Free A Question of Honor by Charles Todd Page B

staring at me. “Of course not. Until the war I was rector of a church outside of Bury St. Edmunds. What business is it of yours?”
    “Then you can’t possibly tell me how well the plumbing works or if there’s worm or dry rot in the attic. Or if the chimneys draw without smoking so badly it chases everyone out of a room. And there are the drains. Do they smell, in the servants’ hall? Not to mention the state of the roof, which I can see for myself. How do you expect to sell a house you yourself consider to be a barn of a place?”
    The poor man didn’t know what to say. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Simon trying to smother a grin.
    “I never met the Caswells,” I went on. “I didn’t even know their names until just before the sexton bore down on us and nearly drove us from the churchyard. Did he tell you we were staring at the graves? I happened to notice that here was a family who died on the same day. You don’t often see that unless there’s plague or cholera or typhoid. I couldn’t have told you the name of the previous owners of that house of yours. But now I know it. Because everyone is behaving as if Simon and I have come here to make trouble. Well, we haven’t. So go away and let us drink our tea in peace.”
    I’d succeeded in reducing the tension between the two men. I wasn’t sure that a chaplain would have resorted to his fists, but I wasn’t going to chance it. Tall as he was, he was several inches shorter than Simon, and his reach was shorter as well. Simon could have floored the man without turning a hair.
    The chaplain stared at me, mouth open, uncertain what to say.
    “Since you’ve insisted on joining us,” I said while he was still at a loss for words, “you might as well have a cup of tea.”
    I nodded to the man who had just served us, asking for a third cup. When it arrived, accompanied by a wooden expression on the server’s face, I poured three cups of tea and passed the honey as well as the small jug of milk.
    By this time the chaplain didn’t know where to look. He had come here with artillery and cavalry in his eyes, and now he was discovering that he and they were in full retreat.
    “Tell me about these people, the Caswells,” I said. “Are they related to you?”
    “I—no—that’s to say, not directly. The house went to my uncle when they—er—when the Caswells died. I’m his late wife’s nephew.”
    “But you’ve been trying to sell the house, without any luck.”
    “I can’t afford to live there. I hope to return to my church in Bury, when the war’s over. Or to one like it. What I earn wouldn’t keep that house for a month, much less a year. I tried to have it turned into a clinic, but even the Medical Board refused to accept my offer. That was at the start of the war. My uncle died in August 1914, just after the Germans marched into Belgium. My aunt had died the year before. She had never liked the place, not after what had happened there. And when I came to stay for a school holiday or the like, she always insisted that I lock my bedroom door. She’d come, after she thought I was asleep, to test it.” He drank a little of his tea and grimaced. It was still too hot. “Why am I telling you all this?”
    “Because you haven’t been able to tell anyone else,” I suggested. “Not if you wanted to sell the property. How did they die, the Caswells? Was it illness, as I’d expected?”
    “They were murdered. All three of them. In cold blood, in what my aunt always referred to as the drawing room. It was shut off. I wasn’t allowed to go in there. I doubt she ever used it. But then she was elderly when she came to Petersfield, and she probably had no taste for curiosity seekers. They came in droves the first few years, she said. And then the story was half forgotten. Until July, before the war started. One of the London papers brought up sensational murders. Jack the Ripper, that sort of thing. And they included the mysterious deaths at The