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“We grew up together, he and I,” she said.

It didn’t take long for Havelock to return. “If you don’t mind,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t seem to locate the body.”

“He’s there, before us. The tree.”

There was a lull in the wind.

After a moment, I said, “The tree, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she said, gesturing again with her cane. “That’s the Duke, right there.”

I made to laugh, but there was something in Havelock’s expression that caught my eye, cutting me short.

“I see,” he said carefully.

“You must find the culprit, Mister Harper,” she said. “It is essential that you do.”

The wind picked up again, and Havelock removed his hat, turning it over in his hands. His expression was intense, and the wind tousled his hair, and after a few moments he placed his hat back upon his head and nodded. “Of course.”

“Havelock—” I began, but he interrupted me.

“Will you help me examine the body?”

I followed him over to the tree, crunching through the jagged remains of the conservatory to its stump. Havelock crouched, and studied the cuts at the base of the trunk. “It looks as if whoever felled the Duke did so in a fit of passion,” he said thoughtfully. “Judging by these strikes, the culprit swung wildly. There is no precision here.”

“Havelock,” I said, quietly, so that the Duchess would not hear. “Are we seriously investigating the felling of a tree?”

Havelock reached across the stump, and took my hand, meeting my eye. “The Duchess is absolutely sincere,” he told me softly. “This tree is very precious to her. It hurts her to be here with us, seeing him fallen like this. Her clothes—they are like an armour to her. She is wearing them to inhabit the confidence of her title, and impress upon us the importance of her station, even if she does not quite believe in either. Walking with her cane is causing her a not inconsiderable amount of pain. She is—to not put too fine a point on it—desperate. I think we should help her.”

I glanced back over my shoulder, and there she was, so small in the gloom of her ruined house. I took a deep breath. “Very well,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“What kind of tree is this?” I asked.

Havelock gestured to a scattering of green pods with spiney protrusions. Some had split, revealing the hard nuts within. “Chestnut,” he said.

There had been a chestnut tree in the yard of my school academy, and I remembered then, with fondness, the way that I would gather its conkers with my fellows every autumn, for the sport of smashing them against each other to try and find the hardest. That old tree was much beloved by us: In summer, we would climb its lower branches, and there sit and eat our lunches together in the shade.

As Havelock continued his study of the felled tree—the so-called Duke—I was filled with a sudden sense of loss. This chestnut tree was not the chestnut tree of my youth, but it was still a sad sight, to see it so fallen. “How old was it?” I asked.

“Judging by the rings of its trunk, around ninety or so years. Ninety years of robust health: I can see no signs of fungal infection, or epicormic sprouting. This was a happy tree. The shape of the canopy suggests that it grew up alone, against the side of the house, and had little cause to shed branches. See these marks here.” Havelock gestured at some bulges in the bark. “This is where the Duke sealed off a few useless branches when he was very young. Strange, isn’t it—the way the scars look like eyes?”

The scars did indeed look like eyes. I peered into them, and was struck, suddenly, by the way that Havelock’s examination of the tree felt like an autopsy. Perhaps we really were investigating a murder. Wind rattled the decaying leaves still clinging hold of the Duke’s remaining branches. “Morbid.”

“I agree,” said Havelock. Stepping back, he brushed the stray leaves from his coat. “Time, I think, that we heard the Duchess’s tale.”

“I grew up in the shade of the Duke,” said the Duchess.

We had followed her outside, through the long grasses of the lawn, to a surprisingly intact and well-kept greenhouse. Its panes rattled in their housings, and the grasses swished against the lower windows, but the Duchess seemed much revived as she went among the rows with an ancient watering can, feeding the saplings growing there. The sun was fleeting, but the flashes of it were welcome. It was warm inside the greenhouse.

“When I was a girl, I would sneak out of my window using one of his boughs. He was always such a beautiful tree, even when he was young. The first to bud in spring, and the first to shed his leaves in autumn; his canopy so thick that his was always the coolest shade in summer; his stark shape unmistakable against the house in winter. Even when he grew older and began to crack the stones of Farleigh House with his roots, we loved him.”

“He certainly had a formidable height,” said Havelock.

“Tall enough to cast a shadow over the house, these days. I can only imagine the might of him had he continued growing.” The Duchess sighed. “He was meant to outlive me. I was to be buried among his roots.”

The Duchess seemed wearied by her work and settled onto an old iron chair at the end of a row. I took up her watering can and resumed her rounds—darkening the earth at the base of each pot. “They must need regular watering,” I remarked.