No, it wasn’t Olivia Marlowe that disturbed him. He, Rutledge, knew very little about Olivia Marlowe. It was O. A. Manning he knew, and the poetry had touched his own spirit in the darkness of war. Standing before God, Rutledge would have sworn that O. A. Manning was not a murderer. Could not have been. And yet, Cormac FitzHugh had no reason to lie, no reason to twist the truth, no reason to know that Rutledge the man, not the police officer, had seen something fragile shatter as he spoke.

As if she’d sensed something of the turmoil in Rutledge’s mind, Rachel touched his arm and stopped. “What is it? What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know,” he told her truthfully. “I think I’ve come to Cornwall on a useless errand.” Better London, and boredom, than this!

“You’ve only been here one day,” she said gravely. “How can you know that? Or did the Yard send you here just to please Henry Ashford, a gesture that was never intended to dig very deeply into these deaths?”

The old proverb—to let sleeping dogs lie—flitted through his mind. Instead, he said to her, out of nowhere, except that they were taking the shorter path to Borcombe, “Who is the old crone I met in the village this morning? She must be eighty, by the look of her. Stooped. But with extraordinarily clear eyes.” And a perverted sense of humor, if he was any judge.

Rachel frowned. “Ah. You must mean Sadie. I’m not really sure what her last name is. She’s been here for so long that she’s just—Sadie. The old rector, Mr. Nelson, who’s gone now, said he thought she’d been a nurse in the Crimea, and it turned her mind. But she has a healer’s touch, it might be true enough. Midwife, confessor, horse doctor, comforter, prescriber of herbs. The villagers may go to her more often than to Dr. Hawkins.”

“Witch?”

She chuckled, a low husky laugh that was at odds with her personality as he’d come to know it. Sensual, almost, and yet full of an appreciation of the ridiculous. “I suppose she’s been called that too! No, if she’s a witch, it’s a white witch, not a black one. I’ve never heard of spells put on anyone or people dying under her care. Well, they die, yes, but of their ailments.”

“No love potions?”