“What does Simon Wyatt himself want in life?”
“Ah!” Aurore answered ruefully. “If I knew that, I would be a very fortunate woman.”
Edith came out with a tray of glasses and a bottle of wine. “The coffee’s not done,” she said apologetically.
“Wine will do very well, for me,” Aurore said, and offered a glass to Rutledge before pouring her own. He accepted, and found the wine very good indeed, dry and perfect for a warm afternoon. She watched him savor it, her eyes observing without judging. “You were in the war, I think?”
“How do you know?”
She tilted her head and thought for a moment before answering him. “You speak French very well. And you know a good wine when you taste it.” But he knew that it wasn’t what she might have said, if she’d been honest.
“The war was neither wine nor language,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “It was a very hard four years. They are finally over.”
Somewhere Hamish echoed softly, “Over?”
“But not yet forgotten,” she said astutely, looking at the man’s face and eyes, and reading more there than he was comfortable having her see. “No, I understand. I also have seen too much pain and death. And my husband as well. I thought—there was a time when I thought he might not survive the war. I watched him, and I knew he was expecting to die. Which sometimes means that it will happen. Like so many of the young men marching off to war, he didn’t understand that he was mortal. He came to the fighting as if it were a game, there on the steps at Eton. And when he discovered it was not like this, it was too late. There was nothing to be done but fight and wait for death to come. And even death failed him. Sometimes I think the survivors feel guilty for having lived, when so many died.”
Thinking of Hamish, Rutledge looked away. It was too near for comfort.
She said, putting down her glass, “Is there anything that can be done?”
“No.” He wanted to offer her hope, and couldn’t. He had none to give. After a moment he realized that Hamish was trying to draw his attention to something—that her digression had led Rutledge away from what had brought him here. Out of purpose? Or because he had listened with some sense, some knowledge of the suffering she was talking about?
“Why do I tell you these things?” she asked, frowning. “I have not spoken of them to anyone, not even the nuns!”
“She’s no’ a woman to do anything by chance,” Hamish reminded him.
He brought the topic of conversation abruptly back to Miss Tarlton’s visit. “I’m under the impression that Mr. Wyatt offered Miss Tarlton a position. As assistant. Is that true?”
Aurore Wyatt looked away. Even in profile, the stillness about her was striking, as if her body were attuned to it in blood and bone. Yet there was a strength too, which seemed to mask a great, unspeakable pain. Part of that she had told him about—but not all. Not nearly all. He was sure of it.
“If you are asking if I approved, no. But not because of Miss Tarlton. She seems to be both respectable and capable, with a surprising knowledge of Asia. Her family had served in India for generations, as I understand it. As an assistant she would have been very useful to Simon. It was—my opinion—that Simon himself should have advertised. Instead he left the task to someone else.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see the problem. If she’s competent.”
Aurore turned to look at him, her fingers on the rim of her glass, her eyes a darker gray that he remembered. “My husband’s assistant will live here, in this house. Take meals with us. Share our lives. That will not be comfortable when I am strongly aware that this person does not approve of me.
He was surprised. “Why? Surely not because you’re French? She can’t know anything else about you in such a short time.”
“Yes, because I am French! I married Simon Wyatt in France, during the war. There are some who think—well, never mind. It is not your affair, you wish to speak of Miss Tarleton, not of me!”
After a moment he said, “They think you took advantage of Mr. Wyatt’s loneliness?”
She lifted her glass and drank, then set it down. “You didn’t know my husband before he left for France. Nor did I. But I’m told—very often I’m told!—that he was destined to be a famous cabinet member—a great prime minister—or God Himself, for all I know! They believe—his father’s friends and associates—that the change in him now is the result of his marriage. And so my doing. They blame me, because it is much easier than understanding why he prefers this ridiculous museum to what he was bred to do!”
“As long as Wyatt doesn’t blame you, what difference does it matter what other people think? Or say?”
“How like a man,” she said in gentle derision. “You do not live in a woman’s world, you don’t know the savagery there. It can be worse than the jungle—”
At that moment Simon Wyatt came storming through the french doors and out into the garden. “It’s my fault, he says! Idiot! I’d like very much to nail him to that wall with one of his own damned bolts!” Coming to the table, he pulled up the third chair. “What’s that? Wine! Good God, I hope you offered him gin or a scotch first!”
“Edith will bring you one, if you prefer it,” she told her husband. “But I think the inspector was leaving. I’ll see him to the door.”
Surprised, Rutledge finished his wine and set the glass on the table. “Thank you, Mrs. Wyatt.” He stood, offering his hand to Simon. “I hope the museum is a success,” he said.
Simon said, moodiness settling in on him like a cloak, “I don’t know that it will be. But the important thing is to try. It’s all I can do.” He shook Rutledge’s hand, and then Rutledge was following Aurore into the house.
At the front door she said, “I hope we’ve answered your questions.”
“There’s one other,” he told her reluctantly. “I’d like Miss Tarlton’s full name, and her direction if you have it.”
“Her first name is Margaret. And she lives somewhere in Chelsea. You’ll have to ask Simon for the street and number.”
“Thank you,” he replied. “Good-bye, Mrs. Wyatt.”
She nodded and watched him walk away.
The watching bothered him. It hadn’t been simple curiosity, nor the look of a woman intrigued by a new man in her sphere, only uneasiness.
But whether it was uneasiness for herself—or for Simon Wyatt—he couldn’t tell.
Margaret Tarlton. Of Chelsea, London.
He had a strong feeling that she wasn’t the woman he was searching for.
Rutledge placed a call to London as soon as he reached Singleton Magna. The reply came before he went down to his dinner.
Bowles said peremptorily, “What’s this Tarlton woman got to do with the Mowbrays?”
“She was on the same train. She got off at Singleton Magna that day. We want to know what she saw—if anything.”
“See to it you’re not stepping on any toes, man!”
“I’m care itself.”
Satisfied or not, Bowles became crisp and to the point. He said, “We sent a man around to find Miss Tarlton. Her maid says she went down to Singleton Magna last week and afterward was to go on to Sherborne. To the country house of a Thomas Napier. One of the political Napiers, Rutledge! He’s in London, but his daughter, Elizabeth Napier, is staying in the house presently. We haven’t been able to reach her”