A False Mirror - Charles Todd [105]
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?
21
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.
It was a poignant farewell. And there were equally poetic entries over the years, as the writer sat in a café and sipped coffee or finished a last glass of wine before going to bed. The rest was a meticulous account of a busy life and a devotion to duty that spoke of loneliness as well as dedication. Names, dates, times, places, matters up for discussion, resolution arrived at for every meeting and official function. Brief but incisive comments on people everywhere, from donkey men on Santorini to political appointees in the courts of the Kaiser and the viziers of Turkey. Cameos, perceptive and devastatingly honest, of visiting dignitaries and other diplomats serving their countries. And amusing sketches of the Englishmen he encountered or who had served with him in this or that capital. During the war years, there was a list of names, framed in black ink, of friends who had fallen.
Rutledge closed the