Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

Hamish said starkly, “You canna’ quarrel with him.”

But before Rutledge could speak, Melinda Crawford was there ahead of him.

“Raleigh,” she said in a voice that brooked no argument, “illness is not an excuse for bad manners. You will apologize to all of us for your rudeness!”

He glared at her. She returned the stare with the authority of a woman who has spent a lifetime learning her own worth.

Rutledge thought, She faced down the Mutineers in India. Masters has forgotten that.

After a moment Raleigh said, “Why should I apologize, I ask you? He comes to dine in the guise of a guest, but who knows what actually brings him here? Policemen don’t have social lives. Or if they do, I’ve never heard of it. And behind my back he asks questions of a derogatory nature about a man whose boots he is not fit to lick! Matthew Sunderland was my friend and my mentor-”

Rutledge turned to look at Bella Masters. Guilt was written clearly in her appalled expression.

He knew instantly that Elizabeth had spoken to her at his request-and she had passed the query on to her husband.

He replied, “I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. I’ve never spoken derogatorily about Matthew Sunderland. I have expressed an interest in one of his cases. One in which I myself was involved.”

“Odd, don’t you think?” Masters inquired of the table at large. “Generally when a policeman has a question concerning a trial, he goes to his superiors. This means, I fear, that Mr. Rutledge is afraid he had not prepared his case well enough and wants the reassurance that he is right in his assumption of guilt!”

It was too damned close to the truth, and for an instant Rutledge found himself thinking that Chief Superintendent Bowles had been in touch with Raleigh Masters. But that was not very likely.

Hamish was roaring in his ears, telling him that Masters had seen through him and he had nowhere to turn.

But Rutledge responded with courtesy, “As you were not a party to the trial, sir, I’m afraid I must rely on the opinion of others.”

Before his host could frame a retort, Mrs. Crawford was on her feet. “ Raleigh! You are not only rude, you are very drunk.” She turned to the maid standing stricken behind Mrs. Masters’s chair. “Will you summon my driver, please? I am leaving. Bella, I must tell you that I will not dine with you again until your husband has apologized to me and everyone present.”

Bella, her voice trembling, said, “Mrs. Crawford-Melinda-”

But her husband’s voice cut across hers. He was standing now also. Something in Mrs. Crawford’s face had finally penetrated the alcoholic haze and touched him.

Or else he had fired all the salvos he’d intended.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I beg forgiveness for my behavior. If you will excuse me, I shall retire. Mr. Rutledge, you have been a gracious and pleasant guest in my home. I don’t know what possessed me to attack you, but you must put it down to my intemperance.”

Raleigh bowed, retrieved his cane, and walked steadily from the room, closing the door softly behind him. Rutledge had the feeling that he was very nearly sober…

Bella was almost in tears. “I don’t know what to say-” she began.

Melinda Crawford replied briskly, “It’s better if you say nothing. There is never any defense for rudeness.” She signaled to the maid. “I think we’re ready for our tea, if you please. And I believe the gentlemen will join us in the sitting room tonight.”

She nodded to Elizabeth and Brereton, then said to Rutledge, “You behaved with generosity. My father would have commended you for keeping your temper. But I will tell you that the man who insulted you is not the man I have known for some years. Now, we shall put this behind us and have our tea!”

With a sweep of her skirts, she ushered the still-trembling Bella toward her own sitting room, with Elizabeth at her heels. Brereton said, following them with Rutledge, “It’s true. He isn’t the same man. But that hardly changes anything-”

Rutledge, still seething with anger, smiled and said, “I am a policeman, you know. It must be the first opportunity he has had to break bread with one. And it marks a dramatic change in his circumstances.”

“All the same-” Brereton began, and then went on, “I would have believed Raleigh Masters was guilty of murder before I would have believed what has become of him.”

He stumbled, catching his foot on the edge of the carpet in the hall, and swore. The loss of his eyesight, Rutledge realized, must be worse than Brereton admitted, even to himself.

They drank their tea dutifully, and kept the conversation bright and reasonably unforced. When a proper length of time had passed to do so gracefully, the guests took their leave and left.

Rutledge’s last glimpse of Bella Masters’s face as she closed the door herself on her departing guests caught the mask of civility slipping and a black despair behind it.

Elizabeth said, as they reached the road to Marling, “I was never so appalled in my life! Raleigh has been unbearable-but never insulting.”

“Don’t think about it,” Rutledge told her. “He will have to make amends to his wife, now. She’ll be hard pressed to find any dinner guest willing to put up with his temper.”

“I don’t think it’s temper,” Elizabeth responded, considering it. “It’s something else. I don’t know… death creeping up.”

“Enough to make any man despair,” Rutledge agreed.

But Hamish was saying from the rear seat, “I willna’ believe it. It’s no’ death. Nor the wasting. Something else.”

Rutledge tended to agree with him, and returned to the possibility that Chief Superintendent Bowles knew Masters-it wasn’t unlikely-and had dropped a hint of some sort. But that didn’t make sense, either.

Elizabeth was finishing a remark that he’d missed, ending with “-I shall have to invite Bella to tea. Without Raleigh. To let her know I’m not blaming her for her husband’s behavior. She’s never quite known how to cope with his moods, you know, but she adores him. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him.”

He was reminded of what Margaret Shaw had said about marriage-that it seldom works out the way it ought to. “What is the medicine he takes in that glass? Laudanum?”

“I suspect it is. For pain initially, of course, but it helps with his-moods.”

Or created them?

Elizabeth sighed. “Why do so many people hurt each other?”

He had no answer to that question. And in the silence that followed he remembered the conversation about the house in Marling that had been sold to a wealthy merchant. “Tell me about the man you saw. At the train station in Helford.”

“There’s really nothing more to tell. He was exceedingly well dressed; you could almost smell expensive tailors. But his voice was overloud, and it grated. New money. That was my first thought.”

“Describe him physically.”

“I’m not sure I can. It was a nasty evening, and he was wearing a heavy coat and a hat. My guess is that he was fair.” She looked across at him. “Tallish, I’d say, but not as tall as you. A bit on the heavy side, perhaps, but with the coat it was difficult to tell. He came rushing into the waiting room, spoke to the stationmaster, and then went out again. I’d been standing inside, out of the weather, but Richard’s motorcar was waiting by the gate. He must have seen it! And so I turned away, for fear he might ask if I was driving in the direction of Marling.” She smiled ruefully. “He seemed to be the sort who might be -encroaching. ”

It was inbred in an Englishman’s nature, this dread that someone casually met might brashly overstep the unwritten rules of acceptable behavior. It was, perhaps, at the root of Raleigh Masters’s abhorrence of a policeman in his house…