A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [31]
Women had hurried into the safety of the nearest shops, their pale faces peering out of windows in horror, while the shopkeepers stood in their doorways, demanding that this nonsense stop. Children clinging to their mothers’ skirts were crying, and four or five dogs attracted by the din had begun to bark excitedly.
As Hamish growled over the odds in some far corner of his mind, Rutledge reached the melee and began forcing his way through with rough disregard for victim or victimizer. He used his voice with coldly calculated effect, the officer commanding discipline, Authority in the flesh, a man to be reckoned with. “That’s enough! Let him go, or I’ll have the lot of you up before the magistrate for assault! Touch me with that whip, you fool, and you’ll be flat on your back with your arm broken….”
His unexpected onslaught scattered the attackers for an instant, and Rutledge quickly had Mavers by his collar, yanking him to his feet with blistering impatience. “Now what’s this all about?”
Dr. Warren had followed Rutledge as fast as he could, and reaching the market cross, began catching men by the arm and calling them by name. “Matt, don’t be stupid, put that whip down. Tom, George, look at the lot of you! Your wife will take a flatiron to you for ripping that coat, Will, wait and see if she doesn’t!”
Mavers, wiping his bloody nose on the sleeve of his shirt, said to Rutledge, “I don’t need the likes of you to fight my battles for me! A policeman stinks of his masters, and I can smell oppression, London’s bourgeois fist in the backs of the people—”
Rutledge gave a jerk of his collar that silenced Mavers with a choking grunt. Warren had stopped tongue-lashing the disgruntled villagers still milling around the market cross and was already casting a professional eye over cuts and bruises and one swelling lip.
Then the affair was over as quickly as it had begun, and Warren said, “Take Mavers to my surgery. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Rutledge’s eyes swept the circle of faces, grimness changing slowly to sullen mortification on most of them, and decided that there would be no more trouble here. With one hand still gripping the rumpled collar, he marched Mavers down the street and across to the doctor’s surgery, ignoring the man’s protests and the stares of latecomers. Warren’s housekeeper, prim and neat in starched black, was waiting in the doorway. She looked at Mavers’s condition with disgust and said, “Don’t you dare drip blood on my clean floor!” before going off to fetch cold water and a handful of cloths.
“What the hell were you trying to do out there, take on half the village?” Rutledge asked, standing in the entrance hall waiting for the housekeeper to come back, one eye on the street.
“I told the fools what they didn’t want to hear. I told them the truth.” His voice was thick and muffled from the swelling nose, like a man with a head cold.
“Which was?”
“That they were too blind to see their chance and take it. That their precious war hero had feet of clay. That the Colonel was nothing but an oppressor of the workingman and deserved what he got.” Warming to his theme, he went on, “It’s the fate of all landlords, to be taken out and shot and their lands given to the peasants. And here somebody has already gone and done the peasants’ bloody work for them.”
“I’m sure Matt Wilmore liked being called a peasant,” Dr. Warren said, coming through the door behind Rutledge, “just when he’s bought his own farm and is proud as punch of it.” His housekeeper arrived with a basin of water and wads of lint to use packing Mavers’s nose, but it wasn’t broken, only