Free Anne Perry's Silent Nights: Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries by Anne Perry Page B

heard in Kelsall. Had the curate loved Olivia? Would it have been infinitely more than friendship if he could have chosen? Was there a completely different kind of hunger beneath the grief he displayed in his young, vulnerable face?
    They walked together without speaking again, and he left Kelsall at his next parishioner’s house.
    Making his way back up the incline again to find Warner, he did not change his mind. He still thought Kelsall a friend, but perhaps a closer one, more observant, more of a confidante than he had at first assumed.
    The redwings were gone from the field. He hoped they would be back after the rain.
    He spent the afternoon with Warner, but the only thing that emerged from their efforts was that Kelsall’s alibi was finally confirmed by the absentminded old gentleman he had been visiting, who had been up late with the croup.
    In the late afternoon, just before dusk, there was a sudden lifting of the clouds and the air was filled with the soft, warm light of the low sun, already touching the high ground with a patina of gold. Suddenly the sea was blue and the Menai Strait a shining mirror barely wind-rippled as the icy breath of the sky whispered across it and disappeared.
    Runcorn started to walk again, drawn towards the shore. It was cold, but he did not mind. There was a simplicity to it, a perfect melting of solid earth with the living, changing sea, a boundlessness of one into the other.
    He turned and craned his neck upwards as he watched gulls soaring inland on the invisible currents, careening sideways and slipping down andthen up, looking effortless as they mounted into the light and were lost to view.
    It was almost silent, a faint whisper of water behind him. London had never offered him such infinite peace. There was always noise, some kind of clatter of human occupation, an end to vision, to possibility.
    He began climbing upwards, away from the shore. Perhaps he was wrong, and he had allowed himself to believe in limits where there were none, except those he made for himself. He thought of the past with a different view, almost as if he were regarding someone else. He saw in himself a man of practical common sense, one whose judgment of character was usually right but without empathy. He lacked a passion, an understanding of dreams. Had he guarded himself from such things, afraid to face his own smallness? He had hated Monk’s anger and his fire, his impatience with stupidity, his arrogance. Or more truly, was he afraid of it, because it challenged the conformity that was so much less dangerous?
    Was that what Olivia had done, too, challengedconformity? She had climbed these hills, he knew that from Naomi Costain. She might even have stood on this level stretch of the path and stared at the fire of the setting sun, as he was doing, and looked at the horizon where the sky and the sea became one.
    Thinking of Olivia, Runcorn realized that small people like himself who want to be safe, who have no driving hunger, are afraid of those who upset their world, remove the boundaries that close them in and excuse their cowardice. He had hated Monk for that. Who had hated Olivia? Not Naomi. But what about Costain? Did she question this edifice of his faith, the daily justification of his status, his income, his reason for being? Could he forgive her for that?
    Or was he simply a good man who did not understand a difficult sister who was his responsibility to feed and clothe, and keep within society’s bounds, for her own sake?
    The sun was a scarlet ball on the horizon, and even as he watched, it dropped below the rim, spilling fire across the sea. He decided he would stand hereas darkness gathered and closed in, wondering what Olivia had felt. What visions had she seen, and perhaps died for? Was Melisande anything like her, except in his imagination? But he was a practical man, trained from years of making himself fit the mold of necessity, and the only real service he could perform now was to