May Trent answered, “But I’d have known that, too. Women gossip on shipboard, Lord Sedgwick, just as they do at a garden party. We knew who was assigned to our table, to our lifeboat stations. Who was available for bridge, who had been confined to bed. Her name wasn’t there.” She looked at Arthur and her face wisted with disgust. “How could you callously use that tragedy for your own ends? I find it appalling!”

Arthur’s mouth tensed, but he said nothing. His reflection in the dark glass of the French doors was a study in control. Yet his hands, locked behind his back, clenched until the knuckles were white.

Rutledge turned to Lord Sedgwick. “And as Herbert Baker lay dying, he couldn’t face the prospect that he was taking with him the one bit of knowledge that might clear up the mystery of what really happened to your daughter-in-law. Trying to set his soul in order, he sent for Father James, not because he was a priest, but because this man cared as much about Virginia Sedgwick’s fate as Baker had. The one man in Osterley who could be counted on to use the information wisely! And that’s why Father James had to die—there was no way of knowing whether what Baker confided to the priest was under the seal of Confession or had been told man to man, with a simple promise binding the priest.”

There was the shock of truth in Lord Sedgwick’s face now. Arthur and Edwin swung around to look at their father. And he gave them no sign.

Rutledge frowned at Arthur. “I was convinced you killed Father James. I was coming here to break the news to your father. Until today, when I discovered two witnesses who placed not you but your father at the rectory that night. And I realized then that he’d been the killer.” Facing Sedgwick, he said, intent on angering the man, “It was quite clever to empty the tin box, to leave a false trail. Certainly Inspector Blevins was convinced by it. You have a flair for planning murder.”

Lord Sedgwick met Rutledge’s eyes with arrogance. “It doesn’t matter if you have a dozen witnesses. I think it’s time you left this house.”

There was an uneasy moment in the room. Edwin, leaning over the back of a chair, his hands lightly gripping the wood frame, was watching the fire. Arthur started toward a chair and then changed his mind, toying with the photographs on the table.

Hamish said, “Watch your back!”

Indeed, there was an odd intensity in their postures. These three men had spent a lifetime with no leavening to counteract the ferocious ambition that had driven them since the day they were born. It was what their character was all about: the paramount importance of a goal set in the first generation.