Charles Todd - Watchers of Time

The doctor, taking the bandages off Rutledge’s chest for the last time, looked at the wound, poked and probed at it-making the patient wince-and then nodded in satisfaction.

“You were damned lucky,” Dr. Fleming said, “that no deep infection set in. Still, it won’t hurt to have a small plaster over it. A matter of prevention. How do you feel?”

Rutledge, looking down at the raised, raw scar in the matted hair on his chest, replied, “I can breathe without discomfort.” He flexed his arm. It felt like a soggy rag. “I doubt I could take on a child of six in a brawl.”

Fleming chuckled. “Nor should you. But that arm will be like new, once you begin using it. Never fear! Just don’t overdo it for the first few days-don’t carry anything heavy or push at anything that doesn’t want to budge. Again, a matter of prevention. I have found in twenty years of treating patients that Nature is a good doctor, too, given half a chance. The problem is, we seldom give her credit and therefore come to regret it.”

It was, Rutledge knew, one of Fleming’s favorite homilies. “I’m off to Norwich. Which shouldn’t be strenuous.”

“Cheating the ratepayer, are you? I’d take the train if I were you. Less demanding on the chest muscles than driving.”

But Rutledge left London in his own motorcar, his claustrophobia still rampant. It was not possible for him to sit in a compartment jammed hip and knee into other travelers. The compulsion to stand and scream for air would be as violent as it was unreasonable.

By the time he reached Norwich, his chest muscles were in open rebellion, Mother Nature urging them on. Hamish, worse than Dr. Fleming at pointing out Rutledge’s shortcomings, reminded him that he had made the drive against advice.

As a compromise, Rutledge found a small hotel on the outskirts of town and stayed the night there, not prepared to face the traffic of Norwich at the end of the day.

Hamish, who had alternately raged at him and baited him for miles of the way, was as tired as he was: The familiar voice was silent over dinner.

Rutledge slept hard from fatigue. Hamish never followed him into sleep-the voice in his head lived in the waking mind, a bitter and hourly reminder of the bloody offensive in 1916 on the Somme, where so many men had died not by the hundreds or thousands but by the tens of thousands, their lives thrown away in wave after desperate wave of futile attacks. Where he himself had been buried in mud and saved from suffocation by the body pressing down on him. He’d been told over and over again that Corporal Hamish MacLeod had saved his life. But the blood caked like a second skin all over his face and hands had come from the English firing squad and the coup de grace Rutledge had had to deliver personally in the instant before a direct hit had blown the salient to bits. Hamish hadn’t died from German fire, and Rutledge had been too shaken, too lost in the depths of shell shock to set the record straight: that Corporal MacLeod had been shot for refusing a direct order on the battlefield the night before that final dawn assault.

The tangled skeins of truth and official reports had left Rutledge with silence, with memory, with a waking haunting that had nothing to do with ghosts. Only with the broken mind of a man who had been sent straight back into battle before he’d had any rest, or come to terms with his own deep sense of guilt for having to choose between one man’s life and the morale of the equally exhausted and dispirited soldiers who hadn’t refused the order to climb out of the trenches and fight again. And three years later, he still had not exorcised that guilt.

It had become too deeply rooted in blood and bone and sinew, like a second self.

Rutledge had tried over and over again to die during the last two years of the War, putting himself in the way of danger, courting the unholy bombardments that splintered the earth, daring the hidden machine-gun nests that raked No Man’s Land with lethal fire. Like a lover embracing a bloody mistress he had sought out any peril-and had come through unscathed.

To find himself again and again hailed as a hero, because he seemed to have no fear of dying.

It had been the bitterest irony.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, RUTLEDGE FOUND HIS way through the busy streets of Norwich to the address he’d been given by Chief Superintendent Bowles. It was a small house near the new Catholic church, far older than the building in whose shadow it stood, and with a small garden behind it. A gloomy house, upright and Victorian, with sharp eaves that seemed to pierce the low clouds. Rutledge walked up to the door in a misting rain that enveloped the earth like a shroud. On a small wooden board, faded gold letters spelled out Diocesan Office. Lifting the door knocker, a great brass ring that fell with a doomsday clamor, he turned to look at the street behind him. A half dozen men were waist-deep in a broken sewer, digging shovels full of stinking mud out of the pit. Urchins gaped down into the hole, fascinated, while passersby held handkerchiefs to their noses against the rank odor. A pair of women huddled together on the corner exchanging news, the hems of their black skirts even blacker with the run-off of the umbrellas they clutched over their hats. A man walking a dog moved swiftly, hurrying it along as it stopped to sniff in the gutters.

No one took notice of the caller at the rectory. Rain was a great separator.

Hamish, whose fierce Covenanter ancestors had taught him well, was skittish about entering this den of popery and idolatry. Rutledge, amused, assured him that his soul was in no danger.

“How can you be sae sure, when the Church of England is hardly better than this lot?”

The door was opened by a housekeeper whose hair, graying at the temples, was auburn, and whose face, flecked with freckles, had a touch of Irish in it. The woman looked him up and down as he gave her his name, and asked, “Are you ill, then?”

He smiled. “Official business.”

“All the same, you look as if you could do with a cup of tea! And the poor man hasn’t had his, either, writing reports all the morning! Come in, then.”

She took his hat and coat, clicked her tongue at the dark patches of rain across the coat’s shoulders, and spread it carefully over a chair to dry. Then she led the way down a passage to a room at the far end. To Hamish’s considerable relief, there were no niches filled with bleeding saints in the passage, nor a pervasive odor of incense. Except for a single small crucifix above the narrow entry, there was no sign that the occupants of this den had designs on anyone’s soul.

Opening a door into a gracious room at the back of the house, the housekeeper stood aside to let Rutledge enter. Beyond the windows the rain fell softly on a garden already drab and colorless, and dripped from a small pear tree. A tall secretary desk, the doors in the upper half standing open and the front piled with papers, stood against the far wall, and there was a table and comfortable chairs set to catch the light spilling in the windows. A man in simple priest’s garb sat there, staring out at the wet flower beds, a book open in his lap. He looked up as the housekeeper gave Rutledge’s name with a flourish.

Hardly a den of iniquity, Rutledge silently pointed out to Hamish. This was more the study of a scholarly man, a place for retreat and thought.

Hamish reserved his opinion.

Setting his book aside and standing, the man crossed the room and held out his hand. “From London, are you? That’s a fair journey! Bryony, some tea for the two of us.”

She cast a quick, smiling look at Rutledge and said, “The kettle is already on the boil.” The door closed silently behind her.