Smith was calling time, and Mrs. Smith said to Rutledge as he looked around for it, “I’ll bring up your dinner, if you like.”
He hadn’t touched it, hadn’t had the time, hungry or not.
He bought a final round, then said good night, leaving the drivers to drink in peace. The farmers had already left half an hour before.
Mrs. Smith met him at the stairs as he came out of the bar, his plate on a tray.
“Were you thinking about Mr. Partridge?” she asked him. “When you wanted to know if someone might find a ride with a driver?”
He was caught off guard.
“Yes, I was, as a matter of fact,” he answered, lowering his voice.
“He was here, once. Playing darts and later asking about traveling to Liverpool. But it was the roads he wanted to hear about. What sort of time he could count on making.”
“When was this?”
“Six months ago, at a guess. Longer, for all I can remember.”
The state of the roads.
“You’re certain it wasn’t the prelude for asking for a lift?”
“No, sir, he has his own motorcar, I can’t think why he would need a lift with the likes of them.”
“How well do you know Mr. Partridge?”
“He wasn’t one to come around in the evening, as a rule.” She smiled ruefully. “I think it’s when he can’t stand his own company any longer.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, he’s a widower, isn’t he?” There was pity in her voice.
“Did he tell you he was?”
“Lord, no, sir, we never spoke about his private life. No, it was young Slater who said he’d lost his wife and hadn’t much use for company. Mr. Partridge kept to himself at his cottage, and seldom went out. We were that glad to see him, when he did come.”
And yet this wasn’t the sort of pub a man like Partridge would frequent. Granted it was the nearest one to the cottages, but he wasn’t working class, if the army was keeping an eye on him.
That reminded him of the dead man in Yorkshire, whose hands were soft and uncallused.
Hamish said, “Why did ye no’ show her the drawing?”
Rutledge wasn’t sure himself why he hadn’t. But he wanted no rumors reaching the Tomlin Cottages before he himself could go there in the morning.
He slept poorly that night. As if the memory of the dart game on his birthday had stirred up the past too deeply, he could hear the guns in France, and men calling and screaming and swearing, bringing himself up out of the depths to lie awake until the sounds receded. And then he would drift into sleep again for another quarter of an hour, sometimes longer, before the guns started shelling his position. Muzzle flashes in the distance seemed to light up the sky, and the flares were sharp, brilliant, nearly burning his eyes.
Once when he awoke, he could hear Hamish talking to someone, and then he realized that the someone was himself, answering the familiar voice of a dead man, even in his sleep.
“I’m trained to it,” he said aloud, and then lay still listening. But from the other rooms came the regular snores of occupants luckier than he was, comfortable in their beds. “Like a dog who knows his master’s voice.”
Hamish’s laugh was harsh. “Oh, aye? More like a man wi’ blood on his conscience, who canna’ find peace.”
“You left me no choice but to execute you. You wouldn’t heed me when I warned you what would follow, if you didn’t relent and obey the orders given you. I warned you, and you didn’t listen.”
“I couldna’ watch more of my men die while the colonel who gave the orders sat safe and ignorant miles behind the lines. You knew, you knew as well as any of us that it was hopeless.”
“No more so than the whole bloody campaign. We did what we were told, because there was no other choice left to us but to obey. One man, two men, a dozen, couldn’t have stopped the madness. We had to carry on to the end, and die if we had to.”
“I wasna’ afraid of dying. Ye ken that well. I couldna’ bear to watch the ithers die. There had been too many, for too long.”
“You refused an order under fire. You left me no choice, damn you!”
“Aye. And afterward, ye couldna’ let me go.”
“You didn’t want to go. Then or now.”
Hamish said, something in his voice now that was unbearable, “I didna’ want to die. But I couldna’ live, no’ even for Fiona. I couldna’ stand before my men and break as we went o’wer the top. It was a question of pride. I’d have shot mysel’, else.”
“But you let me do it instead. You let me call up the men and order them to shoot you. My men, your men. You put that on their souls and mine. If I could ever understand why, I’d find some peace. Why not let the Germans do it for you. You wouldn’t have been the first. Nor the last.”
“Aye, it’s what ye did, but no’ even the Hun could touch you. You were left wi’ your shame. Ye ken, it’s why I willna’ go. No’ now, no’ yet.”
“For God’s sake, tell me why!”
There was a knock at his door, cutting through the darkness in his mind. Smith called out, “Mr. Rutledge? Are you all right?”
He realized that the snoring had stopped—had been stopped for some time, for all he knew. And his shouting could be heard all over the inn.
Rutledge cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry, Smith. It was a bad dream. I didn’t mean to disturb the house.”
There was a moment of silence on the other side of the door. “If you’re sure then?”
“I’m sure.”
He listened to the man’s footsteps receding across the passage, and a door shutting.
Rutledge lay back against his pillows, his body still tense, his fists clenched, not certain when he’d sat up in bed or for how long the exchange with Hamish had been loud enough to be heard.
Hamish said, in the darkness, “But they canna’ hear me. Only you can.”
10
Rutledge was awake when at the back of the inn a rooster crowed, welcoming the early spring dawn. He got up, shaved and dressed, and went outside to walk off his mood.
For a mercy, Hamish was silent.
He found pansies blooming in the shadow of the small barn, and a clutch of hens picking busily at the sparse grass of the yard, then he walked on, down the road to Wayland’s Smithy.
It was smaller than he remembered from childhood, but still an impressive grave. For whom? A chieftain? A warrior? Or perhaps a high priest, the Merlin of his age.
Whoever had lain here, the power of his name had given him a great stone tomb, monoliths that time had barely eroded. And whatever grave goods had been buried with him were long since taken away as the power of his name faded in human memory. And the bones, had they also been scattered?
Rutledge squatted down to look inside and shuddered. A narrow room in which to spend eternity. Claustrophobic and dark.
He thought about Gaylord Partridge, who was being left to rot in an unmarked, unmourned grave, because in some fashion he had offended people with a long memory for revenge.
An outcast. Like the others who lived in the Tomlin Cottages. Lepers, without the sores.
What had Partridge done to deserve his fate? A spy would have been tried and shot behind walls where no one could see him die. How had he offended? That was the crux of this business, to know why he was better off dead in a back corner of a Yorkshire graveyard—a fortuitous death, surely, for those who had hated him.
Or had it been somehow engineered?
That was something to be considered. The army looked after its own, but transgressors were beyond the pale. Abandoned.
T. E. Lawrence had offended and been snubbed. Would anyone weep if he died conveniently on a back road where no one knew him?