Under the Yew

The Thousand-Year Yew

The greenhouse light was off, which was how Dilys Ashcroft knew, two years on, that she had finally learned to sleep in the dark again — though she still woke reaching, out of habit, for a side of the bed a lurcher had long since claimed as his own.

The habit met the fact and gave up the argument. Wellington lay across her feet like something felled, all elbows and dignity, breathing the slow theatrical sighs of a dog who has arranged the entire night to his satisfaction and expects it to be admired. She flexed her toes underneath him. He resettled with an air of grievance and did not move an inch, which was the whole of the negotiation and had been for two years.

Beyond the curtains the light was already the colour of straw. Late August had gone on too long — the way summers did now, holding their heat past all decency, the grass burnt to biscuit and the water-butts down to green sludge — and by half past six the room was warm and would be hot by nine. Dilys lay a moment and let the day assemble itself. Miriam, coming at eight to the greenhouse, to prick out the winter stocks and to tell her, at length and with feeling, exactly what the Quennells had said about the walled-garden budget. The restoration meeting at Hemlock Manor at noon, over which Estelle Quennell would preside in her mother-in-law's chair with a face like a locked door. And the churchyard — she wanted, some time before the meeting, to look in on the churchyard, though she could not have said precisely why, except that the whole village seemed to be down there this fortnight and it was pleasant to be among people who knew the Latin for nothing and dug anyway.

There had been a summer — not so very long ago, though it felt like another woman's — when Dilys had left the greenhouse light burning all night, every night, because Hugh had died in the winter and the small electric warmth of the propagating bench was the last thing of his still running, and she could not bring herself to switch off a thing that was keeping something alive. She had told no one. Miriam had guessed, in the end, the way Miriam guessed everything, and had said nothing either, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for her that whole terrible year.

The light was off now. She had turned it off herself, in the spring, on an ordinary evening, and had stood in the dark garden waiting to feel the loss of it and had felt instead only the cool grass through her slippers and, very faintly, relief. That was the measure of it. She was, against every intention she had formed and stated and defended, alive again — booked and busy and needed, a woman with a diary and a dog and a garden full of other people's opinions — and she was, this hot still morning, quietly and unaccountably afraid.

The reason for the fear stood propped against the clock on the mantel, downstairs, where she had put it four days ago so that she should not have to look at it, and where she looked at it a dozen times a day.

It was a letter, in a hand she knew — a cramped, impatient, deeply legible hand, the hand of a man who had spent forty years writing post-mortem findings in words that would stand up in a coroner's court. Ambrose Cardew wrote as he spoke, which was drily, and with a small barb folded into the third sentence where you would not see it coming. She had read the letter once. It was not, on its face, a letter that required an answer. It was about a monograph on aconite poisonings he thought she would enjoy, and about the disgraceful state of the Kingsbourne magistrates, and about a concert he was not going to, and it ended — this was the barb, this was the thing she had put behind the clock — I find I have got into the habit of your company, Dilys, which at our age is either very foolish or the only sensible thing left. A. C.

She had not answered it. She was sixty-five years old and she had not answered a perfectly civil letter for four days, because the plain truth, which she conducted a great many small daily campaigns to avoid, was that she had got into the habit of his company too; that she found herself, at odd hours, wanting to tell him things, saving them up, hoarding the good ones for the dry pleasure of watching him fail to smile; that when the telephone rang she hoped, before she caught herself, that it would be his voice. And to want that felt — there was no other word for it, and she despised the word even as it arrived — like a betrayal. As though to reach for a living hand were to let go, at last and for good, of one that had gone cold under hers in a hospital bed and never let go of her since.

"Ridiculous," she told the ceiling, and Wellington, taking it personally, groaned and got up, and the day began whether she was ready or not.

---

She walked down into the village at half past ten, when Miriam had gone off to badger the Quennells' gardener and the winter stocks were pricked out and watered, with Wellington ranging ahead on the loose principle that he might, at any moment, be required to save her from a squirrel.

