What was left of the family gathered in the drawing room for a drink when everyone else had finally gone home, but conversation was stilted, uneasy, as if they were strangers meeting for the first time and had yet to find common ground. The truth was, they felt like strangers. In the circumstances. Unsettled, uncomfortable. Isolated by their thoughts.

Then Stephen said abruptly, “Why do you suppose they did it?”

There was an odd silence. No one, thank God, had asked that all the long day! Not through the services nor the burials nor the reception at the Hall afterward, where friends and villagers had mingled, talking in subdued voices. Remembering Olivia and Nicholas, recalling some small incident or ordinary encounter, a conversation-all safely in the past. Avoiding the how and why of death, as if by tacit agreement. Avid curiosity dwelt in their eyes, but they were sensitive to the delicacy of the situation. Suicides.

No one had spoken of the poems, either.

Susannah said quickly, “What business is it of ours? They’re dead. Let that be the end of it.”

“Good God, Nicholas and Olivia were your brother and sister-”

“Half brother and sister!” she retorted, as if that might distance her from real pain.

“All right, then, half brother and sister! Haven’t you even wondered about it? Don’t you feel anything?”

“I feel grateful that they could be buried with Mother in the family vault,” Susannah answered. “Thanks to the rector’s kindness! In the old days, it wouldn’t have been allowed, you know that. Suicides weren’t buried in the churchyard, much less in the crypt! And we’d have been ostracized along with them. It’s still bad enough, God knows. London will be an ordeal, facing all my friends, knowing pity’s behind their sympathy-” She stopped, unwilling to lay her emotions out, raw and painful, for the others to paw over. “I don’t want to talk about it! What we’ve got to face now is, what’s to become of the house?”