Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [54]
It wasn’t madness now that he feared—though he knew that his mind teetered on the brink of self-destruction more often than he cared to admit.
But he was damned if he’d let Hamish pry and tear at him like a bird of prey, pulling out his soul to examine it like some rare specimen from the dark corners of the Congo. The question was, how to shut him out. Rutledge had never found a way.
Hamish had the last word—as he so often did. “It isna’ a matter of a night’s sleep, ye ken that. You willna’ sleep until you allow yoursel’ to live again!”
Trying to ignore him, Rutledge moved along the quay, to stand so that he could see the little stream where the boats came in to tie up. Wildfowl took off from the reeds and grasses, looking for their night’s roost. He watched them for a time, and the long shadows of the late afternoon falling across the marshes. They were golden in this light, or a deep rufous, or pale yellow, and when he stood very still, he thought he could hear breakers coming into the strand out beyond them.
“Tomorrow will be fair,” Hamish said, his countryman’s instincts strong.
“Yes.”
Rutledge turned back, walked to his car in the hotel’s walled courtyard next to a stand of late autumn flowers, and retrieved his luggage from the boot.
It was early in the dinner hour when Rutledge came down for the evening meal. Mrs. Barnett greeted him and led him to a table in the middle of the room under the softly lit chandeliers. With a smile she asked if he’d enjoyed his day, and with equal courtesy he agreed that he had.
Where he had eaten his luncheon, a man was dining alone, a heavy cane hooked over the back of the second chair.
Mrs. Barnett turned to hover over him solicitously as he finished his cheese, and Rutledge caught part of the conversation.
The man was saying, “. . . in Osterley. We’re a benighted lot here on the north coast.”
Mrs. Barnett smiled. “I saw Nurse Davies a time or two in the shops. It was always the rain she . . .”
The glass doors between the dining room and the reception hall had been left open. Sunday night, it appeared, was a popular time for local people to come in for their dinner, and there were already six or eight couples by the windows and two families at the larger tables along the wall beneath the sconces. Their quiet laughter and low-voiced conversation filled the spacious room with warmth and life. A far cry from that noon when it had seemed much too large for its only occupants: Rutledge and the woman guest.
But it appeared that she wasn’t dining in this evening.
Waiting for his soup, Rutledge unobtrusively studied the man by the window, the one Mrs. Barnett had spoken with.
There was something in the shape of his head that had caught Rutledge’s attention, the way his hair grew thickly from its part, and the line of his chin. He was young— perhaps thirty or thirty-two—but his face was lined with pain, aging it prematurely. A member of Lord Sedgwick’s family? The resemblance was there, but softer drawn, as if the bone structure was less formidable.
“I canna’ see it mysel’,” Hamish said. “He’s no’ as large framed.”
It was true. Unless illness had whittled away the muscle and brawn. And certainly this man appeared to be taller, longer limbed.
Later, as Rutledge finished his soup, he saw the man by the window fold his serviette and set it by his plate, his expression relaxed, as if he’d enjoyed his meal. But he lingered, as if reluctant to push back his chair and retire to the lounge for his tea.
And then Mrs. Barnett came in from the kitchen, as if alert to his needs, and handed the man his cane. He grasped the ivory handle and rose with visible effort, his weight heavy on the thick shaft. He straightened, pausing to catch his breath. Rutledge looked away, but not before he saw the sharp sadness in Mrs. Barnett’s face.
After a friendly exchange with Mrs. Barnett, the man walked on toward the lobby with only a slight limp, as if sitting had left him quite stiff and motion improved the