Little Hemlock had gone quietly mad, as it did every August, in the particular way of a place preparing for its scarecrow festival. There was a straw man in nearly every gate. Some were slumped and half-hearted, a coat on crossed poles and a turnip head; some were works of real and slightly disturbing art. The Pethericks had a farmer's wife with a cake tin and staring button eyes. Outside the school a whole row of them leaned shoulder to shoulder, dressed in what Dilys recognised, with a small internal lurch, as the good tweed of men now dead — for the WI's rule was that a festival scarecrow must be dressed from the jumble, and the jumble, in a village this size, was chiefly the wardrobes of the departed. So the lanes stood full of men made of straw, wearing the clothes of the dead, smiling their painted smiles at the birds; and it was, as it was every year, both very charming and not quite nice, and no one ever said so.

At the bottom of Church Lane the charm ran out.

The Glebe Field and the water-meadow beyond it lay behind a double line of orange plastic barrier and blue-and-white tape gone grey with weeks of weather, the tape ticking softly where the breeze caught it, the grass inside grown long and seeding around the little grid of pegged strings and the blue tarpaulins weighted with tyres. It had all been frozen there since midsummer, when the developer's first trial trench had brought up bones — old bones, human, more than one — and the whole shining future of Thornfield Homes' forty executive dwellings had stopped dead in the ground like a spade on rock. Now the archaeologists came and went in their own slow season, and the parish tore itself in half over what the bones meant and whose they were and whether the dead of nine hundred years ago had any business standing between Little Hemlock and a very great deal of money.

Across the green the Green Man had nailed its colours to the mast, quite literally: a hand-painted banner, SAVE OUR MEADOWS, sagged between the two upstairs windows, and Sadie Bunce's blackboard promised a meeting of the action committee on Thursday and a quiz on Friday, in that order of importance. Sadie herself was out sweeping the step, and lifted the broom in salute, and Dilys lifted a hand back, and neither of them stopped, because everything that needed saying about Thornfield Homes had been said forty times over and would be said forty more.

She turned in at the lych-gate.

St. Anselm's had been many things to Dilys over the years — a cool place to sit in July, a source of the best hart's-tongue fern in three parishes, the church where she had not, in the end, been able to sit through Hugh's funeral without going out to stand under the yew — but she had never seen it as it was this summer, which was busy. The restoration had turned the whole churchyard over like a spade. The choked plots along the south path had been cleared of their brambles and their fallen kerbs, so that stones nobody had read in a lifetime stood suddenly plain in the sun; two of the conservation students knelt at a table-tomb with brushes and squeezy bottles, easing a century of lichen off the carving; a girl with a clipboard moved along the row transcribing the epitaphs into a laptop, mouthing the long-s'd words. Barrows and buckets. The smell of cut green and hot stone and, under it, the particular cold mineral breath that comes up out of old graveyard soil however hot the day.

And over all of it, at the churchyard's heart, stood the yew.

Dilys stopped, as she always stopped, and looked at it, and the ordinary noise of the morning fell back a little.

Taxus baccata. The churchyard tree. It had been old when the Normans raised the tower behind it and it would be old when the tower fell; its trunk was not a trunk so much as a fused congregation of trunks, red-brown and fibrous and worn smooth as a thigh where a thousand years of hands and backsides had rested against it, hollow at the heart in the way of all great yews, so that the living tree was a shell of itself grown round its own absence. The dark of it was a genuine dark, cool and resinous, and out of that dark the new growth of the year sprang an almost violent green. It was hung, this late in the summer, with its berries — except they were not berries, and Dilys's mind supplied the correction before she had consciously reached for it, the way it always did, the reflex of forty years. Not berries. Arils. Each scarlet cup a little open-mouthed jewel with the hard green seed showing at the bottom of it, brilliant against the black-green needles, ripening now by the hundred so that the whole flank of the tree seemed strung with tiny lanterns.

There was the thing she loved and the thing that frightened her, and they were the same thing, which was the truth about most of what she loved.

