Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [59]
He opened the door to the kitchen for her, and said good night.
CHAPTER 10
STILL MULLING OVER HIS CONVERSATION WITH Priscilla Connaught, Rutledge went out the hotel door into the evening air. The wind had picked up off the sea, cold as night, and he shivered. Turning toward The Pelican Inn, he made his way up Water Street to the main road, stopping for a time to look up at Holy Trinity. The church had beautiful proportions in this light, standing stark against the sky and framed by trees that marched south of it. Whoever had built it had had an eye for setting as well as architecture. Castles usually went up on the highest point in a district, but here it was the church. It must have been built after the Black Plague and the worst of the Wars of the Roses, because there were no defensive aspects in the design. Gracefulness was its hallmark, and the long windows, the high clerestory, the rise of the roof gave the tall tower at the west front and the round beacon tower at the chancel an elegance of their own.
Among the trees in the churchyard, Rutledge’s night-accustomed eyes picked out a solitary figure, head bent, standing among the gravestones. Then the figure straightened to stare up at the night sky above the towers. A mourner? Or another lonely soul with no home he wanted to go to?
“Like you?” Hamish asked softly.
Turning, Rutledge walked along the main road, passing the darkened windows of Dr. Stephenson’s surgery, the brightly lit ones of the police station, and what appeared to be a small country solicitor’s office tucked—with a prosperous air—into the corner where Water Street and the Hunstanton Road met.
His mind kept returning to the different view of Father James that Priscilla Connaught had presented to him, and before he could sleep, he wanted to think it through. Right or wrong, she herself believed it implicitly. Until half an hour ago, he’d believed that everyone had mourned Father James, the man and the priest, in equal measure.
“Relegating the dead to sainthood,” Hamish pointed out, “is no’ uncommon. No one wants to speak ill of the recent dead.”
Unlike Mark Antony’s wily promise over Caesar’s bloody corpse, Miss Connaught had come to bury Father James in every sense of the word, not to praise him. Which gave the priest human dimensions rather than saintly ones.
“It might have made him a better priest, knowing he’d failed one person,” Rutledge argued.
“Aye, it’s true. Ye canna’ tell without knowing how he’d failed the woman.”
But that had been left unspoken. Had Father James failed Miss Connaught personally—choosing the priesthood over marriage—or had he given her advice that a young man devoting his life to the Church might have seen as the only answer, although not necessarily the most compassionate one?
And in spite of her agitation, Rutledge was prepared to believe Priscilla Connaught when she swore she hadn’t killed the priest. Haunting him had clearly given her far more personal satisfaction than murder ever could. The reserved woman that Mrs. Barnett had described had been completely distraught.
“Unless Father James had learned to come to grips with it,” Hamish pointed out. “It wouldna’ satisfy her, then.”
Still, this second face of the man was intriguing.
Turning down the other leg of Water Street, Rutledge could see the bowl of sky out beyond the water, dark now but filled with stars, their clarity almost breathtaking. As he reached the quay, he stopped and stood there feeling the distant whisper of the waves, although he wasn’t sure he actually heard them. There was a line of luminescence out there as well, as if far beyond his earthbound line of sight, the moon was already rising.
Something prickled along his spine, a warning, and he glanced to his right to discover that he wasn’t alone here on the quay. A woman had walked out of the hotel and was standing some twenty yards away. Lost in her own thoughts, she hadn’t seen him. Holding her coat about her more as comfort than as a wrap against the wind’s chill, she was staring down at the stream that flowed