couldn't explain and he couldn't explain away-how do you tell a child that its father is haunted?
There must be a way-other men had done it.
But that was a lie. And he was beginning to understand that whatever he might have felt for Elizabeth Fraser if he'd been free of his guilt and shell shock, he had nothing to offer her now. She had been right to tell him not to come back to Westmorland, even if she didn't understand the reasons why he would accept her decision. He must quietly shut that door and never open it again.
He stood there, looking in the mirror, damning the war, damning the men who began it and the officers who plotted each battle.
As he began to shave, Rutledge remembered one of the charges leveled against the highest-ranking planners and tacticians at General Headquarters, that they had lost touch with the reality of war on the battlefield and had ordered charge after charge into the teeth of the machine guns, as if they were facing an inferior enemy who would break at the sight of sheer numbers. Officers far from the carnage of No Man's Land, for whom casualties were regrettable numbers on a morning report, weren't faced with the bleeding bodies one stepped over in a broken retreat to the lines.
What had these men brought back from France? How had they slept at night with their blunders and stubbornness and their guilt?
'They didna' suffer any guilt,' Hamish told him bitterly. 'They didna' see what they had done.'
What of the hundreds of faceless men on the streets looking for work, trying to pick up the threads of family life, hoping that the dying had made a better Britain, and finding they were lost in it. Faceless men… People stepped around them now, ignored the brave boy who'd marched away to glory and now begged on the street because a one-armed man couldn't work. He thought sometimes, in the dark corners of his mind, that the dead were the lucky ones. They hadn't been disillusioned. He was still in a dark mood when he went to his breakfast. Mrs. Melford was in the kitchen, he could hear her moving about. How did she feel, cooking meals for strangers, to make ends meet in the aftermath of war?
That train of thought took him to Mrs. Ellison, who had lost her daughter and her granddaughter but had held on to her pride in her name.
Mrs. Melford brought his tea and said, 'There was a fire this morning, did you know?'
'A fire?' he repeated, trying to bring his mind to bear on this news. 'Where?'
'I was hoping you could tell me what had happened. Mrs. Simpson said something about the Baylor house.' Barbara Melford had avoided using Ted Baylor's first name.
She didn't add that that was the one place she felt barred from going. Any word would have to come to her secondhand.
'I'll look into it,' he said. 'Was there much damage?'
'I don't know-Mrs. Simpson did say that no one was hurt.'
'That's good news.'
He finished his breakfast, paid his account, and walked down the lane in the cold sunshine. The heavy odor of charred wood reached him on the wind when he turned into Church Street, but when he came nearer, he couldn't see any signs of fire in the front of the house.
He knocked at the door, and an angry Ted Baylor answered it. 'Another vulture come to gawk?' he asked.
'I'm a policeman,' Rutledge responded.
'Well, I can tell you, it was nothing that would involve Scotland Yard. My brother had nightmares in his sleep and knocked over his lamp. It burned a good part of the table, the cloth over it, the carpet under it, and scorched the floor before I smelled smoke and smothered the flames.'
'He'd fallen asleep with his lamp burning?'
'Is there a law forbidding it?'
Rutledge himself had slept with his lamp burning for the first weeks after he'd left the clinic, in a vain attempt to keep the nightmares away. Before he'd left for Warwickshire, he had slept sitting in his chair more often than lying in his bed.
'There's no law forbidding it. But I understand the need for it.'
'I don't see how you could,' Baylor said, his anger draining and his face lined with exhaustion. 'Unless you were in the war.'
'I was on the Somme,' Rutledge told him simply.
Baylor pulled the door closed behind him and stood on the step with Rutledge. 'It's been hard, dealing with the screams. I don't sleep much myself. He's all right when he's awake. He's been to London, to the doctors. They haven't helped. Sometimes I find myself thinking he would have been better off dead.'
'You don't mean that.'
'I don't know whether I do or not. Joel has always been a trial.' He looked out over the fields. 'This land is in my blood, but not in his. He wasn't born here, he doesn't have the same feeling for it. Maybe you have to be bred to it. Robbie was. He reminded me of my grandfather, an easy understanding of what animals need. Even a stray cat would come to him for petting. And he was thrown away in the war, his life wasted. Joel is city bred, he likes the crowded streets, the smell of the river when there was fog coming in, the way the nights were never really dark. First time he heard an owl, he was petrified.' A smile lingered at the corner of his mouth, but he was unaware of it. 'I told him it was a demon, out in Frith's Wood, searching for the damned. The night it screeched outside his window on that tree over there, he climbed in bed with Robbie and pulled the sheet over his head. And the next morning my father took his strap to me for frightening my brother. Well, half brother. We weren't as kind to him then as we could have been. He was a fish out of water, and we should have made it a little easier than we did. I've tried to make it up to him.'
He had been talking like a man deprived of human companionship, spilling out his frustration and his guilt and his strong sense of duty.
Hamish was saying, 'And how did yon brother see it?'
Baylor said, as if answering him, 'I expect he forgave us after a bit. But we didn't know what to make of him when he came to live with us after his grandmother died. She was always partial to him, probably because he had no one else. But we were jealous, Robbie and I, for no reason other than the fact that he was different from us. Rougher around the edges, arrogant sometimes, generally off-putting when we least expected it. A trial at school, as well-better at football than we ever were, faster in his reactions, stronger.'
He shivered as he stood there in the cold wind in only his flannel shirt, and yet he seemed reluctant to return to the warmth of the house.
Rutledge could sense that Baylor was ridden with guilt yet again, for wishing that Joel had died in the fire in his room, his lungs filled with smoke. But the man had saved his brother, and there was nothing the law could do about wishes.
After a moment Baylor turned to him and said, as if the words were pulled from him, 'How is she?'
He didn't pretend he didn't know.
'I should think she's wondering what went wrong. I found her crying, after you left that night.'
Baylor swore with feeling.
'It's hopeless. But I won't shame Joel by telling her that. I shouldn't have told you as much as I have. Sometimes the words seem to spill out, and I can't stop them. It was wrong.'
'Have you talked with the rector? He seems to be a man of great understanding.'
'That's why I can't talk to him.' He looked at Rutledge. 'He'd understand too much. I just have to soldier on, and get through it.'
'What happened to Joel in the war?' Rutledge felt himself tense, knowing what the answer would be. Shell shock. But Baylor surprised him.
'He was gassed. At Ypres. His lungs are rotted out. I listen to him at night and I curse them all, the generals and the Germans and the wind blowing his way that morning. He said it smelled of violets. Odd thing for a city man to tell you. But that's what he said.'
'Yes, I've heard the same thing.'
There was silence between them. The church clock struck the half hour. Finally Baylor took a deep breath and prepared to go back inside his house. 'You have a gift for listening. If I didn't know better, I'd say you tricked me into talking. But there's been no one since Rob died, and it's been building up. I'd ask you to forget what you heard,
