Elizabeth Mayhew greeted him warmly, clucking her tongue over the weather, and saying, “I was afraid you might not come. That you’d be glad of the weather as an excuse.”

“Nonsense,” he told her, kissing her cheek. “It will lift by noon. Frances sends her love, and I’m to convince you to come to London for a few days over Christmas.”

“How sweet of her,” Elizabeth said, leading the way to the stairs. “I may do that. I’ve grown so dull of late I’ll bore her to death. But perhaps it would be good for me. We shall see.”

The house was a comfortable Georgian manor on the outskirts of Marling, a pretty village that had enjoyed its share of wealth over the centuries and still maintained an air of quiet gentility.

Set back behind a low brick wall, the gardens bedded down for the winter, the house now seemed to wear its age more starkly, but in summer it glowed with the warmth of the sun and with the rampant colors of perennials, with annuals sprawling at their feet. Then it was timeless and beautiful.

There had always been a welcome here, as long as Rutledge could remember. But without Richard’s voice in the passages or his long legs stretched out toward the fire after a day tramping on the Downs, there was an emptiness in the rooms that lamps and Elizabeth’s lighter voice couldn’t fill.

Rutledge had known Richard Mayhew longer than Elizabeth had, long before Elizabeth had come into the picture. In his youth, he’d played tennis here with Richard, and gone for long walks over the Downs, following old tracks and pathways whose origins were lost in time. It had seemed odd, when the summer light lingered late into the evening, to think of the ghosts whose footsteps they were following. Angles, Saxons, Romans-God knew what other now nameless tribes had passed this way. Richard had called it the spell of Midsummer. “The poets are always writing about it. I daresay the ancients worshiping the sun thought this a magic time.”