Revelation

'Will you stay in London, do you think, or go to Bristol? In the long run?'

She sighed. 'I think it would be hard for me to buy a house in London. But perhaps in Bristol I could.' She raised her eyebrows. 'Treasurer Rowland has sent a message; kindly worded, but he made it clear he wants me out of our rooms as soon as possible now.'

'He is a heartless man.'

She shrugged. 'There is a vacancy at the Inn now, he will want to fill it.' She gave me a searching look. 'Samuel would like me to move back to Bristol permanently. But it is not just obstinacy that makes me stay. It is too early to decide on something like that.' She sighed. 'It is hard to think clearly. Everywhere the empty space of Roger's absence follows me. It is like a hole in the world. Yet do you know, I realized this morning that I had worked for half an hour without thinking of him. I felt guilty, as though I had betrayed him.'

'I think that is how grief is. The hole in the world will always be there, but you begin to notice the other things. You should not feel guilt.'

Dorothy looked at me curiously. 'You have known grief too?'

'There was a woman I knew who died. In the plague of 1534. Nine years, but I still think of her. I used to wear a mourning ring for her.'

'I did not know.'

'It was after you and Roger went to Bristol.' I looked at her. 'Dorothy, may I ask you something?'

'Anything.'

'The business you feel you must stay for. Is part of it waiting for the killer to be caught? Because I do not know when that will be.'

She came to a halt, turned and laid a hand on my arm. Her pale face, outlined by the black hood, was full of concern. 'Matthew,' she said quietly. 'I can see this dreadful thing is burning you up. I am sorry it was me that set you on this hunt. I thought officialdom did not care. But now I know they are seeking this man, I want you to leave the matter to them. This is having a bad effect on you.'

I shook my head sadly. 'I am bound tightly into the hunt for him now, bound into those official chains. He — he has killed again.'

'Oh no.'

'You are right, Dorothy, the horror eats into me, but I have to see it through now. And I have involved others too. Guy, Barak.' And even if I was willing to leave the killer alone, I thought but did not say, would he leave me? 'Do not be sorry,' I continued. 'We think we may know who the killer is. We will catch him. And one thing we are certain of now is that Roger was a chance victim, in the sense that the killer could equally have chosen someone else.'

'That is little comfort, somehow it makes it worse. But it has happened, I must bear it. Nothing will bring Roger back.'

I smiled at her. 'You are so much calmer now. Your strength is helping you.'

'Perhaps.'

'Do you feel God helps you in your grief?' I asked impulsively. 'Succours you?'

'I pray. For help in dealing with what has happened. Yet I would not ask God to take away my grief. It must be borne. Though I cannot understand how God would allow a good man to be destroyed like that. That is what I mean by his being a chance victim making it worse.'

'I suppose one could answer the killer is an evil man, who has turned from God and all that is good. And God allows us the free will to do that.'

She shook her head. 'I have not the heart for such speculation these days.'

We walked on in silence for a little. Then she said, 'You have much courage, Matthew, to do this hateful work.' She smiled at me. 'For anyone it would be bad, but you — you are affected by things.'

'It has affected Barak too. And Guy, I think.'

'Are you sure you cannot give it up?'

'No. Not now.'

We had reached the edge of the little escarpment and stood looking out over Lincoln's Inn Fields, towards the more distant fields of Long Acre. Clouds in varying shades of grey raced across the sky, promising more rain.

'Do you remember when we first met?' Dorothy asked suddenly. 'That business of Master Thornley's paper?'

I smiled. 'I recall it as though it were yesterday.' Thornley had been a fellow student who studied with Roger and me twenty years before. The three of us shared a little cubbyhole of an office at the Inn. It had been a summer evening. I had been sitting working with Roger when Dorothy had called, with a message from her father, my principal, about a case the following day where he required my assistance. Scarcely had she told me when Thornley had burst in. 'He was such a fat little fellow,' Dorothy recalled. 'Do you remember? He had a round red face, but that evening it was white.'

I remembered. Thornley had been set a fiendishly complicated problem in land law, one on which he had to present a paper on the morrow. 'The story he told us.' I laughed aloud at the memory. 'He would be unable to present his paper because his dog had eaten it. The lamest excuse in the world, yet that time it was true. Did you ever see that dog?'

'No. It lived in his lodgings, did it not?'