For the yew is a wholly poisonous tree. The needle poisons and the bark poisons and, most of all, the little green seed at the heart of the aril poisons — taxine, all through it, a bitterness that stops the heart — so that a mouthful of chewed leaf could kill a horse, and had, in this valley, within living memory. Every part of the tree is death. Every part but one. Only the flesh — only that sweet, gaudy, scarlet cup, faintly sickly and beloved of every thrush and blackbird in the parish — carries no poison at all; and the birds gulp the whole aril, flesh and seed together, and the poison passes through them untouched, and the seed is dropped a mile off in a hedge, wrapped in its little parcel of manure, to make another thousand-year tree. Poison in every part, and in the one part not poison, the tree's whole future. Mercy, packed inside menace, wearing the brightest colour it owns.

A child ran up under the branches — one of the Petherick toddlers, three and enormously determined — and reached both hands, laughing, for the low bright arils with the plain greed of the very young for anything red.

"Ffft — no." The mother was there in a stride, cracking the small hand down off the branch with a smack that startled a jackdaw off the tower. "No. Dirty. Nasty. Them's poison berries, you leave them." She hauled the wailing child up onto her hip and glared at the tree as though it had reached for the boy and not the boy for it.

Dilys said nothing, and smiled, and thought — mildly, and with the private, useless precision that was the whole architecture of her mind — that the young woman had it exactly, beautifully backwards. For the one part of that entire deadly tree that the child could have swallowed whole and come to no harm at all was the very part she had just been slapped away from. The scarlet flesh was the single safe thing on the yew. It was the leaf that killed. It was the green.

She let the thought go. It was too fine a distinction for a hot morning and a frightened mother, and there was no reason on earth it should matter to anyone.

"Miss Ashcroft — Dilys." The Reverend Clemency Odell came up the path at the half-trot that had become her natural pace this summer, a clipboard clutched to her chest, her dog-collar askew and a smudge of graveyard soil on one cheek. "Bless you, I can't stop, we've the diocesan man about the faculty at eleven and the water's off in the vestry and the — I'm so glad you're here, could you possibly, later, tell the students whether that yew hedge along the north walk wants cutting now or in the spring, they keep asking me and I haven't the faintest —" She pushed her hair back with the heel of her hand. "It runs on will, this place, that's the honest truth of it. My will's gone. Cuthbert's is what's holding it up."

And there, as though summoned, was Cuthbert Larch.

You could not, in fact, be in the churchyard and not know where Larch was, for he was the churchyard's centre of gravity as surely as the yew was its heart. Seventy-three years old and out here since first light, in the same collarless shirt and the same waistcoat he wore in all weathers, a tall stooped man gone spare and stringy with age, moving among the barrows and the kneeling students with the slow certainty of a shepherd among a flock too foolish to be trusted. He had a trowel in one hand. In the other, as he came, he had his flask — his own dented green vacuum flask, that went everywhere with him, out of which he drank all day, at his elbow on the tomb-ledge when he worked, and about which he was, in his dry way, insufferably pleased.

"Now that," he was saying, to the girl with the laptop, leaning over her shoulder to tap the screen with one horny finger, "is a long s, not an f. Bleſſed. You've put blefsed. It matters, you know. If we're going to the trouble of writing them down again we may as well not libel the dead into the bargain." He straightened, and drank from the flask — a small, deliberate, private swallow, the cap held delicately in his knotted fingers — and grimaced faintly at whatever it was, and screwed the cap back on with satisfaction. Green, it always was, the stuff in that flask; she had seen it poured, a dark bitter green, and heard him hold forth on it more than once. His restorative. The thing that kept an old man's heart going at his age, he said, when he had done a day's work that would fell a man of forty. He said it as a rebuke to everyone who took proper tea from Enid's urn at eleven, and drank his green alone, and was proud of it.

"There," he said to the girl, not unkindly, and entirely without doubt. "You'll thank me. Do it right or don't do it."

The girl went scarlet. Clemency, at Dilys's shoulder, made a small sound that might have been a sigh or a prayer, and murmured, "He's not wrong, that's the trouble with him," and trotted off toward her diocesan crisis.

Dilys watched Larch straighten by degrees, one hand going flat to the small of his back, and stand a moment with his eyes shut against the sun, breathing carefully, the flask hugged to his chest — an old man far too long in the heat, and no more able to stop himself than the yew could stop bearing. Everyone in the village knew about Cuthbert Larch's heart. It had been tired for years. It was the sort of thing that got said fondly, over the urn — he'll work himself into that churchyard yet, that man, mark me — and was even, in a way the village would have been ashamed to examine, half-admired.

