Proof of Murder

The Cameras Come In

You can tell what a summer's going to cost you by what comes down the hill. The year I came home it was my own two hands and a suitcase. This year, on the hottest morning of August, it was seven lorries, a marquee the size of the chapel, and a man whose whole job was to decide what kind of story we were.

I had my back to the hill when they came, which is the only way I ever get any warning about anything. The oven was hot, the second tray of splits was in, and Kensa was doing the thing she does now without knowing she does it — testing a bun's give with two fingers, frowning, not touching it again. A year ago she'd have pressed it flat out of nerves and blamed the flour. Now she waited. She let it be what it was going to be.

"Fairings up," she said, and cracked the tray down on the bench so the biscuits split along their tops, all of them, in one clean go, and the whole shop filled with the smell of ginger and scorched sugar. Behind the counter old Mrs Pengarrick made the noise she makes, the little intake of breath, and put her purse on the glass before I'd even weighed them.

That was the shape of the morning until the lorries. Trade thick as jam. The window full of light and one enormous ginger cat. Barnacle had claimed the sunny end of the sill the way a Doge claims Venice, one ear, one eye, and the untroubled sleep of a creature who has never once doubted he owns the place. Visitors leaned in to photograph him and he did not stir. He knew, as I was only beginning to learn, that being looked at is not the same as being loved, and he had made his peace with the traffic.

Out past him the quay was doing its high-August roar. Buckets and spades in a rack outside the chandler's. Ice creams going soft faster than children could ruin them. The tide three-quarters in and sliding, the boats lifting on it, the RNLI slip dark and shining where the water had just left it. Somewhere a dog and a gull were having the argument they have every day of their lives. I stood in my own doorway with flour to the elbow and let myself feel it, which I don't often do, because feeling how far you've come is the surest way to trip over what's in front of you.

A year. The roof over the back store no longer wept when it rained — half of it, anyway; the other half I'd learned to think of as a water feature. The till was healthy in a way that made me nervous rather than glad, because healthy-ish is exactly the number a bank looks at and decides you can afford more than you can. The freehold still belonged to a man in Truro who sent letters on thick paper. Meade's Bakehouse thrived, and Meade did not own the building it thrived in, and that was the small stone I carried in my shoe every single day and told no one about.

Over the road, outside the Gilded Crumb, Curtis Pengelly was chalking his board with a great deal more curlicue than his flat whites deserved. He caught me looking and did the thing we do now, which is nod like two people who have agreed not to mention the war. A year ago he'd have salted my starter given half a chance. We weren't friends. We were something rarer and more useful in a village this size: two people who had decided, separately and without discussion, that it cost less to leave each other's ovens alone.

And down on the slip, in the wreck of a wooden hull he was coaxing back to life, Sam Trerise straightened, put a hand to the small of his back, and looked up at me across sixty yards of granite and gulls. He didn't wave. I didn't wave. That was the whole of it, and it was a great deal, and if you'd asked either of us to put a name to what it was we'd both have found somewhere urgent to be. A thing that lives entirely in glances is a thing that can't be taken away by anyone who only knows the words for it.

I was, God help me, nearly happy.

Which is when I heard the air brakes.

They came down the hill in convoy, and the hill was not built for them. First a low-loader with something white and folded strapped flat as a sail. Then a truck with a satellite dish curled on its roof like a sleeping thing. Then more — a generator on a trailer, a box van with a logo I knew before I could read it, the wheat-sheaf and the crown, gold on royal blue, that has sold more self-raising flour in this country than the war ever did. Bake Britannia. The biggest baking show in Britain, come down my hill at eight miles an hour with a man walking backwards in front of it, waving his arms, mouthing left, LEFT, to a driver who could not possibly see him.

The quay stopped. Even the gull gave up.

They came onto the flat by the harbour and they did not so much park as occupy. Ramps down. A dozen people in black T-shirts and lanyards, moving fast and looking at clipboards, the way people move when they've done a thing forty times in forty villages and the village is just the next set of coordinates. Within the hour there were bollards where the fish vans go and a cable as thick as my wrist snaking from the generator, taped down in a great yellow-and-black seam across stone that had been there since before Trafalgar. Within two, the white thing on the low-loader had bloomed. It went up in sections, a broadcast marquee the size of the Methodist chapel and twice as confident, blank and gleaming, drinking all the light off the water and giving none of it back.

