Charles Todd - Watchers of 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, judging 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…”

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.