Near the great tree, Amos Rudge stood over a barrow heaped with fresh yew — long green boughs, still bleeding their thin resinous smell, cut and flung down anyhow — and looked at the flank of the yew he had been ordered to cut back, and looked at his saw, and did not touch it. His whole square body was a refusal. He had made the low cuts, the safe ones, and left the great limb Larch wanted taken, and by the set of his jaw he meant to go on leaving it until the churchyard fell down. When Larch's shadow crossed him he did not turn round. There was a quarrel there, plainly, gone quiet only because both men had said everything and neither had moved an inch — and Dilys, who liked the sexton, thought that of the two of them it was Rudge who had the tree's own case at heart, and Larch who was certain, as Larch was always certain, that being right settled the matter.

She might have gone to soothe someone — the girl, the sexton, the vicar — for that was the office she seemed lately to fill, going about the place like a bee, carrying a little pollen of calm from one flowering crisis to the next. But her eye had gone past all of them, past the cleared plots and the busy south path and the bright deadly tree, to the far edge of everything.

At the far corner of the churchyard, out beyond the wall where the consecrated ground gave way to nettles and neglect, old Wilf Sallow knelt at a stone that had no name on it and pulled the weeds with a gardener's patience, and Dilys, who had taught herself not to grieve out loud in front of the village, thought that here at least was a man who had never learned the trick, and had simply gone on kneeling at his sorrow for as long as she had known him.

Straw Men

There is no season in an English village so cheerfully sinister as the one in which its people spend a fortnight building men out of straw, dressing them in the clothes of the dead, and standing them about the gardens with painted smiles to frighten off the birds. Little Hemlock had been at it since Lammas. By the first morning of the festival proper the lane down from Foxglove Cottage had sprouted a whole silent congregation of them — a straw vicar in a dog-collar of white card at the school gate, a straw postman leaning drunk against the pillar-box, a straw bride in Sadie Bunce's cast-off net curtains outside the Green Man, all of them turning their painted faces to Dilys as she passed, as if they had been waiting up in the dark to see who would come.

Wellington did not care for them at all. He walked at the very end of his lead with his ears flattened and his long grey spine bowed into a question mark, and at the straw bride he stopped altogether and would not be moved, until Dilys said, "She is made of Sadie's curtains and a bale of last year's barley, you great coward," and hauled him on. He came, but he looked back at the bride twice, which was more than most bridegrooms managed.

The heat had not broken. It had settled over the Hemble valley in the last week of August the way it settles over a kitchen when something has been left too long on the stove — a thick, still, browning heat that had gone into the hedges and turned the blackberries early and dried the churchyard grass to the colour of a lion. Dilys felt it in her knees before she was halfway down the lane. Sixty-five, and the summer sat on her now in a way it had never troubled to when Hugh was alive to complain about it for both of them.

At the lych-gate the festival and the restoration ran into one another and made a sort of glorious muddle. Marion Kettleby stood in the middle of it with a clipboard held against her bosom like a breastplate, marshalling the Women's Institute with the iron gaiety of a general who has decided the battle will be won by cake or not at all.

"Trestles by the tower, Enid, not under the yew, we are not having the sandwiches where the birds are," she was saying, "and where — where — is Clive Sowerby's monstrosity? I gave him the corner by the war memorial and I will not have him inching it toward my raffle tent, I know his tricks."

Clive's monstrosity was, in the event, impossible to hide. It came up the lane on the flat of a borrowed trailer, and the village went out to meet it as it had once gone out to meet the maypole. He had built a scarecrow eleven feet high if he was an inch — a vast straw giant in a scarlet frock-coat and a stovepipe hat, with a turnip head the size of a wheelbarrow, cheeks the red of a fever, a grin painted from ear to ear in gate-gloss, and two great glass door-knobs for eyes that caught the sun and threw it. He had called it, on a placard nailed to its boot, THE LORD OF MISRULE. It leered down over the whole festival like a thing that had escaped from a worse and older sort of harvest.

