Charles Todd - A False Mirror

“It’s been extraordinarily difficult for you, Mrs. Hamilton. But your husband would admire your courage, if he were here to see it. A day or two more, perhaps, and we may have some relief for you.”

“It wasn’t Stephen who attacked him. I can tell you that now. He doesn’t have it in him to do such a thing.”

“I’m sure we’ll have the truth in time.”

“Yes, but you don’t understand. It’s like being married, shut in here together with no one else to talk to. We fight over the smallest things, we storm out of the room in a nervous fury, and then come back again because there’s nowhere to go. And Nan bangs on the ceiling until I’m heartily sick of it. I just want Matthew back again, and everything the way it was.”

“How does Mallory feel about it?”

She smiled, her face coming to life for the first time in days. “He will probably be very happy to see the last of me. He was annoyed with me when I burned the potatoes, but that was only because I’d burned my finger as well and had gone to dip it in vinegar and soda. And he said, ‘Felicity, I have money, I would have provided you with everything in life that Matthew has, and treasured you for yourself. But you had told me all those years ago when we were in love that you could cook.’ And I was just as annoyed, and I said, ‘Of course I can cook, it’s only that I’ve had very little practice.’ I burst into tears and he said, ‘I’ll go fetch Nan.’ But I didn’t want to be shown up by her, she’d never let me forget it, and she’d find a way to tell Matthew as well. So I told him that if he did, I’d leave here when he slept and never come back again.”

From her expression Rutledge could see that she believed she had won the skirmish and she felt better after proving her self-reliance. But it was also clear to him that whatever feelings these two people had kept hidden away for the other, time and closeness had diminished them.

“It’s like being married,” she had put it, like an elopement gone wrong. Living in a garret on slim resources and without public acceptance, and trying to pretend that love was enough.

He felt pity for her, but there was no hope he could offer her. And to tell her that Matthew was very likely dead and their circumstances here at Casa Miranda had taken a dreadful turn, would be cruel. How would she cope, if in the end, she knew Mallory would be taken away to be tried and hanged for two murders?

She seemed to sense his change of mood and said sharply, “Are you keeping something from me, Inspector? Have you told Stephen more than you’ve told me?”

He’d lost sight of the fact that women often read minds or at the very least were sensitive to shifts in emotion.

“I was thinking,” he told her, “that Matthew Hamilton is a very lucky man.”

She blushed, her eyes filling with shining tears.

“When I have him safe again, I’ll never let him go. You can tell him that for me.”

And she was gone, leaving him with the key to the desk in his hand.

Rutledge waited, almost certain Felicity Hamilton would have second thoughts and come back to ask him to leave. When she didn’t, he crossed the room, unlocked the top drawer, and began his search.

There were accounts, letters to a man of business, receipts for payments made to firms shipping his household goods from Malta, and other papers relating to Hamilton’s affairs.

Under them there was a photograph of a cream stone house on a narrow street, its facade plain, but the intricacies of the lacing around the oriel windows were very old and created by a mason with expert hands. Rutledge stood there looking at it, and then turned it to the reverse side. It said, “My house in Malta, Casa Miranda, near a shaded square where I often take my tea. The cream cakes are better than any I’ve tasted anywhere else.” It was as if he had expected to send the photograph to someone and had described it for him or her. The sort of thing a friend might include in a letter to Melinda Crawford.

Rutledge shut that drawer and went to the next. He found more accounts for the Malta house and those from another one in Istanbul. There were letters to and from a man of business, and a name caught Rutledge’s eye as he was setting them back in the folder he’d opened. “I shall want George Reston’s assurance that all is well again, and afterward I shall move my business to the firm in Leadenhall Street, London.” There followed the direction of a firm that Rutledge recognized as old and well-established: McAudle, Harris, amp; Sons.

And why should George Reston have to give his assurance that all was well again?

Rutledge went back to the correspondence and read it more thoroughly. The letter was dated shortly after Hamilton had returned to England.

George Reston’s London partner-a man by the name of Thurston Caldwell-had been borrowing from Matthew Hamilton’s funds for his own purposes. On a small scale at first, and then with increasing assurance as his client had remained abroad.

If such a breach of trust had been made public, it could have ruined Reston as well as Caldwell, and probably led to prosecution.

Hadn’t Mrs. Reston said something about misappropriated funds, and the partner deserving what he got, when Reston lost his temper in public and attacked the man?

Small wonder, then!

Rutledge realized suddenly that she had chosen the perfect instrument for her revenge on her husband. Not just someone she had known as a girl, but a man who had been defrauded by Reston’s London partner. A double-edged sword that had descended with all the force of long-dreamed-of vengeance behind it.

And had Reston, twisting and writhing like a puppet in a tempest, turned not on his tormentor but on a man completely unaware of his role in the failure of a marriage?

Rutledge went on searching through the drawers of the desk and then in the bookshelves that stood across from it. Volumes of history and travel, some of them in French or German or Latin, had been lined up by date and subject, according to a master plan. He could follow it clearly, as if Hamilton had had time on his hands to devise a careful cataloging of his library-or could afford to hire a scholar to do it for him.

And would there be room here for diaries as well? He thought, rather, that there would be.

It took him half an hour to locate them, a set of exquisitely bound volumes in tooled cordovan leather, gold leaf on the edges of the pages, and scrollwork on the binding, but no titles. At first he’d expected the set to be a collection of verse or Latin authors or even, thinking of Reston’s library, biblical references. When he opened the first of the slim works, he discovered that each covered a year of Matthew Hamilton’s life from the time he took up his career to-so it appeared-the last entry on the night before he left Malta:

The Knights and I part company finally. I have followed them from Acre to Rhodes to Malta, not with intent but because they were before me on the road. But I have come to a newfound respect for men who lived and labored in the heat of the Roman Sea, and I understand their fascination with the harsh light of noon and the soft light of dawn and the long rays of afternoon. I have stood on the ramparts as they must have done, waiting for moonrise, and I have found a measure of peace. If these walls are haunted-and it is likely that they are, given the blood spilt here-these shades have been kind to another traveler, passing unseen behind me or standing at a distance, watchful until I go. I wonder what my life would have been if I hadn’t come here or to any of the other places I have lived in my exile. I wonder how I share fare in England. But it doesn’t matter. I have left a part of me wherever I have lain my head, including my youth. What remains will be satisfied to go home.