Anne Perry - A Christmas Grace

“I don’t know him at all, Mrs. Radley,” he repeated, but he did not look at her, and the misery in his genial face deepened.

She put her hand on his arm, holding on to him hard, obliging him either to stop, or very deliberately to shake her off, and he was too well mannered to do that. He stopped in front of her.

“What is it, Father Tyndale?” she asked. “It’s the storm and Daniel, and something else. Everybody’s afraid, as if they knew there was going to be a ship go down. What’s wrong with the village? What is it that Susannah really wants me here for? And don’t say it’s family at Christmas. Susannah was estranged from the family. Her love was Hugo Ross, and perhaps this place and these people. This is where she was happiest in her life. She wants me here for something else. What is it?”

His face filled with pity. “I know, my dear, but she is asking more than you can do, more than anyone can.”

She tightened her fingers on his arm. “What, Father? I can’t even try if I don’t know what it is.”

He gave a deep sigh. “Seven years ago there was another storm, like this one. Another ship was lost out in the bay; it too was trying to beat its way around to Galway. That night too, there was just one survivor, a young man called Connor Riordan. He was washed ashore half dead, and we took him in and nursed him. It was this time of the year, a couple of weeks before Christmas.” He blinked hard, as if the wind were in his eyes, except that he had his back to it.

“Yes?” Emily prompted. “What happened to him?”

“The weather was very bad,” Father Tyndale went on, speaking now as if to himself as much as to her. “He was a good-looking young man, not unlike this one. Black hair, dark eyes, something of the dreamer in him. Very quick, he was, interested in everything. And he could sing—oh, he could sing. Sad songs, all on the half note, the half beat. Gave it a kind of haunting sound. He made friends. Everyone liked him—to begin with.”

Emily felt a chill, but she did not interrupt him.

“He asked a lot of questions,” Father Tyndale went on, his voice lower. “Deep questions, that made you think of morality and belief, and just who and what you really were. That’s not always a comfortable thing to do.” He looked up at the sky and the shredded clouds streaming across it. “He disturbed both dreams and demons. Made people face dark things they weren’t ready for.”

“And then he left?” she asked, trying to read the tragedy in his face. “Why? Surely that wasn’t a bad thing? He went back home, then probably out in another ship.”

“No,” Father Tyndale said so quietly the wind all but swallowed his words. “No, he never left.”

She crushed on the fear rising inside her. “What do you mean? He’s still here?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Manner…what kind of manner?” Now that she had asked, she did not want to know. But it was too late.

“Over there.” He lifted his hand. “Out towards the point, his body’s buried. We’ll never forget him. We’ve tried, and we can’t.”

“His family didn’t…didn’t come and take his body?”

“No one knew he was here,” Father Tyndale said simply. “He came from the sea one night when every other soul in his ship was lost. It was winter, and the wind and rain were hard. No one from outside the village came here during those weeks, and we knew nothing of him except his name.”

The cold was enlarging inside her, ugly and painful. “How did he die, Father?”

“He drowned,” he replied, and there was a look on his face as if he were admitting to something so terrible he could not force himself to say it aloud.

There was only one thought in Emily’s mind, but she too would not say it. Connor Riordan had been murdered. The village knew it, and the secret had been poisoning them all these years.

“Who?” she said softly.

He could not have heard her voice above the wind in the grass. He read her lips, and her mind. It was the one thing anyone would ask.

“I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I’m the spiritual father of these people. I’m supposed to love them and keep them, comfort their griefs and heal their wounds, and absolve their sins. And I don’t know!” His voice dropped until it was hoarse, painful to hear. “I’ve asked myself every night since then, how can I have been in the presence of such passion and such darkness, and not know it?”

Emily ached to be able to answer him. She knew the subtle and terrible twists of murder, and how often nothing is what it seems to be. Long ago her own eldest sister had been a victim, and yet when the truth was known, she had felt more pity than rage for the one so tormented that they had killed again and again, driven by an inner pain no one else could touch.

“We don’t,” she said gently, at last letting go of Father Tyndale’s arm. “I knew someone quite well, once, who killed many times. And when in the end everything was plain, I understood.”

“But these are my people!” he protested, his voice trembling. “I hear their confessions. I, above all, know their loves and hates, their fears and their dreams. How can I listen to them, and yet have no idea who has done this? Whatever it was, they could have come to me, they should have known they could!” He spread his hands. “I didn’t save Connor’s life, and infinitely worse than that, I didn’t save the soul of whoever killed him. Or those who are even now protecting him. The whole village is dying because of it, and I am powerless. I don’t have the faith or the strength to help.”

She could think of nothing to say that was not trite and would sound as if she had no understanding of his pain.

He looked down at the sand shifting and blowing about their feet. “And now this new young man has come, like a revisiting of death, as if it were all going to happen again. And I am still useless.”

Emily hurt for him, for all of them. Now she understood what it was that Susannah wanted resolved before she died. Did she think Emily could do it because of the times she and Charlotte had involved themselves in Pitt’s cases? They had found facts, but she had no idea how to detect from the beginning, understand what mattered and what didn’t, and put everything in its right place to tell a story. Always a tragic story.

Hugo Ross had been alive when Connor Riordan had been here. What had he known? Was Susannah afraid that he had been involved somehow, shielding someone from the law because they were his own people? Or was she afraid that they would blame Hugo, once she was gone and could no longer protect his memory?

Emily wanted to help, with a fierceness that consumed and amazed her, but she had no idea how.

Father Tyndale saw it in her face. He shook his head. “You can’t, my dear. I told you that. Don’t blame yourself. I have known these people all of their lives, and I don’t know. You’ve come here just days ago from a foreign land—how could you?”

But that was no comfort to Emily as she unpacked the shopping on the kitchen table for Maggie to put away.

She went into the drawing room, to find Daniel up and dressed in clothes that were far too big for him, but at least were of the right length. They must have been Hugo Ross’s, and one look at Susannah’s face confirmed it to her.

“Thank you for your care, Mrs. Radley,” Daniel said with a smile that gave him a sudden warmth and that kind of acute but gentle intelligence that comes with humor. “I feel fine, except for a good many aches and some bruises a prizefighter would be proud of.” He shrugged. “But I still can’t remember much, except choking and freezing, and thinking I was going to die.”

“What did the other men call you?” Emily asked curiously.