"Well," said Dilys, tipping her hat back to look up at it. "That is either going to win first prize or start a war."

"Both, dear, knowing Clive," said Marion, without looking up from her clipboard. "You can tell him from me that if one straw finger of it strays onto consecrated ground, Cuthbert will have it on the bonfire before you can say Michaelmas."

And there, on cue, was Cuthbert.

He came out from under the yew with a trowel in his hand and the flat, unhurried certainty of a man who has been right about the same things for thirty-two years and expects to go on being right. Seventy-three, grey in the face already from the heat, his shirt darkened down the spine — and yet upright, tireless, moving through the disorder of the morning the way a keel moves through water, parting it. He looked once at the Lord of Misrule, and the whole festival held its breath.

"That," said Cuthbert Larch, "does not come inside the wall."

"It's for the competition, Cuthbert," said Clive Sowerby, arriving pink and bristling behind his masterpiece. "The judging's in the churchyard. Everyone's is in the churchyard."

"Everyone's is dignified." Larch did not raise his voice. He never needed to. "This is a holy place, Sowerby, not a fairground. We have men and women lying under this grass who were buried in the fear of God, and they will not spend the festival being grinned at by a — a harlequin." He turned the word over as if it were something he had found under a stone. "Stand it in a field. That is where scarecrows belong."

"I'll stand you in a field," said Clive, not quite under his breath, and then, warming to it as the crowd tittered, louder: "I'll stuff you, Cuthbert Larch, stuff you with straw and stand you in the top ten-acre with a hat on, and you can frighten the crows for once instead of the rest of us." He appealed to the lych-gate at large. "He'd do it better dead than most men do it living, an' all — never move, never smile, just stand there disapproving till the birds died of it."

It got its laugh. Even Marion's mouth twitched. Larch did not so much as blink; he simply looked at Clive for a moment as one looks at weather one does not intend to go out in, and turned back under the yew to his work, and that — the not-blinking, the turning away — was somehow worse than any answer, and the laugh curdled and died on its own.

Dilys watched the Lord of Misrule get wheeled off to sulk by the war memorial, and thought that Clive was a fool and a dear and would grumble himself hoarse and forget it by teatime; and she was right about that, though not in the way she would afterwards wish she had been.

---

The working heart of the churchyard was a flat table-tomb near the tower, its great slab worn smooth and illegible, and on it the volunteers had set up the tea-station: the big enamel urn, the ranked white cups, a tin of Marion's flapjack under a cloth. It was where everyone came in and out of the shade all day, and Dilys, who had signed herself up to transcribe the eastern range of stones, drifted to it with the others when the sun got up.

Apart from the cups, at the tomb's far end, stood Larch's flask. It always did. A dented green vacuum flask with a Bakelite cup screwed on the top, and it was his and his alone — nobody touched it, nobody offered him tea, because he did not take the urn's tea; he took, all through the long hot day, little measured sips of the green stuff he kept in the flask and was quietly, insufferably proud of.

"My restorative," he said, when he caught Dilys's eye on it. He unscrewed the cup and poured himself a careful inch of something dark and green and, by the smell of it that reached her, bitter as sin. "At my age, Mrs. Ashcroft, a man's heart wants keeping going. This keeps it going." He drank it off with the air of a man taking a sacrament. "Fenella Alsop's compound. The only sensible thing that woman does."

As if the name had called her, Fenella came up the path with a wicker basket on her arm, chinking with bottles. Fifty-four, weather-brown, brisk as a wind off the down, forever braced for an argument she had had a hundred times before.

"Fresh made this morning," she said, and set a green bottle down among the cups. "Nettle, dandelion, a little mint for the stomach. Yours, Cuthbert, and Mrs. Prentice's, and one for old Tom." She began sorting them out along the tomb-ledge. "All perfectly wholesome, before anyone starts."

"Witch's brew," said Larch, comfortably, screwing his flask shut. He said it every time. It was a joke he had had at her expense for years, and it had long since stopped being a joke and become simply a thing he did to her, gently, the way a man will keep pressing the same old bruise.

