The Confession - Charles Todd [52]
Thompson helped him carry the boxes back to where they’d found them, and the two men left the attic, turning out the light as they reached the stairs.
“Was it a diary, sir?” Thompson asked, clearly worried about what his former footman had seen fit to write about the family and the staff.
“Not precisely,” Rutledge replied. “I should leave the copybooks where they are. They will do no harm.”
“Thank you, sir.” They had reached the kitchen, and Thompson said, “I still have duties requiring my attention. Mary will see you out.”
And the same housemaid who had opened the door to him earlier led him back up the stairs, through the servants’ door into the hall. She said, as he stepped out into the warm night, “Was it really Ben Willet you came here about?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw him in May, the twenty-ninth, it was, when we were in the London house. He didn’t see me. I was on an omnibus and he was walking along the street. He looked—ill. I never said anything. It wasn’t my place. But I wondered. Was it a war wound, do you think? Or was he drinking himself into oblivion? They’d never take him back here, if that’s what it was.”
“He was suffering from an illness,” he told her.
“Was? Is he better? Dead?” When he didn’t answer, she added, “Then he won’t be coming back.”
“I’m sorry.” He meant it.
“We all thought he’d be back, after the war. His things were here, you see. A promise, you might call it. We liked him. He could be very funny, you know. Really, he should have gone on the stage. He was such a gifted mimic.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t want to believe it, you know. But someone told me—someone he’d known before the war—that he wanted to live in Paris. That he liked France. But he didn’t after all, did he? I saw him last May in London. Myself.”
“Who told you this?”
“William Neville. He was a footman in the house next but one to ours in London. He met Ben Willet in hospital in the last weeks of the war. They had trench foot, of all things. He said Ben talked about nothing but France, how different it was from what he expected. He said if he had the money to do it, he’d stay there after the war was finished. William told him he was a fool. And Ben said, all right, he’d come back to London and work five years. Then he’d go back to France and find out if he still wanted to live there. William told him that was brilliant. Ben laughed and said, no, it was economic necessity.”
“Did you like him?”
“Not so much a liking,” she said, considering her feelings. “But he was nice, if you know what I mean. Never any trouble, never any worry. Sometimes on our afternoons off, we’d go into Thetford. It was great fun. Like having a beau for a few hours, then back to ourselves again when we got home.”
He could understand that. Service had strict rules. No romances, no marriages, no unbecoming conduct. All the same, the servants were human, and two young people would find in pretense an escape from the tedium of everyday life.
“Thompson told me that he’d spent a good deal of his time in his room.”
She looked over her shoulder, then said, “He liked to take books from Mr. Laughton’s library. He wasn’t supposed to, but he always brought them back. And so I never told anyone. He was very careful with them.”
“What sort of books?”
“I have no idea. I do know he borrowed a Bible once. I said to him, ‘Don’t you have a Testament of your own?’ And he said he’d never had one. I thought that was very strange.”
There were voices in one of the passages behind her. She said hastily, “I must go.” She shut the door firmly and left him there on the steps.
Hamish said, “It wasna’ a verra’ profitable journey.”
“In some ways it was. For instance, was it his illness that brought the man back to England? Or had he been here all this time?”
“How did he live?” Hamish, ever practical, asked.
It was a good question.
By his craft—or had he fallen on hard times and turned to blackmail?
Chapter 10
At the end of the Laughtons’ drive, Rutledge debated whether to spend