A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [88]
“You don’t belong here—”
“True. Yes. I know that.”
Rutledge’s mind was reeling, fighting shock and disbelief.
And then relief surfaced, the realization that what he’d seen on Guy Fawkes Day two weeks before had been no hallucination, no slippage of the mind into madness. The man was real. He was real.
Rutledge had no idea who he was—or where he had come from—except out of the darkness of war.
And Hamish was saying, “But he’s deid. You said yoursel’ he’s deid.”
“I thought you were dead,” Rutledge found himself repeating aloud. “I watched you die!”
“Yes. Well. I am hard to kill.” The man shivered, and Rutledge came back to the present, staring at the warm blood on his fingers, at the sweater thick with it. He reached out and fumbled for an instant, lifting the heavy wet wool, then found his pocket knife and began to cut it away. With his hands busy, his mind seemed to anchor itself, as if rejecting anything but the work that needed to be done.
He could hear Elizabeth walking back down the passage, her feet hurrying.
The man cautioned hastily, “We will talk about the war another time. Not now.”
She came into the hall, moving quickly to help Rutledge pull away the last of the ripped yarn, gasping at the dark wet blood all over the man’s shirt.
Rutledge cut the shirt in its turn, saying to Elizabeth, “Water. Hot if you can manage it, and cloths. Bandages. Then send someone for the doctor.” His voice sounded different in his ears, strained and brutal.
She went away quickly to do his bidding, but not before he’d seen the glance exchanged between the German and Elizabeth.
“Leave her out of this,” the German was saying. “She has nothing to do with this. I will go with you to the doctor. You must not bring him to this house. It would cause—” He stopped and caught his breath again. “—It will cause comment. Talk. What do you call it?”
“Gossip. You should have thought of that before passing out on her doorstep.”
“I had very little choice. I was nearer this house than where—where I am living now.”
“You’re a German national.” Rutledge was still trying to sort through it.
The man managed a smile. “Even German nationals need a—need a roof when they travel. This hurts like the very devil!”
The knife blade had slashed down from the shoulder across another, older wound that had scarred over on the man’s chest. Deep, but not dangerously so. Rutledge, working carefully, explored the wound.
“Someone didn’t very much care whether they killed you or not,” he told the German. “What had you done to him, to deserve this?”
“I had done nothing. I was walking along the road, my coat over my—over my arm. There was a man at the side of the road. As I came closer, he hobbled out and struck. Then he was—he was gone.”
Sweat was running down the man’s face. His jaw, set now against another wave of pain, quivered with the effort to keep himself alert.
Elizabeth came back with the water in a kettle, and cloths with which to bathe the wound lying across a basin. She handed them to Rutledge and stood back, looking close to fainting herself.
“Go find the doctor,” Rutledge told her, pouring the water into the basin and dipping a cloth into it. Almost too warm, he thought; the stove must have just been banked for the night.
But she stood there, mesmerized, unable to move.
Rutledge cleaned up the wound as best he could, unable to staunch the bleeding even with the water and pads of cloths. In the end, he simply packed it and wound strips of linen around it. It reminded him, more than he cared to admit, of his own wound, hardly a month healed.
“The cook,” Hamish was saying, “willna’ know where her tea towels have got to.”
And Rutledge saw the embroidered initials on one of the strips. An absurdity in the nightmare. Like all nightmares, he thought to himself. . . .
“Give him something to drink. Whisky, with a little of the hot water to dilute it,” he said to Elizabeth, and like a sleepwalker, she turned away to do as he asked.
The German drank it down gratefully, when she handed him the crystal