Even Hamish was struck by the splendor of the view, and Rutledge turned into a small stony cul-de-sac to look out at the scene. Grasses and marshes covered the land like a rough brown-gold blanket, and a few stunted trees bowed before the wind, on the point of giving up against its force. The grasses moved as if with a will of their own as the wind ran capriciously through them. Here ducks and geese and sea birds owned the silence. A thin line of white at the very fringes of the marshes marked the sea. It was wildly beau iful, and Rutledge thought, Here is something man hasn’t destroyed.

Hamish said, “Aye, but give him time!”

A small falcon rose from the thick grass to fly some twenty yards, then hover with beating wings above its unsuspecting prey. Rutledge watched it swoop, and then take off again with a dark smudge hanging from one claw. A mouse?

The stillness was broken only by the wind sweeping in from the sea, and he thought he had caught the sound of waves rolling in, a deep roar that was felt as much as it was heard, like a heartbeat. The sense of peace was heavy, and the sense of isolation.

A formation of geese, out over the surf, flew like a black arrow toward Osterley.

Following them with his eyes, Rutledge remembered the lines of poetry from which the words had come. They ran through his mind almost without conscious thought: “Across the moon the geese flew, pointing my way, / A black arrow on the wing. / But I was afoot and slow, / And stumbled in the dark. By moonset, I was left, / Alone and sad, still far from the sea . . .”

O. A. Manning had been writing about a man’s desperate struggle against despair.

Here in the marshes, watching the wedge of geese, it seemed to be possible to reach the sea after all. . . . He felt his spirits lift.

“Unless,” Hamish told him harshly, “it’s only an illusion. . . .”

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5

IGNORING HAMISH, RUTLEDGE SPENT ANOTHER FIVE or ten minutes there, his eyes scanning the marshes. But now it seemed devoid of life, the spell it had cast broken.

He got out to crank the motor. Under his feet was a bed of stones, white round pebbles that, when split, showed their opaque, flinty core. Many of the towns along the North Sea had been built of such stone, hard and durable at the center.