“Someone stripped the lad. That’s what it means. And why strip a corpse? To keep him from being identified.”

“No, they’d know, God help them, who the boy was. It was done for another reason. Not to prevent identification, but to confuse.”

“Confuse! D’ye no’ think that the mother of that child would know his flesh? Clothed or bare, rotting or whole, she’d know!”

“And if they found the clothes but not the boy—”

“She’d know those as well!”

Rutledge sighed. “True. So why strip the boy? Then bury the clothes in an oiled sack or cloth? Making them last as long as possible, rather than letting them rot. You’d think the sooner they rotted the better, as far as the killer was concerned. All right, who stripped the body? If I had the answer to that, I’d know the whole. And why the poem about the pansies? Pansies for remembrance. I don’t think anyone was likely to forget that wretched child!”

Nicholas or Olivia. That was his choice. Break Rachel’s heart—or wound his own by taking away that one small thing Olivia’s poetry had given him, a little space of comfort in a bloody terrible war.

He skimmed a few stones across the incoming tide, watching them skip and dance. Just as his evidence seemed to skip and dance. From one suspect to the other. And yet he knew, as strongly as he knew where he was standing at this instant, that it was not the two of them. Not working together. It had to be one—or the other. And he knew—God help him—he knew which.

Walking back to the wood, he saw the old woman by the trees, standing there staring up at the house, looking for something in its shadows, needing something it could no longer give. Sadie, whose mind wandered but whose brain understood more than she was telling him. He was convinced of that. Or else, it was something she didn’t know that she knew—

She turned to stare at him as he came over the rise of the lawns and turned towards her. He thought at first she was going to leave before he reached her, disappearing so as not to be faced with more seemingly useless questions. But after a twitch of indecision she stayed her ground.

“A fine evening, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to test her mental stability, as always. “Who’s strolling on the lawns today? Which spirits do you see?”

“I see Miss Rosamund weeping. I see the Gabriel hounds sniffing around the chimneys, their big feet pattering on the roof like hailstones. Sniffing, looking, searching. They’ll howl in the night, once they’ve scented prey. I’ll be snug in my own hearth corner when they howl.”