A False Mirror - Charles Todd [107]
Or would she feel only a sadness for an old acquaintance? Rutledge hadn’t seen any mention in Hamilton’s diaries of Miss Cole or even of a married woman who might be her in later years. He hadn’t read them line for line, of course, but enough to have a very good feeling for what they contained. Indeed, Hamilton had seldom written about England, except for the occasional reference to a personal letter from a friend. Rutledge had come across Melinda Crawford’s name here and there, most often in connection with something Hamilton had seen or done or found that he knew she would enjoy hearing about in a letter. Whether Hamilton had actually written to her Rutledge didn’t know. He’d have to ask Melinda Crawford that. Hamilton might simply not have had time to keep up a lively correspondence, much as he might have wished to. Yet he’d spoken of Miss Cole to the rector.
After twenty years.
On the other hand, there was the photograph of the house on a quiet street in Malta, identified and ready to send. But clearly never put in its envelope. As if second thoughts had entered into the urge to keep a friendship alive, and in the end Hamilton had broken himself of the habit of following through on these small courtesies that would have left doors in England ajar.
And then he had come home and fallen desperately in love with a young woman. To recapture his lost youth? Or because in her eyes his years abroad were merely a romantic past, and she had no experience on which to judge the dangers and hardships and emptiness of a world where politics and protocol and too many secrets circumscribed everyday life.
Rutledge closed his eyes, trying to define what the relationship between Miss Cole and Matthew Hamilton had been. Instead he saw Jean’s face against his eyelids, and then Mallory, his uniform filthy, his face blistered from an early-morning gas attack, sitting with his back to the trench wall and weeping for his dead. But Hamish hadn’t wept, he had moved quietly among his remaining men, touching a shoulder here, saying a word there, bending over a soldier who was shaking and offering him a cigarette to steady him, binding up a wound that didn’t merit the journey back to an aid station. Then he had turned away and rested the splayed fingers of one hand against the earthen wall of the trench, his head coming down to touch them as he slept where he stood. For a mercy the guns were silent and for a few precious minutes the peace lasted.
Rutledge had watched from a distance. There had been nothing he could do, nothing he could say. And so he had turned his gaze back to the wire and the last lingering feathers of color in the clouds, a pink already shading to lavender and gray as night came on.
In a war mourning had to be done privately. There was never any time for more than a snatched thought, a swift prayer, a curse at what Fate had dealt men too young to die. No ceremony, no flags, no fanfare or trumpets. They were all too busy striving to live one more bloody day.
Hamish was saying, “I do na’ ken why ye’re driving sae far. She couldna’ ha’ come for him. How would he summon her? Wi’ no telephone in the surgery? And she canna’ have killed the doctor’s wife for his sake.”
Rutledge was driving west, toward the city of Exeter. The road followed the sea for a time and then turned away, miles sweeping under his wheels, and a soft wind blowing that smelled, he thought, of plowed earth.
He responded, “It isn’t the surgery I’m thinking about. We can’t be sure she hadn’t had news of him over the years, even if he’d failed to write. For that matter, now that he’s back in England, she could have wanted to see him again. And the meeting on the strand was not what she’d expected. She could have walked away, and then turned back to strike him down.”
“Oh, aye, and what of yon doctor’s wife?”
Rutledge frowned. “There’s the rub. Solve the riddle of the attack by the harbor, and that solution doesn’t fit the murder at the surgery. Explain what might have occurred in the surgery, and it doesn’t clear