A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [93]
Sally Davenant’s face flushed with a mixture of anger and speechless embarrassment. Wilton started toward Mavers, but the man said, “And the Sergeant, there, the Inspector over yonder, quaking in their boots to arrest the King’s friend, who shot down the Colonel in cold blood with a stolen shotgun! And the man from London who lurks in shadows and tackles the pathetic likes of Daniel Hickam instead of doing his duty!”
Almost foaming at the mouth in his terrible need to hurt, Mavers paid no heed to the effect his words were having on the targets of his wrath; he poured them out in torrents, spilling over one another in a tangle. Rutledge began to move toward him, cutting across the churchyard, one eye on Mavers, the other on his feet among the damp, tilted tombstones.
“You, with the feebleminded cousin, who ought to be shut away for her own good! And that artist, the one who took a German to her bed and reveled in it—that other one with the witch’s eyes, hiding in her bedchamber, with her lascivious desires, and the Inspector yonder with his cold, sexless wife, and Tom Malone, the butcher, who keeps his thumb on his scales. The bloodless Haldanes dead and not even knowing it. Ben Sanders, whose wife killed herself rather than go on living with him, the Sergeant who—”
But Wilton and Rutledge had reached him by that time, dragging him away from the lych-gate, bending his arms behind him until he choked from pain and stopped lacerating the townspeople with a tongue as sharp as a lash. They hauled him with them down the length of the Court, his aggrieved cries echoing off the facades of the almshouses, raising the rooks in the fields beyond the trees.
The look on Wilton’s face was murderous. Behind them, Rutledge could hear Forrest running to catch up and the Sergeant’s bull roar, telling everyone at the church to pay no heed, that the fool had run mad, like a rabid dog.
But Rutledge thought he had done no such thing. Stopping at the corner to hand Mavers over to Forrest, Rutledge turned on his heel and went back to the lych-gate, searching for Royston in the crowd gathered there, silent and avoiding one another’s eyes, their faces stiff with shocked dismay, unable to think of any way out of the churchyard that wouldn’t take them past the rest of the parishioners equally paralyzed with indecision.
As Rutledge scanned their faces, he saw tears in Sally Davenant’s eyes, though her chin was high and her cheeks still flushed. Helena Sommers seemed to be trying to find something in her handbag, her expression hidden by the wide-brimmed hat she wore, her hands shaking. Georgina Grayson had moved away from the crowd to the tree where Rutledge had been standing earlier, her back to the churchyard, her head tilted to watch the rooks soaring around the church tower.
Royston was gripping a post on the lych-gate, staring at the worshipers on the other side of the wall, a defensive look in his eyes, his mouth turned down in shame.
As Rutledge reached him, he said, “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have told him. I should have thought about what he’d do. And now look what’s happened—I’ll never be able to face any of them again!”
“What did he want?”
Royston turned to Rutledge as if surprised to find him there. “He wanted to know if we’d read the Will. Charles’s Will. He wanted to know if his pension was going to continue.”
“Pension?”
“Yes. Charles gave him a pension years ago.”
“Why?”
Royston shrugged expressively. “It was his sense of responsibility. The other son—there were two boys and a girl in the family, the mother had worked at Mallows as a maid before she married Hugh Davenant’s gamekeeper—the other son died in South Africa. The daughter drowned herself. When Mavers ran off to join the army, Charles had him sent home. He was told that as long as he stayed there and looked after his mother, he’d be paid a pension. After the mother died, Charles didn’t stop it, he let it go on. Against my better