“By all means.”
“Be careful. Interviewing Lady Benton. You don’t want to make matters worse by making her doubt herself. Not doubting her account, you understand—herself. There’s a difference.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? It’s important that you do. I’m the one who will have to pick up the pieces long after you go back to the city.”
Rutledge stood up. “You will have to trust that I know what to do. How do I find the house?”
Wister reluctantly gave him her direction.
Then, at the door, Rutledge asked, “What became of the motorcar? Afterward?”
“According to Gregson, it was left there until after the inquest. In the event it was needed. And then there was the wait while the Captain’s sister was reached in America. Finally the commanding officer saw that it was removed and disposed of—it was bad for morale. And Lady Benton insisted as well. She told him it was distressing to her staff to see it there. The Major cleared it with Gregson, of course. He made a note of that too. For the record. What became of it after that I can’t tell you.”
Rutledge thanked him, and left.
When he drove out to the Hall, several miles north and east of the village, he passed the ruins of the gatehouse that had once marked the entrance to abbey lands. The base was flint, but there wasn’t enough left to judge more than its size. A mile farther along he came to gates of the house itself, set into the high wall that appeared to encircle the estate. They were closed.
He could see what must have become of the original gatehouse, for the wall was flint, the tall pillars on either side of the gates as well. The original builders hadn’t wasted good materials.
He’d hoped to find them open, even at this hour, but perhaps after what had happened, he thought, Lady Benton wasn’t eager to have either visitors or curiosity seekers.
It was as he was reversing to return to Walmer, that he noticed the gates themselves.
Tall, wrought iron, inset into the pillars and rising in a graceful arch. There was half of a brass scroll on each that came together in the center when the gates were shut as they were now.
He’d taken for granted that it simply gave the name of the property. But it wasn’t the name, it was a single word.
Lachrymosa
Rutledge stared at it.
Latin. A place of weeping . . . Tearful.
He could feel Hamish stirring in the far corners of his mind, and as he drove back to the village, he knew he was in for a long night.
Rutledge ordered his dinner standing at the desk in Reception, then went up to his room. The sky was still clear and sunlight lit the roofs he could see from his windows, but it didn’t brighten his mood.
His meal was brought up, and he’d barely finished it when the darkness began to come down.
Corporal Hamish MacLeod was dead. His bones lay in the black mud that was once a battlefield and now a cemetery. Yet it was more difficult for Rutledge to think of him there than it was to deal with the voice in his head that seemed to come from outside it, just by his shoulder. Where Hamish had stood through so many night watches, waiting for the dawn and another attack across No Man’s Land. They had shared a friendship, two very different men from very different backgrounds, brought together by war. The young Scot had been a natural soldier, with an eye for tactics and strategy, a good mind, and a strong sense of duty. His acute hearing had often saved them from night attacks and quickly pinpointed the source of a concealed sniper’s shots.
Yet it was that strong sense of duty that had led to Corporal Hamish MacLeod’s death. During the bloody and seemingly endless battle of the Somme, for interminable weeks of attack and counterattack, he had seen as his duty the welfare of the exhausted and dispirited men under him, keeping them alert, keeping morale high, making certain that they faced each day ready for whatever was thrown at them. And when orders came down to take out a German machine gun that would stop the next offensive, he had called the assault what it was—sheer murder—and after repeated, useless sorties that failed to stop the German gun, Hamish had finally refused to lead another suicidal attempt to break through to it. Rutledge as the commanding officer had tried to persuade him to change his mind, and Hamish had flatly refused. Neither man realized how close the other was to breaking—neither man could find a way out of their dilemma. And in the end, faced with Hamish’s steadfast refusal, Rutledge had had no choice but to order his Corporal shot. It had been the only way to prevent what amounted to a mutiny and regain control of his men.
Rutledge had just delivered the coup de grâce to the dying Scot when a ranging shell from their own side fell short and buried them all, the living and the dead, in the same grave. Only Rutledge had survived, his face pressed against the body of his dead Corporal, finding a tiny air pocket until that too gave out and rescuers pulled him unconscious out of the black and stinking mud.
He had fought on, haunted by the memory of what he’d been forced to do, haunted too by the voice in his head that had become his only way of denying that Hamish was dead. And when the war ended and he was sent home, Rutledge brought the voice with him. Survivor’s guilt, Dr. Fleming had told him at the clinic: the desperate need to blot out what he’d done, for his own sanity’s sake. Like so many officers, dealing with the terrible burden of having sent hundreds of men to their deaths while he himself escaped with a few superficial wounds, Rutledge had found his own salvation. Or so he’d believed in the darkest corners of his mind.
Shell shock, the rest of the world called it, and Rutledge had done his best to keep that secret, struggling back through the harrowing nightmares and the punishing voice in his mind just enough in 1919 to return to the Yard. He struggled still, but at least he functioned now. For as Dr. Fleming had told him on his last day at the clinic, “It’s important for you to realize, Ian, that you must win this battle for your mind. And Hamish won’t help you there. I can’t either. You must fight with all the strength in you to win. Or when the darkness comes down again, it won’t lift.”
Sometimes that was his greatest fear.
And there were also nights when he could almost wish that it wouldn’t lift, that there would be peace, finally, in oblivion.
Then somehow he found the strength of will to fight through the nightmares. Unwilling to give in. Or give up.
He had learned that they were not the same . . .
2
Rutledge slept finally as the sun was rising. But the bustle in the street beneath his window woke him again shortly after seven. He got up, shaved with cold water, and dressed, then went out to walk the streets of the village for half an hour before he was able to consider his breakfast. And after he’d eaten, he waited again, but this time until he was sure the Hall would be open.
And so it was just after nine when he turned in through the open gates and followed the drive up to the main door.
It was, he thought, an unusual blend of architecture. In front of him was an imposing facade nearly two stories tall, soaring to a slender tower that was more ecclesiastical than defensive. Above the massive door was a lovely mullioned window, with coats of arms in stained glass. The remains of what the monks had built? A graceful Elizabethan center seemed to embrace another wing, very likely built from the very stone that had come from the rest of the abbey. Several oriel windows decorated the upper floors, their diamond panes catching the morning light. Smaller than other grander houses of the day, the Hall was in perfect proportions for its size.