“Murder?”

The word seemed to rip itself from the Reverend Miller’s throat, and Charity could see immediately that the hurt in his eyes was entirely genuine. “Good heavens, child, surely you cannot believe your own father to be capable of murder?”

“I did not think my own father to be capable of lying to me,” Charity replied, her eyes downcast and her voice ripe with unshed tears. “But it does seem at present that, in that quarter at least, I was mistaken.”

The Reverend bowed his head, obviously pained by her words but unable to take any dispute with them.

“That I cannot argue with,” he said softly. “Therefore I must ask you to appeal to the testimony of your own heart, my daughter. Do you truly believe me to be so cold-blooded, so godless, that I could murder a woman and child? Even if I had something to gain from their deaths — which I did not — my conscience would always forbid it. Surely you can see that, Daughter?”

Charity looked between her father’s face and Adam’s. She longed desperately for one of these men to confirm matters for her, to tell her what was true and what was not in a way that excluded any doubt.

But she knew that that was not possible. And even if it were, it was a matter for her own judgement. How could she call herself a grown woman — a grown woman who sought to marry and make her own life — if she could not even trust her own judgement?

Acting purely on instinct, she replied. When she spoke her own words surprised her.

“I would like to believe you, Father,” she said. “But I ask that you explain yourself to me. At this moment the situation seems unfathomable, and I do not even know how I could go about believing you.

The Reverend gave a great sigh, as though he did not know how best to manage the relief that her words gave him.

“Well then, daughter, that is all I could wish at this present moment,” he said. “Even if I am to go to the scaffold, so long as you believe me, I can leave this world with gladness in my heart.”

Charity did not respond to this; what could she possibly have said? Her father continued as if to fill the silence, “If you will allow me, I will present to you all the account of what truly happened that day. May the three of you be the judges of whether I am telling the truth, and may you act as a jury in deciding what is to be done with me.”

He turned to look at Esther.

“I have just told lies about you that I know were greatly injurious to your honor,” he said. “I fear that lying has become a habit for me, the place in which I am most comfortable. For what it is worth, I beg your pardon, although I understand that you may have no wish to bestow it upon me.”

Esther made no indication of how she felt about this utterance. Charity could only imagine that she was too angry and confused to even have considered how she felt about the matter.

Still, no one spoke.

“The first thing to say,” the Reverend Miller continued, “is that I had no quarrel at all with Mary Warwick, nor with her little boy. I never wished a moment’s harm upon either of them, still less could I ever have inflicted it myself.”

“But what really did happen then?” Charity pressed. She wanted to believe her father — she did believe her father — but it all seemed so impossible. How could a young woman and her child simply have drowned and mysteriously vanished?

“It was the most foolish mistake I have ever made in my life,” the Reverend said. “And, judging from my behavior toward you in previous days, Daughter, and toward you, Mr. Harding, I have learned very little from the error of my ways. What a fool I am.”

At this Charity really thought that he was going to break down into sobs. She walked over to her father and took his hand, saying gently. “It is not too late to learn, Papa. Tell us what happened, and that can be the beginning of your atonement.”

“I met the girl,” the Reverend Miller continued, his voice still thick. “Mary Warwick. I had known her all her life, of course, seen her in the lane and thought her to be a radiant and charming creature. But it had only recently come to my attention — from a passing comment from Farmer Roberts — that she was living in the parish but not attending church. We all thought that she had disappeared.”

“I remember,” Charity said. “No one saw anything of Mary after Freddie was born.”

“I went to speak to her on several occasions,” her father continued. “To me, it was evident that she was a lost soul, and I wished to bring her back into the fold. How arrogant I was then, to believe that I had any right to judge sinners or to believe that I myself was without sin.”

We all have plenty of things that we are ashamed of, Charity acknowledged. The question is whether we can bring ourselves to admit them.

“Mary did not like me to come to her cottage, for she felt that it was drawing attention to her presence, and she preferred to live very quietly with Freddie. But she walked freely in the grounds of Lawley Hall. I wonder that you did not see her, Mr. Harding.”

Adam thought back to all those times where he thought he had seen a woman walking through the grounds. He had believed that it was Esther, and when he had first seen Esther, he had believed her to be Mary. At this point, he hardly knew what he believed.

