After breakfast the next morning, Rutledge made his way to the vicarage to speak to Mr. Sims. The sun was shining again, catching the sparkle of flint, the dark red of the brick window facings, and the almost Mediterranean warmth of the tile roofs of Osterley.

Water Street was busy, carts and drays maneuvering around each other to make early deliveries—cabbages and turnips for the greengrocer, a brace of ducks and a cage of live hens for the butcher, and lumber for the smith’s shop, where a new wagon was in progress. Behind the houses, Monday’s wash hung on the lines, blowing in the surprisingly soft breeze.

Climbing the hill toward the vicarage, he could feel the coolness of the copse beyond the church and smell damp wood and wet leaves rotting beside the path. He turned into the vicarage gates, startling a half dozen birds busy at a bush along the drive. They swirled away in a glitter of sound, bright as berries on the wing. Overhead the old trees that sheltered the house spread heavy boughs, reaching out for sunlight and casting an umbrella of shade and shadow across the roof. Thick roots had broken through the earth to form a tangle of enticing places for childhood games—transformed into fortresses for lead soldiers and houses for dolls and sometimes even strong arms in which to curl up and sleep in summer’s warmth.

They dredged up memories. Rutledge’s grandfather’s house had had such places. An ancient oak, which he had thought he would never grow tall enough to reach his arms around, had stood near a pond of garrulous frogs, and just beyond its shade was the swaybacked shed where bicycles and sleds and croquet sets lived. The last time he’d seen it, at the age of seventeen, the back garden had seemed small, like his aging grandfather, and the tree had been toppled in a storm, ripped from rotting roots to sprawl like a drunken giant across the iron fence.

“We worked hard for our bread in the Highlands,” Hamish answered his thought, “and didna’ play with fine toys on well-trimmed lawns. Instead we washed in the stream that ran through the glen, and watched the sun go down over the mountain, glad to call an end to the day.”

Rutledge answered, “It made you what you are, as my childhood made me what I am. I can’t say that one or the other is better.” But Hamish could.

The vicarage was rather plain, sprawling, built of flint, designed more for a large family than for beauty. But there was a small, graceful porch over the door, and a pot of late-blooming flowers had been set in a patch of sun by the step.

Rutledge lifted the knocker and let it fall.

A man came to answer the door, his shirtsleeves rolled above his elbows and a large paintbrush in one hand. Slim and fairly young, his blond hair awry, he looked more like someone’s younger brother than a Vicar.