“I don’t think about her,” he said. “My task is to locate the rest of the Mowbray family—if they exist—or find out what part in this business Margaret Tarlton played. Which reminds me. I’d like to know something about her—not as your secretary, but as a woman might see her.”
“Which is as adroit a way of changing the subject as any I’ve seen since my mother’s uncle used to make excuses for his forgetfulness!” she said lightly, turning aside his refusal. “I think Aurore has turned your head as easily as she has Simon’s. And my father’s! He likes her, you know. He says if the French army had been made up of soldiers half as brave as Aurore, we’d have won the war three years ago.”
Rutledge said, “They lost their best men early on. And the rest lost heart.”
“And we paid in British blood for their inadequate weapons and their inadequate generals. Not that we didn’t have a few incompetent generals of our own! Frankly I wasn’t prepared to like Aurore. But I do. She’s got a quality of stillness that I admire—I’ve never been able to stop my mind or my tongue from working as they pleased. I can quite understand why Simon fell in love with her. And out of love with me!”
“War does strange things to people,” he said, falling back on the old cliché and wondering if he could shift the conversation one last time to Margaret.
“It certainly changed Simon,” she said, a wistfulness in her voice. “I was frightened by what I saw in him today. A fragility. It wasn’t there before! He was a man who had never known personal defeat, never had any doubts, always had his eye well set on the mark. It was what I truly loved in him, you know. His certainty. Not quite arrogance, just an assurance that he knew his way and was confidently following it. It was a guarantee of safety, that assurance. I felt safe in his care.” Toying with her teaspoon, she stopped, then added, “I asked Aurore if she’d noticed it—after all, she hadn’t known Simon before the war, she might not have been aware of any change in him. But she said, ‘He’s terribly afraid.’” Elizabeth paused thoughtfully. “I can’t accept that. I’ve never known Simon to be afraid of anything. Or any one!”
But Rutledge knew what Aurore meant. It wasn’t a question of lacking courage. Surviving had frightened Simon. He hadn’t expected to live. He couldn’t comprehend how he’d deserved to live. And there was a feeling, deep down inside, that God would remember him one day and rectify the error.
“Simon isn’t afraid of anyone or anything. That’s not what his wife was trying to tell you. He’s alive and so many other good men are dead. There’s a sense of guilt in that. It breeds fear of a different kind.”
She stared at him. “Were you in the war? Do you feel that way?”
Oh, God, he thought, as Hamish echoed the question in the depths of his soul. Guilt was—it was the agony of spirit that made every day bleak. The fear that you might not live up to the cost of your survival—that you might not, somehow, justify the whim of fate that let Death miss you and take so many around you. The drive—and the brake—on all that you did and thought and felt, when the Armistice came and you were alive to see it. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. There was a biblical ring to that, straight out of the Old Testament, the sort of resounding phrase that thundered from the pulpit and terrified small boys even when they didn’t know what in God’s name was being said.
She saw his unwitting reaction and said quickly, “No, don’t answer that, I’d no right to ask it of you!”
“Then tell me instead about Margaret Tarlton.”
She sighed. “Margaret grew up in India. It made her—I don’t know quite how—seem much older than I was. As if all the things she’d seen and done and learned gave her a different sort of maturity from mine. And heaven knows, I’d grown up quickly myself, in a household where political intrigue was mother’s milk!”
“Did she come from a family with status? Money?”
“No, although from what I know of her father, he had aspirations, and he used to tell her as a child that England was her hope. If the family could just return to England, they’d be fine. If they could find the money for passage, they’d be fine. I don’t know what golden rainbows he saw for her, or why, but he made her hungry for a way of life she wasn’t going to have unless she married well. In the end, both her parents died of malaria, and she came without either of them. There was a younger sister too, who died near Suez of a fever several men brought back to the ship after going ashore. Margaret arrived in England alone, with no one to call family but distant cousins she’d never met She finished her education at the same school I was sent to; there was a family in Gloucester who provided a scholarship. They’d been missionaries or some such, and often did such things in the hope that it might make the recipient think of taking up the same burden. Well, they reckoned wrong with Margaret! She thought the heathen were quite happy with their own ways and would profit very little from being persuaded to try ours. Buddhism, she told me, made life a long series of chances to try to do better and see oneself more clearly. She didn’t care for Hinduism as much—she said it was as class-conscious as the Church of England. In my opinion, these beliefs—Hinduism and Buddhism—put far too much emphasis on the fate of the individual rather than on the good of mankind as a whole. It sustained a sort of—I don’t know—selfishness. I saw that from time to time in Margaret too, as if she’d been infected by it.”
“It seems she’d have made a perfect assistant for Simon. With her deep knowledge of the East.”
But Elizabeth Napier evaded that question very neatly. “I’m no judge. It wasn’t a subject she usually cared to speak of. Most people had no idea she’d lived anywhere but England.”
“She spoke of India to Captain Shaw.”
Elizabeth’s face went very still. “Captain Shaw heard it first from me,” she said. “He couldn’t understand why Margaret wasn’t in love with him. She wouldn’t tell him, and I felt he was owed an answer. I asked him not to bring it up with her, but I think he did anyway. I don’t know that Margaret had a capacity for love. If she did, it was buried under such layers of wanting that she’d nearly smothered it. Whatever drove my secretary, it was so fierce she was blind to anything else. I hope her death came quickly; she would have hated dying before she’d gotten what she was after. It was the ultimate failure, you see.”
The next morning, before he’d had time to order his breakfast or think about the day, Rutledge came face to face with Hildebrand.
“You ought to come see Mowbray,” he said. “He’s got something on his conscience, and damned if I can find out what it is. I’ve sent for Johnston, in the event it’s a confession. He might speak to you or his lawyer.”
Rutledge left with Hildebrand, crossing the street in time to see Johnston just passing though the station’s door.
Inside it was damp and musty from the rain, and this morning, although the clouds were moving northeast, the sun hadn’t shown its face.
They moved down the passage to the cell where Mowbray was kept, and Rutledge could feel Hamish growing tense, uneasy.
The heavy key turned in the lock, the door swung back, and the misery inside was almost palpable. The smell of unwashed flesh and hopelessness was enough to make Johnston stop in his tracks. “My God, haven’t you allowed him even the decency of soap and water!”
“We’ve brought him soap and water,” Hildebrand said curtly. “We can’t dip him into it. My constables are already complaining it’s not fit in here for beast or man. That’s why you’re here. To get to the bottom of this!”