“I see no purpose in passing it on. You’ve helped me make a personal judgment, that’s all.”

Lifting the tray again, she smiled. “It must be the fact that you’re a policeman. You listen rather well, and before I knew it, I was rattling on. Or perhaps I’ve missed my dear friend Emily more than I’d realized, since she moved to Devon to be with her daughter!”

He opened the door to the kitchen for her, and said good night.

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 10

STILL MULLING OVER HIS CONVERSATION WITH Priscilla Connaught, Rutledge went out the hotel door into the evening air. The wind had picked up off the sea, cold as night, and he shivered. Turning toward The Pelican Inn, he made his way up Water Street to the main road, stopping for a time to look up at Holy Trinity. The church had beautiful proportions in this light, standing stark against the sky and framed by trees that marched south of it. Whoever had built it had had an eye for setting as well as architecture. Castles usually went up on the highest point in a district, but here it was the church. It must have been built after the Black Plague and the worst of the Wars of the Roses, because there were no defensive aspects in the design. Gracefulness was its hallmark, and the long windows, the high clerestory, the rise of the roof gave the tall tower at the west front and the round beacon tower at the chancel an elegance of their own.

Among the trees in the churchyard, Rutledge’s night-accustomed eyes picked out a solitary figure, head bent, standing among the gravestones. Then the figure straightened to stare up at the night sky above the towers. A mourner? Or another lonely soul with no home he wanted to go to?

“Like you?” Hamish asked softly.

Turning, Rutledge walked along the main road, passing the darkened windows of Dr. Stephenson’s surgery, the brightly lit ones of the police station, and what appeared to be a small country solicitor’s office tucked—with a prosperous air—into the corner where Water Street and the Hunstanton Road met.

His mind kept returning to the different view of Father James that Priscilla Connaught had presented to him, and before he could sleep, he wanted to think it through. Right or wrong, she herself believed it implicitly. Until half an hour ago, he’d believed that everyone had mourned Father James, the man and the priest, in equal measure.

“Relegating the dead to sainthood,” Hamish pointed out, “is no’ uncommon. No one wants to speak ill of the recent dead.”

Unlike Mark Antony’s wily promise over Caesar’s bloody corpse, Miss Connaught had come to bury Father James in every sense of the word, not to praise him. Which gave the priest human dimensions rather than saintly ones.

“It might have made him a better priest, knowing he’d failed one person,” Rutledge argued.

“Aye, it’s true. Ye canna’ tell without knowing how he’d failed the woman.”