A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [141]
The front wheel jerked and almost threw her into a bank of late thrift, where the road narrowed a little.
Rutledge sped up and cut her off.
Getting out, he said, “You shouldn’t be riding this in your state of mind. Go on, let me put the bicycle into the back. I’ve given you my word.”
She stopped just inches from where he stood.
“I may be your enemy,” he said gently, “but accepting a lift from me doesn’t convict you of anything but good sense.”
“I hate you, did you know that?” she said with some force, but when he reached for the handlebars she dismounted and let him have the bicycle. He set it in the back, more concerned about invading Hamish’s space than anything else, his hands shaking as he maneuvered it to fit.
Hamish chuckled derisively, saying only, “When I’m ready to be seen, ye canna’ hide.”
Rutledge got back behind the wheel, his mind on Hamish, and nearly choked the motor.
Sarah Parkinson said tartly, “You’re no better driver than I am.”
She was goading him, and she’d succeeded, but Rutledge kept his promise, only asking where she wanted to go.
“To Pockets, my sister’s house.”
He took off the brake and set out. As they passed the cottages, she shivered, as if her father’s death were still too raw a reminder.
He said nothing, letting the silence grow heavy between them. Finally Sarah Parkinson said, “If you will let me out a mile before her house, I’ll pedal the rest of the way.”
“As you like.”
It was almost as if the silence accused her. Again she broke it first. “You weren’t there when my mother died. You can’t even imagine how we felt. And my father standing over her, after we’d summoned him, and saying that it had been a long time coming. Then why hadn’t he tried to prevent it? Why hadn’t he made her happier when it mattered?”
He didn’t answer her.
“Sometimes in the dark while I’m trying to fall asleep I can see all of it again. People talk about nightmares, but this was real, and it happens over and over again until I’m half sick, my head aching, my mind struggling to forget. You have no idea what that’s like. You must sleep well at night, duty done, and you have no idea what it’s like.”
But he did. He wanted to tell her that she was wrong, others suffered as she did, and that his hovering spirits were as fearsome as hers.
She must have read something of it in his face, for she snapped, “Oh, don’t sit there, pretending you can’t hear me.”
“Then I’d have to ask you if you killed your father to stop your nightmares. If it helped at all, to punish him for what he’d done to your mother and to you. I’d like to know. I can’t kill my ghosts, you see. I left them all on the battlefield in France.”
She stared at him. “You were in the war?”
“I was in France, yes.” He fought to get himself under control. “It was worse than anything you can imagine. Worse, even, than finding your mother dead. And it went on for four years, relentless, without respite. And there was no one to kill except the Germans, and even that wasn’t as easy as we’d thought. In the night sometimes you could hear them singing. Men’s voices, homesick and as frightened as we were. And the next day you were firing at them, trying to make every shot count, and using your bayonet when you had to, and trying to stay alive one more minute, one more hour, and after a while, you didn’t even care about that, only about not letting your men down, shaming them in the face of the enemy, trying to set a good example that they could follow. And the worst of it was, they trusted me, and I led them to slaughter as surely as if I’d been the judas goat at an abattoir. If you want to compare nightmares, Miss Parkinson, you’ve chosen the wrong man.”
She sat there stunned, her face pale, and her hands shaking in her lap, the gloves she wore bicycling clenched into fists to stop it.
“You see, your righteous defense of your mother is all very well. But if you killed your father, you are a murderer as surely as any other murderer in the dock. Your excuse may seem important to you,