” I told Byram, as we rested our horses at the old village inn that had once been the Knights’ presbytery. “Or rather you have. Pray, borrow a shovel from the gravedigger and join me in the churchyard.”

Byram gave me a look and went out, muttering “bloody Thomas Tresham and his sacred trust” under his breath loud enough for me to hear.

I took the mantle of the Knights Hospitaller from my saddlebags where it had resided since I had left Lyveden. It was wrapped within a leather purse now, and inside that there were several layers of linen encasing the silk mantle itself. Whether it would survive burial was another matter and one that I was prepared to leave in the hands of God. I had promised Thomas only that I would take the symbol of the Knights Hospitallers back where it belonged and lodge it in safety. I had thought of the chalk pit beneath the garden but in the end I decided it needed to be as close to the original presbytery as possible, high on the hill beneath Catherine’s memorial stone.