A False Mirror - Charles Todd [131]
“Yes, that’s what happens in war, people are killed. It isn’t personal, is it? Like this.”
“When you watch the living force go out of a man’s face as you fire your weapon into his unprotected body, it is very personal,” he told her grimly.
That gave her pause. “I begin to see. I’m sorry.”
The tea came soon afterward, and Dedham had added sandwiches to it, and cakes iced in pale green, as if intended for a celebration that hadn’t taken place.
Rutledge poured, so that the maid could be dismissed. Miss Cole took her cup, drank deeply as if the tea were a lifeline, and then set it aside.
“If Matthew Hamilton is dead, you’ll have no answers in the end,” she warned him.
“I can’t help but pray that he’s still alive. We need to close this case. It has done great damage to too many people. Dr. Granville, the maid’s cousin. Mrs. Hamilton and even Stephen Mallory. Others have been dragged into it as well. It would be unkind to let them all go on suffering.”
“But what will you do, if you find him? Carry him off in custody, like a common felon while you sort this out?”
“Hardly that, unless we caught him with a weapon in his hand, trying to kill someone. My first question would have been, ‘What happened on your last walk?’ And my second, ‘What happened in that surgery?’”
“If he can’t tell you, what then?”
Rutledge set his own cup aside. He answered her honestly, weariness infusing the words with what sounded very like despair. “I don’t know.”
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the chair.
“Do you believe me, that he was incapable of murder, when I knew him all those years ago?”
He took a chance, over Hamish’s fierce objections.
“I’ll try, once you’ve told me why it was you wouldn’t marry him.”
Her eyes flew open, her head coming up with a snap. “You have no right!”
“There are two people dead, Miss Cole. Women who never harmed anyone to my knowledge. But they died because of Hamilton, one way or another. You owe them something.”
“I don’t owe anyone anything,” she cried, the pain in her voice so deep it sounded even to her own ears like someone else’s.
“You have lived here in shabby gentility, shut away from the world, punishing yourself because something happened to your sight and you believed that you had no right to inflict your suffering on someone else. He called you the most honorable woman he’d ever met, Miss Cole. I have it on good authority.”
“I couldn’t entertain for him. I couldn’t recognize faces and remember them the next time we met. I couldn’t live in a strange world where I couldn’t see my surroundings or find my way without someone there to help me. It would have been a burden at the very start of his career, and I couldn’t bear to hear him make excuses for being overlooked for promotion or for assignments where a suitable hostess was imperative.”
“And so you released him from any duty to you. Were you surprised he took that release?”
She moved as if she’d suffered a physical blow. “It took him five years to accept my answer. By that time, love tends to fade a little, and it’s harder to bring someone’s face back with the same clarity. The sound of the voice is not the same, and you can’t quite recapture it. Five years of lying awake at night, five years of getting through the next day somehow. But in the end, he stopped writing. And I never heard from him again.”
He knew she had described her own anguish rather than Hamilton’s. But he said nothing, preparing to bring the interview to a close.
She rose, as if anticipating that, and he stood as well.
“Thank you for taking the time to help me through what has become the most difficult day of my life.”
“I’m sorry that you’ve been brought into my inquiry—”
Miss Cole brushed that aside, fumbling for her cane. She found it and moved easily toward him. “I wasn’t sure what to do. Now I see my way more clearly. Come with me,