Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

Better to be dead. Better to walk out into that machine-gun fire and be dead, than to go home to nothing…

He could hear the voices around him, men who had survived, talking tentatively about what would actually happen here. But not of home. Not yet. No one could quite grasp an end to the bloody Great War. There was neither jubilation nor hope, only an odd reluctance to think beyond the appointed hour. As if it would be unlucky. He wondered if the Germans in their hidden trenches were feeling the same fatalistic acceptance, or if they, too, counted their dead in their thoughts, and wondered why it had all begun anyway.

He didn’t know why it had begun, this war. He understood the political reasoning, the invoked alliances, the assassination in Sarajevo, where the Austrian archduke had died. He had succumbed to the banners and the enthusiasm and the euphoria as all the others had, he had trained and shipped out for France, and gone into battle with a sense of duty and honor. Then he had watched it metamorphose into the most appalling slaughter in living memory. And still the generals and the political leaders and the press had fought on, safe in their cocoons far from the dying…

Appalling…

Coming back to the present, he watched a wind lift the boughs of the trees and run lightly across the grass.

Was it barely a year ago that this slaughter had ended, with no banners and no enthusiasm and no posturing, in a last barrage of shells and the cold gray November dawn? He shivered. For too many men, this was not a day of solemn commemoration but a day of agonized remembrance.

For him, a reminder that Hamish MacLeod had not come home.

When he went down to breakfast, Elizabeth was already there. “Good morning!” she said cheerily, then seeing his face, the tired lines that marked a sleepless night, she went on in a more subdued tone, “Melinda Crawford has asked us to tea. There’s a note that just arrived. I’m to send back an answer.”

“Yes, why not?” Rutledge answered. “And I’ll take you both to dinner afterward, if you like.”

“I’d like that,” she agreed. She watched him lift the lids of serving dishes on the handsome buffet, and fill his plate. “I’ll give the staff the day off. They’ll be delighted.”

Sitting down across from her, he picked up the napkin ring and then reached for the teapot. It was a quiet domestic scene, far removed from the images that had haunted him only a short hour ago, soothing in a way that he hadn’t anticipated. As if it had the power to wipe away the past, simply by being so normal, so undemanding.

As he looked up, he thought Elizabeth was about to say something to him, and he waited, expecting her to suggest plans for the morning. But she finished her toast instead, eyes dropping to her plate.

“I’ll just tell the chauffeur we’re coming,” she said after a moment. “He’s waiting in the kitchen for my reply.” Rising, she walked gracefully to the door and left him to his own meal. He knew, none better, that an appearance of hearty appetite was an accepted indication of good health. The knowledge had served him well when he had spent more than a week in his sister’s home, an invalid after being shot in Scotland.

But Elizabeth had been picking at the food on her plate, and he wondered what was on her mind. The policeman in him was too well trained not to take notice. It would, he thought, come out one way or another in its own good time.

The door opened and she came back into the room, frowning. “Ian. The most horrid thing. There’s been another murder-closer to us this time. And on the road we took just last night. Mrs. Crawford’s chauffeur, Hadley, was regaling the cook and scullery maid with the gruesome details. He’d come that way this morning-the police stopped him to ask his business-”

Rutledge stared at her. Had he struck the man in his headlamps? Was this the body that the police were examining even now?

“Who was killed? Was the driver told?” He kept his voice steady with an effort of will.

“The police didn’t say. But a farmer who was bringing his horse to the farrier had seen the body and told Hadley that it was a one-legged man. Like the others.”

“How did he die?”

“I don’t think they know yet. It wasn’t an accident. Hadley was certain of that. Ought you to do something?”

The last thing Rutledge wanted to do was to go back to that crossroads and look down on the face of a man he might recognize. And yet he knew very well that the figure he’d seen had had two good legs. It was coincidence-and a damned uncomfortable one. He had to believe that. Whatever he’d glimpsed was a trick of memory, a startling but harmless tearing of the curtain between sleeping and waking.

Hamish was saying, “You werena’ asleep at the bonfire…”

“There’s nothing I can do to help. I don’t have the authority here,” Rutledge told Elizabeth truthfully.

She pressed her hand to her cheek as if for comfort. “What a terrifying start to the morning-”

“Come eat your breakfast, and don’t dwell on it,” Rutledge responded quietly. “There’s nothing you can do. Nothing I can do, for that matter. I’d only be in the way.”

With a twist of her shoulders as if trying to shake off her unsettled mood, she said, “I’d never realized, quite, how unpleasant your work must be. Dealing with such things.”

“No different, in fact, from a doctor’s surgery, where one patient has hiccoughs and another has a gall bladder.” He lied with a lightness that he didn’t feel. But it earned him a smile from Elizabeth. He reached for the jam pot and said in a more cheerful voice, “What would you like to do this morning? I’m at your service.”

She bit her lip. “Would it be too much to ask-could you help me go through Richard’s things? I haven’t been able to face it alone. And that’s not why I asked you to come and stay-but this isn’t starting out as the morning I’d planned-and-” She broke off, distracted by what she was trying to say. But the words wouldn’t come, whatever they were.

“I’ll help you,” Rutledge told her. “On one condition. That we try not to make it morbid. For your sake, if not mine.”

She nodded. “I won’t cry on your shoulder. Nor you on mine. This is what one does after a death in the family, isn’t it? A practical matter. Before the moths get into the clothes.” It was her turn to try for lightness; she failed wretchedly. “Oh, hell!” she ended bitterly. “Why couldn’t he have come home!”

Hamish answered her, but of course she couldn’t hear the words. “Because the guid died, and left only the dregs to make the new world

…”

As it turned out, the morning passed uneventfully. The clothes hanging in the wardrobes no longer carried the scent of the man who had worn them in 1914. A faint mustiness had crept in, despite applications of lavender, and they had lost the personality that had given them vitality. Elizabeth folded and packed them as Rutledge took them out and handed them to her. The drawers of the chest were easier, their contents already folded, already in neat piles. In the top drawer, Elizabeth came upon a pair of cuff links engraved with initials. She held them for a moment in her hand, then passed them to Rutledge. “You gave him these-a wedding gift. Would you like them back to remember him by?”

He thanked her and took them. He’d liked Richard immensely, and had found in him a good friend. It was kind of his widow to remember that.

As the tall case clock in the hall struck the eleventh hour with its deep tolling chimes, they both paused in silence. Standing where they were, in the midst of their work, as a natural thing.

Rutledge thought he could hear the distant sound of the bagpipes that had buried Hamish MacLeod, but it was only a trick of the mind.