No longer “What would you like, love?” Rutledge smiled. “What would you recommend for dinner?” he asked her.

“You’re fortunate tonight,” she said. “There’s a roast of chicken with dumplings and potatoes, and I can tell you, there’s nothing like it this side of London!”

Rutledge felt an unexpected surge of sympathy for the woman in a book he’d once read, who had been branded with an A for Adulteress. Everyone in Osterley knew more of his business than he knew of theirs. He’d been branded with an O for Outsider—no longer the visitor who was benign, no longer the anonymous traveler who could ask questions and expect an honest answer. There was neither coldness nor rudeness in their manner, only a formality that precluded any expectation of breaking through it.

How long, he wondered, did it take a man to reach the status of “one of ours” in this village? For a policeman who hadn’t been born here, perhaps never. For a passing stranger there was welcome and courtesy. For an intruder, only suspicion. And yet Father James had come to be one of theirs. . . .

He chose the chicken with dumplings and ordered a pint to go with it.

Although he tried to keep his eyes away from the table by the window and to stop himself from speculating about the relationships of the four people sitting there, Rutledge caught himself glancing that way from time to time. The woman had a quiet vivacity, and seemed to be comfortable with both men. It emphasized the formality she had displayed toward him on the few occasions when they’d spoken.

A stranger even among strangers . . .

He turned slightly to change his line of sight. Indirectly now, he could see the lonely man sitting in the corner. He served only to reflect Rutledge’s own isolation. Hamish had struck a chord with his words.

As Rutledge watched, the man’s hands began to tremble, and he hastily shoved them out of sight under the table, dropping the newspaper as if it had burned him. Shell shock?

Rutledge shuddered, Hamish suddenly aware and challenging in his mind. He himself had so narrowly escaped from that horror. And the fierce agony of it still haunted him. To be shell-shocked was to be publicly branded a coward—a man unfit to be mentioned in the same breath as the soldier with a missing limb or shot-away jaw. A shame—a disgrace. Not an honorable wound but the mark of failure as a man. He himself had been caged with the screaming, shaking, pathetic remnants of humanity in a clinic that kept them shut firmly away from the public eye. Until Dr. Fleming had rescued him.