“I’ll deal with Scotland. When I’m back in London.”

“Oh, aye? Then tell me why we’re driving north again?”

It was a pretty route, leaving Norwich to follow country lanes through gently rolling hills. Many of them hid small flint or brick villages in pocket-size valleys. And the still-green meadows on the rounded hillsides were sheltered by a line of trees, where fluffy clusters of Norfolk sheep dotted the landscape, their fleece thickening for the winter. So unlike France, with its broken walls and stark chimneys lining the roads from the Front. He could almost pretend that it was 1914, and nothing had changed. But of course it had. There was never any going back.

To Hamish this was “soft country”—peaceful and prosperous, where a living came more easily than in the harsh, often barren landscapes of the Highlands. That very harshness, in Hamish’s opinion, had made the Scots formidable fighting men.

Norfolk had produced fine soldiers, too, Rutledge reminded him. But as far as Hamish was concerned, training and blood were two very different factors in the making of an army. One could be taught—the other was in the very bone.

Even in the trenches Hamish had been fond of citing examples—some of them ranging back to the twelfth century—of Scottish prowess in battle. It was, Rutledge thought, a way of life that had seldom brought prosperity or contentment to the Highlands, but in pride and fierce spirit, it had bred a full measure of courage.

The miles rolled away behind them, and then the road Rutledge was driving wound through a cut in a hill and unexpectedly came to an end facing a broad expanse of marshes, as flat as they were striking and bronzed now with the coming winter’s palette of red-brown and yellow and old gold. He paused at the junction to stare out across them, thinking to himself that for such a small country, England had its share of beauty.

Here the road went either right toward Cley or left toward Hunstanton, running along the landward edges of the marsh as far as the eye could see. Rutledge turned left, feeling the wind coming in from the northwest, bearing with it the cries of gulls out along the ridge of dunes by the sea. Rounding a curve a few miles farther on, Rutledge found himself in the outskirts of a small, sprawling village, lying under a sky that looked like a great gray bowl, holding in the light from the unseen water beyond the marshes to his right.

This wasn’t the famous “Constable sky,” those broad horizons that the artist had made his signature: vast banks of clouds filled with delicate color that somehow emphasized the simplicity of the ordinary lives he chose to paint. Farm lads fishing or tired horses drawing a haywain across a tree-shaded stream, each caught in his workaday world—rustic beauty unaware of the grandeur overhead.