Rutledge set out, following the woman’s directions, along the narrow, hilly road he’d traveled the night before. Finding the fork between curving fields of late hay, he walked on past a cottage or two and small patches of farmed land, and beside a long sweep of rough pasture. Within half an hour, he had reached the gates, dark with age and damp, leading through tall, wet stands of rhododendron backed by taller trees, into what seemed to be a sea of mist. But as he followed the rutted drive curling uphill, he came out into sunlight and brightness. And there at the end of a graceful sweep of lawn stood a house set in formal gardens, protected by the slope of the headland beyond.

It was an old house, the architectural history of four centuries locked in its embrace. Rutledge could trace a Tudor core, with Restoration, Georgian, and Victorian additions, but there was also an older, battlemented gateway near the stables that came from a dimmer past. The great palaces of the English nobility, Blenheim and Hatfield, Longleat and Chat-sworth, spoke of power and money. This house whispered of longevity and old bloodlines. Of timelessness and pride and peace.

He stood there, looking across at it, imagining its past, and searching for a key to its owners. What he felt was . . . sadness? No, that wasn’t it, it was a stronger emotion, something about the place that tugged at him.

Hamish, on the other hand, didn’t find it to his liking. “There’s too many dead here,” he said uneasily. “And they don’t lie quietly in their graves!”

Rutledge chuckled. “I’d haunt the estate too, if it’d been mine. I wouldn’t go peacefully to the churchyard in the town. Not with that view.”

For beyond the headland he could see the sea, already in the clear and gleaming in the morning light, whitecaps dancing in the sun. There seemed to be a small strand where the land ran down to the sea. Then, turning to his right, he could see the distant roofs of Borcombe.

Damned if the old crone hadn’t sent him the longest way around! You could walk from the last house he could see in the village into a copse of trees, and out of them into Tre-velyan land, in what? Ten minutes? Say, fifteen all the way to the house.

He unlocked the door with the key that Dawlish had given him and stepped into the wide front hall, where the curving staircase swept down from a gallery above. The hall itself was old, with a massive stone hearth at one side, and great oak beams that were black with age and smoke encompassing the hall and the long gallery that ran at the top of the stairs.