But that had been left unspoken. Had Father James failed Miss Connaught personally—choosing the priesthood over marriage—or had he given her advice that a young man devoting his life to the Church might have seen as the only answer, although not necessarily the most compassionate one?

And in spite of her agitation, Rutledge was prepared to believe Priscilla Connaught when she swore she hadn’t killed the priest. Haunting him had clearly given her far more personal satisfaction than murder ever could. The reserved woman that Mrs. Barnett had described had been completely distraught.

“Unless Father James had learned to come to grips with it,” Hamish pointed out. “It wouldna’ satisfy her, then.”

Still, this second face of the man was intriguing.

Turning down the other leg of Water Street, Rutledge could see the bowl of sky out beyond the water, dark now but filled with stars, their clarity almost breathtaking. As he reached the quay, he stopped and stood there feeling the distant whisper of the waves, although he wasn’t sure he actually heard them. There was a line of luminescence out there as well, as if far beyond his earthbound line of sight, the moon was already rising.

Something prickled along his spine, a warning, and he glanced to his right to discover that he wasn’t alone here on the quay. A woman had walked out of the hotel and was standing some twenty yards away. Lost in her own thoughts, she hadn’t seen him. Holding her coat about her more as comfort than as a wrap against the wind’s chill, she was staring down at the stream that flowed in from the sea.

He stood very still, unwilling to disturb her reverie. She said something, the words whipped away in the wind. Thinking that she must have been speaking to him, he answered, “It’s a beautiful night.”

But she looked apprehensively in his direction as if only just aware that someone was there.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have a most dreadful habit of talking to myself!”

He walked toward her, stopping some ten feet away. She was, he thought, the other guest at the hotel. And, he realized, possibly the woman he’d seen in the churchyard on his first day. It was the set of her shoulders, and the way her skirts moved in the breeze.

“I’m afraid I’m guilty of that as well,” he said, then added as one does with a chance-met stranger, “I haven’t visited East Anglia in a number of years, and I’ve never been to Osterley. It’s a different world from London.”

“Yes.”

He thought for a moment that she was not going to continue, that her brevity was a signal to him to walk on.

But then she added, “I’ve come here before. It was a very long time ago. This trip, I’d planned to continue up the coast toward Cley, but for some reason, I’ve lingered. I suppose it’s because of the marshes. They’re beautiful around Osterley.”