"It's greens, Cuthbert." Fenella's chin came up. "Same greens as are in your dinner, only I know which ones and you don't. You'll be glad of my witch's brew when it's ninety in the shade and your ticker's still going." She thumped the last bottle down harder than she needed to. "I don't know why I keep on bringing it to a man who slanders me over the parish notices."

"Because I pay," said Larch, "and because I am the only person in this village who reads the label." And he tucked his own bottle of the green tonic into his jacket to refill the flask from later, and turned back to his graves, leaving her flushed and muttering among her honest bottles.

And moving through all of it, gentle and helpful and everywhere and remarked by no one, was old Wilf Sallow.

He had the churchyard plan spread on a board at the shady end of the tomb, and the old burial registers beside it — great foxed things with their spines gone soft — and he was transcribing, in a hand as neat and small as a hymn-number board, the names off the eastern stones onto the new plan, because he was the only living soul who could still name who lay where when the letters had worn away. Fifty years at the organ; fifty years of playing the parish to its rest; he knew the dead of Little Hemlock the way Dilys knew her seed-drawers.

"Morning, Mrs. Ashcroft." He looked up over his spectacles, mild and pleased. "You've the Comptons and the Ferrers, along the east there. Watch the third stone — it's Ferrers, not Ferris, whatever the moss says. I did that funeral. Nineteen sixty-eight. Terrible rain."

"I'll trust you over the moss, Wilf," said Dilys, and meant it.

He had, as he always had at a festival, brought his cordial — a stone bottle of last year's elderflower, and he went round the volunteers with it and a stack of paper cups, pressing a drop on each of them the way another man might have handed round cigarettes. "Dear Mr. Sallow's," said Enid Purslowe happily, taking hers, glowing pink with the sheer holiday of being useful and widowed and free; "you must have a drop, Dilys, it's ever so good, he does it every year." And it was good — flowery and clean and cool, and Dilys drank it in the yew's shade and thought, not for the first time, that the whole trouble with old Wilf was that a man so entirely kind gave you nothing to say about him.

He worked as he talked, that was the thing; he never sat still. Between names he would drift off to the memorial borders and tuck in a straggle of pinks, or pull a bramble, or snip a dead head, and he had a trug he carried for it, and into the trug went the greenery as he went — a handful of this, a sprig of that, the leavings of the borders, and now and again a little dark spray off the great yew itself where Rudge had left the clippings in barrows along the wall. Nobody looked twice. Wilf Sallow gathering green in a churchyard he had kept for half a century was as unremarkable as the sexton's spade or the weathercock. He was part of the fabric. He was the least-seen man in Little Hemlock, and he was in plain sight from breakfast to dusk.

The yew stood over all of it. A thousand years old, so old its trunk had gone hollow and fluted and grown into a ring of separate red-brown limbs, its foliage that flat dark green that lets no light through, and its arils just now ripening — little scarlet cups of soft sweet flesh, brightening among the needles, that the blackbirds were already squabbling over. Dilys looked up into it and thought what she always thought: that it was the deadliest thing for a mile in every direction and had watched the village bury its dead for ten centuries, needle and bark and seed all poison and only that one sweet red flesh harmless on the whole grim tree — the single mercy, made to be eaten, made to carry the seed away in a bird and drop it living somewhere new. Poison in every part but the one that fed.

They were cutting it hard back, this summer, for the restoration. And that was where the morning's second quarrel was waiting.

---

She heard Rudge before she saw him — a low bull's rumble from the north side, where Amos Rudge stood at the foot of the yew with his loppers hanging from his fist and refusal in every line of him.

"I'll take the low limbs and I'll take the dead," he said. "I'll not take the heart out of a thousand-year tree because you want it tidy, Larch."

"It's a safety matter." Larch had his hands folded. "The diocese's man says—"

"The diocese's man's never climbed her." Rudge's face was dark. "You cut her that hard, back to the old wood like you're drawing, and you'll open her up to the wet and she'll rot from the middle out, and it'll not show for twenty year and then she'll go, and it'll be your doing and you'll be dead and never answer for it." He set the loppers down on the ground with enormous care, which was more frightening than throwing them. "I'll not make those cuts. Get your diocese's man to make 'em."

