Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [139]
It was, he thought from her expression, more a condemnation of a woman at the wheel of a motorcar than it was of speed. Priscilla Connaught would have little in common with Mrs. Danning. They were brought up in very different worlds. The farmer’s wife had work-reddened hands and dressed much as her own mother must have done a generation ago. Youth had deserted her, her life given over to chores and cooking and raising children. To her, Priscilla Connaught was a city-bred peacock suddenly and inexplicably set down in a farmyard.
Holding the door for him, she walked ahead down a flagged passage, past the dairy room and a larder, then opened another door into the warm, lamplit kitchen. “She’s just in here,” Mrs. Danning added over her shoulder, and he stepped into the large room, his hat in his hand. Although sparsely furnished, there was a good round table, handsome chairs, the work sink, and two oak dressers. One of them held jugs and plates, cups and bowls, the glaze shining in the lamp’s glow.
Priscilla Connaught, her hair pinned up haphazardly, her coat dirty and torn, a long scrape across her cheek from her ear to her nose, was sitting hunched in a chair by the coal stove, though the room was warm. Someone had given her a shawl to wrap around her shoulders. It was handmade, thick, and appeared to have been knitted of whatever oddments of wool had been in the basket. There was almost a frivolous air about it, as if the juxtaposition of blues and grays and a very pretty rose had not been thought out as a pattern. A child’s first efforts, perhaps, for the stitches were sometimes too tight.
He said, “Miss Connaught?”
She looked up, her face streaked with tears and blood from the scrape. The misery in her eyes shocked him.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I didn’t know who else to ask. These people have been very kind—but I’d like very much to go home, now.”
He crossed the room to pull out a chair from the table, to set it next to hers. “Are you hurt?”
“Hurt?” She stared at him, as if the word was foreign to her. “I don’t think I am.”
He’d seen the car in the ditch. She’d have taken some punishment.
Rutledge reached out and gently lifted the hair from her face. His intent had been to make her more comfortable, but she flinched as he touched it, and he saw that there was a bloody cut at the very edge of her forehead.
Turning to Mrs. Danning, Rutledge said, “Could you bring me a wet cloth, please?”
She went to the sink and pumped up water into a small bowl. “It’ll be cold. Shall I set it on the stove for a spell?”
“No, that will do.” She brought him the bowl and a clean towel from a drawer. Rutledge got to his feet, dipped the towel into the bowl, and moving the hair aside, began to clean blood from the wound.
Priscilla Connaught’s breath caught at the coldness of the water, her eyes fluttering, but she held her head still like a good child, and let him work. Mrs. Danning, standing just behind him, was saying, “My dear lord, I never saw that! And she didn’t say anything—”
It was deep, and the blood welled up, in spite of his efforts to stem the flow. Rutledge said, “I don’t mean to hurt you—” And then he added, to distract her, “How did you come by this?”
“I don’t know,” she said faintly. “I don’t remember anything, except wanting to die . . . lying there in the ditch, wanting to die.”
She began to cry, silently at first, moving her face away from his fingers, and then the sobs shook her body, and she hunched away from his ministrations, into herself.
Mrs. Danning took the bowl from his hands. Her voice was troubled as she said, “She was this way when Michael brought her in. He’s the dairyman. He’d gone out with the milk cans, and the dogs found her first—dark as it still was, the motorcar was that hard to see in the ditch. He discovered she was alive, and ran back for my husband, to help get her out of the vehicle—her door was jammed, they said, and she