A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [78]
Bella nodded. “I remember going to a party there, oh, well before the war. It was Mrs. Morton’s seventieth birthday, and her husband wanted to cheer her up a bit. There were lovely old pieces in that house. I remember she was mourning the fact that there was no one to pass them on to. Only a distant relative out in New Zealand, I think it was. Influenza took both of them last year. And the house has stood empty ever since. There’ll be damp and dry rot, and heaven only knows what else, before it’s finished. And who’ll pay for that, I ask you?”
Rutledge found himself thinking that people like the Mayhews and the Hamiltons, and indeed the Masterses, with their declining income and rising prices, would be hard-pressed to keep their homes as once their ancestors had. But the new money, the war money, would manage quite well. The man from Leeds, for one.
“Has anyone actually met this man?” Brereton asked, looking around the table.
After a moment of silence, Elizabeth said tentatively, “I think I may’ve.”
Everyone turned to stare at her, and she went pink. “It was quite by accident and very brief,” she said, stumbling over her words. “I’d gone to Helford at the end of last month to meet someone taking the train down from London. And a man was asking the stationmaster about transportation to Marling. He had a rather loud voice, although he was dressed well enough—” She broke off, shrugging. “I didn’t see his face.”
Rutledge, his attention caught, listened to Elizabeth Mayhew but said nothing.
Hamish murmured, “Ye ken, no one would think to ask the likes of Mrs. Mayhew about strangers . . .”
Raleigh Masters, ignoring the small glass containing his medicine that stood beside his plate, was finishing his fourth glass of wine instead.
The glitter in his eyes was the only thing that betrayed him. He sat like a toad, waiting. Hamish, alert to Rutledge’s own watchfulness, growled, “’Ware!”
As Elizabeth paused, glancing around the table uncertainly as if she’d gone too far, Bella opened her mouth to speak and then closed it sharply.
Raleigh said, “We are an odd lot, we English. We judge a man by his voice. And the price of his clothes. God help us, if we are born brilliant but poor, and have nothing to indicate the quality of our minds.”
Elizabeth said, haltingly, “I didn’t mean—”
“No, of course you didn’t,” Melinda Crawford interposed bracingly. “Raleigh is simply reflecting on our propensity to judge from outward appearances. A barrister would certainly not fall into that pit.”
She was, Rutledge realized, drawing fire on herself.
Masters said, rather nastily, “He won’t last long if he does. All the same, there is something to be said for a man’s upbringing. It generally tells in the end. As the old saw would have it, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
“I shouldn’t care to try,” Mrs. Crawford retorted.
“You would tell me, then, that your friendships are all of a sort that reflects well on your judgment of people?”
“I never choose my friends because they reflect well on me. I choose them because they’re interesting. I consider boredom far more soul-crushing than the Seven Deadly Sins. And so I have made a point throughout my life never to be bored. It has, I think, kept me young.”
But Masters apparently wasn’t to be deflected from whatever was on his mind. Rutledge, watching him, was reminded of a prosecutor waiting to pounce. It was, he thought, a natural mannerism in a man who had spent his life judging others.
Masters’s eyes swept down the table to his wife’s face. “And I, I think, shall never grow old. We learn to put up with distasteful things, at the end.”
“Raleigh, it’s hardly the end—” Bella protested, her voice anguished.
As if he didn’t believe her, Masters swept on. “I know whereof I speak, my dear. Otherwise, I shouldn’t be reduced to entertaining a policeman at my table. People are not overly fond of watching death creep up on themselves or others. But perhaps