"You are the sexton of this parish," said Larch, flat.

"Aye," said Rudge, "and she was here afore the parish, and she'll be here after," and he walked off toward the Glebe Field with his shoulders up round his ears, and Larch watched him go with that same weatherproof patience, and made, Dilys had no doubt, a small immovable note of it somewhere in the ledger of his mind.

There were more of these all morning, once she had the eye for them. Verity Coppin, the junior warden, brought Larch a scheme for the new pathways — she had drawings, she had costings, fifteen years of being told to wait folded up small inside her — and Larch looked at it for perhaps four seconds and said, "We'll do it as we discussed. As I discussed," and handed it back, and Verity took it and said, "Of course, Cuthbert," in a voice with all the life pressed out of it, and went and stood by the urn and gripped a white cup very tightly and did not drink from it.

And Councillor Naseby came, glad-handing, in a linen jacket too good for a churchyard, working the WI ladies and the volunteers with a builder's-merchant's easy warmth — and Larch met him on the path and stopped him with a look. Dilys was near enough for that one.

"Roderick," said Larch. "You'll be at the parish meeting Thursday."

"Wouldn't miss it, Cuthbert."

"No," said Larch. "I don't imagine you will." A pause, like a held breath. "It will be interesting, I think. I've been going through the accounts. The nursery-site business." Another pause. "I know where a certain payment came from, Roderick. I know whose money it is." He let that sit. "Bring your papers."

Naseby's smile did not move, but something behind it did, some small cold shift, and then Larch had turned away to his flask on the tomb-ledge and was pouring himself another careful green inch, and the councillor stood a moment in the sun with his handsome face gone briefly stupid before he remembered to put the smile back on and move it along to Marion's raffle.

Motive, Dilys thought afterward, had been standing about that churchyard all morning as plainly as the straw men in the lanes, and she had walked through the middle of it and seen nothing but a hot day and a difficult old man.

---

What lifted the morning, and lifted her heart with it, came up the path a little before noon, and for a moment she did not know him.

A young man in a good grey suit, hatless, moving with a settledness that the boy she remembered had never owned — and then he grinned, and it was Owen Fettiplace after all, and she put down her pencil and got up off the Ferrers stone faster than her knees liked.

"Owen."

"Mrs. Ashcroft." He came and took both her hands, careful, the way you take the hands of someone you have decided, somewhere in the last year, that you love. "Detective Constable now, they'll have told you. I'm on the water-meadow bones — the cold case, the ones from midsummer." He said it plainly, but there was a shine of it on him, the pride he was too well-brought-up to show and could not quite hide. Not the green PC who had once written down Taxus baccata with the x the wrong way round. A man. Steadier. Come home.

"They didn't tell me you'd grown up," she said, and had to look hard at the eastern stones for a moment, because he was not her son and she had no son and the churchyard was suddenly very bright.

He'd brought, without seeming to, a reason to blush; for over by the newly-lettered graves a young woman in a leather apron was cutting fresh gold into an old name with a chisel and a wooden mallet, absorbed, a smudge of stone-dust on her cheek — Josie Vane, the stone-conservator up from the diocese for the summer — and Owen's eye went to her and away and back, and he said, too casually, "The lettering's — that's coming on well, isn't it," and Josie looked up and said, "You're standing in my light, Constable," and smiled while she said it, and Owen moved out of her light with the alacrity of a man who would have crossed three counties to be told to.

Dilys, who had buried a great deal of happiness in the last two years and was learning, slowly, to dig some of it back up, watched the two of them not-look at each other and felt something in her own chest ease.

She was still warm with it when, at the lych-gate, on her way to fetch more water for the eastern range, she came on the last of the morning's quarrels — and this one she saw only the end of.

"'The answer is the same as it has always been, Wilfred,'" said Cuthbert Larch at the lych-gate, in the tone of a man closing a ledger, and turned back to his flask and his graves; and old Wilf Sallow stood a moment with the churchyard registers held against his chest, and then walked away through the straw men to the far corner beyond the wall, and knelt down again — and Dilys, who had seen it and understood none of it, went home thinking only what a patient and gentle old man he was.