On the steps, he turned to look up at the drawing room windows. Frances would give him hell for deserting her, but the Farnums would be glad to see her safely home.
There would be no need of the cab.
He tried to tell himself that Mrs. Channing possessed no strange or exotic powers. But he could still feel her eyes on him, and recall the way she had made certain he was not in the circle. He went cold at the thought that she had somehow known his secrets, that she had seen into his mind and found the shadow of Hamish. And refused to make that knowledge public.
But that was ridiculous.
Walking home would clear his head of such nonsense.
Flipping up his coat collar against the night air, he went down the pair of stone steps to the pavement.
His shoe struck something that rolled, making a tinkling noise across the walk and into the gutter.
His first reaction was surprise. It was a sound he knew.
Moving to the curb, he bent down to search intently.
Light spilling from the windows behind him picked out a metal cylinder a little distance away. He retrieved it and recognized it even as his fingers reached for it. A .303 cartridge casing from a Maxim machine gun, its shape cool and familiar in his hand. There had been thousands of them on the battlefield, as common as the mud underfoot.
But what was it doing here, on a quiet street in London?
He stood up quickly, his gaze sweeping the fenced garden in the square, then scanning the street in both directions.
There was no one in sight.
Hamish said, “It’s no’ here by chance.”
A sense of unease made Rutledge turn to look up at the housefront. He could see the drawing room, the curtains drawn, only a faint glow behind them from lamps shaded by shawls. The quiet, spellbinding voice of the woman conducting the séance seemed to echo in his head.
The cartridge casing hadn’t been there when he arrived at the Brownings’. It would have been dislodged then, as he or Frances mounted the steps. And no one else had arrived after they were admitted to the house.
Turning the casing in his gloved fingers, he could tell that it wasn’t smooth. The lines were irregular, as if something had been cut into the metal surface. Loops and swirls, not initials.
Soldiers by the hundreds had done this sort of thing in the long watches of the night or the deadly boredom of waiting for the next attack. In hospitals and convalescent homes, passing the time as they healed, men had been encouraged to make such things as boutonnieres, vases, cigarette lighters, and even canes out of empty cases of every size. Even copper driving bands from artillery shells and lumps of shrapnel had been turned into souvenirs. An exercise in patience.
In the light from the nearest streetlamp, Rutledge tried to judge what the design was. It was useless, he couldn’t see anything but the glinting surface where the metal had been polished.
Not that the design mattered. He was more interested in how such a thing came to be here, in front of the house where he’d been a guest.
Hamish was saying, “It doesna’ signify. It fell from the pocket of someone passing by.”
“I heard it fall. So would whoever was carrying it. Why not look for it?”
“It wasna’ of great value.”
“Who could have known that I’d leave early...” It could as well have been Dr. Gavin, he told himself. Called to a deathbed. Or Mrs. Channing, séance over, leaving Maryanne’s guests to talk behind her back about the evening’s entertainment.
Neither of them had been in the trenches.
“I wouldna’ make sae much of it.”
“It’s out of place.”
“Aye. That doesna’ make it sinister.”
Yet in a way it did. It was as if in an unexpected fashion the war had reached out to touch him again.
“Yon woman has unsettled you.”
Perhaps that was all it was. But the casing in his fingers was real. He hadn’t imagined it. Where had it come from?
Hamish was silent, offering no answers.
After a moment, Rutledge slipped the casing into his pocket. Then he turned away from the Browning house and began the long walk home.
Rather than settling his mind, the walk had given Rutledge too much time to dwell on other matters. The letters on his desk. One of them from his godfather, David Trevor. And that reminder of Scotland, of what had happened there months before, had stirred Hamish into grumbling activity.
David had written in haste...
Young Ian has measles and I’ve left him to Morag and Fiona. I’m banished to my club in Edinburgh, and thoroughly miserable at missing his first Christmas with us. Much as we’ve looked forward to your visit, the doctor advises no excitement. I’ve promised the lad a pony if he stays in his darkened room without fuss. That’s all I’m allowed to do. You might search out a saddle, and have it shipped north for Boxing Day, if you like...
It had been a visit intended to mend fences.
Rutledge had last seen his godfather in September, just before Fiona and the child had come to stay with Trevor.
He’d found it hard to face the young woman Hamish might have married, the woman whose name he’d spoken as he died. Harder still to greet her as a friend, when Rutledge knew himself to be responsible for Hamish MacLeod’s death. It was a shadow that lay heavily between them, even though he’d never confessed the truth to her.
Yet he’d told himself, as he had left behind the snowy fells of Westmorland barely three weeks ago, that perhaps the time had come to return to Scotland to face the tangle he’d made of his life and find a little peace. It had seemed possible then. A fair-haired woman in a wheelchair had made anything seem possible. Even confessing his nightmares to those who cared about him. Clearing his conscience so that he could feel something again besides despair.
But his good intentions had been swept away by another letter that had arrived hard on the heels of the first.
It had stripped away hope. Now he was glad not to travel north. Glad to be spared what would have been a futile errand. He’d convinced himself that love would make a difference. He’d have ended up making a great fool of himself instead.
But such protests rang hollow in his ears, and all the while Hamish called him a coward.
Even after Rutledge had retired, the soft Scots voice kept him awake, taunting and accusing by turns, raking up memories, driving him like a spur.
He lay there, counting the hours as the clock struck each in turn, his thoughts shifting from one unsettling image to the next. A narrow track of road twisting through the heavy drifts. A child’s face. A woman standing in the cold snow light of an open door, her hands on either side of the frame and the room behind her dark as the grave. The sound of a weapon being fired, so loud in the confines of the kitchen that it seemed to ring in his head even now.
Shifting again, he tried to find a more comfortable position—a drowsiness that might lead to sleep.
Instead he remembered Mrs. Channing’s expression as she greeted him only hours earlier—that fleeting pity, a sense of understanding in her face, as if she’d read his thoughts.
Or had known him somewhere before.
France?
He stared at the barely visible walls of his bedroom.
Why had she reminded him so strongly of the war and the trenches? Or was it only that bloody shell casing he’d never taken out of his coat pocket?
By the time he’d drifted into uneasy sleep, he began to dream of the war, as he so often did, jerking awake as the whistle blew to send his men over the top—he could smell the trenches, he could smell the cordite, the sour sweat of fear that bathed his men even in the cold air. He could feel the rough wood of the ladder, the terror of anticipation, waiting for the soft thunk! as a bullet hit its target and someone at his elbow went down. He could hear the yelling, the deafening sound of steady machine-gun fire as they walked out into the barren hell of No Man’s Land, moving quickly toward the unseen enemy—