A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [64]
The doctors had had to keep him drugged to let him sleep, and if he could have found the powders the sisters brought him, he would have swallowed them all, to end it. Not a bad way to die, a way where dreams couldn’t follow him.
He cranked the motorcar and got in, sitting there shaking. It had nothing to do with the rain.
Hamish said roughly, “Aye, that was the heart of it. You wanted to die. I wanted to live. And we neither of us got our wish.”
“And so we’re damned, both of us, because God got it wrong. I wish you had lived and I had died. I would have come to haunt you, and when you married your Fiona, I would have been the skeleton at the feast.”
“No,” Hamish said, his voice cold. “I would ha’ forgotten you, and left you rotting in France.”
12
Rutledge wasn’t sure how he had driven to the Tomlin Cottages. When his mind cleared, he was there, the motor still ticking over quietly and the White Horse washed clean in the rain.
He got out and walked to one cottage he hadn’t called on yet. He knocked on the door and waited.
It was opened finally by a broad-shouldered man whose prematurely white hair was brushed back from a young face. It was hard to judge his age, but when he spoke, it was clear that he was of a class that possessed Victorian manners.
“Good morning. Are you lost?”
Rutledge introduced himself. “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” he went on. “Mainly about one of your neighbors, Mr. Partridge.”
“Silly name,” the man said. “I should think he dreamed it up. We’re not a friendly community, you see. I’ve often wondered how many of us use the name we were born with. Come in out of the rain, man.”
He stepped aside and allowed Rutledge to enter the main room of the cottage. It was a parlor, with a Georgian desk in one corner and a tall shelf of books along the inner wall.
“Singleton is the name,” he continued. “Tell me why you’ve been looking for Partridge.”
“You know he was away, then?” Rutledge asked, taking the chair offered him. “His friends have been anxious about him.”
“Were they indeed? I shouldn’t have thought he had many friends. No one ever comes to call.” He smiled, the austerity of his face relaxing. “I can see the horse from my desk, and his cottage as well. We have very little to occupy us, you see, and while none of us is anxious to have his own business bruited about, we are curious about our neighbors to the point of nosiness.”
“There was, I understand, a young woman who came to his door.”
“Yes, I remember. But she wasn’t admitted, and I found myself thinking that she had stopped to ask directions. She never came again, you see.”
It was a possibility that Rutledge hadn’t considered.
In the pause, Singleton asked, “In the war, were you?”
“France,” Rutledge answered.
“Then you were lucky to survive. I salute you. It was quite different in my war. Skirmishes in the Empire mostly, though some of them turned nasty of course. For the most part we played polo, set a good example, and dined rather well.”
“India?”
“For the last ten years. I spent some time at the Khyber Pass, for my sins. The tribesmen were a wretched lot, troublesome in the extreme, and knew the country far better than we did. Keeping them bottled up was a bloody business, any way you looked at it.”
Rutledge gestured to the cottage. “This is not the England you fought for.”
It was a statement.
Singleton shook his head. “Sadly, no. It’s far from that. We learn to cope, you know, it’s what we’re trained to do. I’m writing about my experiences. Not for publication, you understand, but for my own satisfaction. We’re too busy living to fully understand our lives, you see. Where we came from, where we were going. What went wrong. It’s a way of making sense of the past.” As if he’d said enough about himself, he changed the subject. “Is there anything else I can tell you about Partridge? We spoke, the usual platitudes—‘good morning, lovely weather we’re having, I see your hollyhocks were knocked about by the wind last night, yes, a pity isn’t it, cold enough to be thinking about a fire again, heavy mist this morning,