Behind it, where the public wasn't meant to look, they built the part I couldn't stop looking at. A grey steel cabinet on rubber feet, sprouting armoured cable, and a man in ear-defenders wiring the whole show into it before he'd let a single kettle be plugged in anywhere. A distribution board. I'd stood at a thousand of them, in a thousand pop-up kitchens and festival tents and one memorable gala in a field, and I knew what it meant the way you know a knock on your own front door: a proper temporary set runs off a protected supply, every plug earthed and tested, so that if a machine ever tries to kill you the board trips first and gives you a fright instead of a funeral. It is the one boring, invisible, life-and-death courtesy this whole travelling circus paid a village nothing to notice. I noticed. I couldn't help it. It was the only thing on that quay I actually trusted.

Barnacle woke up. He looked at the marquee for a long moment through the glass, stood, stretched himself to twice his length, and removed himself to the flat upstairs with the unhurried dignity of a cat declining an invitation.

I should have gone with him.

Petroc Angove found me instead. The harbourmaster came along the quay at a trot he was too broad for, hi-vis flapping, and fetched up in my doorway breathing hard and clutching a sheaf of paper he kept half-offering me and half-hiding, the way you do with a bill you can't pay.

"Robyn." He mopped his face. "Robyn, maid, before you say a word —"

"I haven't said a word."

"You've got a face on. That's worse." He looked back at the marquee as though it might have moved. "The permits. I want you to know I fought them. Petroc, I said, this is a working harbour, not a — a stage. And they had the letters, didn't they. County, tourism board, the lot. Grant money attached. Grant money, Robyn, for the hall roof, if I signed. And Rev. Quick standing there with her hands together looking at me like the Sunday School depended on it. What's a man to do."

"Sign," I said, gently, because it wasn't his fault, and because I'd already clocked what he hadn't. A runner — a boy of about nineteen, sweating in his black shirt — had dropped a stack of printed sheets carrying them across from the box van, and the wind off the tide had taken three of them and pinwheeled them along the quay. One fetched up against my step. I put my foot on it before it could go over into the water, the way you save anything, and picked it up.

CALL SHEET, it said, and a date, and DAY 1: ARRIVALS & SET BUILD. Then, under a heading that said EDITORIAL, in a cheerful sans-serif that made it worse:

STORY: incomer vs establishment. Meade's (plucky/scrappy) vs Gilded Crumb (glossy/local royalty). Look for tension. Lean into the rivalry. We want DRAMA — bake-war, harbour feud, "who really runs this village." Keep it warm but find the edge.

I read it twice. The ginger smell of my own shop was behind me and this was in my hand, and for a second the two didn't belong in the same country. There was no rivalry. There was Curtis with his silly curlicues and me with my ginger and a truce as quiet as the tide. There was a village, which is a thing that takes a hundred years to make and about a week, I would learn, to break.

Someone had already decided what kind of story we were. They'd decided in an office in London, off a map and a postcode, before a single one of them had tasted a fairing or learned that Denzil Nancarrow will not speak to you until you've said good morning to him twice. Lean into the rivalry. You cannot lean into a thing that isn't there. You have to build it first. And they had the money and the tape and the marquee, and, I understood, standing in my own doorway with my foot on the last of the sheets, they had every intention of building it right down the middle of us.

The cold came up my spine then, the old cold, the one I'd spent a year learning to live without. I knew this world. I'd cooked at the sharp end of it — kitchens where the pass was a stage and every plate was a performance and a man with a headset could end you between services and call it notes. I'd walked out of it with two Michelin stars behind me and my hands shaking and I had come here, to the one place on earth where a bun was allowed to just be a bun. And now the whole apparatus had come down my hill and parked on my harbour and started taking notes on who to make the villain.

I folded the call sheet small and put it in my apron. I did not give it back.

By dinnertime the village had chosen sides, which is the one thing a village can always be relied upon to do at speed.

Peggy Chynoweth had done her hair. There is no faster barometer in Porthgowan than Peggy's hair, and it had gone from post-office practical to full curl-and-set, and she was standing outside the shop in a blouse I'd never seen, telling anyone who slowed down that she'd "been on the television before, mind, during the lifeboat centenary, they filmed her back going into the church." She had already learned two of the crew's first names and one piece of gossip, which was that "the tall angry woman is the director and she can't abide the little smiling man, and the little smiling man is in charge of the lot of them." I filed that without knowing yet that I would need it.

