A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [3]
Not ever?
Hamish, alarmed and accusing in the back of his mind, was exclaiming, “It canna’ be. Ye’ve gone o’wer the edge, man!”
Badly shaken, Rutledge had lost sight of the perambulating Guy, making a lap on the far side of the bonfire. Now the grotesque effigy was coming round once more, a final circuit while the lengths of harder wood smoked and began to burn hot enough to consume the fire’s prey.
Over by the bronze statue of a mounted Cavalier that stood at the point of the square where the main road curved away from the High Street, there was hilarity as a police sergeant gathered older boys around him and gave his orders. The bronze Cavalier’s back was turned on the antics of his descendants, his face haughty and withdrawn under the brim of his plumed hat, the aristocratic arch of his nose and the smooth sweep of his cheekbones highlighted by the fire’s blaze.
As the first Roman candles went streaming noisily skyward from the cluster of children, Rutledge flinched. At the Front, flares had been used to test the wind—
The crack! and the rat-a-tat-tat of the smaller charges sent his heart rate soaring. He felt exposed, caught out in the open, as the sounds of war surrounded him again. His immediate inclination was to shout orders to his men, to bend into the run that would carry him across No Man’s Land—
Elizabeth, suddenly aware, looked up at the tension in his face and cried, “Oh—I didn’t think—are you all right? It’s only the children—”
Rutledge nodded, unable to trust his voice.
Just then the Guy went sailing into the heart of the blaze, like a living creature struggling to escape as the heat rushed toward him. The onlookers were ecstatic, roaring at the top of their lungs as the straw-stuffed figure jerked and twisted as if in torment. The candles streamed wildly above the tongues of flame, and the noise was deafening.
Rutledge was still scouring the faces illuminated by the flames. A policeman was trained to observe, to remember the shape of a nose, the width of a mouth, the way the eyes were set, and the height of the forehead.
He couldn’t have been wrong, there had to be someone who bore a faint resemblance to the man he’d seen. Something had triggered that memory, something had reached somewhere deep in his past and dredged it up.
But there were only strangers here, appearing and disappearing in the smoke like wraiths, none of them familiar, all of them solidly alive, villagers with every right to be here enjoying the night.
In God’s name, it had surely been a ghost. . . .
He knew about ghosts—
People were milling around him now, slapping each other on the back, celebrating, calling out to friends, pressing him toward the fire, into the heart of the crowd. Mind-numbing to a man who was claustrophobic. Someone who knew Elizabeth came past and thrust a glass of long-hoarded champagne into their hands, shouting something Rutledge couldn’t decipher in the din. He drank the champagne quickly, to steady himself. What was happening to him? Why had a perfectly normal evening gone so badly wrong?
Hamish said, “It’s November—”
As if that explained everything.
And in a terrible way it did. Last November Rutledge had been in the trenches of France, he and his men abandoned by hope, and bitter, too tired to relish the successes of the Americans or to believe the whispers of a peace.
The doctors had warned him there would be flashbacks, that he would from time to time find himself reliving what was best forgotten. “Sometimes as vividly as life,” Dr. Fleming had cautioned him. “And far from unnatural.”
Easy for Fleming to say, sitting in his sparsely furnished surgery surrounded by stacks of folders of the living dead, the men who had come home shattered in body or spirit.
Locked in by the crowd, his body confined on all sides by people oblivious to his sense of suffocation as the claustrophobia gripped him, wanting to break through them to space and air, fighting to draw a full breath, Rutledge struggled with panic. Even Elizabeth, chatting with