The medieval market cross that I remembered as being in the center of the square was gone, perhaps a victim of fire or development or simply the wear and tear of time. In its place was a pleasant enough statue of a stern-faced man in Regency clothing, doubtless one of the sober town fathers of the past century.
Tommy parked the car in the shadow of the statue, and turned in his seat to look at me.
'That's quite a walk,' he commented. 'Almost four miles. It must have taken you well over an hour each way.'
'I suppose so. Of course, it didn't seem that long, because I had company.'
'What sort of company?'
'Rachel.'
'Who?'
'Rachel,' I repeated, before I realized that, as familiar as all these people of the past were to me, to Tom they meant nothing. They were strangers from a foreign land, without substance or meaning.
And so I proceeded to tell my brother all I knew about Greywethers—how it had belonged to Mariana's grandfather, and subsequently passed to his eldest son, the ubiquitous, unyielding Jabez Howard. I told him of hollow-eyed Aunt Caroline, and of Rachel, who had lived with her sister and brother-in-law since their marriage. I sort of skimmed over the inhabitants of the manor house, but by then Tom wasn't paying much attention. He was more interested in my trip to the market that morning.
'So you and Rachel came into this square,' he said, 'and ... then what? What did you do?'
'We stood over there'—I waved a hand toward a newsagent's on the far side of the statue—'and watched a bit of a play going on, and then we both went our separate ways and I just sort of wandered around, if you know what I mean. Stopped to look at a few of the stalls, but mostly I just wandered. I ended up in that lane there, between the tea shop and the bank.'
Hardly a lane anymore, I corrected myself. It had been widened to accommodate motor traffic, although it was still on the narrow side, and the cobbles lay buried beneath smooth black pavement.
Tom looked.
'What did you do there?' . 'I patted a horse.'
'And then you left?'
'Yes. Rachel came and found me, and we went off home, back the same way we'd come.'
'I see.'
I looked at him suspiciously. 'You think I've snapped, don't you?'
'I do not! I've never said—'
'Oh, leave it,' I told him, raising a weary hand to my head. 'I'm sorry. It's not you, Tom. It's just that ... I don't know, it's just that everything seems so damned real when it's actually happening, and then when it's over, I feel so ... so lost. Like maybe I dreamed it all, I don't know....'
My voice trailed away miserably, and Tom subjected me to a hard, brotherly stare before pushing open the driver's-side door.
'Well,' he said brightly, 'there's one way of finding out whether you were really here this morning.'
'How's that?'
He flashed me a patronizing smile. 'My dear woman, you were puddling about the market square in the pouring rain. Surely someone must have noticed you.'
'But the shops wouldn't have been open yet.'
'I'll lay you odds at least one of them was,' was my brother's determined reply, and I watched him walk across the square and disappear into the newsagent's. When he emerged some ten minutes later, he was carrying two polystyrene cups and looking terribly pleased with himself.
'Coffee?' he offered, handing me a cup as he slid back into the car seat and pulled the door shut behind him. It was still raining lightly, and he brought the dampness with him, drops of moisture glistening on his black hair and dark-blue overcoat.
'I can't drink this stuff,' I complained, looking down at the cup in my hands. 'It isn't real coffee, Tom.'
'Suit yourself.' He took a great swallow from his own cup before speaking again. 'You were here this morning, as it happens. The lady in the shop saw you. Or at least she saw a "wee little dark lady with short curly hair," standing in the square at around seven-thirty. At first she thought you were looking in the window of her shop, but when she went to speak to you, you had gone. She saw you a few times, walking around the square. Figured you were waiting for someone to come get you.'
'And how did you get her to tell you all this?' I asked him politely. 'Or do I want to know?'
'Nothing to it.' Tom shrugged. 'I told her I was a doctor from the psychiatric hospital, and we were missing one of our patients. She was properly sympathetic'
'Tom!' I was scandalized. 'You're not serious! This is a small community, you know—word gets around. I won't be able to set foot outside my house!'
'It's still too easy, love.' His smile was indulgent. 'To get a rise out of you, I mean. You can calm yourself, I only told her that I was supposed to meet you here earlier, and that I'd had car trouble so I arrived late. I asked if she'd seen you, she said yes, and then I pretended an enormous amount of guilt and bought my coffee. She probably thinks you got tired of waiting for me and went home, and that I'm now on my way to try to placate you. All right?'
'Yes.'
'Good. Then just duck your head down a little as we drive by, will you? I don't want the woman to think I'm a philanderer as well as a thoughtless cad who leaves his girlfriends waiting in the rain.'
I ducked my head obediently, and we rounded the marketplace statue, heading back along the Old Marlborough Road toward Exbury.