Curtis had not done his hair; Curtis had done his whole self. He'd changed his shirt and put out his good cups and was standing in the marquee's growing shadow talking to a woman with a clipboard and a lanyard, nodding, laughing at the right moments, his hand pressed to his chest at one point as though something had genuinely touched him. Courting them. Openly, gladly, both feet. I couldn't even blame him. The show was the biggest thing to happen to the Gilded Crumb since the Gilded Crumb, and Curtis had spent his life wanting to be somebody in a village that only had room for one or two, and here was London saying you, we'll have you. I watched him take the clipboard-woman a coffee, unasked, and something in me that had learned to like him a little went quiet with worry.

And Denzil Nancarrow sat on the bench by the war memorial where he has always sat and watched them run their cable over the granite and said, to nobody, to the tide, loud enough for the runners to hear and too old to be told off: "They've come to sell us back to ourselves. You watch. Four pound a slice, and we'll queue up to buy it, and think we've done well." He spat, precisely, into the harbour. "Filming the sign. My father mended that quay. They'll film a photograph of it and put it in a shop."

Half the village thrilled. Half the village wary. And me in the middle with a call sheet in my apron and a cold in my spine, holding the door of the one building they most wanted to get their cameras inside.

I went down to the slip in the last of the light because I could not stay in the shop and watch the marquee eat the quay, and because Sam was there, and both of those were the same reason if I'd been honest, which I wasn't.

He was oiling a plane and pretending the marquee wasn't a hundred feet away. He has a boatbuilder's face for anything that'll be gone by Friday — a settled, unbothered contempt, the look of a man who works in oak and tide and hundred-year commitments regarding a thing that comes flat-packed. He didn't look up when I came, and he moved along the plank he was sitting on to make room without being asked, and I sat, and for a while we just watched them run their lights up on stands.

"Big tent," he said eventually.

"Big tent."

"Tide's not read the call sheet." He nodded at the marquee's nearest guy-rope, pegged into the quay a good deal lower than a local would have pegged it. "That corner's under two foot of water at springs. Which is Thursday." He said it the way he says everything about the sea, as a plain fact he'd no intention of warning them about. They hadn't asked. He is careful, Sam. Careful with a boat, careful with the tide, careful with the things he keeps behind his face. He'd been careful with me for a year and I'd let him, and it was the safest, gladdest thing I'd ever taken part in, this courtship made entirely of moving up a plank and not looking at each other.

"Peggy says the smiling one's in charge," I said.

"Fry." Sam wiped the plane. "Dominic Fry. Producer." A pause, the length of one long stroke. "He's been down here. Talking to me, even, about the boats — wanted to know would a lifeboat launch on camera. I said that depends on whether anyone's drowning, which he didn't like." The corner of his mouth moved, very slightly, and was still. "He's been asking Peggy a lot of questions."

"Peggy loves a question."

"Not this kind." Now he did look at me, briefly, and then away, out at the water, which is where he looks when a thing matters. "About your place. The heritage bit — they want to film in Meade's, the old oven and that, tell the story of the village through a bakehouse. Which is you." He set the plane down. The lights came up gold across the harbour and the marquee took all of it. "They want to film in your place," Sam said, watching the great white marquee swallow the quay. "Heritage bit. And that Fry — the producer — he's been asking Peggy all about the old name under your paint." He didn't look at me; he was too kind for that. "Told her you'd want asking first."

I looked at MEADE'S over my door, and the ghost of TREGONING & DAUGHTER under it, and felt the cameras turning our way like gulls onto a dropped pasty.

The Story Underneath

A fairing is an honest biscuit. You bake it hot and hard, and just as the tops go you crack the tray down so they split — because a fairing that hasn't cracked open is hiding something, and my grandmother did not hold with anything that hid what it was. I thought about that a great deal, the week the cameras came to teach us all to hide.

We made them first thing, before the light was properly up over the harbour, because a fairing wants a hot oven and a cold morning and no one leaning over your shoulder. Kensa had the flour weighed before I'd got my apron tied, which two years ago would have been a small miracle and now was simply Tuesday. She'd learned to work clean. She'd learned to work ahead. She had the butter cut into the flour and was rubbing it through with the flats of her fingers, lifting her hands high so the mixture fell back and caught the air, and she didn't know she was doing it, which is the only way that particular knack is worth anything.

"Ginger," I said.

