A Test of Wills

by Charles Todd

  Was Tuesday the day that the Colonel had told his ward what he was planning to do? To call off the wedding?

  But why? It was an excellent marriage from any point of view, as far as an outsider could tell. Wilton and Lettice were well matched in every way—socially, financially, of an age. Unless there were things about Wilton that Charles Harris knew and didn’t like. Then why allow the engagement to take place seven months ago? Because he hadn’t known at the time?

  What could he have learned in the last week that would have made him change his mind? Something from Wilton’s past—or present?

  The only other person who could answer that question was Lettice herself.

  Rutledge drove out to Mallows in sunlight that poured through large cracks in the heavy black clouds, bringing heat in waves with it.

  Lettice agreed to see him, and he was taken up to the sitting room by Johnston.

  There was a little more color in her face this afternoon, and she seemed stronger. As he came into the room, she turned to him as she’d done before and said at once, “Something’s happened. I can tell.”

  “It’s been a rather busy morning. Mavers was on the loose as services ended at the church. He raked most everyone there over the coals, as vicious a display of hate as I’ve ever seen. Royston, the Captain, Mrs. Davenant, Miss Sommers, the Inspector—even people I don’t know.”

  Lettice frowned. “Why?”

  “Because he’d just discovered that his pension from Charles Harris ended with the Colonel’s death. And he was furious.”

  She was genuinely surprised. “Charles paid him a pension?”

  “Apparently.”

  Lettice gestured to one of the chairs and sat down herself. “It’s the sort of thing Charles might do. Still—Mavers!”

  “And a very good reason for Mavers not to kill him.”

  “But you said Mavers didn’t know the pension would end.”

  “That’s right. He stopped Royston as he came out of the church and asked if the Will had made any provision for the pension to continue. All those months when he agitated for Harris’s death, Mavers doesn’t seem to have considered the fact that he might lose his own golden goose.”

  She sighed. “Well. You said there were witnesses who claimed Mavers was haranguing everyone on Monday morning. He wasn’t in the running anyway, was he?”

  “I’ve discovered that he could have been. With a little planning. But he isn’t high on my list. Tell me, what did you and Charles Harris argue about on Tuesday at the Inn? Or rather, in the garden there?”

  The swift change in subject caught her unprepared, and her eyes widened and darkened as she stared at him.

  “You might as well tell me about it,” he said gently. “I already know what Harris and Mark Wilton quarreled about on Sunday evening after dinner. And again on Monday morning in the lane. Harris was planning to call off the wedding. I have a witness.”

  Her color went from flushed to pale and back again. “How could you have a witness,” she demanded huskily. “Who is this witness?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I know. That’s what’s important. Why didn’t you tell me before? Why did you pretend, when Mark Wilton came to the house, and I was there to overhear, that you were calling the wedding off because you were in mourning? If Charles had already ended your engagement?”

  She met his eyes, hers defiant, challenging. “You’re fishing, Inspector. Let me meet this witness face-to-face! Let me hear it from him—or her!”

  “You will. In the courtroom. I believe Mark Wilton shot Charles Harris after he was told on Sunday night that the wedding was off and the Colonel refused again on Monday morning to listen to reason. All I need to know now is why. Why your guardian changed his mind. What Wilton had done that made it necessary.”

  Lettice shook her head. “You don’t go out and shoot someone because a wedding has been called off! In another year, I’d have been my own mistress. It wasn’t necessary to murder Charles—” She stopped, her voice thick with pain.

  “It might have been. If the reason was such that Wilton could never have you. Mrs. Davenant has said she’d never seen him so in love—that you’d given him a measure of peace, something to live for, when he’d lost his earlier love of flying. That he’d have done anything you asked, willingly and without hesitation. A man who loves like that might well believe that in a year’s time, your guardian would have convinced you that he’d made the right decision, breaking it off. Even turned you against Wilton while he wasn’t there to defend himself. When he thought he was in love with Catherine Tarrant, Wilton waited for her because her father felt she wasn’t ready for marriage—and in the end she changed her mind. It came to nothing.”

  “That was different!”

  “In what way?” When she didn’t answer, he asked instead, “Is that why you didn’t go riding with your guardian Monday morning? Because you were as angry as Wilton over what was happening?”

  She winced, closing her eyes against his words. But he inexorably went on. “Is that why you had a headache, and left the two men alone to discuss the wedding? Because you’d already lost the battle?”

  Tears rolled silently down her cheeks, silvery in the light from the windows, and she made no attempt to wipe them away.

  “I will have to arrest Wilton. You know that. I have enough evidence to do it now. But I’d prefer to spare you as much grief as I can. Tell me the truth, and I’ll try to keep you out of the courtroom.” His voice was gentle again. Behind it, Hamish was restlessly stirring.

  After a moment, he took the handkerchief from his pocket and, going to her, pressed it into her hand. She buried her face in it, but didn’t sob. Outside he heard the first roll of thunder, distant and ominous. Rutledge stood by the sofa where she sat, looking down at the top of her dark head. Wondering whether she grieved for Mark Wilton. Her guardian. Herself. Or all three.

  “That first day I was here, you thought, didn’t you, that Mark had shot him. I remember your words. You didn’t ask who had done the shooting—instead you were angry about how it was done. I should have guessed then that you were a part of it. That you already knew who it was.”

  She looked up at him, such anguish in her face that he stepped back. “I am as guilty as Mark is,” she told him, holding her voice steady by an effort of will. “Charles—I can’t tell you why it was stopped. The wedding. But I can tell you what he said to me on that Tuesday at the Inn. He said I was too young to know my own heart. That he must be the one to decide what was best for me. All that week I begged and pleaded—and cajoled—to have my way. Saturday evening, when Mark had gone home, Charles and I sat up well into the night, thrashing it out.”

