Something prickled along his spine, a warning, and he glanced to his right to discover that he wasn’t alone here on the quay. A woman had walked out of the hotel and was standing some twenty yards away. Lost in her own thoughts, she hadn’t seen him. Holding her coat about her more as comfort than as a wrap against the wind’s chill, she was staring down at the stream that flowed in from the sea.

He stood very still, unwilling to disturb her reverie. She said something, the words whipped away in the wind. Thinking that she must have been speaking to him, he answered, “It’s a beautiful night.”

But she looked apprehensively in his direction as if only just aware that someone was there.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have a most dreadful habit of talking to myself!”

He walked toward her, stopping some ten feet away. She was, he thought, the other guest at the hotel. And, he realized, possibly the woman he’d seen in the churchyard on his first day. It was the set of her shoulders, and the way her skirts moved in the breeze.

“I’m afraid I’m guilty of that as well,” he said, then added as one does with a chance-met stranger, “I haven’t visited East Anglia in a number of years, and I’ve never been to Osterley. It’s a different world from London.”

“Yes.”

He thought for a moment that she was not going to continue, that her brevity was a signal to him to walk on.

But then she added, “I’ve come here before. It was a very long time ago. This trip, I’d planned to continue up the coast toward Cley, but for some reason, I’ve lingered. I suppose it’s because of the marshes. They’re beautiful around Osterley.”

“. . . a very long time ago . . .” He had the feeling that she meant long ago in memory, not in actual years. That she was thinking of someone and unwilling to speak of him to a stranger. A war widow?

Hamish said, “You willna’ hear me speak of Fiona—”

“No!”

Fiona, who had loved Hamish before the war, and loved him still. . . . She was a part of Scotland, and Rutledge refused to remember her.

But Hamish did, and the name hung between them like a bad dream.

The black ribbon of the tidal stream below the quay quivered as a small fish came to the surface and then vanished again.

The woman was saying pensively, “I don’t know why, but the rivulet there reminds me of something I read once. ‘I know a brook / Where the willow dips long fingers into / Water made sweet with summer. / Where birds come to drink, / And a lone fox lies dozing / In dappled shade . . .’ ”