The pain in the eyes of the man across the desk from Rutledge told him much. It was the same unbearable pain he’d read in Mowbray’s. Something so deep, so infinitely dark that it would destroy.
Rutledge had seen that look in his own face, bearded and strained, thin and half mad, in a mirror in hospital. A stranger, he’d thought, bewildered, has come back in my place!
Simon stared at Rutledge, not seeing him, not seeing the reflection of emotion that was there, naked and unguarded, if he’d had the wit to look. He was too busy trying to hold himself together, trying to force the devils back inside the small, crowded box where they’d been locked.
Slamming his fist on the desk, Simon said, “Damn you! Damn you!”
His eyes closed, and there was a white grimness about his mouth, as if he felt sick and was fighting hard against the tide of nausea that threatened to overwhelm an iron control.
The silence in the room was so deep that Rutledge could hear a clock striking somewhere in the house, a slow, deep tolling of the hour.
And then, without warning, the door opened and Elizabeth Napier said, “Dear God!”
She went protectively to Simon, her hands on his shoulders, the fingers kneading with her anger.
“Leave him alone! Do you hear me!” she cried, lashing out at Rutledge. “I won’t have it!”
As if—he thought, his own iron will struggling desperately to reassert control, Hamish pounding in his mind like hammer on anvil—as if, small as she was, she could stand in the way of the majesty of the law. “We were discussing the war—” he began in his own defense.
“The war’s over,” she told him. “It’s finished It killed, it maimed, and it destroyed—and yet none of you will let it go! You carry it around with you like sackcloth and ashes, you live with it in your very bones by day and your dreams by night, and treat it like some Holy Grail you brought back with you! Well, it isn’t; it’s a legacy of despair and hate and grievous hurt, and I won’t let it touch me anymore, do you hear me! I won’t let it!”
Rutledge looked at Simon. His eyes were still closed, his breathing ragged and harsh.
But Simon said, “It’s all right, Elizabeth. He didn’t know—he didn’t mean to stir it up. I’m sorry—”
But you did! Elizabeth’s eyes accused Rutledge. And it was just as terrible for you as it was for Simon, wasn’t it?”Go away!” she said aloud. “Go away. Before you both find yourselves on the other side of your nightmares!”
And Rutledge got to his feet, knowing he had to leave, that Simon was past questioning and his own frail peace was shattered as well.
“Simon, I’m back—” It was Aurore who had come in, blocking his escape. She looked at her husband, at Elizabeth fiercely protecting him, her hands dug into the white fabric of his shirt, his eyes closed, their bodies touching, her side against his arm, his head resting on her wrist, an intimacy between them that spoke of comfort offered and comfort accepted on a level beyond friendship. She turned to Rutledge, his face grim and his eyes haunted, staring at her as if he too saw her as an outsider.
Without a word she whirled and went out again, with such a deep grief in her movements that Rutledge could feel her pain and his own inability to assuage it
She was gone, and he still stood where he was, rooted. Until Elizabeth’s voice reached him.
“Go to her,” she said urgently. “Make her understand! I’ll see to Simon.”
“No. It’s better if you go,” Rutledge said. “She won’t trust me.”
But he found himself walking the three paces between himself and the door, and heard Elizabeth saying, “She needs comfort, and she won’t take it from a woman! She’s too strong to let me see her cry!”
And he thought that was true.
He found Aurore up by the churchyard, deep into the dark, shadowed clearing under the trees, her hand lifted to one drooping branch, her head against her upper arm.
Not wanting to startle her, he said quietly, “Is there anything I can do?”
She said huskily, “Go away. No.”
He moved closer, still some six yards from her, but near enough that his voice wouldn’t carry to anyone else.
“I brought back the war, that’s all it was. Simon had built a very high wall, but not high enough. It was—Elizabeth came to see what was wrong, she must have heard us—and she thought I’d badgered him. Blame me for what happened.”
Aurore turned to face him. There were streaks of tears on her face. He felt a surge of self-disgust, as if he himself had been the one to make her cry. “You brought back the war. Yes, I think that was true. But it was Elizabeth who used it for her own ends. He won’t turn to me for comfort anymore. Did you know? He shuts me out, as if he doesn’t want me to see what he believes is weakness in him! He thinks—if this museum is a success, I’ll admire him, look at him with love and pride for what he’s accomplished. He thinks—he thinks that it will wipe out the past. I saw him break, you see. A man can forgive a woman anything but that. If I’d slept with half the British army, he could forgive me. If I had betrayed his soldiers and got them killed, he’d find a way to forgive me. But not this!”
He understood her better than she realized. He found himself wondering if perhaps Jean had been clever enough to know that he might come to hate her in the end, if she’d married him after seeing him in hospital, broken and in despair. Then he knew it wasn’t an excuse he could make for her—Jean had been half embarrassed, half horrified by what she couldn’t understand. She’d been so tightly wrapped in her own dread she hadn’t seen the urgent need to reach out and comfort him.
He said, “There were men who came home damaged. Physically, most of them. Emotionally, a good many of them.”
Aurore replied with a heaviness that spoke of long sleepless nights waiting for a man to show he cared. “I don’t think most of the English soldiers who went to France were prepared for what this war was going to do to them. Battles, yes, they expected battles. Great glorious charges, like Waterloo, where there’s no time to think or feel, just the intensity of trying to survive. Instead they sat in filthy trenches. How do they explain this at home? Simon’s father wrote over and over, ‘Where are the letters you promised? Why are they not coming through? Is it a problem with the censors? And the photographs, where are they? Is the camera working? Do you have film? For God’s sake, why are you letting this opportunity slip through your fingers? Where is the next Churchill?’ And Simon couldn’t tell him what was wrong. That he was faced with mortality, and what he’d been born and bred to do no longer seemed to matter. I think he realized for the first time that he hadn’t chosen his political future, it had been thrust at him. But in its place, what did he want? What else was he fit for? How do you decide such things on a battlefield? He was the walking dead. Waiting for death to remember he was still there and come for him. There was no future. And yet he desperately wanted one.”
For an instant she put her hands to her eyes, as if pressing them might stop the aching in her head. Or the aching in her heart. She took a deep shuddering breath, to steady herself.
“Do you even know what I’m saying? I gave him hope. I gave him something to hold in his heart until death came. My body and my love brought him a little peace before the end. Only—he lived. And he wasn’t prepared for that Or for a marriage that might last after all. Or for his father dead and Thomas Napier furious with him for jilting Elizabeth, who was desperately trying to be brave and noble about it. He came home to change—and an accounting. And I was the living symbol of how far he’d fallen from grace in the eyes of those whose good opinion was important to him.”