Anne Perry's Silent Nights_ Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries - Anne Perry [26]
Runcorn looked sideways at him, plunging forward into the wind and rain, and did not know for certain whether it was tears that wet his cheeks or the weather. They reached the house of one elderly parishioner, and Runcorn waited outside shivering in the lee of the porch until Kelsall returned. They set out walking again.
“Is it true that she refused Mr. Newbridge’s offer of marriage?” Runcorn asked after forty or fifty paces.
Kelsall hunched his shoulders and walked more intently forward. Thunder rumbled around the horizon. “She was a woman of deep feelings,” he said, shaking his head a little and fumbling for the right words. “Visionary. You could never have tied her down to petty things. It would have broken her. He couldn’t see that. He didn’t love her, he liked what he thought she was, and did not look closely enough to see that he was utterly wrong. I don’t think he even … listened.” He looked suddenly at Runcorn. “Why do people marry someone they don’t even listen to? How can they bear to be so lonely?” He was shuddering, waving his hands as he strode. “Of course she refused him. What else could she do?”
Runcorn did not reply. In his mind for a moment he saw the face of the girl in green as she had passed him in church, then he saw Melisande, and the bland, handsome features of Faraday, and he was filled with the same helpless despair that he heard in Kelsall. Had the curate loved Olivia? Would it have been infinitely more than friendship if he could have chosen? Was there a completely different kind of hunger beneath the grief he displayed in his young, vulnerable face?
They walked together without speaking again, and he left Kelsall at his next parishioner’s house.
Making his way back up the incline again to find Warner, he did not change his mind. He still thought Kelsall a friend, but perhaps a closer one, more observant, more of a confidante than he had at first assumed.
The redwings were gone from the field. He hoped they would be back after the rain.
He spent the afternoon with Warner, but the only thing that emerged from their efforts was that Kelsall’s alibi was finally confirmed by the absentminded old gentleman he had been visiting, who had been up late with the croup.
In the late afternoon, just before dusk, there was a sudden lifting of the clouds and the air was filled with the soft, warm light of the low sun, already touching the high ground with a patina of gold. Suddenly the sea was blue and the Menai Strait a shining mirror barely wind-rippled as the icy breath of the sky whispered across it and disappeared.
Runcorn started to walk again, drawn towards the shore. It was cold, but he did not mind. There was a simplicity to it, a perfect melting of solid earth with the living, changing sea, a boundlessness of one into the other.
He turned and craned his neck upwards as he watched gulls soaring inland on the invisible currents, careening sideways and slipping down and then up, looking effortless as they mounted into the light and were lost to view.
It was almost silent, a faint whisper of water behind him. London had never offered him such infinite peace. There was always noise, some kind of clatter of human occupation, an end to vision, to possibility.
He began climbing upwards, away from the shore. Perhaps he was wrong, and he had allowed himself to believe in limits where there were none, except those he made for himself. He thought of the past with a different view, almost as if he were regarding someone else. He saw in himself a man of practical common sense, one whose judgment of character was usually right but without empathy. He lacked a passion, an understanding of dreams. Had he guarded himself from such things, afraid to face his own smallness? He had hated Monk’s anger and his fire,