“Yes, I’ve come down in the world,” she said, following his gaze. “I only have this house through the courtesy of a friend. It was the best she or I could do.”
“I can understand that you don’t want to live at Partridge Fields again. But what will you do with it?”
“It’s the tomb of my mother. When Becky and I are gone, it can be torn down by people who don’t know why we deserted it. Better that way.”
“The housekeeper still comes to see to it. Who pays her to clean and sweep?”
“My father, I expect. I can’t afford to keep her there.”
“May I ask why you and your sister don’t choose to live together? It would make sense.”
“I think we both prefer the silence. If we were together, we’d talk too much about the past. We wouldn’t be able to help it.”
“Whose motorcar do you drive? Your own? Or Rebecca’s?”
“It belongs to a friend of hers who went to France and came back without his legs. He didn’t want to look at it any more, and told her she could drive it.”
“But you borrow it from time to time?”
“When I can.” She looked away from him, her gaze following a bee at the window. “It’s a long walk for both of us to go anywhere. We trade days. It’s not the life I’d have chosen.”
“You’re young. You’ll marry in time and the past will seem less vivid.”
“After what I’ve seen of marriage,” she retorted, “I want no part of it. It leaves you terribly vulnerable. And in the end you hate each other. My father killed my mother as surely as if he’d held her head under the gas and made her breathe it in. I’ve never understood why he couldn’t love her enough to stop what he was doing. She was so softhearted she couldn’t bear to see a bird suffer. He knew that, but it didn’t matter. He turned his back on her feelings and did what he wanted to do anyway, and in the end she died. When he saw what he had done, it was too late.”
“Was it always that way? You remember your father being kind to you, but was he kind to your mother as well? When you were five, for instance, did you think they were happy?”
“I thought they were. More fool I. It must have been a pretense, for our sakes. I realize that now.”
“They couldn’t have pretended so perfectly that you didn’t see the strain of their trying. Children are very perceptive. Think about when you were six—twelve. Think about birthday parties and holidays and long winter evenings together.” He tried to suggest images that she could explore, and watched her face closely as she frowned, sorting through her memories.
“When I was four, we went to Cornwall for our holiday. I remember it well, it was the first time I’d seen the sea. And we watched moor ponies one afternoon, and in one of the harbors, there was a fishmonger with a tray of fish, silvery in the sun. We took our breakfast out to the rocks and watched the fishing boats coming in.”
“Did your parents laugh? Hold hands with each other? Seem comfortable with each other? Or was there tension, sometimes raised voices?”
“I—yes, I think everything was all right. I rode on my father’s shoulders when my legs were tired, and Becky held on to his coattails. Mama laughed, calling us a dragon, three heads, six arms, six legs. And we made up stories about the dragon, how he could run faster than anyone else, and lift twice as much and see before him and behind him at the same time, and my father made silly noises, while Becky laughed so hard she fell down and the dragon came apart.”
She looked away, seeing a day she had buried in the past. “I loved my father more than anything, then. I had forgotten.”
“And later?”
“We went to Kent when I was six, to visit an aunt. She told us there was a ghost in her house, but it was only mice behind the walls. The next summer, Mama was very ill and kept to her bed. I remember we had to be quiet, and there were nurses coming in to look after her. My father was worried, he sat in his study and I think he cried. His face was wet when I came in to kiss him good night.”
Her gaze came back to Rutledge, startled and confused. “I had forgotten. It frightened me to see Mama like that, pale and helpless, and I didn’t want to think about it. I don’t remember her laughing for a long time even after the nurses had left and she was well again. That was after my father had begun to use the laboratory in the garden. He said he had more freedom there than at Cambridge. She railed at him once, calling him a murderer. She was so distressed, and she threatened to burn down the laboratory. And he told her that if she did, he would leave her.”
Sarah Parkinson put her hands to her face, reliving that scene. “It was never the same after that. Never. There were no more holidays. Mama told me that it was because my father refused to leave his precious laboratory long enough to take us anywhere. That it meant more to him than we did, and because he spent so much of his time there, I knew it to be true. Sometimes he had his meals brought to him there. And I’d hear him come up the stairs at night long after we were in bed. I always waited for him to come in and say good night, but he didn’t. I thought perhaps he’d stopped loving Becky and me.”
“Why was your mother ill? Do you know?”
“I was never told. I have no idea.”
“But it changed her—and her feelings toward your father.”
Sarah Parkinson bit her lip. “I can’t answer that. Although she must have been happy when we were in Kent. She and my father took long walks together, and I watched them from the windows. I was a little jealous, I expect. I know I felt left out. Why are you asking me these things? I’ve worked hard to forget most of it.”
Rutledge didn’t want to tell her that he’d come to find out if her father had struck her mother in arguments over the laboratory. Sarah at least had no memory of that. Or had suppressed any she did have. “I never had the opportunity to meet your father. The man who died in Yorkshire is a mystery to all of us.”
“Why do you keep telling me that my father died in Yorkshire?” There was an element of defensiveness in her question. “How do you know where he died?”
“All right. The man who was found dead in Yorkshire. He’s your father, whether you wish to acknowledge him or not.” He rose to leave. “No one wants to claim his body. He’ll be buried in a pauper’s grave, without a marker.”
“You can put the name he used in those cottages on his stone. It was the one he chose, and it shut us out completely. Why should I care about him now?”
“You came back to the cottages,” Rutledge said as he walked to the door. “Why?”
Her eyes were bright with tears. “I’m looking for something I lost. But I can live without it. I learned the hard way to do that.”
She didn’t see him out. He closed the door as he went.
Hamish said, as the motorcar turned toward the cottages at Uffington, “She willna’ change her mind. But when she’s old, she’ll have regrets to overcome.”
“Unlike her sister.”
“Aye, the elder. She learned to hate at her mother’s knee.”
“Her mother’s child. As Sarah might well have been her father’s favorite.”
“Looking into the past hasna’ given you a solution.”
“Not yet.”
Rutledge arrived at the cottages and walked down the lane separating them, turning in at Mrs. Cathcart’s door.
She was reluctant to open to him, but in the end, her innate politeness won. She said, “That other policeman has been here, asking me what I’ve seen, what I know, how Mr. Brady struck me. I don’t spy on my neighbors and I didn’t know Mr. Brady well enough to answer him.”