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By Root 1201 0

some comment to that effect. He raised his head and looked at me. ‘No, they’re doing well enough just now.’ Then he added simply, ‘God works in mysterious ways. I’ve been given an answer to a question that has troubled me for years. But I can’t make use of it to set things right. It came unexpectedly, and in such a way that my choices are very limited.’ He put his face in his hands and I could see that he was under a great strain. I asked, ‘Would it help to speak to the Bishop?’ and he said, ‘That door is shut, but there may be another that will open.’ And so I went back to the report I was writing, to give him a little space. Half an hour later he was gone, and that was the end of it.”

“But you guessed—did you not—what he was referring to.”

“Not then.”

Rutledge waited.

Monsignor Holston said, “It wasn’t until the funeral Mass for Father James that I first heard the name Baker.”

“During the service?” Rutledge was surprised.

“Actually, a young woman came up to me afterward to say that she didn’t know Father James well, but that she had attended the Mass from a sense of duty. He’d given her father comfort as he lay dying, even though Herbert Baker wasn’t a Catholic. She felt she was returning a kindness, in her own fashion. She was quite shy, stammering out the story, but I thanked her for coming and told her that Father James would have appreciated her thoughtfulness. And it was true. Later on I asked Sims, here, about her. Dr. Stephenson overheard and added that Father James had come in to the surgery to inquire about Baker— whether his mind was clear at the end. His point was that Father James had been a conscientious priest, but I read more into the conversation than Stephenson realized. Because I knew the one other bit of information that mattered.”

“That Herbert Baker had been coachman—and sometimes chauffeur—to Lord Sedgwick’s family,” Rutledge said.

“Everyone in Osterley could have told you that, if you’d asked. No, that it was Herbert Baker who drove Virginia Sedgwick to King’s Lynn, the day she disappeared. At her particular request.”

The Vicar, listening apprehensively, sat back with a sigh. But Monsignor Holston had no more to say.

Rutledge turned to May Trent. She had kept her composure, a woman with hidden strengths, learned from her personal suffering. He chose a different course with her.

“The other door Father James mentioned—it was you. He wanted to know if Mrs. Sedgwick had been on board ship, if you’d actually seen her, spoken with her. If you had, then he no longer had to rely on Baker’s confession, whatever it was, to fill in the details of Mrs. Sedgwick’s disappearance.”

“No, it wasn’t like that! He was trying to help me. To stop the nightmares. He said.” Her voice was odd, a tremor behind it. She seemed on the point of adding more, but stopped.

“And when you refused to remember, the priest went to his solicitor and added a codicil to his Will. Father James left you a photograph of Virginia Sedgwick”—there was a sharp intake of breath from the listening Vicar—“but not the cuttings that he’d collected so painstakingly. He wanted only your own memories, and he wished you the courage to write down what had happened—to you and to her. Why would he have believed so strongly that you—of all the survivors—had met her on shipboard?”

“I didn’t refuse to remember, as you put it. And he didn’t believe any such thing!” She was flushed, her chin high and her eyes bright. “I can’t understand why you keep harping on it. He just felt that the nightmares would stop if I could face them once and for all. And I couldn’t; I wasn’t ready. He never forced me to go back to that night—he was careful. We tried to discuss less frightening experiences, who had the cabins next to mine, the people I sat with at meals, what I wore the first evening out—and I couldn’t even remember that!”

Hamish scolded, “The lass is tired. Let it go.”

Rutledge heard him. He said to May Trent, trying to make amends, “I’m not hounding you—”

“You are!” she said angrily. “You’re worse than Father James ever was. You don’t know what