Watchers of Time

by Charles Todd

  But even as he tried to make light of Bryony’s forceful plea and Monsignor Holston’s fears, Rutledge couldn’t escape the fact that their intensity had touched him.

  Hamish said, “Aye, but it will pass, with the mood.”

  Which was probably true. The thing was, Bryony had made it very hard for him to walk away.

  Instead, he put the motorcar in gear and turned the bonnet north instead of south toward London, driving on to Osterley.

  As a schoolboy, learning to draw the map of Great Britain, Rutledge had been taught that the island resembled a man in a top hat riding a running pig. The top hat was the northern part of Scotland—the Highlands. The man’s head and body were the Lowlands and the Midlands of England. The pig’s head was Wales, its front feet the Cornish peninsula, its hind feet the downs of Kent. And its rump was East Anglia, the great bulge of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk jutting out into the North Sea toward the Low Countries.

  It was a picture he and his schoolmates had found diverting, endlessly practicing their drawing of the pig and its rider, unaware that the effort sealed forever in their minds the geography of their country.

  Now, as he covered the miles between Norwich and Osterley, Rutledge watched the raindrops collect on his windscreen and resisted Hamish’s efforts to draw him into a debate over the interview with Monsignor Holston. He didn’t want to delve into the priest’s motivations or Bryony’s. The earlier mood (as Hamish had predicted) was wearing off, and in its place was a rising doubt about his own judgment. He hadn’t been cleared for a return to full duty—and his instructions had been to travel to Norwich. Nothing had been said about continuing north.

  Old Bowels would have his liver if he upset the local man on a whim and brought the wrath of the Chief Constable down on both their heads. On the other hand, Rutledge could say with some certainty that he had made precious little progress in “reassuring” the Bishop’s representative. The Monsignor wouldn’t have settled for less than a full-blown investigation by the Yard, given any choice in the matter. If a visit to Osterley was what it took to satisfy him of the Yard’s faith in Inspector Blevins, there would be no official objections to that.

  But Hamish wouldn’t be put off. “It’s no’ the body that’s standing in your way! Ye havena’ put Scotland out of your mind. Ye werena’ ready to return to work because you werena’ ready to face living!”

  “The bandages are off,” Rutledge answered flatly. “By the time I’m back in London, the police surgeon will be satisfied that the medical leave can be rescinded.”

  “Aye, but watching yon fine doctor cut away bits of bandage is no’ the same as coming to grips with yoursel’.”

  “I’ll deal with Scotland. When I’m back in London.”

  “Oh, aye? Then tell me why we’re driving north again?”

  It was a pretty route, leaving Norwich to follow country lanes through gently rolling hills. Many of them hid small flint or brick villages in pocket-size valleys. And the still-green meadows on the rounded hillsides were sheltered by a line of trees, where fluffy clusters of Norfolk sheep dotted the landscape, their fleece thickening for the winter. So unlike France, with its broken walls and stark chimneys lining the roads from the Front. He could almost pretend that it was 1914, and nothing had changed. But of course it had. There was never any going back.

  To Hamish this was “soft country”—peaceful and prosperous, where a living came more easily than in the harsh, often barren landscapes of the Highlands. That very harshness, in Hamish’s opinion, had made the Scots formidable fighting men.

  Norfolk had produced fine soldiers, too, Rutledge reminded him. But as far as Hamish was concerned, training and blood were two very different factors in the making of an army. One could be taught—the other was in the very bone.

  Even in the trenches Hamish had been fond of citing examples—some of them ranging back to the twelfth century—of Scottish prowess in battle. It was, Rutledge thought, a way of life that had seldom brought prosperity or contentment to the Highlands, but in pride and fierce spirit, it had bred a full measure of courage.

  The miles rolled away behind them, and then the road Rutledge was driving wound through a cut in a hill and unexpectedly came to an end facing a broad expanse of marshes, as flat as they were striking and bronzed now with the coming winter’s palette of red-brown and yellow and old gold. He paused at the junction to stare out across them, thinking to himself that for such a small country, England had its share of beauty.

