A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [52]
“Nothing came of it, then?” he prompted after a time. She seemed to have forgotten the painting in her hands, and after a moment absently put it back in its place.
“Not at first. Then I realized that he loved me.”
“Did he tell you that?” If so, Rutledge thought to himself, the man was an opportunist, whatever she had been led to believe.
“No, it happened rather prosaically. He was gored by the bull we’d brought in for the dairy herd, and he couldn’t be moved. So I nursed him, and when he was too ill to know what he was saying, he said too much. After that, well, somehow we managed to keep it a secret from everyone else. But he was terrified that I’d find myself pregnant, and late in 1917 I wrote to Lettice to ask her to contact Charles for me—I thought he might use his influence to let us be married.”
She walked aimlessly across the studio, straightening the canvas on her easel, picking up a dry brush and running the tip through her fingers, frowning at a palette as if the colors on it were entirely wrong. And all the while her eyes were hidden from him. “In all fairness,” she said, as if to the palette, “I do believe Lettice when she says she wrote to him. I think she kept her promise.”
Behind the unemotional voice was a well of anguish, and Rutledge found himself thinking again of Jean. He knew what loss was, how the mind refuses to believe, the way the body aches with a need that can’t be satisfied, and the awful, endless desolation of the spirit. And as always when he was under stress, Hamish stirred into life.
“You rant about your Jean,” he said, his voice seeming to echo in the high ceiling of the studio. “What about my Fiona? She promised to wait. But I didna’ come back, did I? Not even in a box. There’s nae grave in the kirkyard to bring flowers to, so she’ll sit in her wee room and cry, with no comfort to ease her grief. Not even a kiss did we have in that room, though I saw it once….”
Desperate to silence him, Rutledge said aloud, and more brusquely than he’d intended, “Go on. What happened?”
“It all went wrong. He was taken away, sent elsewhere, they wouldn’t tell me where he had gone. And then, around Boxing Day—no one was quite certain of the date because so many people were ill and the records were all botched—he came down with influenza. No one told me that either.”
She looked up suddenly, her eyes hot with unshed tears. “It wasn’t until the war ended and I had searched half of England for him that I finally discovered he’d been dead for over a year—a year! I went a little mad, I blamed Lettice and Charles—for Rolf being taken away, for his death, for no word being sent to me—for all of it. I told myself she hadn’t tried to make Charles understand how much Rolf and I loved each other. I was certain that Charles never did anything more than glance at her letter and then send it straight to the War Office. It was the only way they could have learned the truth about Rolf and me, the only reason they would have punished us by taking him away. Charles had done nothing—except betray us.”
In the brightness of the skylight over her head, he could see that her breathing was ragged, her face settling into taut lines as she fought for control. And she won. No tears fell, because the remembrance of anger had burned them out instead.
“Did you ever ask Harris what he’d done—or not done?”
“No.” It was uncompromising. “Rolf was dead. Nothing would bring him back. I had to learn to forget, or I knew I’d be dead as well. Emotionally, I mean.”
Which gave her a powerful motive for murder. And could explain why she’d defended Wilton at the Inn.
He looked around him at Catherine Tarrant’s work, at the strength of her lights and darks, the daring use of spaces, the power of her colors. At the emotions her subjects evoked. Even the bold black of her sketches set the imagination ablaze.
A mother and child locked in each other’s arms, fierce protectiveness in the mother’s face, terror in the child’s. He had seen refugees on the roads of France who might have posed for that. An old man,