Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [60]
He stood very still, unwilling to disturb her reverie. She said something, the words whipped away in the wind. Thinking that she must have been speaking to him, he answered, “It’s a beautiful night.”
But she looked apprehensively in his direction as if only just aware that someone was there.
“Sorry,” she said. “I have a most dreadful habit of talking to myself!”
He walked toward her, stopping some ten feet away. She was, he thought, the other guest at the hotel. And, he realized, possibly the woman he’d seen in the churchyard on his first day. It was the set of her shoulders, and the way her skirts moved in the breeze.
“I’m afraid I’m guilty of that as well,” he said, then added as one does with a chance-met stranger, “I haven’t visited East Anglia in a number of years, and I’ve never been to Osterley. It’s a different world from London.”
“Yes.”
He thought for a moment that she was not going to continue, that her brevity was a signal to him to walk on.
But then she added, “I’ve come here before. It was a very long time ago. This trip, I’d planned to continue up the coast toward Cley, but for some reason, I’ve lingered. I suppose it’s because of the marshes. They’re beautiful around Osterley.”
“. . . a very long time ago . . .” He had the feeling that she meant long ago in memory, not in actual years. That she was thinking of someone and unwilling to speak of him to a stranger. A war widow?
Hamish said, “You willna’ hear me speak of Fiona—”
“No!”
Fiona, who had loved Hamish before the war, and loved him still. . . . She was a part of Scotland, and Rutledge refused to remember her.
But Hamish did, and the name hung between them like a bad dream.
The black ribbon of the tidal stream below the quay quivered as a small fish came to the surface and then vanished again.
The woman was saying pensively, “I don’t know why, but the rivulet there reminds me of something I read once. ‘I know a brook / Where the willow dips long fingers into / Water made sweet with summer. / Where birds come to drink, / And a lone fox lies dozing / In dappled shade . . .’ ”
Rutledge finished the lines silently. “ ‘. . . I know secret places / Where toads rest, / And a child sits, / Mourning the passing / Of butterflies . . .’ ” O. A. Manning had written those in a poem called “My Brother.” He knew it well.
Oddly enough, he understood what this woman was trying to say. That this barren little stream here in the marshes, gone astray and all that was left of the once-broad harbor, was neither familiar nor safe. As she, too, had managed to wander from the comfort and safety of a life she had once lived. But with no offer of surety that either would find a way back again, the stream or her world.
There was no answer he could make to that. He had no sureties either. Only of Hamish being there, from waking to sleeping, and unwilling to let him go in peace.
She lifted her head to look up at him, and smiled. There was a wryness in her smile that he found attractive. “How terribly dreary that sounds! I suppose it’s because we’ve had nothing but rain until yesterday. A rusting of the spirit, perhaps?” As she turned away to walk back in the direction of the hotel, her profile was outlined by the sky, very patrician, pale as a cameo against the darkness of her hair and her coat. “Good night.”
The farewell was formal, indicating that the brief companionship here in the dark was happenstance and not at all an invitation to further acquaintance.
“Good night . . .”
The air seemed to grow colder, and he could hear the lonely rustlings of the marshes.
Hamish had fallen silent.
Rutledge let her continue to the hotel alone, and stood for a time by the quay, until she had gone up the stairs.
After breakfast the next morning, Rutledge made his way to the vicarage to speak to Mr. Sims. The sun was shining again, catching the sparkle of flint, the dark red of the brick window facings, and the almost Mediterranean warmth of the tile roofs of Osterley.
Water Street was busy, carts and drays maneuvering around each other to make early