  Here the road went either right toward Cley or left toward Hunstanton, running along the landward edges of the marsh as far as the eye could see. Rutledge turned left, feeling the wind coming in from the northwest, bearing with it the cries of gulls out along the ridge of dunes by the sea. Rounding a curve a few miles farther on, Rutledge found himself in the outskirts of a small, sprawling village, lying under a sky that looked like a great gray bowl, holding in the light from the unseen water beyond the marshes to his right.

  This wasn’t the famous “Constable sky,” those broad horizons that the artist had made his signature: vast banks of clouds filled with delicate color that somehow emphasized the simplicity of the ordinary lives he chose to paint. Farm lads fishing or tired horses drawing a haywain across a tree-shaded stream, each caught in his workaday world—rustic beauty unaware of the grandeur overhead.

  Here the sky was self-effacing canopy, accepting its more prosaic role of joining sea and land even when the sea was nowhere to be seen. But it was out there, beyond the marshes that had taken root on the salty, wet silt it had left behind. This part of Norfolk had fought long battles with the forces of wind and water, which had often changed the shape of the coastline. A village might lie on the shore this century and find itself miles away from the sea in the next.

  The first scattering of houses led him next into the village of Osterley. To his left a great flint church stood high on a grassy knoll, well above the main road and looking down across it to the houses that marked the waterfront. A church, Rutledge thought, that must have been built by the wool trade and heavy coastal shipping. There were a goodly number of these cathedrals in miniature in Norfolk, which had seen a flourishing economy in its day. If he remembered his history correctly, Osterley had been one of the great ports in the Middle Ages, and some of those riches had gone into the clerestory and the strong soaring towers, creating a sense of light and power at the same time.

  Rutledge turned up the lane leading to the church, driving up the hill for a better look. A sign posted by the churchyard gate told him that this was Holy Trinity.

  Someone—a woman—walked out the church door, a notebook in her hand, and shielding her eyes, looked up at the clerestory. The way the wind played with her skirts and the long coat she wore, Rutledge got the impression that she was slim, fairly young, and attractive. It was there in the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head, though her hand and arm hid her features.

  “There must be a fine view from yon tower,” Hamish said. “It’s verra’ high.”

  “A landmark from the sea as well, I should think.” The town of Boston in Lincolnshire had used its church tower as a beacon for centuries.

  The woman walked back into the church. Frances, Rutledge thought, would have approved of the hat she was wearing. Dark red, with silver and blue feathers on one side that gave it a stylish air. He was tempted to get out and pay a visit to the church, to see her better. Just then a man came up the hill from the village, not by the road but through the churchyard, and went inside. A workman from the look of him, wearing a smock and heavy shoes. She’d been waiting for him, perhaps.

  He turned his attention back to the terrain.

  Ahead of the motorcar’s bonnet, the lane disappeared into a small copse. He thought there must be five or six houses scattered beyond it, but decided not to trust his axles to that twisting, rutted stretch of muddy road. He could just see a few chimneys rising above gabled roofs, and at the far end, what might have been a barn, ju
dging from its bulky silhouette.

  Across the lane from the church stood the vicarage, half hidden behind a flint wall, its drive disappearing into old trees that gave some hint of its age.

  He turned the motorcar and went back down the lane to the main road. Just on the corner of a street to the right—Water Street, the sign informed him—stood the police station.

  Rutledge pulled up in front of it, and got out to pay his courtesy call on Inspector Blevins. But there was a notice posted on the door, dated this morning: Gone to Swaffham. In the event of an emergency, contact East Sherham police station. A number was given.

  He opened the door and looked inside. The front room was silent, uninviting as a place to wait.

  “Aye, and for how long?” Hamish asked querulously. Rutledge closed the door again.

  Starting the motorcar, he decided his time would be better spent exploring the village and calling on Mrs. Wainer. That could be viewed as an extension of his original brief—putting Bishop Cunningham’s mind at rest—rather than an infringement of the local man’s investigation.

