The Shivering Sands by Victoria Holt

back. And now he is married to Edith Cowan all will be happily settled. At one time it seemed likely that Sir William would make Edith his heiress. There would have been an outcry if he had. But he was very fond of Edith’s parents and he had made her his ward. However, this is the happiest of solutions. Edith will inherit…through her marriage with Napier.”
    The vicar was beaming like the good fairy who has waved a wand and made everything as it should be.
    At that moment a maid appeared at the church door to say that the churchwarden had called to see the vicar on a matter of some urgency and was waiting in the drawing room. I told the vicar I should like to look round the church by myself and he left me.
    “You will find your way back to the house, Mrs. Verlaine. Mrs. Rendall will be delighted to give you some refreshment…and then you will be able to meet my curate, Jeremy Brewn, and talk of the young ladies’ lessons with him.”
    Left alone I went back to that statue in the wall and thought about the young man who in his nineteenth year had been shot by his brother. But chiefly I thought of the brother who at the age of seventeen had been sent away because of the accident. How could parents have behaved so to a son however much they had loved his brother, unless…Oh, no, it most certainly would have been an accident.
    I turned away and wandered into the graveyard. The silence all about me moved me deeply. There I stood among those memorials to the dead and I saw from the inscription on some that they had stood there for over a hundred and fifty years—some even longer; they looked as though they were so old they could no longer stand up straight and some of the names and writing on them was half obliterated by time.
    I wondered if that boy was buried here. It was almost certain that he would be; and I was sure I should have no difficulty in finding his grave for surely the Stacys would have the most magnificent of vaults or mausoleums.
    I looked about me and sure enough there was a vault grander than all others. Wrought iron surrounded it and when I saw the name Stacy, I knew this was the family vault. Marble statues of angels with drawn swords had been placed at the four corners as though to guard it from intruders; and there was a gate, padlocked, which led down to the vault. Inside the iron railings was a great tablet on which the names of those buried there had been inscribed with the dates of their births and death. The last on the list was Beaumont Stacy.
    As I was turning away I thought of Isabella Stacy in whose room I had sat and played the piano, the mother of Beaumont and Napier. She was dead, but where was her name? It was not on the scroll. Surely she would have been buried here?
    I studied the scroll once more; I walked round the vault; I looked about me as though I could find the answer to this mystery here in the graveyard. I was filled with a burning desire to know where she had been buried and why not here.
    And as I retraced my steps to the vicarage I was reminded once more that the strangeness of this new world into which I had been suddenly launched was occupying my mind as much as the mystery of Roma’s disappearance.

    Mrs. Rendall was waiting for me in the vicarage hall.
    “I wondered what had become of you,” she announced. “I told the Reverend to look after you.”
    I said quickly: “I asked to be allowed to look round the church alone.”
    “Alone!” Mrs. Rendall was surprised, but mollified. “I hope you liked our windows, Mrs. Verlaine. They are some of the best in the country.”
    I hastily said that I was sure they were, and added that I had walked through the graveyard and seen the Stacy vault. Was Lady Stacy not buried there? I had seen no mention of her.
    Mrs. Rendall looked startled, which was a strange position for her to find herself in, I was sure.
    “My word, Mrs. Verlaine,” she said with a touch of asperity, “you are a regular detective.”
    I was sure in