“She was friendly enough, whenever we ran into each other, but no, I wasn’t likely to know her well. She didn’t go about much. I was that surprised when they told me she wrote poetry, but then she was an invalid, wasn’t she? With time heavy on her hands. Nicholas was here sometimes in the evening, to visit my father. I always thought he might marry Rachel.” A pink flush rose in her cheeks. “I’ve never known a man quite like him—there was an intensity about him, a—a force.” She began to search through the Chinese stand beside the door, and took out an old umbrella. ‘‘You can borrow this, if you like. Otherwise, you’ll sure to be calling on the doctor with a fever.” Then, in a rush, as if she felt she had to finish what she’d begun. she said, “Nicholas tried to protect Olivia from everything. He thought if he was there, with her, he could hold off the pain, he could keep her from the darkness that beset her. He tried so hard, you could see it— I could see it, I mean—and I thought, when I heard how he’d died, that he was still afraid for her in death. As if, somehow, he could save her from what came after ...”

Rutledge splashed through the puddles on his way back to the inn, heedless of where he put his feet or the dampness spreading through his socks. Wet feet had been the ever-present hell of the trenches; it had cost more men than Stephen FitzHugh their toes or part of a foot. You learned somehow to shut it out, until the smell told you that the rot had begun.

Hamish was fuming at the back of his mind, telling him something, and he ignored the voice, his mind on Olivia Marlowe.

If she knew where Richard was buried, then she’d killed him. And if she knew, then it was a place that could be found. The boy hadn’t been taken by gypsies or thrown into quicksand, he’d been killed and hidden.

“With pansies—for remembrance—”

Had Olivia meant that figuratively? Or literally?

“It doesna’ matter. What if she meant pansies to put near him, flowers that wilted and were gone in a day? Who would see them, who would guess what she was about?”

The angel then, a frailer angel. Herself? Somewhere that Olivia, with her brace, could reach?

She could ride a pony. That widened the circle. He’d been right to order the constable to search the moors again.