The Confession - Charles Todd [81]
He said, fighting to keep his voice even, “It was what we knew.”
Still skimming, he stopped at the top of a page and read on.
I hadn’t heard from home for some weeks, and then I saw an officer I recognized. He lived near my village. His shoulder was in a bad way, and he was being sent to England for further treatment. I asked if he would find out if my father and my sister were all right. I’d heard that one of my brothers had been killed, the one here in France, but there had been no news about the one in the Navy. Captain F— told me he intended to go to Essex as soon as he was well enough, and he promised to send me word. But he never did. I expect he must have died of his wounds, because as far as I know, he never came back to France. I’d asked around, hoping he was all right and they hadn’t had to take off his arm. All of us fear amputation more than death. My sister did write finally, and told me that Joseph was dead as well, and she begged me to come home safe. It was with heavy heart that I went back into the line that day, and I think I killed a good many Germans in Joseph’s name . . .
Rutledge was about to ask Miss Farraday if she’d read the chapter and if she thought Captain F— was a reference to Justin Fowler. He remembered in time that she had told him she could have loved Fowler. Instead he looked for the date of that passage, and it was in the spring of 1915. And as far as he could judge, reading on into September, there was no other reference to Captain F—. He’d have to read the book from cover to cover, to be sure of that.
“Have you found something of interest?” she said, watching him as he read.
“It brings back memories,” he said, evading her question.
She nodded. “I expect it would.”
He turned to the second book, thicker by far, and this time, fiction. The title was simply, Marianne.
It was set in Paris during the war, and the chief character, Browning Warden, was searching for a woman he’d met before the war while smuggling along the French coast.
Hamish said, “Ye ken, it wouldna’ make his family verra’ happy.”
Which was probably why Willet hadn’t told them about the books. Or perhaps he felt that he wasn’t ready to share this next part of his life, given the trouble he’d had over becoming a footman.
Rutledge said to Cynthia Farraday, “Have you read this one?”
“Yes, I thought it quite good.”
But had she known how much truth had gone into the story?
Skimming again, he looked for a chapter similar to the one he’d read in Thetford, and he found it. The description of the war-torn French village was astonishingly real now, unlike the poorly imagined village in the copybook. The odd thing was, the woman in the earlier version had been dark haired, dark eyed, the girl Willet must have recalled from his boyhood. In this version, she had light brown hair and sounded very much like Cynthia Farraday. Had she recognized herself ?
The early pages, describing where Browning Warden lived, evoked Furnham, although Willet had renamed it and the river. The isolation, the marshes, the dark river where he learned to sail, the crossing to France, all spoke of firsthand knowledge. The first meeting with the girl he would seek during the war, her search later for the wounded soldier who had deserted to marry her, shadowed a fulfillment of the promise glimpsed in the Thetford notebooks.
Realizing that he’d been reading for some minutes, he set the book aside. “You’re right. Willet was quite a fine writer. Do you by any chance know what the third book was to be about?”
“Pure evil,” she replied. “That’s what he said once, that it was a study in man’s depravity. But I can’t tell you what story he was telling. I’m sorry. He didn’t want to talk about it very much. He said it was a reflection of what he’d seen in the war and what he knew of heroism and cruelty. Ambitious, that was his word for it. And Gertrude Stein, whoever she may be, thought what she’d read was splendid.”
“These first two books had roots in Willet’s life. His experiences in the war,