Flowers were more acceptable in tall vases inside the church. Rutledge could remember as a small boy going with his mother to do the altar flowers when it was her turn. He’d sat on the cold stone floor, running his fingers in the deep crevices of the memorial brasses that held place of honor down the aisle, until he knew the shapes by heart. A knight with plumes and sword and handsome spurs. A lady in a conical hat, the sweep of her long, embroidered robes nearly hiding the little dog near the hem. And an elegantly bearded Elizabethan gentleman with padded breeches and coat, looking more like a portly merchant than the adventurer he had been.

He walked slowly through the gravestones in the churchyard, some of them tilted with age and so mossy he could barely make out the words incised on them. Others he recognized at a glance—Trepol and Trask, Wilkins and Penrith, Dawlish and Trelawny. There were Poldarins and a Hawkins, a half-dozen Raleighs, though none later than the seventeen hundreds, and a pair of Drakes.

But no pansies. He walked on, looking at the delicately drawn Celtic cross on one gravestone, the sad lines of verse on another for a small child drowned in the Bor, an open book with a ribbon marking its stone pages, any numbers of “Beloved wife” and “Beloved husband.” War dead and plague dead, and a very fine stone angel on a plinth with the legend below it, “In Memory of the Men of the Mary Anne, Lost at Sea in a Storm, October 23, 1847. Eternal Father, Keep Their Souls Safe in Thy Care.” And a list of the names, twenty-seven of them.

It was surely Richard’s angel, the cool marble cheeks turned slightly so that the serene eyes stared unwaveringly towards the church tower for all eternity. There was both compassion and strength in the body, power in the wings. He could see why it had made an indelible impression on a small boy who passed the statue each Sunday morning on his way to services.

A voice behind him said, “Lovely, isn’t it? The village took up a subscription to have it carved in London. The Trev-elyans sent an anonymous donation to help make it up to the amount required, in addition to the sum they’d given openly. It was the sort of thing they did.”

It was Smedley, dressed in a dark suit of clothes, not the rough corduroys of the gardener. Over the wet grass his shoes had made no sound.

“I saw you here and wondered if you were searching for a place to lay the sheep bones to rest,” he went on. But there was a sympathetic gleam in his eyes that took away any sting. “I doubt there’s a soul in the village who hasn’t heard.”

“Yes, well, they never seem to know what I want to hear,” Rutledge said irritably. “Only what I’m doing.”