The Rowan Tree Inn is an eighteenth-century country inn about a mile outside Hodershall, set behind an arm of the North Downs with the parish church standing a further mile away. First introduced as a low, local-stone building serving visitors to the downs, it later becomes an accidental refuge after a violent storm. In its candlelit rooms, rival seekers gather around the object taken from Randolph Ash’s grave, and the inn’s temporary shelter culminates in the reading of a private letter that changes what the group can know about Ash and Christabel LaMotte.

Setting and architecture

The inn is long and low, built of flint and slate beneath a mossy slate roof. It fronts a meandering road that has since been modernised and widened across largely bare downland. The building stands apart from Hodershall village, sheltered behind the curve of the downs. A grassy track continues from the road for another mile to Hodershall Parish Church, a twelfth-century building described as squat and stony, with an unassuming tower and a weathercock shaped like a flying dragon. The inn and church are thus related by their isolation and proximity, but separated by the open ground between them.

The Rowan Tree has twelve bedrooms: five along the frontage on the main road and seven in a modern annexe behind the original building, constructed in the same local stones. An orchard, with tables and wooden swings for summer visitors, gives the establishment a country-leisure character. It is also mentioned in Good Food guides, a detail that places the inn within familiar travel and hospitality rather than presenting it as a remote, wholly abandoned building. Its everyday amenities and local setting later contrast with the extraordinary night when the storm brings its competing scholars under one roof.

Cropper and Hildebrand’s stay

On October fifteenth, the inn has few guests despite weather that is warm for the season: the trees still carry their leaves, but the rain is heavy. Five rooms are occupied. Two of the guests are Mortimer Cropper and Hildebrand Ash, who have already been staying there for a week. Cropper has the best room, above the solid front door and looking toward the track to the church; Hildebrand is in the room next to him. The placement quietly aligns their lodging with the route to the churchyard that will become central to their activities.

During the week, Cropper and Hildebrand take long walks across the downs in all weathers, equipped with high boots, waxed jackets, and portable parkas. Cropper speaks in the dark, wood-panelled bar of possibly buying a home in the district, where he might settle and write for part of each year. He visits estate agents and looks at properties; his knowledge of forestry and interest in organic farming make the prospect seem like an ordinary plan for a life in the country. Against that surface of leisure and domestic possibility, his preparations for the graveyard are already under way.

On October fourteenth, Cropper and Hildebrand go to Leatherhead and visit the offices of Densher and Winterbourne. On their way out of town they stop at a garden centre and buy heavy-duty spades and forks, as well as a pickaxe, paying cash before stowing the tools in the boot of the Mercedes. That afternoon they walk to the church, which is locked against vandals, and inspect the gravestones in the churchyard. A notice identifies the parish as St Thomas and states that it belongs to a group of three parishes under the Reverend Percy Drax. The church holds Holy Eucharist and Morning Prayer on the first Sunday of each month and Evensong on the last. These mundane notices and scheduled services make the churchyard part of an inhabited parish landscape even as Cropper’s concealed purpose turns toward disturbing its graves.

Refuge after the storm

After the confrontation at the grave, Cropper is told that he is surrounded and that a tree has fallen on his Mercedes. When a flashlight catches the people looking through the branches, the gathering includes Roland Michell, Maud Bailey, Leonora Stern, James Blackadder, and Beatrice Nest, her white woolly hair streaming down after the storm. Their pursuit and the weather have left the company exposed to fallen vegetation and blocked routes. It takes them an hour and a half to struggle back on foot to the inn.

The group that comes from Mortlake has travelled in two cars. Before setting out for the church, its members had begun to see signs of the storm; they bring a small saw from Blackadder’s Peugeot and the walkie-talkie Euan has supplied. Using the saw, the radio, and Cropper’s shovels, they climb over and under fallen columns and vegetation, helping one another along the way. At the road they find cables hanging in festoons and dark windows: the power is out. Cropper lets the others into the inn while still holding the box. Inside, the building has become a shelter for a larger, mixed company: stranded lorry drivers and motorcyclists share the hall with a couple of firemen, while the landlord moves among them with candles in bottles and large pans of water boil on the kitchen Aga.

The late-night arrival of so many wet, dirty scholars might ordinarily have caused commotion, but the inn receives them with the same practical calm as its other stranded guests. Coffee and hot milk are brought upstairs to Cropper’s room, along with a bottle of brandy at Euan’s suggestion. Dressing gowns and spare sweaters are found among Cropper’s bags and Hildebrand’s new luggage. The storm has reduced the scholars’ capacity for anger: despite the conflict that has just brought them together, Cropper and the others seem unable to muster indignation. Their shared dampness, chill, and dependence on shelter briefly outweigh their rivalries.

The box and the letter

In Cropper’s room, the recovered box sits on a table by the window among the candles, rusty, wet, and earthy. The women are all in pyjamas: Maud wears Cropper’s black silk, Leonora his scarlet cotton, and Beatrice peppermint-and-white stripes from Hildebrand’s belongings. Val and Euan retain their own clothes, while Blackadder wears Hildebrand’s sweater and cotton trousers. The borrowed garments register how thoroughly the group has been displaced from ordinary arrangements. Within the room, the seekers and hunters are made temporarily alike by shared shelter, while the box between the candles preserves the purpose that brought them there.

Cropper oils the join of the box, works at the rust with his knife, and prises off the lid. Inside lies Randolph Ash’s glass specimen container, cloudy and stained but intact. Cropper opens it carefully and removes an oiled-silk bag holding a hair bracelet with a silver clasp formed by two joining hands, a blue envelope containing a long, finely plaited pale hair, another oiled-silk parcel, and a long, once-white envelope addressed to Randolph Henry Ash under cover. The other parcel contains a thick bundle of letters tied with ribbon. Cropper identifies the bundle as the love letters; the separate, still-sealed envelope is handed to Maud, who recognises the handwriting with growing certainty.

The unreceived-looking letter raises a question of ownership: whether it belongs to its sender because it was never received, or to its addressee because it lies unopened in his grave. The inn’s temporary gathering therefore becomes more than a place to inspect recovered objects. Its occupants must confront the difference between possessing a physical document and having a claim to its words. At Maud’s recognition, the group asks her to read it. In the hotel room, by candlelight and with the wind driving debris against the rattling windows, Christabel LaMotte’s letter to Randolph Ash is read aloud to the assembled seekers and hunters. The inn gives the private message a public audience, turning a storm refuge into the scene where the contents of Ash’s grave begin to disclose the concealed history between the two writers.