A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [4]
The nightmare surrounded him, unending, like torment meted out carefully to make the pain last. He felt like the Guy, a helpless spectacle.
And then the Guy was consumed, the flames began to die back, and the euphoria of the evening seemed to wane as well. Women began to collect reluctant children, and men with rakes and brooms went to brush some of the ashes back toward the still-red coals at the center. Voices could actually be heard over the din and the crowd started to move in different directions, freeing him at last.
Elizabeth, her face pink from laughter, looked up at him and said gratefully, “Thank you for coming, Ian! I couldn’t have faced it on my own. Although it’s time I learned, isn’t it?” She was holding his arm again, her fingers like individual bands of steel gripping him.
And then as swiftly as he had seemed to suffocate, his mind cleared and he was himself again. He put his hand over hers and managed a smile.
As she moved away to speak to someone else, Rutledge scanned the far side of the smoking remains of the fire for a last time, but the face was not there. The man was not there.
Surely he never had been—
Elizabeth said, turning to look behind her, “Did you see someone you know? Do you want to try to catch him up?”
“No—!” Rutledge answered abruptly, and then added at Hamish’s prompting, “I— A trick of the light, that’s all. I was wrong.”
It was surely something about the night that had disturbed him, and the noise and the acrid smell of the fireworks lingering in the smoky air. There was no one there—
“He canna’ be,” Hamish reminded Rutledge. “He’s deid. Like me!”
Deid. Like me!
Rutledge hesitated, on the point of asking Hamish what he knew—what he might have seen. Then—or just now.
But before he could frame the words, he stopped himself.
What if this had nothing to do with the war?
AFTER A VERY fine dinner with Elizabeth and three of her friends at the hotel just along the High Street, Rutledge drove back to London. Introductions and the subsequent settling into chairs as everyone exclaimed over the success of the evening had given Rutledge time to collect himself and present a polite, pleasant facade in spite of his unsettled state of mind.
It was something he was becoming increasingly good at doing, finding the right mask for his terrors.
Caught up in their own excitement, no one at the table noticed his long silences or made anything of his distraction. He was the outsider among them, and they included him from kindness, expecting nothing in return. He overheard one of the women as she leaned toward Elizabeth and murmured, “He’s absolutely charming! Where did you find him?” as if he were a new suitor.
His hostess had replied dryly, “He was Richard’s best man. I’ve known Ian for ages. He’s been a great comfort.”
For Elizabeth’s sake, he was glad to find himself accepted. He couldn’t have borne it if he’d embarrassed her. Yet it could have happened all too easily.
Frances had been wrong—he was not ready to meet old friends and pick up the threads of an old life. There were too many walls that shut him off from people who remembered a very different man called Ian Rutledge.
Still, Elizabeth had not let him go without extracting a promise that he’d be back on 10 November.
“You will ask for leave, I hope,” she said anxiously, a reminder. “And Chief Superintendent Bowles will agree, won’t he?”
“I see no reason why not,” Rutledge responded, bending his head to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be here. If I can.”
What he didn’t tell her was that—with or without leave—he had no intention of being in London on 11 November.
But on the long drive home, watching the headlamps pick out the verges of the road and pierce the heavy shadows of trees and hedgerows, Rutledge had found himself seeing again and again the face he’d carried with him since the bonfire.
It lingered against his will, as if once having surfaced it refused to be stuffed down once more into the bleak depths from which it had risen.