“I thought you would want to know that there is to be a meeting in the village tonight, at the inn.”
“Ah, they don’t know what to do about me.”
Maisie came to her feet. “I’ll be there, Webb. I want to hear what they say, and I want them to explain themselves, to tell what happened on the night of the Zeppelin raid. Just as you told me, in your words, how you came back here, so I want to hear their story.” She turned to stroke a horse who had come close in search of a treat before she spoke again. “If you are well enough to come to the inn, I would have thought that you might want to hear their story too. It is, after all, part of your past.”
Webb looked at Paishey, and she smiled. “If I’m there, I’m there,” he said. “That’s how it is.”
Maisie looked across toward Beulah’s vardo. “When will she be buried?”
“On Tuesday. The word’s gone out, and I’ve seen the vicar, the one who comes to the village from Horsmonden. She’ll be buried in the churchyard, with my people.”
“Then back here for the afterwards?”
Webb nodded. “It’s not as if Sandermere will be here to complain about a bit of a singe on his field, is it?”
MAISIE PARKED THE MG close to the church and watched as villagers came alone and in pairs to the inn. Even though the evening was not cold, each and every one was wrapped as if winter’s breath had settled upon the community and their bones had been touched by a sliver of ice. When those whom she knew had arrived, Maisie left the MG and walked across to the waste ground opposite. Gone was the chill of her earlier visit, the specter of the terrible night when the Zeppelin came and the van Maartens became the crucible who paid the ultimate price.
Pulling her collar up around her neck, she walked at an unhurried pace toward the inn. Was it on a night like this that the Zeppelin came over, its low drone lingering above the village? Had a light—perhaps embers from the smithy’s fire—caught the enemy’s attention, providing a new target? Here, in a place where sleep evaded those who had just learned that their sons were dead, Wealden boys killed on a foreign field and never to return home again, the Zeppelin had brought the war to a village in England.
She lingered for a moment or two outside the inn, looking through the ancient diamond-paned glass as the villagers came together, some seated, some standing at the bar. Fred Yeoman leaned across, resting his elbow on the counter, with his sleeves rolled up and a cloth in his hand that he absentmindedly drew back and forth across the wood as he spoke. From a seat next to the low inglenook fireplace surrounded with shining horse brasses, a man raised his hand to Yeoman and called out above the throng, loud enough for Maisie to hear, “Better get on with it, Fred. There’s a lot of talk to be done tonight.” Maisie took a deep breath, rested her fingers on the door handle for a moment, and entered the inn.
At first she was hardly noticed, then a woman glanced around to see who had joined them, and Fred Yeoman looked up from the counter, ready to pour another half-pint. The woman nudged her husband, who turned, and soon the hubbub of conversation died. The innkeeper broke the silence.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit in the residents’ room, Miss Dobbs?”
She shook her head. “No, thank you, Mr. Yeoman. But I would like a half-pint of the Harveys ale, if you please.” She pulled off her jacket, a sign that she was staying, and looked around the bar. A man next to the counter stepped away and held out his hand toward a stool. She inclined her head and stepped forward, thanking the man for giving up his seat. Fred placed the frothy brew in front of Maisie, which she sipped before turning around. All eyes were upon her, the outsider.
She set down her glass and looked again at the villagers, weighing her words with care. She had no need to raise her voice; the crackle and spit of a fire in the inglenook was the only sound to punctuate her words. “You’ve all seen me in this village, and you know I’m working for the company involved in negotiations to purchase the brickworks and the estate. And you know by now that my interest has been in the crimes, and more importantly, the fires that have occurred in this village.”
Her words were met with silence. One man shuffled his feet, only to be met with a scornful look from his wife, who crossed her arms and turned away from him. Maisie continued.
“Heronsdene is a beautiful village, and I believe you are all good people.” Again she paused, choosing her words with care. “But a secret cannot be kept forever—”
At that moment the door opened, and it appeared to Maisie that every single man and woman in the room drew breath as the man they had known before the fire only as Webb, the traveling gypsy, came into the bar. Maisie nodded and smiled, holding out her hand to the seat just vacated next to her. No one attempted to leave. No one made an excuse to depart, or coughed, or made a noise.
Webb joined Maisie and looked around the room, as if to remember every single face and to torment each villager with his silence.
“I was just saying,” said Maisie, her voice low, “that a secret cannot be kept forever.”
Webb cleared his throat to speak, but instead nodded to Maisie, who continued addressing those assembled.
“You came together this evening to decide what to do about this man, whom you knew as Pim Martin when he was a boy. He was from a family you understood to be of Dutch blood until the night of the Zeppelin raid, when you came to sense the power of doubt. Will anyone speak to this man of that night?”
There was silence for a moment. Then a woman began to sob and was comforted by Mrs. Pendle. One man stood as if to leave, but was stopped by another, who laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and shook his head.
Maisie spoke again. “Pim Martin went to war as a boy. He fought for his country, as did the other sons of Heronsdene. This man, then barely fourteen years of age, saw death of a most terrible kind—” Her words caught in her throat, as she banished images of the war from her mind. “Then he came home to . . . nothing.” She paused. “So I ask again—will anyone speak to this man of that night?”
Now the silence in the room was interwoven by more sobbing. Maisie watched one woman repeatedly punch her knees with her fist, as if to strike feeling into limbs that were otherwise numb.
The man she knew to be Mr. Whyte coughed and raised his hand, taking off his cap, then passing it from his left hand to his right and back again. “It’s hard, to tell of what happened—”
Another voice joined in. “It was madness. We were all touched by madness and didn’t know what we were doing.”
“It wouldn’t’ve happened if the boys hadn’t been killed.”
“Or if that Sandermere hadn’t been drunk, the lying hound.”
Now voices came from left and right, as if every man and woman wanted to speak at once, to confess and have the hand of absolution laid upon them.
Fred Yeoman raised his hand. “Miss Dobbs is right. We’ve got to tell, and it’s no good starting in the middle and then going both ways at once. Someone has to start at the beginning, and it might as well be me, because I’m the landlord here. But first I’ll put a glass in Pim’s hand, if you don’t mind.”
“Webb. You can call me Webb now.”
Yeoman nodded and pulled an ale, finishing the pour with a hearty head before passing it to the gypsy. Then he wiped the counter once again, threw the cloth to one side, and gripped the edge of the bar as he began to speak, looking down at his whitening fists, then up at Webb and the gathering in front of him.
“After you’d gone, after they’d taken you to the reformatory, there was change here in the village. We lost a lot of our boys, the first lot in ’ 15, then others here and there, then a dozen all together in the summer of 1916. It was during the hop-picking that the telegrams with news of more lost were delivered.” He looked at Webb. “You’ll remember them. There was Derek Tovis, John Barham, Tim Whyte, Bobby Pickles, Sam Pendle, Peter Tillings—all gone on the same day. All our boys.”