Rutledge turned to May Trent. She had kept her composure, a woman with hidden strengths, learned from her personal suffering. He chose a different course with her.

“The other door Father James mentioned—it was you. He wanted to know if Mrs. Sedgwick had been on board ship, if you’d actually seen her, spoken with her. If you had, then he no longer had to rely on Baker’s confession, whatever it was, to fill in the details of Mrs. Sedgwick’s disappearance.”

“No, it wasn’t like that! He was trying to help me. To stop the nightmares. He said.” Her voice was odd, a tremor behind it. She seemed on the point of adding more, but stopped.

“And when you refused to remember, the priest went to his solicitor and added a codicil to his Will. Father James left you a photograph of Virginia Sedgwick”—there was a sharp intake of breath from the listening Vicar—“but not the cuttings that he’d collected so painstakingly. He wanted only your own memories, and he wished you the courage to write down what had happened—to you and to her. Why would he have believed so strongly that you—of all the survivors—had met her on shipboard?”

“I didn’t refuse to remember, as you put it. And he didn’t believe any such thing!” She was flushed, her chin high and her eyes bright. “I can’t understand why you keep harping on it. He just felt that the nightmares would stop if I could face them once and for all. And I couldn’t; I wasn’t ready. He never forced me to go back to that night—he was careful. We tried to discuss less frightening experiences, who had the cabins next to mine, the people I sat with at meals, what I wore the first evening out—and I couldn’t even remember that!”

Hamish scolded, “The lass is tired. Let it go.”

Rutledge heard him. He said to May Trent, trying to make amends, “I’m not hounding you—”

“You are!” she said angrily. “You’re worse than Father James ever was. You don’t know what it is like to be haunted, you’ve never sat up screaming in bed in the middle of the night, hearing the dying cry out for help and knowing that you will live and they won’t—! ”

Exhausted as he himself was, the strength of her emotions touched him on the raw. His own anger flared with unwitting heat.

“Don’t I? I live it with every breath I take—”

Hamish’s voice was sharp. “You mustna’ betray yoursel’!”

Rutledge’s iron will shut off the flow of words even as he heard the warning. His face had grown so white and so strained that May Trent reached out a hand to him, as if to stop him, too. And then she dropped it.

They stared at each other in horrified silence.