After a time, she rose and walked toward him. There were no tears now, just the resolve he was dreading, and she said, "Will you take me back to the hospital now?"
It was too short a distance to say anything important, and so they walked in silence. When they reached the hospital with its frivolous roofline of chimneys, she asked that he carry her valise to the door. "They'll find somewhere for me to stay. Close by. I can visit every day."
He did as she asked, numbly, knowing he had already been shut out.
As he set the valise down with a click on the marble step, she said, "I'm so sorry. But this is something I have to do." Her voice was steady, but only just. A little deeper in note as well, from the tears she was holding back.
"Duty is bitter company," he said quietly.
"I don't know how long he will live. Months. Years. But I'll close the London house and live in Bruges for now."
"Meredith-"
"I wish I had met you then. I wouldn't have been so foolish as to marry without love." She rose on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. "Good-bye, Ian."
Someone opened the door, as if he or she had been waiting to admit Mrs. Channing. She stepped inside, and it swung shut again behind her.
He stood there for a moment longer, as if hoping she would change her mind. And then he went to the motorcar.
France was just miles away, and he knew where Hamish had died. His service revolver was in his valise.
It was time to end it.
22
R utledge crossed the frontier between France and Belgium and soon after found a deeply rutted road through devastated countryside that led in the direction of the River Somme, approaching it from what had been the German lines. The land was healing, after a fashion, grass and weeds struggling to reestablish themselves. Nature seemed to find a way to cover up the scars of tragedy. But men had marched down this road to kill other men, and the land was rough and desolate, as if no one cared to live here where so many had died. He couldn't blame them. If ghosts walked anywhere, surely they did here, and he felt that nothing grown in such bloody soil would ever prosper again.
He could see across the twisted landscape to where he and so many others had fought, and yet he found his sector of that fateful night hard to recognize. Rains had washed down trench walls, the stench had gone, and somehow it all seemed so much smaller in scale now. Without the men who had served here among the wire, the hellish pits of shell craters, and the tools of war, whether guns or tanks or trenches, it seemed to have changed. He stopped the motorcar at one point and got out, listening. There should have been shouts and the cries of men, the whistle of shells and the chatter of machine guns, the deafening roar of battle, the deeper throb of aircraft overhead. Instead, there was only a light wind, hardly stirring the ridged and torn landscape.
He could still name the men he'd led to their deaths here. As he walked, he thought he could see their faces, but it was only the tightness in his throat and the tension across his shoulders that made him light-headed.
It wasn't long before he found the place he'd been searching for. He'd always had a good sense of direction, and even without markers he knew it was here.
Looking down, he saw the lace of a boot sticking through the soil next to a struggling clump of grass, and he felt ill. How many times had a heel or a buckle marked all that was left of a man who had been living and breathing seconds before? He'd been told that farmers in some places still dug up the dead with their plows. He'd seen them lying rotting in the sun, shrouded with the first snowfall, twitching in the pelting rain.
The revolver was heavy in his coat pocket, well oiled and loaded. He was not likely to miss. And Hamish, he realized, had been silent since he left the motorcar, waiting.
He took the weapon out and held it in his hand. Its feel and its weight were familiar, comforting.
He was raising the revolver, his head bowed for the shot, his eyes closed, when the image of that single boot lace came to him.
It would be obscene to kill himself here, he realized. To add one more body to the thousands upon thousands who littered this land. A desecration to fire a revolver here in this stillness.
Even France had failed him. After a time, the revolver still in his hand, he turned back toward his motorcar, and then drove back the way he'd come.
23
R utledge landed in Dover and collected his motorcar from the bowels of the ferry. When his turn came to present his identification, he was asked to step aside, and waited impatiently as others behind him were cleared and sent on their way.
Eventually a uniformed constable from the Dover police came up to him.
"Mr. Rutledge, sir? Will you come this way?"
Wary after his last encounter with the Kent Constabulary, Rutledge left his motorcar where it was and followed the man.
Inside one of the dock buildings stood former Sergeant Bell. He looked at Rutledge and then smiled. "Yes, that's him, all right," he told the constable standing to one side. He added for Rutledge's benefit, "You'd said to watch for certain names on ships' manifests. When yours showed up, we weren't precisely sure who was coming in from France. The constable here sent for me because I knew you by sight."
"Yes, good work," he told the two men. It was, in fact, reassuring that someone had taken him at his word. As he and Bell walked toward the motorcar, he added, "How is the Summers's dog?"
"Muffin?" Bell made a face. "Silly name for a dog, but he answers to it right enough. Still, he looks for someone every time I take him outside. And he sleeps by the door, as if to be ready if anyone knocks. Sad, really. He's devoted to someone. We manage well enough, mind you, but I can see where his heart is."
"Can I give you a lift?" Rutledge asked.
"Yes, thank you, sir. Have any luck in France?"
Rutledge realized Bell believed he'd gone there on police business. "No luck," he replied simply.
"And where are you off to now?"
"Sussex. I'll look in at Eastfield and at Hastings. Then back to London." As he ran down the road along the water, he said, "You know this coast, Bell. Where would you come in, if you didn't wish to attract attention to yourself?"
"There must be a thousand coves and inlets from the Scots border to the Welsh, rounding this part of England. And none of them requires more than a boat sufficiently sturdy to cross the Channel-the smaller the better-and some knowledge of where one is heading. I doubt your man knows this coast. And so he'd have to ask some Frenchie to bring him over. During the war, we worried about the Germans setting spies ashore in the dark of night, sneaking in, like, where nobody was looking. The coast watch was all very well and good, but there was no way to prevent them if they got past the Navy. A good fog works wonders, if you know your landing."
"Our man could be here already."
"Very possible, if you ask me."
Rutledge left Bell at his door and continued down the coast toward Hastings. Vast stretches of marsh interspersed with habitation and villages that had been part of the old Cinque Ports trusted with the defense of England marked this road. He ran through Winchelsea and tiny Dymchurch, then detoured to St. Mary's in the Marsh, desolate and isolated, with its scatter of cottages. He went into the church itself and found it empty. At Rye, he turned inland and came eventually to Eastfield.
Constable Walker greeted him with some relief. "Constable Petty has been withdrawn, sir. I was told Tommy Summers is out of the country."
"He took the boat across from Dover to France, it appears. But for how long? He may already be in Sussex again."
"Damnation." Walker shook his head. "I'd never given that lad credit for being smart enough to outwit the police, the way he's done. I don't know what to make of it, and that's the truth."