No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [58]
He walked home again when the rain had stopped. The elms were still dripping, and the road steamed in glittering drifts like silken gauze, too faint to catch, and yet weaving brightness around him. The perfume of the earth was almost overpowering. Wet leaves and flowers shone as the sunlight caught them.
Birdsong was sudden and liquid, a beauty of sound, and then gone again.
As he passed the church he saw a man move very quickly into the shadow of the lych-gate, the thick honeysuckle completely hiding him. When Matthew drew level and looked sideways, he was gone. He was certain from his height and the oddly sloping angle of his shoulders that it was the same man he had seen earlier on his way to Isenham’s house. Was he going somewhere and had taken shelter from the rain? Without having any reason he could name, Matthew went under the lych-gate and into the churchyard.
There was no one there. He walked a few paces between the gravestones and looked toward the only place where anyone could be concealed. The man had not gone into the church; the door had been in Matthew’s sight all the time.
He walked two or three yards farther on, then to the right, and saw the outline of the man half concealed by the trunks of the yew trees. He was standing motionless. There was nothing ahead of him but the churchyard wall, and he was looking not down, as if at headstones, but out across the empty fields.
Matthew bent his head as if reading the gravestone in front of him. He remained motionless for several moments. The man behind the yew tree did not move, either.
Finally Matthew walked over to his parents’ grave. There were fresh flowers. Judith must have put them there. There was no stone yet. It looked very raw, very new. This morning two weeks ago they had still been alive.
The world looked just the same, but it wasn’t. Everything was altered, as a golden day when suddenly the clouds mass across the sun. All the outlines are the same, but the colors are different, duller, something of the life gone from them.
The caltrop marks on the road had been real, the rope on the sapling, the shredded tires, the searching of the house, and now this man who seemed to be following him.
Or was this exactly what his father had done, added together little pieces that had no connection with each other, and made of them a whole that reflected no reality? Maybe the marks were not caltrops but something else, put there not at the time of the crash but some other time that day. Perhaps an agricultural implement of some sort had stopped and left scars from the blades of a harrow?
Had there really been anyone in the house, or was it just things rearranged wrongly in the shock of tragedy, a reversal of habit, along with everything else?
And what was to prove the man behind the yews had anything to do with Matthew? He might not want to be seen for a dozen reasons: something as simple as an illicit Sunday afternoon assignation, or a grave to visit privately, to conceal his emotion. Was this how delusion started? A shock, too much time to think, a need to feel as if you understood, so you find yourself weaving everything together, regardless of wherever it fits?
For a moment he considered speaking to the man, a comment on the rain, perhaps, then decided not to intrude on his contemplation. Instead he straightened up and walked back through the lych-gate and out into the lane without looking toward the yews again.
CHAPTER
SIX
Afew miles away in Cambridge the Sunday was also quiet and miserable. Thunder threatened all morning, and by the afternoon it rolled in from the west with heavy rain. Joseph spent most of the day alone. Like everyone else, he went to chapel at eleven, and for an hour he drowned all thought in the glory of the music. He ate luncheon in the dining hall; in spite of its magnificence, it was claustrophobic because of the heat and the oppressive weather outside. With an effort he joined in casual conversation with Harry Beecher regarding