"In." She tipped it from the little tin, and then the mixed spice, and the cinnamon, the whole warm brown drift of it, and the kitchen changed. That's the thing about ginger. It doesn't creep. It arrives. It goes up your nose and down the back of your throat and it means business, and by the time the syrup went in — golden, unspooling off the spoon in that slow amber rope — the smell had already gone out under the door and down the quay to do its work.

"Not too much syrup," I said. "It'll spread flat and toffee on you."

"I know." Not sulky. She used to be sulky. Now she said I know the way a person says it when they actually do, and to prove it she warmed the tin of syrup a half-second in her hand so it would give a clean measure and not string. I said nothing. In the kitchens that made me, a girl who knew a thing before she was told it got told anyway, louder, with a hand slammed flat on the bench beside her so she'd flinch and learn to flinch faster. I had flinched for ten years. I had got very good at anticipating the slam. And somewhere in the resurrecting of this crooked bakehouse I had decided that Kensa Chynoweth would learn her trade off warmth and repetition and the smell of ginger, and not off fear, and that if it took longer then it took longer, and that was the whole of my quarrel with the world put into one nineteen-year-old and a bowl of spiced dough.

She rolled them small and even, walnut-sized, spaced wide on the trays because a fairing needs room to fall.

"Hot oven," I said. "Hotter than feels sensible."

"Two hundred."

"Two hundred, and don't open the door to peek or you'll let the ghost out." She rolled her eyes, because that was Gran's line and she knew it was Gran's line, and I let her roll them.

In they went. And then the bit that matters, the bit you can't put in a recipe card and have it mean anything — you watch, and just as the tops dome up and start to set, before they've caught any real colour, you haul the tray half out and you bring it down hard on the rail, once, a good honest bang, so the biscuits drop and crack across their tops. And out they come split open, fault-lines running through the crust, ginger showing in the seams.

"A fairing that comes out smooth," I said, sliding the tray onto the rack, "has cheated. It's held its shape. It's kept itself to itself." I cracked one in half while it was still too hot to sensibly hold, and the inside breathed out a little cloud. "Gran wouldn't have it. She said a biscuit ought to show you what it's made of."

Kensa took the other half. She ate it the way you eat something you made yourself and can't quite believe came out right — quick, suspicious, then still. "That's proper," she said, which from her was a review to frame.

By half seven the queue had started, the way it always does when I bake fairings, drawn up the quay on nothing but the smell, holidaymakers who didn't know what they were queuing for and would spend the rest of their lives trying to buy a biscuit that tasted like this one and never managing it. Kensa boxed and bagged and gave change and told a woman from Solihull, quite seriously, that no, they didn't post.

And it was somewhere in the lull after, both of us pink and floured and pleased, that she said it, to the wall, not to me.

"Gran's put me in for it."

"In for what."

"The show." She scrubbed at a clean patch of bench. "The wildcard. Every village round the coast's meant to put one baker in, local colour, and Gran went and — she filled the form. Sent a photo. Of me." Her ears had gone scarlet. "I told her she had no business. I'm going to kill her." And then, unable to help it, the other thing leaking out under the mortification like syrup off a warm spoon: "D'you think I'd make an idiot of myself? On the telly?"

I looked at her. Nineteen, and gifted, and terrified, and wanting it so badly she couldn't look at me while she asked.

"No," I said. "I think you'd bake circles round the lot of them and they wouldn't know what hit them." Which was true, and also the beginning of a fear I didn't name yet, because I had already met what a show like that does with a girl like her — how it would want her gormless and gurning, a bit of West Country comedy, cream-tea and confusion, and how it would cut her that way whether she gave it to them or not.

I didn't say any of that. I said, "Fairings. If they let you choose. You could make these in your sleep and no one on that show has tasted a real one in their life."

She grinned like the sun coming up. Then she went back to being nineteen and horrified, and I went and put the second batch in, and that was the morning before it soured.

---

She came at noon, the researcher.

You could tell what she was before she spoke, the way you can tell a health inspector or a man about to sell you something. Lanyard. Trainers that had never been near a boat. A phone held not quite up, angled, the way they all held them now, so you were never sure if you were being recorded or merely might be. Bright as a new pin and about as sharp. Immy, she said, sticking out a hand, just Immy, and she was such a fan already of the whole vibe of the place, and could she grab two minutes.

She grabbed forty.