  Water Street clearly went down to the quay. It ran along there for some distance before turning back to the main road, as if disappointed by what it had found at the harbor. But he passed that turning and stayed on the main road, interested in the size and general layout of Osterley. It appeared to be prosperous enough, no ugly areas of run-down housing or noticeable poverty, but without signs either of money to waste on ostentation.

  There were some half a dozen streets running inland to his left, short streets for the most part, although he thought that Sherham Street went on to the next village, for it appeared to vanish over the hill into farming land. Two streets turned to his right, Old Point Road and Marsh Lane. Down Old Point Road he saw the second church in the village, and decided that it must be St. Anne’s.

  And then as suddenly as he’d come upon Osterley, he was out of it.

  A muddy farmyard on the right, a house half glimpsed on a rise to his left, and the main road west dropped sharply down a hill and ran along the marshes that spread to his right as far as the horizon.

  Even Hamish was struck by the splendor of the view, and Rutledge turned into a small stony cul-de-sac to look out at the scene. Grasses and marshes covered the land like a rough brown-gold blanket, and a few stunted trees bowed before the wind, on the point of giving up against its force. The grasses moved as if with a will of their own as the wind ran capriciously through them. Here ducks and geese and sea birds owned the silence. A thin line of white at the very fringes of the marshes marked the sea. It was wildly beau iful, and Rutledge thought, Here is something man hasn’t destroyed.

  Hamish said, “Aye, but give him time!”

  A small falcon rose from the thick grass to fly some twenty yards, then hover with beating wings above its unsuspecting prey. Rutledge watched it swoop, and then take off again with a dark smudge hanging from one claw. A mouse?

  The stillness was broken only by the wind sweeping in from the sea, and he thought he had caught the sound of waves rolling in, a deep roar that was felt as much as it was heard, like a heartbeat. The sense of peace was heavy, and the sense of isolation.

  A formation of geese, out over the surf, flew like a black arrow toward Osterley.

  Following them with his eyes, Rutledge remembered the lines of poetry from which the words had come. They ran through his mind almost without conscious thought: “Across the moon the geese flew, pointing my way, / A black arrow on the wing. / But I was afoot and slow, / And stumbled in the dark. By moonset, I was left, / Alone and sad, still far from the sea . . .”

  O. A. Manning had been writing about a man’s desperate struggle against despair.

  Here in the marshes, watching the wedge of geese, it seemed to be possible to reach the sea after all. . . . He felt his spirits lift.

  “Unless,” Hamish told him harshly, “it’s only an illusion. . . .”

  CHAPTER 5

  IGNORING HAMISH, RUTLEDGE SPENT ANOTHER FIVE or ten minutes there, his eyes scanning the marshes. But now it seemed devoid of life, the spell it had cast broken.

  He got out to crank the motor. Under his feet was a bed of stones, white round pebbles that, when split, showed their opaque, flinty core. Many of the towns along the North Sea had been built of such stone, hard and durable at the center.

  As the motor came to life and he turned to walk back to the driver’s side, he found himself thinking about Bryony again. The housekeeper had told him that the police had got nowhere. Why had no one in Osterley come forward with information about the priest’s death? It was a crime that any community should instantly condemn, the kind of sudden death that drove people to lock their doors at night and look askance at their neighbors and remember small events that might be pieced carefully together until the puzzle was solved.

  “I saw a man . . .”

  “I overheard such and such while waiting to pay my account at the greengrocer’s . . .”

  “Father James told me one day after Mass . . .”

  A village thrived on prying. Privacy was an illusion protected by silence.

  Rutledge turned the car once more and went back the way he’d come.

  The answer to his question seemed to be that they had no information to give, the residents of Osterley. Or they had closed ranks around the murderer of the priest.

  “But that’s no’ likely,” Hamish pointed out.

  “Or does it explain why the Bishop called in Scotland Yard?”

