Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

She moved restlessly. “I’d rather not talk about Richard just now.”

He changed the subject, and as they drove through the night reached a truce in whatever silent war lay between them.

Raleigh Masters greeted his guests with a chilly courtesy.

Rutledge saw his wife glance at him several times, an uneasiness in her eyes. But their host was pleasant and made an effort to draw out his guests. They were seated in a drawing room where the elegance was growing shabby around the edges, as if there was no money to renew the drapes or the gilding in the plastered ceiling. The house, Georgian and foursquare, possessed a beautiful staircase in the entrance hall and a collection of exquisite Venetian glass displayed in cabinets between the doors. The light from the lamps caught the colors and gave them a depth that was jewel-like. Whether the collection was valuable or not, Rutledge couldn’t judge, but the quality was there, in shape and design.

Bella had gestured toward the cabinets as she ushered him into the drawing room and said diffidently, “My father’s hobby. Glass. My mother traveled to Italy every winter for her health, and in his free time, my father roamed the old markets in Venice, searching for unexpected treasures. Raleigh doesn’t care for Italy.”

Nor for the glass, Rutledge thought.

Melinda Crawford, looking rather tired, greeted him with warmth and kissed Elizabeth’s cheek as if delighted to see her. Brereton, standing by the hearth, shook hands with Rutledge and asked quietly, “Any progress?”

“Early days yet,” Rutledge told him. It was the standard formula. But even as he spoke the words, Hamish was reminding him how empty they were.

Brereton said, “Kent has always had an independent spirit. My guess is that whatever people may suspect, they won’t point fingers.”

Rutledge was saved from answering by a query from Elizabeth regarding a mutual friend in London. Twenty minutes later, as they were finishing their sherry, dinner was announced, and Rutledge found himself escorting Mrs. Crawford. She pinched his arm, as if in warning, as they followed their host and hostess through to the dining room.

“Even if this meal is inedible, you must swallow every mouthful for Bella’s sake!” she hissed under her breath.

He smiled and said, “I’ll try.”

But it appeared the cook was intent on making amends. The roast of pork, seasoned with rosemary, was as delicious as any Rutledge had ever eaten. As the conversation flowed around him, he listened to two threads that seemed to intertwine and then separate.

Local gossip of the ordinary variety, to be heard at any country dinner table in England-and an undercurrent of speculation about the newcomer from Leeds who was buying one of the larger houses in Marling. Whether he intended to live there or if it was purchased for a son or daughter, whether he was the sort one would wish to meet or the sort one ignored.

“There’s money,” Bella was saying. “And I hear from John Sable that he’s renovating the house and gardens.”

John Sable owned a small construction firm in Helford, Brereton explained to Rutledge across the table.

“He won’t come cheaply,” Elizabeth responded. “I’d asked John about working on the drains, and he sent a note quoting an exorbitant sum.”

Brereton said, “Too bad our Leeds friend’s not interested in the old property out on the road to Seelyham. The one with the stone gates. Shame to see it go to rack and ruin. But I suppose we must wait on the lawyers to sort out who inherits.”

Bella nodded. “I remember going to a party there, oh, well before the war. It was Mrs. Morton’s seventieth birthday, and her husband wanted to cheer her up a bit. There were lovely old pieces in that house. I remember she was mourning the fact that there was no one to pass them on to. Only a distant relative out in New Zealand, I think it was. Influenza took both of them last year. And the house has stood empty ever since. There’ll be damp and dry rot, and heaven only knows what else, before it’s finished. And who’ll pay for that, I ask you?”

Rutledge found himself thinking that people like the Mayhews and the Hamiltons, and indeed the Masterses, with their declining income and rising prices, would be hard-pressed to keep their homes as once their ancestors had. But the new money, the war money, would manage quite well. The man from Leeds, for one.

“Has anyone actually met this man?” Brereton asked, looking around the table.

After a moment of silence, Elizabeth said tentatively, “I think I may’ve.”

Everyone turned to stare at her, and she went pink. “It was quite by accident and very brief,” she said, stumbling over her words. “I’d gone to Helford at the end of last month to meet someone taking the train down from London. And a man was asking the stationmaster about transportation to Marling. He had a rather loud voice, although he was dressed well enough-” She broke off, shrugging. “I didn’t see his face.”

Rutledge, his attention caught, listened to Elizabeth Mayhew but said nothing.

Hamish murmured, “Ye ken, no one would think to ask the likes of Mrs. Mayhew about strangers…”

Raleigh Masters, ignoring the small glass containing his medicine that stood beside his plate, was finishing his fourth glass of wine instead.

The glitter in his eyes was the only thing that betrayed him. He sat like a toad, waiting. Hamish, alert to Rutledge’s own watchfulness, growled, “’Ware!”

As Elizabeth paused, glancing around the table uncertainly as if she’d gone too far, Bella opened her mouth to speak and then closed it sharply.

Raleigh said, “We are an odd lot, we English. We judge a man by his voice. And the price of his clothes. God help us, if we are born brilliant but poor, and have nothing to indicate the quality of our minds.”

Elizabeth said, haltingly, “I didn’t mean-”

“No, of course you didn’t,” Melinda Crawford interposed bracingly. “Raleigh is simply reflecting on our propensity to judge from outward appearances. A barrister would certainly not fall into that pit.”

She was, Rutledge realized, drawing fire on herself.

Masters said, rather nastily, “He won’t last long if he does. All the same, there is something to be said for a man’s upbringing. It generally tells in the end. As the old saw would have it, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“I shouldn’t care to try,” Mrs. Crawford retorted.

“You would tell me, then, that your friendships are all of a sort that reflects well on your judgment of people?”

“I never choose my friends because they reflect well on me. I choose them because they’re interesting. I consider boredom far more soul-crushing than the Seven Deadly Sins. And so I have made a point throughout my life never to be bored. It has, I think, kept me young.”

But Masters apparently wasn’t to be deflected from whatever was on his mind. Rutledge, watching him, was reminded of a prosecutor waiting to pounce. It was, he thought, a natural mannerism in a man who had spent his life judging others.

Masters’s eyes swept down the table to his wife’s face. “And I, I think, shall never grow old. We learn to put up with distasteful things, at the end.”

“Raleigh, it’s hardly the end- ” Bella protested, her voice anguished.

As if he didn’t believe her, Masters swept on. “I know whereof I speak, my dear. Otherwise, I shouldn’t be reduced to entertaining a policeman at my table. People are not overly fond of watching death creep up on themselves or others. But perhaps Mr. Rutledge is accustomed to it.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, broken only by the sharp intake of breath from Bella Masters. Her face was pale with embarrassment. Rutledge could feel himself reddening at the insult.