Charles Todd - A test of wills

"Nothing has happened, that I'm aware of. I've come to ask you about something that has been puzzling me, that's all. The German."

The slender stretcher in her hands snapped, and she stared at him with a mixture of anger and exasperation. "I might have known! As a general rule I find that men who were at the Front are the least prejudiced, in spite of what they've suffered. Or saw their friends suffer. I'm sorry you aren't one of them."

He found a smile for her, although she had made him angry in turn. "How do you know? To tell you the truth, I don't have any idea what I'm supposed to be prejudiced about. Why don't you tell me, and then we'll see where I stand."

Putting down the canvas, she walked over to one of the open windows, her back to him. "As a matter of curiosity, who told you? About the German?"

"Several people have alluded to him," he said carefully.

"Yes, I expect they have," she answered, weary patience in her voice. "But I really don't see what it has to do with this enquiry." She turned around, lifted one of the paintings stacked against the wall beside her, and began to study it as if she saw something she didn't like about it.

"How can I be sure, until I hear your side of the story?"

She glanced up wryly. "You've been talking to Lettice, I think. Well, everyone else has pawed over what happened with salacious enthusiasm, why not Scotland Yard? At least you'll hear the truth from me, not wild conjectures and the embroideries of gossip." She put that painting down and picked up another, keeping her voice coolly detached, but he could see the way her hands gripped the canvas as she held it at arm's length.

"It's very simple, really. During the war, when there weren't enough men to do the heavy work on the farms, the government allowed people to take on German prisoners of war to help on the land. Most of them were glad to do it, it was better than being cooped up in camp all day with nothing to occupy them. Mallows was allowed three Germans to bring in the harvest one year."

"And you?"

She turned the painting a little, as if to see it better. "Yes, I applied for one, but he didn't work out-I don't think he'd ever seen a cow before, much less a plow! He'd been a clerk in a milliner's shop, and although he was willing, I spent most of my time trying to show him what he was supposed to be doing."

Rutledge said nothing, and after a moment she went on reluctantly. "So they sent me a new man, and then someone to help him. He was marvelous. He could do anything- make repairs, plow, birth a foal, milk, whatever was needed-and he seemed to take pleasure in it. He had grown up on the land, but he hadn't actually worked it, someone else did that for him. He was a lawyer in Bremen. Rolf was his name-Rolf Linden. And-I fell in love with him. It wasn't an infatuation this time. It wasn't at all like my feelings for Mark. But Rolf was a German-and as far as everyone in Upper Streetham was concerned, the only good German was a dead one. And he was a prisoner, he went back to the camp every night. Hardly the stuff of high romance, is it?"

"Nothing came of it, then?" he prompted after a time. She seemed to have forgotten the painting in her hands, and after a moment absently put it back in its place.

"Not at first. Then I realized that he loved me."

"Did he tell you that?" If so, Rutledge thought to himself, the man was an opportunist, whatever she had been led to believe.

"No, it happened rather prosaically. He was gored by the bull we'd brought in for the dairy herd, and he couldn't be moved. So I nursed him, and when he was too ill to know what he was saying, he said too much. After that, well, somehow we managed to keep it a secret from everyone else. But he was terrified that I'd find myself pregnant, and late in 1917 I wrote to Lettice to ask her to contact Charles for me-I thought he might use his influence to let us be married."

She walked aimlessly across the studio, straightening the canvas on her easel, picking up a dry brush and running the tip through her fingers, frowning at a palette as if the colors on it were entirely wrong. And all the while her eyes were hidden from him. "In all fairness," she said, as if to the palette, "I do believe Lettice when she says she wrote to him. I think she kept her promise."

Behind the unemotional voice was a well of anguish, and Rutledge found himself thinking again of Jean. He knew what loss was, how the mind refuses to believe, the way the body aches with a need that can't be satisfied, and the awful, endless desolation of the spirit. And as always when he was under stress, Hamish stirred into life.

"You rant about your Jean," he said, his voice seeming to echo in the high ceiling of the studio. "What about my Fiona? She promised to wait. But I didna' come back, did I? Not even in a box. There's nae grave in the kirkyard to bring flowers to, so she'll sit in her wee room and cry, with no comfort to ease her grief. Not even a kiss did we have in that room, though I saw it once…"

Desperate to silence him, Rutledge said aloud, and more brusquely than he'd intended, "Go on. What happened?"

"It all went wrong. He was taken away, sent elsewhere, they wouldn't tell me where he had gone. And then, around Boxing Day-no one was quite certain of the date because so many people were ill and the records were all botched- he came down with influenza. No one told me that either."

She looked up suddenly, her eyes hot with unshed tears. "It wasn't until the war ended and I had searched half of England for him that I finally discovered he'd been dead for over a year-a year! I went a little mad, I blamed Lettice and Charles-for Rolf being taken away, for his death, for no word being sent to me-for all of it. I told myself she hadn't tried to make Charles understand how much Rolf and I loved each other. I was certain that Charles never did anything more than glance at her letter and then send it straight to the War Office. It was the only way they could have learned the truth about Rolf and me, the only reason they would have punished us by taking him away. Charles had done nothing-except betray us."

In the brightness of the skylight over her head, he could see that her breathing was ragged, her face settling into taut lines as she fought for control. And she won. No tears fell, because the remembrance of anger had burned them out instead.

"Did you ever ask Harris what he'd done-or not done?"

"No." It was uncompromising. "Rolf was dead. Nothing would bring him back. I had to learn to forget, or I knew I'd be dead as well. Emotionally, I mean."

Which gave her a powerful motive for murder. And could explain why she'd defended Wilton at the Inn.

He looked around him at Catherine Tarrant's work, at the strength of her lights and darks, the daring use of spaces, the power of her colors. At the emotions her subjects evoked. Even the bold black of her sketches set the imagination ablaze.

A mother and child locked in each other's arms, fierce pro- tectiveness in the mother's face, terror in the child's. He had seen refugees on the roads of France who might have posed for that. An old man, clutching a folded British flag in his arms and fighting back tears as he stood in a small, overgrown country churchyard staring down at the raw earth of a new grave. If you wanted to capture the waste of war, Rut- ledge thought, what better expression was there than this, the very antithesis of the dashing recruitment posters? A girl in a rose-splashed gown whirling in ecstasy under the spreading limbs of an aged oak. The lost world of 1914, the innocence and brightness and abandonment to joy that was gone forever.

There were landscapes heavy with paint, storm clouds thrusting upward, wind racing wildly through a high meadow, waves lashing a rocky coast where watchers waited for stormbound ships, to lure them inland.