A False Mirror - Charles Todd [40]
He wondered how any of them—Mallory, Hamilton, or his wife—would manage after the fact, when they must live here in spite of gossip and suspicion of what might have transpired in that house while Mrs. Hamilton was held against her will.
Or was she? He remembered the tousled head among the bedclothes. How many women in Mrs. Hamilton’s situation could sleep so deeply and so free from anxiety?
“She knows Mallory,” Hamish offered. “She mayna’ believe he’s guilty.”
And that was a good point. “But why isn’t she by her husband’s side, even if she had to fight her way out of that house? Mallory can’t stay awake forever. He can lock doors but he can’t prevent her from trying to climb out her window. Or even stop her from standing there screaming for all the world to hear. It would go a long way, that screaming, toward making the neighbors aware that she was held against her will.”
“Would it please her husband, if she makes hersel’ a spectacle?”
“If I were married to her, and couldn’t get there to help her, I’d have liked to know she wasn’t taking the separation without some effort to defend her honor.”
“Aye, but then you havena’ a wife.”
It was a blow that Rutledge hadn’t expected. He’d spoken without thinking, considering the issue theoretically.
Jean was in Canada, married to her diplomat. What if he, Rutledge, had gone there after her, and held her against her will? What would she have done then? But she would know, of course, that he’d do no such thing. He hadn’t been able to fight for her when she released him from their engagement. He’d been too ill in his mind to find the strength to defend his love for her or explain that he was haunted by what had happened in France, by the dying and the turmoil and the horror of watching men he knew fall with appalling wounds. He hadn’t been able to tell her what it was like to know with certainty that carrying out his orders had killed so many of them. Never mind that the orders were only his to give, not his to change. He’d failed his men in a way that no amount of argument or reason or excuse could alter. He’d held their lives in his hands. And he’d let them slip through his fingers. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that.
How could he have explained Hamish? Come to that, how could he explain to any woman what war had done to him and to so many others? How could he describe watching Hamish fall, how could he tell anyone how the man had lain there, trying to speak to him, begging for release? And how could he ever condone drawing his revolver and delivering the coup de grâce, the blow of grace, to put Corporal Hamish MacLeod out of his pain and torment?
Jean would have despised him, walked away in disgust long before he’d finished telling her half of it. And so he had let her go without a struggle, knowing that he was abhorrent to her in his battered state, knowing that he couldn’t ask her to love him, when Hamish MacLeod owned him, body and soul. Better to let her go, let the last hope of his salvation walk out the door of his hospital room and never come back again. Better to let her think that he was a pathetic remnant of the man she’d loved, rather than believe he was what he truly was—a man who had killed other men, including his own. A common murderer, come to that.
Rutledge straightened up from the window and turned around to look at the room, the draperies beside him, the desk to the other side, one chair and a chest with drawers, a bed. A room in a hotel, a man without roots, without a home, without any ties of love.
He and Mallory…
In an attempt to shrug off the mood that had swept him, he tried to think what to do next. Where to turn in this investigation that had been thrust upon him.
For one thing, what did he know about Matthew Hamilton, the face behind the diplomatic mask? Where had the man served besides Malta? Had his career been blameless? A civil servant