A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [73]
“But of the three, Mark Wilton was surely the most attractive?”
She laughed as she poured herself another cup of tea, then refilled his cup. “Oh, by far. If he came in here right now, every woman in the room would be aware of it! And preen. I’ve seen it happen too many times! Hugh had charm, Mark has looks, Charles had charisma. The difference is that Hugh and Charles knew how to wield what they’d been given. Mark isn’t a peacock, and never has been. It’s his greatest failing. People expect too much from beauty.”
“Which is why you feel he couldn’t have lived in Charles Harris’s shadow.”
“Of course. I think that’s why he never fell in love with me—Hugh was one of those men who dominated with charm. To tell you the truth, Hugh used it as a weapon to have his own way. Sending you to the skies one minute, tearing your heart out the next. And although I was close to hating him at the end, it was too late, I’d lost the ability to trust. I’d have made a shrew of a wife for Mark Wilton! And he knew it.”
The words were said lightly, with a smile, but there was pain behind them, in her eyes and in her voice. Rutledge heard it, but his mind was occupied by what she’d told him the first day he’d spoken to her—that Mark Wilton would have been a fool to harm Lettice’s guardian, it was the surest way to lose her.
And yet just now she’d contradicted that.
Whether she had realized it or not, she’d given him a motive for murder—not her own motive, but Mark Wilton’s.
Unless you turned it the other way about—and asked yourself if the most complete revenge was to destroy all three of them, Lettice, Charles, and the Captain, in one single bloody act whose repercussions would leave Lettice as alone and empty as Sally Davenant herself. Could she also have betrayed Catherine and her German lover? Women often sensed such things—his sister Frances always knew before the gossips what the latest scandal was.
Almost as if she heard his thoughts, Sally said quietly, “But you wanted to hear about Catherine, not me. Her father taught her to shoot, you know. If she’d wanted to shoot Charles, she’d have known how to go about it. But why now? Why after all this time? I’d always thought of her as hot-blooded, to paint like that. Not cold-blooded…” She let the thought trail off.
It was a wearing day. Hickam was still too ill to question, and Dr. Warren was testy from lack of sleep. A child he was tending was dying, and he didn’t know why. When Rutledge tried to prod him over Hickam, he said, “Come with me and see this child, and then tell me, damn you, that Hickam’s life is worth hers!”
So Rutledge went back to the meadow, walking up and down it, trying to see the murder, the frightened horse, the falling man. He tried to feel the hatred that had led to murder, worked out angles to see how the horseman and the killer had come together here in this one spot. How long had the killer waited? How sure had he been that Charles Harris would come this way? Had he known, somehow, where the Colonel was riding that morning? Which would bring suspicion back to Royston, surely. Or Lettice. Unless, before the quarrel, something had been said over dinner about his plans, and Wilton had remembered. Or perhaps the killer had simply followed Harris from the lane. Wilton again. Or Hickam? What would bring Catherine Tarrant out so early on that particular June morning, shotgun in hand, murder on her mind? Or Mrs. Davenant?
The damnable thing was, except for Catherine Tarrant’s dead lover and Mark Wilton’s quarrel,