Charles Todd - Watchers of Time

He told himself it was merely a precaution, to lock his doors.

In bitter fact, he was coming to terms with the unexpected discovery that the Cloth, which had always seemed his armor and his shield, was neither, and that a man of God was no safer than any other householder.

OCTOBER 1919 . London

Rutledge cut himself shaving and swore.

His sister Frances, sitting in the chintz-covered chair by the window, winced but said nothing. When he did it again, she couldn’t stop herself.

“Darling, must you carve up your face on your own? Or could I do it for you? Surely I’m a better butcher than you are?” The words were light, intentionally.

He shook his head. “If I’m to return to work, I must learn to manage.” He was on medical leave from the Yard, and it was dragging on, day into endless day, chafing his spirit.

She regarded the heavy bandages that swathed his chest, still binding one arm close to his body. “I’m surprised the Yard will allow you back until that comes off. Surely there are regulations? You can barely button your own shirt, and I’ve done up your shoes for you all these weeks. A half-dressed policeman is hardly a proper representative of the majesty of the law?”

“Frances. Shut up!”

“Yes, I know, it isn’t a pleasant reminder, is it? I’m sorry. But I do think you may be acting prematurely.”

He put down his razor, splashed water on his face, and groped for a towel. The razor went sailing across the room. This time he swore silently.

Hamish, reflecting his anger, said, “Aye, it isna’ a brave thing you do, merely foolhardy.”

Rutledge said, “I am going mad cooped up in these rooms.” The words served to answer both of them.

Frances said, deliberately misunderstanding him, “Yes, you must be. I did ask you to stay longer at the house. It’s still warm enough to sit in the gardens in the afternoon, or walk across the street into the square. You can come back again, if you like.” She had brought him there from hospital, and found a nurse to care for him until he could fend for himself, then taken over the chore of getting him dressed and undressed each day while he impatiently healed. Wounded tigers, she had thought more than once, would have been less of a handful.

But in the beginning, when she’d been summoned north, she had been terrified that he’d die before she got there. She’d only just got used to him being home and safe, with War’s end. After four bitter years of killing, her brother had come back to her alive and so she had let her guard down at last. Policemen weren’t supposed to be shot in the line of duty. The shock had left her breathless. Still, she’d done her best not to fuss over him…

Rutledge, who understood the unspoken concern that lay behind his sister’s efforts to keep him under her eye, had found it impossible to explain to her that he preferred his own flat, where he could swear at the pain or pace the floor at night or simply sit with his eyes closed until the worst had passed. Instead he’d merely said that he needed to learn to do for himself again.

Now he gingerly stooped and picked up the razor, then turned to grin at her. “Frances, you are the most capable woman I’ve ever met. When it comes to dealing with a crisis, you have no peer. All the same, it’s easier, sometimes, not to have witnesses.”

She smiled. “Yes, Father was just the same. I can’t remember a time when he was ill that he didn’t want to find himself a burrow somewhere and crawl off until he was better. It drove Mama to despair.” The smile faded. “But returning to work, Ian-is it wise?”

Rutledge studied her. She knew, a little, what he’d been through in the War. Not all of it. She knew that he had been shell-shocked. But not that he had brought back from the Western Front the living voice of a dead man, Corporal Hamish MacLeod. Nor did she know what it was like to order a man shot, or to send weary and battle-worn men into certain death. To walk on the maggot-ridden bodies of corpses, or watch a friend die hideously, screaming. Nothing deadened such memories. They stayed bottled up. Raw, brutal, barbarous. The stuff of nightmares that the mind scrambles to bury deeper and deeper, just to survive, until there was no way to exorcise the demons that had seized possession of part of him.

There were stories he could tell when friends or colleagues asked “How was it over there?” And these were tailored to each listener. For some, humorous accounts of the incessant rain and sucking mud. The lack of water for bathing. How necessary it was to shave, so that the gas masks fit properly. To others he spoke of acts of bravery he’d witnessed, or the kindness of the nursing sisters. To a few he was comfortable discussing the shared danger that had turned men who had almost nothing else in common into brothers. But seldom the whole truth for anyone, only a small measure of it. It was, he thought, better that way.

“This is no’ a wound of war,” Hamish reminded him now. “You made yourself a target, on purpose.”

Yet in some ways the confinement of this healing had once again left him vulnerable to all the horrors he’d fought these past five months to overcome. Now they were creeping out again in spite of him, reaching out to pull him back into the morass of despair and hopelessness he’d struggled so fiercely to leave behind. In the distraction of work, the subsequent exhaustion that brought him dreamless sleep, the concentration that kept Hamish at bay, he had scraped together a measure of peace.

“Until Scotland.” It was a refrain that Hamish had dinned in his head day and night for the past three weeks. Until Scotland…

Rutledge told his sister lightly, forcing the shadows out of his conscious mind, “There’s sanity in work. I’ve a desk full of papers to get through-hardly a test of endurance. And I am on sick leave, not permanent disability. This will heal, in good time.” Unlike the spirit

… “It’s little more than a week early.”

Frances was that rare woman who knew when to stop persuading and start encouraging. “All right, then, let’s try a compromise. You can manage your own breakfast, and find yourself a midday meal, but come to me for your dinner. At least I can be sure you’re eating properly. You don’t, you know. You are far too thin, still-”

But it wasn’t eating improperly that kept Rutledge thin and drawn. It was so many hauntings… Hamish. The War. The impossibility of forgetting, when England was full of wounded men, struggling to go about lives that years in the trenches had altered irretrievably. People looked away from such men now, embarrassed by them, unable to think what to say to them. The War was finished. Over and done with. Except for the crosses in Flanders’s Fields. And the living reminders no one quite knew what to do with. He saw himself a dozen times an hour on the streets-among the amputees, the blind, the ugly coughing of the gassed-even though he’d come home from France whole in body. His wounds were invisible, yet he shared the misery of such men. Even now he could see clearly the poor devil he’d watched from his window that very morning, clumsily managing his crutches and attempting to steer a reasonably straight course among the passersby. Or the hideously burned face passing under the street lamp three nights ago, long after dark. The man had tried to hide the worst of his scars with a scarf. But with one ear missing, his hat had settled awkwardly… A pilot, shot down in flames and unlucky enough to have lived through it.

As he had lived through Scotland… somehow.

Hamish said, “Ye ken, I wasna’ ready for ye to die!”

To silence his thoughts, Rutledge agreed to dinner with Frances. The prospect of working a full day again was daunting; he knew quite well he hadn’t regained his full strength. All the same, it would do no harm to try, and possibly offer him some little respite from Hamish’s morbid concentration on Scotland.