Nicholas, frowning at the camera, was intense, chin up, eyes defiant. But he was smiling in another photograph, with Olivia now—Anne would have been dead several years—and Rosamund, holding a pair of twins in her arms, all but invisible in swathes of christening robes. Susannah and Stephen. But Rosamund still seemed no more than a few months older than the girl she’d been at twenty, with a tilt of her head and a smile in her eyes that any man might respond to. Lovely, vivid with spirit. Olivia, on the other hand, was nearly in her shadow, a slim girl with long hair that curled around her face, Nicholas beside her with his arm protectively around her. Rut-ledge looked again at Olivia. This was the budding poet, this was the woman who had left her mark in words, and yet there was something about her, something in the shadows, that drew him back to her face, wishing it was larger, clearer. Unforgettable, the rector had said. But what?

A man with Cormac on one side, and the twins, now walking, at his boots, holding on to his legs and grinning shyly at the camera. Brian FitzHugh, his elder son, and his children by Rosamund. Brian wasn’t handsome, and yet he had an attractiveness that came from his smile. Cormac, on the other hand, was remarkably handsome already, a slim boy with grace in the set of his shoulders, and strength in his eyes. Who knew himself, and felt no doubts about where he might be going. The twins were as fair and pretty as cherubs, with Rosamund’s beauty and only a faint shadow of their father, more in their sturdy build than in their features. Her liveliness in their faces.

The last two were of men. An older, bearded man, straight and broad-shouldered, beside a younger man in uniform. Captain Marlowe, Rosamund’s first husband, with her father, Adrian Trevelyan. Trevelyan wasn’t smiling, as most of his generation seldom smiled for the camera, but Marlowe had been laughing when this photograph was taken, catching him with its reflection in his eyes, and giving remarkable spirit to his face. Rutledge could understand why Rosamund had fallen in love with him. They must have been a handsome pair. The other man, tall, standing alone beside a horse, was James Cheney, Nicholas’ father, and Rutledge didn’t have to glance at the back of the photograph to identify him. His son was his image, darkly attractive and yet a quiet, introspective man.

Rutledge looked at the collection again, and thought of the faces. All dead now but two. Cormac and Susannah. One who belonged, and one who didn’t.