With poor grace, she said, “A cup of tea then.”

Frances was about to protest, saw her brother’s expression, and sat down in the chair he was holding for her.

As he joined her at the table to await their tea, Frances said quietly, “This is Yard business, isn’t it?”

Without denying it, Rutledge looked out the window at the buildings straggling along the riverfront across the way. One, he thought, was indeed a small schoolhouse, and another appeared to be a shoemaker’s shop, a third a chandler’s. Furnham gave him the impression that it hadn’t changed since Queen Victoria’s day. And its inhabitants seemed to be intent on keeping it that way.

And yet the airfield must have provided the decent if overgrown road that he had followed out here, keeping to the river most of the way and turning only when it opened into the sea beyond. There would have been officers to house, and the pilots. Had there also been an antiaircraft battery? The crews who kept the aircraft flying, the men who fed all of them, saw to their needs, maintained the fields they used for runways, and kept up the buildings they lived in must, at a guess, have doubled the population of Furnham. They must also have brought with them the breath of an outside world the local people were so intent on shutting out. Yet there was no sign as far as he could tell that the airfield had ever existed. As if on the day the war ended, those who had lived and worked there were as eager to make their escape from this isolation as their neighbors were to be rid of them, and like the Arabs, folded their tents and quietly melted away. He could almost envisage Furnham mustering to a man to tear down and obliterate this thorn in their side.

Their tea was brought on a tray painted with wildflowers tied in a bunch by a pretty ribbon. The woman set down a pot and two cups, spoons, a bowl of sugar and a small jug of milk without a word. As she went back to her counter, Rutledge saw a young couple start to enter the shop, notice the strangers by the window, and turn away.