Now, as I knelt beside her, I wanted to feel revenge.
But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
Should I stay beside her? Keep watch over her until the sun came up?
Perhaps I should run to Dr. Darby’s house for help. Or rouse the vicar from the vicarage.
These thoughts were racing through my mind when there was a soft footstep behind me. I leapt to my feet and spun round.
There stood the vicar, his face white as ashes.
“Oh dear,” he was saying. “Oh dear. I feared it would come to this.”
Not What are you doing creeping round the church in the middle of the night? Not Why are you crouching over my beloved wife? Not What have you done to her?
Just “Oh dear. I feared it would come to this.”
Come to what? I wondered.
And when it came to that, what was Cynthia doing creeping round the church in the middle of the night? Could it have been she who—
I couldn’t allow myself to complete that impossible thought.
“I think she fainted,” I said rather stupidly, and I caught myself, incredibly, wringing my hands.
“This is not the first time,” the vicar said, almost as if to himself, shaking his head. “No, I fear it is not the first.”
Not knowing what to do, I stood there like a lug.
“Flavia, dear,” he said at last, kneeling beside Cynthia’s crumpled body. “You must help me get her home.”
The words seemed odd and strained. Why not let her regain consciousness before hauling her back to the vicarage?
It wasn’t as if she were drunk in a public place and needed to be whisked out of sight before the parishioners found her out.
Or was it?
No, it couldn’t be. I hadn’t detected the slightest smell of alcohol, and I prided myself on my ability to sniff out the ketones.
“Of course,” I said.
The vicar lifted his wife as easily as if she were a doll and moved quickly with her down the center aisle toward the door.
I followed him through the churchyard’s cold wet grass to the vicarage, glancing round to see if there were faces peering out from behind the ancient tombstones, but there were not. The intruders had made their getaway.
I dashed ahead up the vicarage steps and held open the door.
“In the study,” the vicar said as I flicked on the dim bulb in the little foyer.
The study, as usual, was a landslide of books. I shifted several stacks of tinder-dry volumes from the horsehair sofa to the floor: the same sofa, I noted, upon which Mad Meg had been stretched out at the time of the Rupert Porson affair.
The vicar arranged my coat as carefully round his wife’s body as if he were tucking a child into bed.
She stirred slightly and gave out a little moan. He touched her face tenderly.
Cynthia’s pale eyes opened and moved uneasily from side to side.
“It’s all right, darling,” the vicar said. “Everything is all right.”
Her eyes found his, and it was then that the miracle happened.
She smiled!
Cynthia Richardson smiled!
I had always thought of the woman as rat-faced, although perhaps I was a little prejudiced. The fixed grin of her protruding teeth, canceled out by a perpetual frown, gave her the look of a terrible-tempered rodent.
Yet Cynthia had smiled!
And to be perfectly fair, I would have to admit that her smile was of the sort that is generally described as radiant.
No Madonna had ever gazed down upon her child with such a tender look; no bride had ever smiled up at her groom with such love as Cynthia Richardson gave to her husband.
It almost brought tears to my eyes.
“Shall I run for Dr. Darby?” I asked. “I can be there and back in a jiff.”
The truth was that I wanted to leave them alone in this moment. I was an intruder.
“No,” the vicar replied. “Rest is what she needs. Look, she’s already asleep.”
And it was true. With part of that wonderful smile lingering at the corners of her mouth, Cynthia had nodded off.
A small snore confirmed it.
“What happened?” the vicar asked, rather tentatively.
“She must have—had a shock.”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Tell me,” he said gently. “We have all night.”
One of the things I love about our vicar, Denwyn Richardson, is the fact that he accepts me as I am. He does not ask idiotic questions.
He does not want to know, for instance, what I was doing at two or three o’clock in the morning, emerging, covered in grave dirt, from the paneling of his church.
He does not want to know why I am not at home, tucked up into my own little bed, dreaming childish dreams.
In short, he treats me as a grown-up.
It is a gift.
To both of us.
Which is why I broke my long-standing rule and not only took responsibility, but also volunteered information.
“I’m afraid it’s my fault,” I said. “I gave her a start. She thought I was someone else.”
The vicar raised a sad eyebrow. He didn’t need to do more.
“She said ‘Hannah,’ ” I told him. “And then she collapsed.”
There was one of those long silences during which, through embarrassment, you’re aching to say something but, for fear of even greater embarrassment, you don’t.
“Hannah,” he said slowly. “Hannah was … our daughter.”
I felt something horribly heavy descend upon me: as heavy as all the universe, and yet invisible.
I said nothing.
“She died when she was four,” the vicar said. “I killed her.”