“A question I’ve asked myself over and over again. Cor-mac was the only man she saw much of who wasn’t a part of the family. I know, Stephen claimed that she’d taken her fondness for him and extended it to the experience between a man and a woman. It may be true—she was capable of that leap of understanding, if anyone was. And Stephen was the kind of child—the kind of man—who endeared himself to everyone. I’ve forgiven him sins that I’d have turned another lad over my knee for committing. Told myself he was fatherless, and young, and meant no harm. But I loved the boy as I’d have loved my own son, for the goodness in him, and the light. He was very like Rosamund, and I know my own weakness in that direction too.” He frowned. “Perhaps that’s what Olivia saw in him. Rosamund.”

He sat in silence, drinking from his cup, and letting the sounds of the house creak and breathe and whisper around them. Comforting sounds. Then he said, “And the last collection, the Lucifer poems? Have you read those?”

“Not yet.” He’d been in hospital when they came out last year.

“It’s a very interesting study of the face of evil. Olivia understood that, just as well as she understood love and war and the warmth of life. As a priest I found it ... disturbing. That she should know the dark side of man so much better than I. That she should believe that God tolerated evil because it has its place in His scheme. That there are some who are not capable of goodness in any sense. The lost, the damned, the sons of Satan, whatever you choose to call them, exist among us, and cannot be saved because they don’t have the capacity for recognizing the purpose of good. As if it had been left out of the clay from which they were formed.”

Rutledge thought about a number of the cases he’d worked on before the war. And some of the acts of sheer wanton viciousness that he’d witnessed in France. He believed in evil, and in the capacity of man to be evil. In a sense, evil paid his wages. He wasn’t as sure as Smedley was that everyone had a capacity for good.

Smedley drained his cup. “I’d not like to think that Olivia Marlowe knew such a being as she describes. Actually knew him. I’d not like to think that I’d met him, on the streets of Borcombe or along the farm lanes or in one of the towns on market day. I would have trouble with that.”