She bought a fairing, to her credit, and ate it while she talked, and talked while she ate, and every third sentence was a question with a hook filed onto the end of it. Wasn't it amazing, the history down here. How long had the bakehouse been going. Was it in the family. She loved the sign — and here she went to the door, phone rising, and I watched her frame it — MEADE'S, and beneath it in the flat noon glare not much, but she was patient and she was hungry and she tipped her head.

"There's a — is there something under it? Under the paint?" She zoomed. "Tregoning. And — and Daughter?" She said it the way a gull spots a chip. "Oh, that's gorgeous. That's the story right there. What's the story?"

"It's an old sign," I said. "Places round here have had a lot of names."

"But it's your building, so it's your — was it Tregonings before it was Meades? Was there a marriage, or a—" She'd got a notebook now, an actual paper notebook, which unnerved me more than the phone. "Because I did a bit of digging before I came down, I always do my prep, and there's this brilliant little thing in the county archive, a parish bulletin, 1963, and it mentions the old Tregoning bakery and — hang on—" She flipped. "'The matter of the missing Tregoning inheritance.' Missing! Isn't that delicious? A missing inheritance, in this exact building. Was there a scandal? There was a scandal, wasn't there. I can feel it."

The kitchen was very warm and I had gone very cold in it.

"There wasn't," I said.

"Because Dominic — that's our producer, he's a genius, honestly, he can smell a story through a wall — he says the best heritage bits aren't the pretty ones, they're the ones with a shadow in them, you know? A feud, a secret, a — and I've got a missing inheritance under sixty years of paint on the hero location. That's it. That's the whole segment." She beamed. "Would there be family? Someone old who'd remember? An auntie? We'd sit them in the window with a cuppa, golden hour, they tell the tale, we do a slow push in on the sign — it'd be unbelievable telly."

I thought of Ivy, who is seventy-four and would say yes to a camera the way she says yes to a second scone. I thought of Denzil, who would say no and then say too much. I thought of a slow push in on a name my grandmother had painted over on purpose.

"There's no one," I said. "And there's no story. It was a bakery, then it wasn't, then it was ours. The inheritance thing" — I made myself laugh, and it came out near enough — "that's the sort of thing every old shop's got. Someone owed someone. It's dust."

"Dust's my favourite," Immy said, and wrote something down.

I got her out eventually with a box of fairings for the crew and a smile I'd learned in London to hang on a face that felt nothing, and I stood in my own doorway after and watched her go up the quay with her notebook, straight toward the post office, straight toward Peggy, who would tell her the weather and the tides and everything anyone had ever said within a mile of the harbour. And I stood under my own sign, under MEADE'S, under the ghost of TREGONING & DAUGHTER coming up faint and patient in the light, and I understood that the thing I had been quietly unearthing in the dark, a spoonful at a time, for a year — the thing that was mine — was about to be dug up in a week by a girl with a lanyard and sold to the nation as an amusing shadow, and I could not think how to stop it.

---

I didn't sleep, so I did the other thing.

The flat over the kitchen is crooked in every direction; the floor runs downhill to the window and the window looks at the sea, and on the sill I keep the box. Gran's box. A year ago I hadn't known it was anything but a box. Now I knew its weight in the dark.

The brass key first, cold and heavier than it has any right to be, worn bright along one edge from a lifetime of a thumb that was not mine and was, a little, mine. It fits nothing I have ever found. I turned it over and set it down.

The photograph. 1961 written on the back in a hand I've come to know better than my own mother's — Loveday's, my grandmother's, upright and careful. On the front, the shop, this shop, the door where my door is, and the sign new-painted and whole: TREGONING & DAUGHTER, and under it two women, one older and one young, aproned, not smiling for the camera so much as caught mid-argument about who should stand where. Grace, that would be the older. Grace Tregoning. And the daughter, dark-eyed, chin up. I have looked at that girl a hundred nights and not known, quite, who she was to me.

And the book.

It looks like a recipe book and it is a recipe book, until you notice that some of the recipes make no sense — a seed cake with no flour, a saffron loaf that calls for a quantity of "patience, in the third measure" — and that the wrong words come too regular, the way a thing does when it's carrying something underneath. Loveday's cipher. I'm no cryptographer; I'm a pastry chef with a stubborn streak, and I'd cracked it the way I crack anything, by living with it, by leaving it out on the bench of my mind while I did other things until the pattern showed itself the way a fault-line shows in a fairing. It's built on the bakes. The measures are letters; the ingredients turn the wheel. I'd got maybe a fifth of it in a year. Slow, careful, mine.

