Every Secret Thing by Susanna Kearsley Read Free Book Online

for a bench and a birdbath.
    I stood at the dining room window and looked at that garden, and tried to imagine the work that had gone into making it – the never-ending daily round of weeding, trimming, watering…of tying off the branches of the vines so that they grew just so against the sun-warmed wall…of digging up perennials, dividing up the roots, and then replanting them…a task for every season. And I tried to picture Andrew Deacon sitting on his bench beside the birdbath, lost in thought, as old men sometimes are, and looking at his flowers, at the beds of tea roses that grew close against the lawn.
    He had liked to look at things of beauty. That I knew, from standing in this long room that had served as both a living room and dining room, its walls a pale golden peach colour that warmed in the light and set off the mahogany dining room suite to advantage. He’d hung paintings – not prints, but real paintings – wherever he could. Mostly landscapes, and street scenes, and one I particularly liked, of a little round windmill with wood-and-cloth sails. It didn’t look Dutch, I thought. Greek, maybe. Mediterranean.
    Andrew Deacon had been to Greece, I knew, because above one low cabinet he’d hung a collection of photographs, all of them black and white, all of them good, all displaying the same eye – his own, I guessed – for light and composition. At least one was from Greece, looking down on the ruined remains of the open-air theatre at Delphi. I’d stood in almost the same spot myself, on my only trip to Greece, and it was strange to see the view again through someone else’s eyes; to know that Andrew Deacon had once stood there, too, and seen what I had seen.
    The other photographs showed places that I didn’t know. Like the paintings, they were mostly landscapes: an avenue of plane trees, deep in shadow, that looked French; a sweep of barren desert underneath a cloudless sky; a curve of coastline backed by jagged mountains wreathed in mist, that felt distinctly Oriental. And there, unexpected, the little squat windmill again, with its round stone walls, backed by the sun with a man’s silhouette standing just to one side.
    I was leaning in for a better look when a pleasant male voice said behind me, ‘They’re lovely, those photographs, aren’t they? He had a great talent.’
    Turning, I found myself facing the vicar. He looked even younger close up – early thirties, perhaps, with dark hair and dark eyes and a warm, relaxed smile. He offered me his hand. ‘Hello. I’m sorry, I don’t know all Andrew’s friends.’
    ‘Kate Murray,’ I introduced myself above the handshake, and his eyebrows lifted.
    ‘You’re American.’
    I didn’t correct him. My grandmother always said that there were certain categories of people who shouldn’t be corrected, for the sake of politeness, and I was fairly certain men of God fell into one such category. ‘I’ve been working in London,’ was all that I said, and then into the short pause that followed I added, ‘That’s where I met Mr Deacon.’
    ‘Ah.’ He didn’t ask for details, but then why would he? I thought. I was the only one who felt a need to justify my presence.
    I shifted the talk from myself. ‘That was a lovely service, Reverend…’
    ‘Beckett. Tom Beckett.’
    I nearly made some remark about his name being well suited to his profession, but I stopped myself, figuring that he probably got it all the time, so I said nothing, and the Reverend Thomas Beckett grinned.
    ‘It’s quite all right,’ he told me. ‘My mother’s way of making sure I chose the right sort of career, I think. And I’m glad you liked the service.’ With his hands in his pockets, he studied the frames on the wall. ‘I always think they’re rather sad things, photographs, when someone dies. One is left with the pictures, but none of the stories.’
    I hadn’t really thought of that before, but he was right. I looked at the pictures with new eyes,