A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [16]
“Well, I hope you’re not thinking of wanting one. They’re taken, the lot of them. They were put up near the beginning of the late Queen’s reign, leper houses they were. But no lepers came, and then they were let to anyone who was willing to live there. The local people don’t much care for them, but there’s no dearth of people who do.”
“Why leper houses? Was leprosy a problem here?”
She paused on her way back to the kitchen. “It was a Miss Tomlin, they say, who was set on them, having been a missionary and seen her share of suffering. And there’s a leper in the Bible, you know. I expect that was what put her in mind of doing something for them. She sold off another parcel of land her grandfather had left her and sent for a builder to make cottages where the poor things could live without being tormented. But she never found any ‘children of God’ as she called them, and she died not long after.”
“At least she cared enough to try.”
“Well, there’s that, I expect. Or a guilty conscience. The fact is, she could have done more good with her money in other directions, in my opinion. A touch of the sun, it’s what my granddad always said. Too much sun and too long in heathen lands. She’d lost sight of what truly needed doing in England. And I’ve dishes to see to. My husband’s gone to market, and the girl who dries for me has a bad thumb, so I’m on my own. Give me half an hour, and there’ll be a room for you.”
She was gone, leaving him to the hearty breakfast.
Afterward she showed him to a small room that seemed Lilliputian, and he remembered the young man on the road. He’d have played the very devil getting himself into this box, he thought.
And the cramped space sent his claustrophobia reeling. The first order of business was to open the only window, which looked out on the road. He stood there breathing in the morning air and fighting an urge to run back down the stairs after Mrs. Smith, begging for something larger. But there weren’t any larger rooms, given the size of the building.
Fatigue overtook him after a few minutes, and he lay down on the narrow bed, asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. The fragrance of sun-dried sheets folded with lavender was the last thing he remembered.
It was late morning when he drove back to the White Horse and climbed the hill. His legs were longer than they had been at age nine, and he made short work of it now. As a child he’d huffed and puffed in his father’s wake, trying to keep pace but stumbling as he tried to see everything at once.
Hamish, unhappy with this heathen horse, kept him company with a vigorous objection to having any part of it.
When one stood on the crest of the hill looking down at the figure, it was difficult to pick out what the expanse of white chalk represented. Aware of what the design was, it was possible to identify the flowing tail, the legs stretched in a gallop, the reared head. But the ancient people who had cut the turf here to create the figure must have had someone standing on the ground below, guiding them.
As, he realized, someone was standing now, looking up at him.
He began to walk back the way he’d come, and the man stayed where he was. It wasn’t the young giant from early this morning, but an older man with gray in his hair and a lined face. His eyes, when Rutledge was near enough to see them, were brown but the whites were yellow.
Malaria.
Rutledge had seen troops from the Commonwealth, especially India, with just such yellowing.
“Good morning,” he said to the man, for all the world a traveler taken with the local sight. “It’s quite a piece of work, isn’t it? I expect it was dug with wooden mattocks or antler horn. I wonder how long it took to create the full figure.”
“Don’t ask me, I don’t know a damned thing about it. And care less. Is that what brought you here, the horse?”
Warily, Rutledge said, “Should there be another reason?”
“Well, Partridge has gone