A False Mirror - Charles Todd [43]
He stopped, and then tried to change his own words. “Someone hated Matthew Hamilton enough to give him that beating. Someone you haven’t found yet.”
“But not for lack of trying,” Rutledge retorted, his impatience getting the best of him. And then he added rapidly, before Mallory could move to the door to shut it, “Mrs. Hamilton, you must tell me about your husband’s work in the Mediterranean. Who it was who envied him? Who it was who resented his skill in carrying out his duties or was angry about what happened in Paris? Who it was who caught up with him on the strand and tried to kill him?”
She stared at him. “But I don’t know what Matthew did. I don’t know that part of the world, I met him after he’d come back to London. I asked him once if we could travel to Malta and let me see the places he knew there. And he wouldn’t hear of it. He said that part of his life was finished, done with, and neither of us should dwell on what had gone before.”
“Then who would know? Who might have seen him at work, who might have been to Malta and understood what he was doing there?”
Mrs. Hamilton’s face crumpled, tears heavy in her voice. “Don’t you see? I believed he was telling me that my engagement to Stephen was closed, that the bargain was, neither of us would look back, and so I never pressed him, because I didn’t want him to press me. It never seemed to matter, not really, though sometimes he would grow quiet and stand there in the drawing room, his hands on that ugly female figure, and I knew his thoughts weren’t in the room with me. And it hurt to be shut out, because I’d have liked to ask him about her, where he’d found her, and what he knew about the other figures he kept there. But I was afraid it would open Pandora’s box for both of us, and I couldn’t bear it. I don’t know what’s in his past.”
It was a difficult admission to make, that the marriage had had its secrets. But had it been a true bargain? Rutledge wondered. Had her own guilty memories made her believe that Matthew Hamilton was deliberately concealing something from her? His silences might have been no more than a deep and abiding fear of one day losing his wife. By the same token, Felicity Hamilton had no way of judging, young as she was, the breadth of Hamilton’s experiences in foreign ser vice. What secrets he was privy to, what mistakes he had made.
There was anguish in Mallory’s eyes as he watched her cry, and his hands moved once to comfort her, and then drew back.
“Surely there was someone at the wedding, someone who came to call when you were in London—a place for me to start?” Rutledge pressed her.
But she shook her head, and Mallory said protectively, “She’s told you. She can’t help.”
And then he shut the door, as if raising a shield between Felicity Hamilton and the world outside.
It was a tender gesture, in a way, an odd sort of moment between captor and captive.
As he stood there, staring at the brass knocker and the solid wood panels of the door closed in his face, Rutledge found himself thinking that this was more a wretched triangle than what it had seemed in the beginning—Mallory’s desperate effort to stay out of prison.
Over Hamish’s objections, Rutledge drove back to Dr. Granville’s surgery, let himself in quietly through the back garden, and sat down by the bedside of the wounded man.
“You mustna’ do this,” the voice in his head warned him, and he shut it out.
After a time Rutledge began to speak to the unconscious Hamilton. At first about that island in the Mediterranean that had been such a large part of Hamilton’s life, and then of his marriage, and finally, running short of material to fill the gaps in his knowledge of husband or wife, about the war.
Rutledge found himself back in the trenches as he spoke, his body tense and his mind distracted not by fear of dying but by the unbearable fear that he wouldn’t die.
Hamish rumbled in the back of his mind, emotions filling the narrow room and spilling over into silences that grew increasingly