She sat there, torn. He could read it in the tightening of her shoulders. Wanting him to go, wanting him to stay and prove that Nicholas had in fact loved her, though those weren’t the words she used even to herself. That his death had nothing to do with what he felt for her. It mattered. In a fashion that went deeper than conscious thought.

“I need to see that day through the eyes of someone who was there.”

“Ask Cormac!”

Before, she’d told him that she hadn’t thought Cormac was there ...

“But Cormac was an outsider. You weren’t. Cormac was the Irish latecomer, there on sufferance because his father had come with Rosamund’s horses. He hadn’t played all his life with the family, lived in the nursery with the other children, heard them quarrel and laugh and make up games. He hadn’t been part of their growing up, the way you’d been. He saw them as a stranger sees, superficially, the outward facade instead of the inner feelings.”

His voice was persuasive, his body very still in the shadows of the room, just out of her line of sight, the warmth of the sun’s slanting rays taking away any sense of danger or fear, the quiet absolute, except for the sound of her breathing. And the voice of Hamish, which she couldn’t hear.

He’d seen the doctors at the clinic use these same techniques. He’d seen them break through silences that were so deep even the men locked in them couldn’t find the key to them. Persuaded by quiet and serenity, and their own sense of need, such men would suddenly speak of events that would send them screaming into horror—and then complete breakdown—and finally, with luck, survival.

It hadn’t worked for him. Only drugs had broken down the walls he’d built so high and strong.

Hamish, realizing what he was up to now, roused and thundered at him not to take risks with this woman’s mind. “Ye’re no’ a doctor, you could do grave damage without knowing it!” But Rutledge couldn’t see any other way to learn the truth, and forced the voice in his own mind into rumbling, sullen stillness.

“I don’t know what there is to tell,” Rachel said. “It was an accident.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of, have you? Except for grief and the memory of someone you loved long ago.”

“I don’t know that I loved Anne—-” She stopped.

“Why not? She was your cousin.”

“She was bossy. Sometimes she made me feel very young, or very stupid. Awkward, somehow. When we played games, I was always the one who had to lose, and then she’d tease me about it.”

The cruelty of children. He could hear Smedley’s voice saying that.