A Pattern of Lies
Page 34
“Tell her it’s a souvenir of an earlier battle.”
I sighed. “There won’t be time to go home. I’ve seen the Colonel Sahib twice, and my mother only once. I’ll ask Mrs. Ashton to write to her and tell her why I never got to London, much less Somerset. And you must explain to my father as well. But leave out the worst of the details.”
“He’ll see them in the Army’s report. Be sure of that.”
“Oh well. There’s nothing we can do, I expect.”
“The war will be over in a few weeks, Bess. At most.” He reached out and briefly put his hand over mine, where they were folded in my lap. “Your mother is counting the days.”
And I knew she wasn’t the only one . . .
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There was in fact a terrible explosion and fire at the Oare Gunpowder Works near Faversham in Kent on 2 April 1916. Accounts vary, but more than a hundred men were killed. It was a tragedy for the people of The Swale both personally and economically, and it had dire consequences for the war effort barely two months before the bloody and fierce fighting at the Battle of the Somme.
We’d heard about this event many times during our visits to Kent. The Oare Gunpowder Works is now a lovely outdoor park where visitors can learn more about what happened and how gunpowder was made. It’s well worth a visit. And there are the real graves of the real victims in Faversham.
Having lived in Delaware, where the Hagley Mills made gunpowder for du Pont and often dealt with sudden death, we were intrigued by what might happen to a small community when it is visited by such a calamity, natural or man-made, and how people cope when the inexplicable changes their world.
A Pattern of Lies is not the story of the Oare Works or its aftermath. Instead it is a look at a fictional village where the livelihood of many people depended on the powder mill, and the loss of life touched almost every household. We have borrowed some of the details from the 1916 event because they fit the story we wanted to tell. That is all we have borrowed. But we are reminded of what someone said in another more modern disaster: When you can’t blame God, what do you do?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES TODD is the author of the Bess Crawford mysteries, the Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries, and two stand-alone novels. A mother and son writing team, they live in Delaware and North Carolina.
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ALSO BY CHARLES TODD
The Ian Rutledge Mysteries
A Test of Wills
Wings of Fire
Search the Dark
Legacy of the Dead
Watchers of Time
A Fearsome Doubt
A Cold Treachery
A Long Shadow
A False Mirror
A Pale Horse
A Matter of Justice
The Red Door
A Lonely Death
The Confession
Proof of Guilt
Hunting Shadows
A Fine Summer’s Day
The Bess Crawford Mysteries
A Duty to the Dead
An Impartial Witness
A Bitter Truth
An Unmarked Grave
A Question of Honor
An Unwilling Accomplice
Other Fiction
The Murder Stone
The Walnut Tree
CREDITS
Jacket design by James Iacobelli
Jacket photographs: © by Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (woman);
© by Malgorzata Maj/Arcangel Images (hat);
© by Debra Lill/Trevillion Images (background)
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A PATTERN OF LIES. Copyright © 2015 by Charles Todd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-238624-3
EPub Edition AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780062386267
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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