“Indeed I am.”So keep your eyes on your own husband. Constance tried and failed to laugh at herself and turned swiftly to business. “I have just been talking to Constable Heron, and he mentioned a few items in the village that have been inexplicably lost over the years.”
“Really?” Mrs. Raeburn sounded only vaguely surprised and not terribly interested. It was not, clearly, the sort of gossip she enjoyed.
“One of them, apparently, was a prayer book from the vicarage.”
“Ah!” Memory clearly dawned, followed swiftly by annoyance. “Yes indeed. It was a lovely little book, bound in leather with gold tooling, engraved with my husband’s initials. The pages were edged with gold leaf, too. I gave it to him as a gift, on our first Christmas at Sutton May.”
“It sounds very beautiful. He must have been delighted.”
“He was. He treasured it. We were both really annoyed when we could not find it anywhere.”
“When exactly did it disappear?”
“Oh, it must have been at least three years ago now. Maybe four. Certainly, between one Sunday and the next.”
“Then he only used it during the Sunday service?”
“Oh no, he kept it in his study to consult also. But if he couldn’t lay his hands on it at once, he would use one of the others that were to hand. A vicarage tends to collect several Bibles, prayer books, psalm books, and hymnaries… At any rate, he only noticed it was missing when he was looking for it onEaster Sunday. We couldn’t find it in any of the likely places, and he had to take another to church that day. Later, of course, we searched all theunlikely places too, but it never turned up.”
“Did you report it to Constable Heron?”
Her eyes widened. “Why would we do that?”
“In case it had been stolen.”
“Who would steal the vicar’s prayer book?”
His favorite prayer book,Constance thought. Was that the reason behind the theft? “I don’t know, but it is always a possibility. Anything can be stolen, with or without reasons you or I might recognize. In this case, I imagine it was quite a valuable book, in terms of money.”
“It was not cheap,” Mrs. Raeburn agreed, her expression softening. “But I wanted to give him something special to mark his arrival here. Sutton May is an excellent living.” She shook her head. “But I really doubt it was stolen.”
“Then what do you think happened to it?”
She shrugged with an air of helplessness. “I really don’t know. It was not a large book, so I suppose it might have got knocked off the study desk and landed in the wastepaper basket. Alice could have emptied it without noticing.”
“Alice was with you then?”
“Oh yes. She was quite young when we took her on, when we first arrived here. To be honest, we were not sure we could afford the luxury of a parlor maid.”
And young maids, especially those with less-than-perfect backgrounds, could be paid less than their more experienced sisters. More to the point, Alice’s mother, Mavis, had also lost something.
Of course, servants generally got the blame for anything lost or stolen, but in this case, Mrs. Raeburn seemed to bear no suspicion of malice in her servant.
“Or Luke could have dropped it in the street, I suppose,” she continued. “Although I would have expected someone to bring it back to him if that were the case. Unless it was a market day.”
The day that strangers came into the village. “I suppose,” Constance said without much hope, “you cannot recall who visited you or the vicar during that week? Or whom he called upon, perhaps with the prayer book in his pocket?”
“Oh, goodness, no. You really think someone stole it from him? I thought you were interested in Mrs. Chadwick’s nasty letter—surely the two cannot be connected?”
“They are both unusual events,” Constance said, feeling slightly foolish. “But no, I don’t know if they are connected at all.”
She did not stay long after that, since Mrs. Raeburn seemed more interested in Solomon than in gossiping about the village, and Constance did want to be too pointed in her questions about Miss Fernie. When she rose to take her leave, Mrs. Raeburn rang the bell for Alice to show her out, and they exchanged civil goodbyes.
As the maid helped her back into her coat, Constance said, “Alice, do you recall a box of your mother’s that went missing a while ago?”
Alice’s hands stilled, then dropped as Constance turned to face her. “I do,” she said. “Pretty little carved box with a sliding lid. You had to find the hidden catch to open it. I loved playing with it, but Mam always put it back on the mantelshelf because it was one of her favorite things.”
“She valued it particularly, then?”
