Vanessa came out of the kitchen and said hello.
‘Lord Peter – my cat,’ Audrey explained to her. ‘Such a worry. He treats the Vicarage as his second home.’
I leant nonchalantly against the door, preventing her from stepping into the hall. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t seen him.’
‘The kettle’s on,’ Vanessa said. ‘Would you like a cup?’
Audrey slipped past me and followed her into the kitchen. ‘Lord Peter has to cross the main road to get here. The traffic’s getting worse and worse, especially since they started work on the motorway.’
‘Cats are very good at looking after themselves,’ Vanessa said.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’ No doubt accidentally, Audrey tried to insinuate a hint of indecency, the faintest wiggle of the eyebrows, into this possibility. ‘I’m sure you were in the middle of something.’
‘Nothing that wasn’t going to wait until after tea,’ Vanessa said. ‘How’s the book selling?’
‘Splendidly, thank you. We sold sixty-three copies over Christmas. I knew people would like it.’
‘Why don’t you take Audrey’s coat?’ Vanessa suggested to me.
‘People like to know about their own village,’ Audrey continued, allowing me to peel her plastic mac away from her. ‘I know there have been changes, but Roth really is a village still.’
Changes? A village? I thought of the huge reservoir to the north, of the projected motorway through the southern part of the parish, and of the sea of suburban houses that lapped around the green. I carried the tea tray into the sitting room.
‘There’s not much of it left,’ Vanessa said. ‘The village, I mean.’
Audrey stared at Vanessa. ‘Oh, you’re quite wrong. Let me show you.’ She beckoned Vanessa towards the window, which looked out over the drive, the road and the green. ‘That’s the village.’ She nodded to her left, towards the houses of Vicarage Drive. ‘Here and on the left: the Vicarage and its garden. And then on our right is St Mary Magdalene, and beyond that the gates to Roth Park and the river. If you cross the stone bridge and carry on down the road, we’ll come to the Old Manor House, where Lady Youlgreave lives.’
‘I must take you to meet Lady Youlgreave,’ I said to Vanessa, attempting to divert the flow. ‘In a sense she’s my employer.’
It was no use. Audrey had now turned towards the green and was pointing at Malik’s Minimarket, which stood just beside the main road at the western end of the north side of the green.
‘That was the village forge when I was a girl.’ She laughed, a high and irritating sound. Her voice acquired a faint sing-song cadence. ‘Of course, it’s changed a bit since then, but haven’t we all? And beside it is my little home, Tudor Cottage. (I was born there, you know, on the second floor. The window on the left.) Then there’s the Queen’s Head. I think part of their cellars are even older than Tudor Cottage.’
We all stared at the Queen’s Head, a building that had been modernized so many times in the last hundred years that it had lost all trace of its original character. The pub now had a restaurant which served steaks, chips and cheap wine. At the weekend, the disco in the basement attracted young people from miles around, and there were regular complaints – usually from Audrey – about the noise.
‘The bus shelter wasn’t there when I was a girl,’ Audrey went on. ‘We had a much nicer one, with a thatched roof.’
The bus shelter stood on the green itself, opposite the pub. It was a malodorous cavern, whose main use was as the wet-weather headquarters of the teenagers who lived on the Manor Farm council estate.
‘And of course Manor Farm Lane has seen one or two changes as well.’ Audrey pointed at the road to the council estate which went off at the north-east corner of the green and winced theatrically. ‘We used to have picnics by the stream beyond the barn,’ she murmured in a confidential voice. ‘Just over there. Wonderful wild flowers in the spring.’
The barn was long gone, and the stream had been culverted over. Yet she gave the impression that for her they were still vivid, in a way that the council estate was not. For her the past inhabited the present and gave it meaning.
The finger moved on to the east side of the green, to a nondescript row of villas from the 1930s, defiantly suburban, to the library and the ramshackle church hall. ‘There was a lovely line of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cottages over there.’
Vanessa’s eyes met mine. I opened my mouth, but I was too late. Audrey’s head had swivelled round to the south side, to the four detached Edwardian houses whose gardens ran down to the Rowan behind them. Two of them had been cut up into flats; one was leased as offices; and the fourth was where Dr Vintner lived with his family and had his surgery.
‘A retired colonel in the Bengal Lancers used to live in the one at the far end. There was a nice solicitor in Number Two. And the lady in Number Three was some sort of cousin of the Youlgreaves.’
Black fur streaked along the windowsill. A paw tapped the glass. Lord Peter had come to join us.
‘Oh look!’ Audrey said. ‘Isn’t he clever?’ She bent down, bringing her head level with Lord Peter’s. ‘You knew Mummy was coming to look for you, didn’t you? So you came to find Mummy instead.’
In February, Lady Youlgreave demanded to see Vanessa. She invited us to have a glass of sherry with her after church on Sunday.
When I told Vanessa, her face brightened. ‘Oh good.’
‘I wish she’d chosen some other time.’ Sunday was my busiest day.
‘Do you want to see if we can rearrange it?’
‘It would be diplomatic to go,’ I said. ‘No sense in upsetting her.’
‘I’ll take you out to lunch afterwards. As a reward.’
‘Why are you so keen to meet her?’
‘Not exactly keen. Just interested.’
‘Because of the connection with Francis Youlgreave?’
Vanessa nodded. ‘It’s not every day you have a chance to meet the surviving family of a dead poet.’ She glanced at me, her face mischievous. ‘Or for that matter the man responsible for the care of his earthly remains.’
‘No doubt that was the only reason you wanted to marry me?’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Anyway, I want to meet Lady Youlgreave for her own sake. Isn’t she your boss?’
The old woman was the patron of the living, which meant that on the departure of one incumbent she had the right to nominate the next. The practice was a quaint survival from the days when such patronage had been a convenient way to provide financially for younger sons. In practice, such private patrons usually delegated the choice to the bishop. But Lady Youlgreave had chosen to exercise the right when she nominated me. An ancient possessiveness lingered. Though she rarely came to church, I had heard her refer to me on more than one occasion as ‘my vicar’.
On Sunday, swathed in coats, Vanessa and I left the Vicarage. We walked arm in arm past the railings of the church and crossed the mouth of the drive to Roth Park. The big wrought-iron gates had stood open for as long as anyone could remember. Each gate contained the letter Y within an oval frame. On the top of the left-hand gatepost was a stone fist brandishing a dagger, the crest of the Youlgreaves. On the right-hand gatepost there was nothing but an iron spike.
‘What happened to the other dagger?’ Vanessa asked.
‘According