That night I took the line I'd been stuck on for a fortnight, the one that ran through the false saffron loaf, and I had the third measure at last, and it came apart in my hands.

What Grace put by, put by against the losing of it.

I sat with it. The tide was going out; you can hear it let go of the harbour wall, a long soft sucking sigh, twice a day, and it did that while I read the line over and over by the lamp.

Put by. Not taken. Not lost, not owed, not gone. Put by — the way you put by jam, put by money, put by a thing you love against a hard winter you can see coming. And against the losing of it — you don't put a thing by against losing it unless you already know it's going to be come for.

I didn't understand it. I want to be honest about that, the way Gran would want it: I didn't crack it open and see the whole. But a word had turned over in the dark and shown me a different face than the one the whole village had shown that name for sixty years. Missing inheritance, the girl had said, delicious as a chip. Stolen, everyone had always meant. Loveday Meade, née — and there my knowledge stopped — had had her fingers in the till and the Tregoning money had walked, and that was the shadow Gran had painted over.

Put by, said the book. Not taken.

I closed it. I put the key back on top and the photograph face down, which I never do, and I went to bed and did not sleep and by morning had decided to say nothing to anyone, which lasted until the afternoon.

---

Because the village would not leave it alone; the village never does.

Curtis found me on the quay, of all people, mid-strut, three inches taller than God, because the show had given him a screen test. He told me twice. He'd worn the blue shirt. They'd said the camera loved him — those words, the camera loves you, which I could have told him is what they say to everyone they've decided to use — and he stood there in the wreck of my morning glowing like a man who'd been promised the moon, and I hadn't the heart, quite, to tell him what the moon costs.

"You want to get yourself on it," he said, generous in his glory. "They're doing the two bakeries, you know. The rivalry." He put a little relish on rivalry that made the back of my neck go cold, because there was no rivalry, there'd been a truce and a wary hand of friendship a year in the growing, and I heard in his mouth already the shape they meant to make of us.

"There's no rivalry, Curtis."

"Well," he said happily, "there is now," and went off to be loved by the camera.

Ivy fed me, later, because Ivy always knows when I've missed a meal by the way a person misses meals, and she put a plate down in front of me that I hadn't asked for and stood over me till I ate it, and while I ate she said, apropos of a conversation I hadn't started, "Your gran never spent a penny she couldn't account for, whatever they said." She said it to the teapot. "Never. I'd know. I was in and out of that kitchen fifty year." She poured. "So whatever that bright little maid's after with her notebook, going up and down the quay — you tell her there's nothing in it, my love." A pause, and something under the pause, something I'd have missed a year ago. "There's nothing in it your gran'd be ashamed of. That I'll swear to."

Ashamed of. Not nothing in it. The two are not the same, and Ivy chooses her words the way she chooses her plums, one at a time and by the feel.

And then, at the end of the day, when the light went long and gold and the tide came brimming back up the harbour and the great white marquee down on the quay lit itself from inside like a lantern full of strangers, I walked out past the RNLI slip for the air and found Denzil Nancarrow on the bench there, where he always is, with the unlit pipe he isn't allowed to light and the eyes that have watched this harbour for eighty-four years and forgotten nothing they didn't decide to.

He'd been watching the marquee too, dark under his cap.

"Buying us," he said. "That's what that is. Buying the look of us." He worked his jaw. "Been up the shop, has she. That maid. Asking about the Tregonings."

"She has."

He was quiet a while. The tide came on. And then he said the thing, low, and not to me exactly, to the water, to sixty years of it.

"They never had it right, you know. The whole parish. Called your gran a thief to the day she died and past it." He turned his head and looked at me then, and there was something in it close to anger and closer to grief. "The Tregoning money weren't ever stole, maid. It were hid. And there's a difference the whole village forgot."

The hair went up on my arms. "Hid," I said. "Hid how? By who?"

"Hid, not stole," Denzil said again, and jabbed the air with his pipe as if he could pin the difference to it. "Grace Tregoning put that money by her own self, maid, against the day they'd lose the shop — and your gran knew where, and never touched it, and let the whole parish think her a thief for sixty year rather than say." He stopped, appalled at himself, and clamped his mouth shut. But it was too late; I had heard the shape of it, and I would not stop pulling now.