  Reaching Old Point Road again, Rutledge turned in. The second church was smaller than Holy Trinity, its steeple a slim finger pointing into the gray sky. Built of flint and weathered by the sea winds, it offered a plain face to the world, but seemed to be timeless, after a fashion. A survivor. A black board with gold letters informed him that this was indeed St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church. The churchyard lay behind it, a low stone wall enclosing the gravestones that over time were slowly encroaching on the building. Another hundred years, Rutledge thought, and the stones would reach the apse.

  Next to the church was the brick rectory, small and Victorian, but with such a flair for extravagance it might have alighted here one night in a storm and decided to stay. An exotic bird faring well in this northern climate far from its native land. Hardly a setting for bloody murder.

  He stopped the motorcar in the yard of the rectory and was on the point of getting out to knock on the door when a woman pushing a pram along the road called to him, “Mrs. Wainer has gone to do her marketing in the town. But I should think she’ll be back in an hour at most.”

  Rutledge thanked her. He turned for a third time, and decided to make his way back to the waterfront. He might even find his lunch there. It had been some time since he’d breakfasted in Norwich.

  Osterley was built of local flint with brick facings at windows and doors, the lumpy pebbles seeming to cling to the walls like hungry leeches. And yet there was a quality to the construction that spoke of sturdiness and endurance, and a certain seaworthiness, as if prepared for the onslaught of storms.

  He found the street that turned off to the harbor, and it swept him around an unprepossessing bend where houses clung to the edge of the road on either side, then down to the narrow quay, to run along it for some distance before Water Street turned back toward the main road. It was a busy part of the town, people coming and going, carriages and carts standing in front of shop doors, horses with their heads down dozing where they waited. But Rutledge’s attention was drawn to the harbor as he drove slowly through the congestion.

  Where there had once been the blue wash of water, banks of silt met his eye instead. These grassy hummocks rolled like earthen waves out to the North Sea’s edge, and the muddy earth below the stone quay gleamed wetly under the gray sky, a small ghost of its medieval magnificence. A handsome port, suitable for coastal trading, where fishing boats had brought in heavy nets filled with plaice and cod and mackerel, had become a narrow ribbon of water that wan
dered halfheartedly into view, touched the quay at high tide, and then wandered away again. Two or three small boats had been drawn up behind a line of sheds at the far end of the quay and left to rot. Another pair sat in the black mud, waiting to be pushed into the main stream of the ribbon.

  He lifted his gaze to the great arm of sand dunes, covered with shore plants and grasses, which was flung out beyond the marshes on his right, ridged with color—rust and waning green and dull gold. It had once sheltered Osterley from storms, making it a safe haven. But it must also have allowed the sand to find a haven as well, until the water had been lost amid the pits and shallows rising faster than it did. A haunt of waterfowl now, but through the breaks in the ridges one could still glimpse the sea, tantalizing and perhaps close enough to hear when the wind fell off. There must be a fine strand still, out where the headland rose to his left, the kind of place that would have attracted fishermen and bathers had there been easier access.

  Small houses, shops, and a single hotel had taken over the waterfront now. Cheek by jowl, they presented a blank face to the sea: few windows and most of the doorways shielded by narrow, rectangular entries that kept out the wind and provided some protection in storms. These were a signature of many seaside towns accustomed to rough weather.

  Neither rich nor poor, and mostly unchanged over the past century or more, Osterley offered a middle-class solidity that was the backbone of England, attitudes still firmly fixed in Victorian morality and the responsibility of Empire. Clinging to the edge of the land, the town was no longer a part of the sea.

  His was the only motorcar on the street today, although he saw three more standing at angles in the walled yard beside the only hotel.

  A fat gray goose, wild, not domestic, picked at the black mud beyond the quay, and its mate stood watch, neck straight and eyes bright. Early winter arrivals. Beyond the town to the right of the harbor the marshes spread east for miles. Rutledge found a small space in which to shift into neutral and look out across them. They held a fascination for him, always had, but he had forgotten their odd beauty.