Stillness.
It seemed to spread through him, it seemed to wrap him about, it seemed to fill him full.
For nearly a quarter of an hour he stood there alone and listening.
When he turned away to walk back to the car, there were tears in his eyes.
But he had found the strength he needed.
6
Morag Gilchrist greeted Rutledge at the heavy front door of The Lodge almost before he’d knocked.
She had looked after this house just south of Edinburgh for nearly three generations of the Trevor family, and nobody seemed to know just how old she was. If anyone asked, he was given short shrift. Morag’s back was straight as a sergeant-major’s, her eyes as bright as a crow’s, and her hands as soft and steady as a girl’s.
“Mr. Ian!”
He thought for an instant she was going to embrace him. There was such warmth in her face that it seemed to reach out to him. He put his arms around her instead, and she let him, then pushed him away with a “Pshaw! You’ll muss my gown, lad! Give o’wer!”
Her black gown, to the floor, was nearly as stiff as she was, Victorian and a badge of honor, like the heavy ring of keys at her waist on a silver chain.
David Trevor came out of the room just off the passage where they stood, and gripped Ian’s hand hard, with something in his face that made them both feel deeply the loss that neither spoke of.
Trevor’s son had died at sea in the third year of the war. Ross had been as close to a brother as anyone Rutledge had known. It was still a raw grief.
He was led into the sitting room, small and low-ceilinged and old-fashioned, with comfort apparent in every cushion and a fresh fire on the hearth. The dogs, after their first joyous welcome, curled themselves at his feet with sighs of contentment. The tick of the clock was steady, peaceful. A glass of good whiskey seemed to appear in his hand before he’d settled in the chair opposite the one he knew his godfather favored. The stiffness and fatigue of the long drive vanished. He was, in a sense, home.
Hamish, after hours of angry turmoil, seemed to find his own peace here too. Or was it the fact that Rutledge himself had crossed a border in his mind as well as an invisible line on the landscape? He thought it might be both.
“How was your journey-?”
It was the beginning of a long and undemanding conversation that lasted until Trevor heard the clock on the mantel chime the half hour.
“We’ll be late to our dinner and Morag will scold me for keeping you here when you want to change. Go on, it’s the old room, under the eaves.”
But large enough not to be claustrophobic. Rutledge knew it well; he’d stayed there on his visits, boy and man, since he could remember.
At the door, Trevor clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s damned good to see you. I hope you’ll stay as long as you can!”
Then his eyes slid away toward the fire. “Mind Morag, will you? She hasn’t been the same since-well, since the news came. She’s showing her years now, and it’s a pity. But she loved him, you know.. ..” His voice trailed off.
Rutledge managed to say, “Yes. I know,” and made his way down the passage to the stairs.
His throat felt thick with grief. Ross had been clever and handsome and destined for a brilliant future in his father’s architectural firm. And now he lay at the bottom of the sea with tons of metal strewing the seabed around him, one more Navy man with only a memorial to mark his death. Rutledge had received the news in France, one soft spring morning that heralded another gas attack. There had been no time to mourn. There seldom was.
Morag came out of the room that was his, having brought him hot water and fresh towels. She stood with hands clasped in front of her until he reached the top of the stairs and walked toward her. Her eyes were on his face, a woman who had known him from childhood, who had scolded him for mischief-making, saved him cakes left from tea, dressed his scrapes, and mended shirts torn by tumbling out of trees. He couldn’t turn away, and so he smiled.
“Were you hurt, then? In the war?”
“Nothing that hasn’t healed,” he told her, lying for her sake.
But her eyes read more in his face than he realized. “Aye, that’s what the letters said, but letters aren’t always the whole truth, are they? I wanted to see for myself.” She paused. “Do you dream, is that it?”
Wordlessly, he nodded.
“Aye. I thought as much. Well. That will pass. In God’s good time.”
She followed him to his room, smoothing the towels on the rack, twitching the curtains, moving the chintz- covered chair a quarter of an inch. Then she said quietly, “Mind Himself, lad. He’s still grieving. You saw the terrible change in him now.”
Rutledge had-the hair grayer, the new lines about his mouth, the dark circles under his godfather’s eyes. Trevor had aged-but not from age.
“Aye.” She nodded. “Don’t let him sit and remember-”
“No. I won’t.”
“Come down to the kitchen in the morning.”
“I will that,” he said, and she grinned at him.
“I’ll have hot scones for your breakfast, come Sunday.” It was a treat, a remnant of childhood. She walked on down the stairs to put the finishing touches on the dinner she’d made.
The two men sat late over their port that evening, and Trevor took out the book sent to him by a young architect who’d joined his firm in 1912. Edward Harper had been killed in 1917, blown to bits with half a dozen other men, when an ammunition wagon went up in their faces.
“Tell me what you think of this.” The way he unwrapped it and handed it to Rutledge showed clearly how he himself treasured it.
During his months in France, Harper had managed to finish a collection of watercolors-cameos of men of every rank and unit he’d come across. African chausseurs, Malay coolies, a French dragoon, a cocky Australian grinning cheekily. A Sikh of an East Indian regiment wearing a gas mask, his flourishing black beard framing it like a giant ruff. A range of pugarees-turbans-each identifying the district Indian troops had come from. Spahis, native Africans in French service, who collected trophies. Scots in kilts and a Belgian infantryman in his odd helmet. These were indisputably individual portraits, each vividly captured. It showed a remarkable talent.
“It’s wonderful,” Rutledge said, and meant it. It also showed the public face of war, cheerful and colorful, without the casualties and the horrors. Safe to send home. But he said nothing of that to Trevor.
Rutledge sat there, turning the pages, thinking of all the men he’d watched die, and all the skills that had died with them. And for what? He wished he knew.
“I’ll frame them for the office,” Trevor was saying. “A memorial of sorts.” Then with intense anger, draining his glass, he added, “A waste. God, it was all a bloody waste!”
And Rutledge, watching his face, knew that he was thinking of his son.
The weekend was, oddly enough, healing for both men. They walked in the early morning, they sat and talked by the fire, they took the dogs out to flush game, by common consent leaving the guns at home. There had been enough killing.
Hamish, his presence always there, kept silent for the most part, as if he, too, had taken some pleasure in Trevor’s broad interests and quiet humor. Rutledge wondered if the two men would have liked each other in life. Or if his own precious and precarious sense of peace had held Hamish at arm’s length. But when Rutledge was alone, it was as it had always been, a trial of the spirit.
When he arrived in the kitchen on Sunday morning, Morag wasn’t alone.
In the big room with its iron stove and old-fashioned hearth, the scent of fresh scones was warm and delicious. But the thin, fair man who stood up from the table, pink with embarrassment and determination, was
