Charles Todd - A False Mirror

Mallory said, “I’ll wager he doesn’t come. It will all be to do over again tomorrow night. You have to remember, he’s been badly hurt. He may need a night’s sleep before he can make the effort a second time.”

“There’s that,” Rutledge agreed. “Still, I don’t want to run the risk.”

“Nor I.”

Felicity Hamilton called through the door, “Is anything wrong?”

“We’re just passing the time. Don’t worry. If you want to sleep at all, between now and midnight might be best,” Mallory replied.

“Yes. I don’t want to turn off my lamp. But should I?”

“The drapes are drawn. Be certain they’re tightly closed. It should be all right then.”

“I could set it on the floor on this side of my bed.”

“Too great a risk of fire.”

“Yes.” It was a forlorn affirmative, and there was silence again from her room.

“I pray to God she sleeps,” Mallory said grimly. He poured a little whiskey into a fresh cup of tea. “I can’t count the times I wished for Dutch comfort in the trenches. If only to keep out the wet and the cold.”

“I don’t want to talk about the war,” Rutledge told him shortly. “We can’t afford to be distracted.”

“But it’s there, isn’t it, in the back of your mind? Mine as well. Will it ever go away, do you think?”

“If God is kind,” Rutledge answered, and pulled a blanket across his shoulders against the cold that was inside as well as out.

Sometime close to midnight, Mallory said in the darkness, “Do you ever dream-I mean, dream?”

His voice, like Hamish’s sometimes, came out of nowhere. They had turned down the lamps and set them inside the nearest room, to preserve their night sight.

Rutledge finally answered him: “No.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t want to discuss the war.”

“I have to talk about it. It’s the only way I stay sane.”

“Not to me, you don’t.”

“Tell me about Hamish and the rest of the men I knew. How they died.”

“No!”

“I need to hear it.”

“I need to forget.”

There was a long stretch of silence, then Mallory asked, “If I didn’t attack Hamilton, who did?”

“A good question. What I’m wondering now is if we’ve got two separate problems. The initial attack-and what it might have set in motion.”

“Yes. Like running over Bennett’s foot. It wasn’t intentional, but I did it, and I’m paying for it. What I don’t understand is, why Hamilton, in the first place? If you’d asked me, I’d have said he’s the last man to find himself in trouble in Hampton Regis.”

Rutledge’s chair creaked as he tried for a more comfortable position. “Which explains why Bennett came to question you at the start. There’s been gossip, Mallory. You should have considered that, for her sake if not your own.”

A sigh answered him. And then, “Yes, well, you haven’t been in love. You don’t know what it’s like to pin your hopes on someone throughout that bloody war, and then discover that she’s learned to love someone else.”

But he did. And it was none of Mallory’s business.

“Did you expect her to wait for you? That was where you went wrong.”

“I had hoped she would. But I left her free to make that choice.”

“And she made it. You failed her by not accepting it and walking away.”

“When I was released from hospital, my doctor made me swear I wouldn’t come to Hampton Regis. But then I thought, what harm can it do, to live near her? And soon it was, what harm can it do to see her? I convinced myself I’d been extraordinarily careful, that no one would guess how I felt.”

“In a village the size of Hampton Regis? Where you can’t cross the road without being seen?”

“If Hampton Regis is a hotbed of gossip and general nosiness,” Mallory demanded with some heat behind the words, “why hasn’t someone come forward to give you the information you need about Matthew Hamilton’s disappearance?”

Felicity Hamilton’s voice came through the door panel. “What is it, what has happened?”

“My apologies, Mrs. Hamilton,” Rutledge said at once. “Mallory and I were engaged in an argument over how gossip works. We didn’t intend to disturb you.”

Mallory said in a lower tone, “You haven’t answered me.”

“I don’t know why we haven’t got what we need. It was late at night. Most decent people are in their beds. The pubs are closed. The milk wagon hasn’t gone round. The fishermen haven’t gone out-”

He broke off. From a room downstairs had come the sound of someone or something scratching at a window.

“Stay here. Don’t leave Mrs. Hamilton, whatever happens. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot me as I come back up the stairs,” Rutledge told him.

But when he finally located the source, it was a limb blowing back and forth across the glass panes of a drawing room window as the slender trunk of an ornamental fruit tree just outside dipped and swayed in the wind.

He stood there, looking out at the blustery night, and thought, He’s not coming. Not on a night like this. He needs his ears as much as we need ours.

Hamish answered him in the darkness, “I wouldna’ go back up the stairs.”

“I don’t have much choice. Mallory will come down here if I don’t return.”

He wondered how his watchers were faring. But there was no method of communicating with them. A field telephone would have been useful tonight, he told himself, turning away from the window.

He went to the hall and called up the stairs, “It’s Rutledge. Nothing but the wind.”

Mallory’s voice surprised him, rolling down from the head of the steps, invisible in the well of darkness there.

“I was beginning to worry. You’re a perfect target, you know. Against the panels of the door. I’d keep that in mind if I were you.”

Rutledge took the steps two at a time. “Thanks for the warning,” he said, and passing Mallory, nearly invisible except for the sound of his breathing, he felt a distinct shiver run down his spine.

Rutledge had lost track of the time. Eternity, he thought, must be like this. A world where there was no mark for day or night, or for sunrise or sunset, just an endless expanding infinity. He wondered what the rector would make of that.

The crash, when it came, seemed to shake the foundations of the house. Later, thinking about it more clearly, he told himself it had done no such thing.

Felicity Hamilton cried out, and came at once to the door, fumbling with the lock.

“No, stay where you are,” Mallory murmured in her direction. “Rutledge, where did it come from, that noise?”

“I couldn’t tell. The back of the house, I think.”

She had the door open, standing there outlined in the dim glow of her shaded lamp, fully clothed and clutching a shawl around her shoulders. “Don’t leave me!” she begged. “I won’t stay here by myself.”

“Felicity, for God’s sake-”

“No, if you go, I’m going too. I won’t be cornered like this.”

Rutledge said, “We’ve got a choice. Stay and wait, or go and investigate.”

They listened, holding their breath as they did. But there was no other sound from below.

“If he’s in the house, he could be anywhere,” Rutledge said softly. “We could walk straight into him before we knew he was there.”

“He must be searching rooms. One at a time. It sounded as if he’d knocked over something.”

“It was more like a window breaking-glass falling,” Rutledge said.

“I think it must have been the dining room,” Felicity whispered. “It was in the back, at least. I know how this house creaks in the wind, like a ship at sea. It wasn’t like that.”