“At any rate,” the Reverend Miller continued, “it happened that she preferred to meet with me in the grounds of the Hall, rather than at her home. She would bring little Freddie with her, and the three of us would walk together. The Duke saw no trouble with it; he was glad that she had some company other than him. He trusted me implicitly, of course.”

At this, his voice became choked, and he passed a hand briefly over his eyes.

“Freddie loved to play by the lake, so that was where we walked.”

“On that final day, I was remonstrating with Mary particularly energetically, trying to suggest that she found ways of putting her sins behind her. I must confess that in the course of the conversation I became very heated. Undoubtedly Mary was distressed, and I fear that she was even a little frightened.”

“Freddie became angry with me, angry that I was distressing his mamma. He flew at me as though he wanted to beat me. Of course, he was only a tiny little thing, but he did succeed in tearing at my gown. He tore a piece of the cloth off.”

“At this, I grew very angry. I have always understood why anger is numbered among the Seven Deadly Sins that can do more mischief than any other mood man might experience. At any rate, I was quite overtaken by anger on that day. I roared at Freddie that he was a young scoundrel, a little knave, a fool. I am afraid that I frightened the little boy terribly.”

At these words, the tears began to flow freely down the Reverend’s face and sink into his beard.

“The little fellow ran away,” he said, scarcely able to gasp out the words, such was his distress. “He cried, and I believe that he cried so bitterly that he could not see where he was going. He fell… he fell into the lake. I shall never forget the sound of his mother’s scream as he fell.”

No one said anything. What could one possibly have said?

“Mary ran after him,” the Reverend continued. “She threw herself into the lake after her boy without a moment’s thought, and I just stood there, rooted to the spot. I thought that within a few moments she would come back up again. I really did. I thought that they would be shaken but safe.”

His voice was brittle, as though he were constructing his story out of shards of broken glass.

“I could have got into the water. I am an old man, indeed, but I am a strong enough swimmer. I could have helped them. I could have called for help. I could have done any number of things, but I did nothing.”

All Charity could think about was the blind panic that Mary Warwick must have experienced while she was thrashing about in the water. She imagined the desperate search for the childish hand, the sensation of her skirts and petticoats water logging and dragging her downward, the last frantic glances toward the sunlight before the shadow finally took over.

She could not bear to look at her father. She might faint from the thought of it all, from the sheer horror of it. She glanced sideways at Adam, who had grown very pale. Doubtless he, too, could only think of what it would be like to drown.

“Why did I not help?” the vicar asked himself. It seemed that the question was partially rhetorical and partly a true plea to his past self. Make me understand what really happened.

“I cannot say for sure. Who knows how they will ever behave in such a circumstance until it has come to pass. But what I do know is that in that moment, the cruelest and most wicked thought crossed my mind.”

At these words, his shoulders began to shake.

“I thought that God was punishing Mary Warwick for her sins,” he gasped out between sobs.

Charity’s overwhelming impulse was to go to her father, take his hand and assist him through his suffering. But she did not. On some level, she felt it would not be right to do so. Her father needed to face his own sins, and she would not be doing him any favors in trying to shield him from the suffering.

“I thought that if God willed Mary Warwick to be saved, then saved she would be. I thought that it was not for me to intervene. Perhaps I was appeased with the idea that I saw heavenly justice in action. I shall never forgive myself for such thoughts.”

Charity was reminded of how, in past times, women accused of witchcraft were taken to ponds and tied to stools. If they floated, it was thought, then they had proven themselves as witches and would be killed. If they sank, then their innocence was proven, and death was a small price to pay for the proof.

It felt to her that very little had changed for unfortunate women in the world like Mary Warwick.

“As for the child…” the Reverend continued, seeming to gain some hold over himself and passing his hand over his eyes once again, “did I believe that he was a sinner? Did I condemn him in the same way that I condemned his mother? I do not know. Perhaps. All I know is that these wicked thoughts passed within a few seconds, but by then it was too late.”

None of them said anything for a long while. They were all horrorstruck by what the Reverend Miller had said. It was not so much because it sounded so difficult to believe that a person could behave as he had, but rather that it was all too easy to fathom.

All three of them had their moments of foolishness, weakness, and cowardice. It was not so difficult to believe that the same had been the case for the Reverend Miller, and when that moment had struck, he had made the most unforgivable mistake of his life.