If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget the rest of that day. I kept thinking Rick Winthrop’s epitaph should be “No One Wanted to Know Who Put Me Here” . . . and found myself wondering grotesquely what some passerby fifty years from now would think, coming upon it carved on a lichen-covered stone in the little Romney cemetery under the weeping willow beyond the pear orchard. Whether it actually was what, in part at least, it seemed to be—a conspiracy of silence—I wouldn’t know. I do know that if the villain had to be picked out by virtue of being the most stubborn objector, then Irene and Major Tillyard and Mr. Purcell the State’s Attorney would have been quietly taken out and hanged forthwith on the highest branch of Romney Oak.
And it wasn’t what they said, so much, because afte
