'Betsy, dear-'
She stopped when she saw a stranger standing on her threshold.
'Oh, I do beg your pardon. I was expecting a friend, and she's late. Are you lost?'
'My name is Rutledge,' he said, offering her his identification. She peered shortsightedly at it.
'Scotland Yard? Oh, dear. Perhaps I ought to call my husband.' She turned to the girl. 'Will you fetch Papa, darling? There's someone here to see him.' She sounded uncertain.
The girl disappeared, and in a moment or two a man came to the entry. He was dressed in rough work clothes and there was paint on his hands and across his face.
'Sorry, we're doing up my mother's room. How can I help you, Mr.-er-Rutledge, is it?'
'Yes, from London. I'm looking for a Dr. Butler, who once practiced in these parts. Are you by chance related to him?'
'Good God, how did you ever find us? Yes, he was my father. Dead now, I'm afraid. I don't think he practiced after 1910.'
'One of his patients was a woman named Parkinson. I'm trying to learn more about her, and the illness he treated. You don't, by any chance, have his records?'
Butler brushed a hand across his forehead, pushing his light brown hair out of his eyes and leaving another streak of paint there. 'I doubt they'd do you much good. But yes, we do. Somewhere. In the attic, at a guess. Well, not his records, actually, those went to the man who took over his practice. And he's dead, as well, killed in the war, worst luck. I don't know who might have taken over from him. But my father kept a series of diaries, and they're boxed up just as he left them. Would that be of help?'
'If I'm lucky,' Rutledge said.
'Do you need them now?' It was clear Mr. Butler would have preferred another time. 'We'll be up all night with our painting. My mother arrives in the morning. This morning.'
'It would be best.'
'Let me clean up a bit first, then. Come in, man!'
Rutledge followed Butler into a sitting room and waited there for nearly three-quarters of an hour before Butler came back with a wooden box in his hand. Inside were rows of small leather-bound diaries, each with a year printed in gold on its spine.
Rutledge had been trying to calculate which year he was after, based on what Sarah Parkinson had told him about her holidays as a child. He pulled out a likely diary, but there was no mention of the Parkinsons at all save for a reference to a cough that had kept Sarah in bed for three weeks and a burn that the housekeeper, Martha Ingram, had sustained while cooking a Christmas goose.
Butler was sitting across from him, clearly anxious to get back to his painting, and Mrs. Butler, held by curiosity, sat quietly knitting and watching from across the room. The girl was nowhere in sight.
Rutledge had to go back two years before he found the diary entry he was after. There was a date, April 27, and then the notation 'Mrs. Parkinson went into labor at two o'clock in the afternoon. All proceeding normally. Three weeks short of full term.'
Was that the reference he'd been after? The housekeeper had distinctly told him there was a miscarriage. This child was nearly full term.
'Yon housekeeper wasna' there. She left to wed a scoundrel.'
On the twenty-eighth there was a second entry. 'Eleven in the morning. Boy survived only an hour. Gave Mrs. Parkinson a strong sedative and told the housekeeper, Mrs. Fortner, to sit by her through the night, until I can arrange for a nurse. Four o'clock same day, set Robert Dunning's leg after he was kicked by a horse. Five o'clock, Peggy Henderson brought in with a splinter in hand. Six-thirty, looked in on Mrs. Parkinson again. Sleeping. Nurse Meadows with her now, replacing Mrs. Fortner. Just as well, not impressed with housekeeper's skills. Had long talk with Parkinson, explaining situation. Question about who should see to burial. He left arrangements with me. I did what I could. Sad day for that family.'
There was nothing else about treating Mrs. Parkinson, except for the daily visit to be sure she was recovering from the birth.
Rutledge scanned ahead.
Two months later there was a final entry. 'Mrs. Parkinson refuses to leave her room. Have advised husband to let her mourn in her own fashion. Would have been easier if she hadn't heard the child cry and knew it lived. Better to have told her it was stillborn. But it was out of my hands.'
The only other mention of the Parkinsons that year was a notation that Parkinson had come to Dr. Butler in July with cuts on his hands after an accident in his laboratory. 'Self-inflicted' had been added to the terse notation. But Dr. Butler hadn't seen fit to elaborate.
The heartbreaking loss of a son recorded in a few dozen words written in a cramped but clear hand.
Rutledge went through the next year to be sure, but there was no other mention of the child or how the family had learned to cope. Whatever role Dr. Butler had played in Mrs. Parkinson's recovery was not given. These were reminders to himself, not a medical record.
He jotted down the dates and events, then closed the diary and thanked the Butlers. They were glad to see the back of him, he thought. Another woman had arrived with an armload of freshly ironed bed hangings, and Mrs. Butler had taken her directly upstairs.
He could hear her voice drifting down after her. 'Betsy, you're a good friend to pitch in like this. I'd never have got them ready in time. There's just one wall left to paint-'
Butler followed Rutledge to the door, as politeness dictated, saying, 'I don't suppose you found what you were looking for. Sorry.'
'It was worth my time to read what was there.' Rutledge thanked him and went out to his motorcar.
It was after midnight, in fact closer to two o'clock. He could feel the long day in his shoulders, and in the tension in Hamish's voice as they drove back to Berkshire.
There had been a living child. So much harder to forget, so much more of a tie for the grieving mother who had heard him cry.
It had been a wild-goose chase, as Hamish was pointing out, but Martha Ingram had been right in her supposition that while she was occupied with her short-lived marriage, there had been another child, a boy after two daughters. And when she returned to serve the family, Mrs. Parkinson had never told her the whole story.
He recalled the comment, 'Had long talk with Parkinson, explaining situation.'
And later, Gerald Parkinson had smashed something in his laboratory, cutting himself badly.
Things had gone wrong for him as well.
When he reached the inn, Rutledge went up to his bed and fell asleep almost at once. Hamish, silent at last, waited as he always did for the dawn.
There were no alarms in the night, and Mrs. Cathcart announced over breakfast that she was ready to return to her cottage.
Rutledge took her back, and on the way told her that Allen had died. She cried for him.
'Poor man. But he knew it was coming. If I had anywhere else to go, I'd leave here. But there's no hope of that and I mustn't even dwell on it.'
He saw her safely inside, then stood there in the soft end of April morning light, looking up at the White Horse. There were workmen repairing the damage to Quincy's door, the blows of their hammers echoing against the hill and rebounding.
Legend had it that if someone knew the secret, he could stand on the ground below the hill and make his voice appear to come from the horse. Rutledge's father had told him that, but try as they would, they never found the spot. A priest or chieftain would have known where to look for it, and like the Delphic oracle, could have given his pronouncements the power of a god.
It was time to go back to London and report. But he was reluctant to leave until Inspector Hill had caught his murderer. What he would do about his own was another matter altogether. It hadn't worked to turn one sister against the other.
Slater called to him as he was walking home from the village, and Rutledge went to meet him.
'You were wrong. Nothing happened last night.'
But Hill had left a message earlier at the inn for Rutledge, saying that he'd collected a sample of handwriting from each of the surviving inhabitants, and the results were unclear. The message ended with 'Whoever wrote this
