Search the Dark - Charles Todd [79]
But you did! Elizabeth’s eyes accused Rutledge. And it was just as terrible for you as it was for Simon, wasn’t it?”Go away!” she said aloud. “Go away. Before you both find yourselves on the other side of your nightmares!”
And Rutledge got to his feet, knowing he had to leave, that Simon was past questioning and his own frail peace was shattered as well.
“Simon, I’m back—” It was Aurore who had come in, blocking his escape. She looked at her husband, at Elizabeth fiercely protecting him, her hands dug into the white fabric of his shirt, his eyes closed, their bodies touching, her side against his arm, his head resting on her wrist, an intimacy between them that spoke of comfort offered and comfort accepted on a level beyond friendship. She turned to Rutledge, his face grim and his eyes haunted, staring at her as if he too saw her as an outsider.
Without a word she whirled and went out again, with such a deep grief in her movements that Rutledge could feel her pain and his own inability to assuage it
She was gone, and he still stood where he was, rooted. Until Elizabeth’s voice reached him.
“Go to her,” she said urgently. “Make her understand! I’ll see to Simon.”
“No. It’s better if you go,” Rutledge said. “She won’t trust me.”
But he found himself walking the three paces between himself and the door, and heard Elizabeth saying, “She needs comfort, and she won’t take it from a woman! She’s too strong to let me see her cry!”
And he thought that was true.
He found Aurore up by the churchyard, deep into the dark, shadowed clearing under the trees, her hand lifted to one drooping branch, her head against her upper arm.
Not wanting to startle her, he said quietly, “Is there anything I can do?”
She said huskily, “Go away. No.”
He moved closer, still some six yards from her, but near enough that his voice wouldn’t carry to anyone else.
“I brought back the war, that’s all it was. Simon had built a very high wall, but not high enough. It was—Elizabeth came to see what was wrong, she must have heard us—and she thought I’d badgered him. Blame me for what happened.”
Aurore turned to face him. There were streaks of tears on her face. He felt a surge of self-disgust, as if he himself had been the one to make her cry. “You brought back the war. Yes, I think that was true. But it was Elizabeth who used it for her own ends. He won’t turn to me for comfort anymore. Did you know? He shuts me out, as if he doesn’t want me to see what he believes is weakness in him! He thinks—if this museum is a success, I’ll admire him, look at him with love and pride for what he’s accomplished. He thinks—he thinks that it will wipe out the past. I saw him break, you see. A man can forgive a woman anything but that. If I’d slept with half the British army, he could forgive me. If I had betrayed his soldiers and got them killed, he’d find a way to forgive me. But not this!”
He understood her better than she realized. He found himself wondering if perhaps Jean had been clever enough to know that he might come to hate her in the end, if she’d married him after seeing him in hospital, broken and in despair. Then he knew it wasn’t an excuse he could make for her—Jean had been half embarrassed, half horrified by what she couldn’t understand. She’d been so tightly wrapped in her own dread she hadn’t seen the urgent need to reach out and comfort him.
He said, “There were men who came home damaged. Physically, most of them. Emotionally, a good many of them.”
Aurore replied with a heaviness that spoke of long sleepless nights waiting for a man to show he cared. “I don’t think most of the English soldiers who went to France were prepared for what this war was going to do to them. Battles, yes, they expected battles. Great glorious charges, like Waterloo, where there’s no time to think or feel, just the intensity of trying to survive. Instead they sat in filthy trenches. How do they explain this at home? Simon’s father wrote over and over, ‘Where are the letters you promised? Why are they not coming through? Is it a problem with the censors?