  Thunder rolled again, much nearer this time, and she flinched, startled. The sunlight was fading, an early darkness creeping in. Outside the windows the birds were silent, and somewhere Rutledge could hear a rustle of leaves as if the wind had stirred, but the heat was oppressive now.

  Taking a deep, shaking breath, Lettice went on. “Charles was a very strong man, Inspector. He had a fiercely defined sense of duty. What he did on Sunday evening wasn’t easy for him. He liked Mark—he respected him. It was for my sake—not because of any weakness in Mark!—that he changed his mind about the wedding.”

  “Charles doted on you—he’d have given you anything you wanted. Then why not this one thing—the man you planned to marry?”

  “Because,” she said softly. “Because he did put my happiness above everything else. And he finally came to believe that Mark Wilton wasn’t the right man.”

  “And Wilton, who believed as strongly that he was the right man, turned on his friend, shot him out there in the meadow, and with that one act, lost any hope he might have had of marrying you! I don’t see how he gained anything by killing Charles that he couldn’t have gained by waiting. Unless there was something else—some reason powerful enough that silencing Charles Harris was worth the risk of losing you forever. Something that might have destroyed Captain Wilto
n personally or professionally.”

  She looked up at him, eyes defensive but resolute. It was a strange test of wills, and he wasn’t sure exactly where it was leading. Or even if she knew the answer he wanted to hear.

  “All right, I did think it was Mark at first—not because I saw him as a murderer, but because of my own sense of responsibility over what had happened, the feeling that he’d done it to obliterate Charles, to get even. I was half drugged, ill with grief, not knowing where to turn or what to do. Charles was dead, they’d quarreled over the marriage—one thing on the heels of the other—what else could I think? But I’m not as sure now. When Mark finally came here, I couldn’t sense guilt, I couldn’t find any response in him—or in me—that ought to have been there if he’d killed. Only—a terrible emptiness.”

  “What did you expect? Shivers of premonition?”

  “No, don’t offer me sarcasm! Give me credit for a little sense, a little knowledge of the man I was planning to marry!” A flush of anger in her cheeks made her eyes glitter, the unshed tears brightening them.

  “But still you called off the wedding! In my presence.”

  “You don’t marry while you’re in mourning!”

  “Then you’ll go ahead and marry him after you’ve mourned a decent length of time? If he isn’t hanged for murder?”

  Shocked, she stared at him. “I—I don’t—”

  “Lettice. You aren’t telling me all of the truth.” He gave her time to answer him, but she said nothing, her eyes holding his, unreadable, once more defiant. “Who are you protecting? Mark? Yourself? Or Charles?”

  The wind had picked up, lashing at the house, sending a skirl of leaves rattling across the windows. She got up quickly and went to close them. From there, she turned to face him again. “If you want to hang Mark Wilton, you’ll have to prove he’s a murderer. In a court of law. With evidence and witnesses. If you can do that, if you can show that he was the one who shot Charles Harris, I will come to the hanging. I’ve lost Charles, and if I truly thought Mark had killed him, and no one could actually prove it, even though that was the way it had happened, I’d go through with the wedding and spend the rest of our lives making him pay for it! I care that much! But I won’t betray him. If he’s innocent, I’ll fight for him. Not because I love him—or don’t love him—but because Charles would have expected me to fight.”

  “If Mark didn’t shoot Harris—who did?”

  “Ah!” she said, smiling sadly. “We’re back to where we were, aren’t we? Well, I suppose it comes down to one thing, Inspector. What mattered most to Mark? Keeping me? Or killing Charles? Because he knew—he knew!—he couldn’t do both. So what did he have to gain?”

  The storm broke then, rain coming down with the force of wind behind it, rattling shutters and windows and roaring down the chimney, almost shutting out the flash of the lightning and a clap of thunder that for an instant sounded as if it had broken just overhead.

  17

  The rain was so intense that he stopped at the end of the drive, in the shelter of overhanging trees. Rutledge’s face was wet, his hair was matted to his head, and the shoulders of his coat were dark with water. But he felt better out of that house, away from the strange eyes that told him the truth—but only part of the truth. He didn’t need Hamish whispering “She’s lying!” to tell him that whatever Lettice Wood was holding back, he’d find no way of forcing it out of her.

  As the storm passed, the rain dwindled to a light drizzle, the ground steaming, the air still humid and unbreathable. He got out and started the car again, then turned away from Upper Streetham toward the Warwick road. He drove aimlessly, no goal in mind except to put as much distance between himself and the problems of Charles Harris’s murder as he could for the moment.

  “You’re drawn to her, the witch,” Hamish said. “And what will Jean have to say about that?”

  “No, not drawn,” Rutledge answered aloud. “It’s something else. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Do you suppose, then, that she bewitched the Captain and the Colonel as well? That somewhere she had a hand in this murder?”

  “I can’t see her as a murderess—”

  Hamish laughed. “You ought to know, better than anyone, that people kill for the best of reasons as well as the worst.”

  Rutledge shivered. What was it about Lettice Wood that reached out to him in spite of his better judgment?

  Reluctantly, bit by bit, she had confirmed Hickam’s rambling words. And Wilton’s own behavior, his unwillingness to come to Mallows after the quarrel or explain what it had been about, reinforced the picture all too clearly. And it was slowly, inevitably developing. The child’s part in it still—

  Rounding the bend, he saw the bicycle almost too late, coming up on it with a suddenness that left decision to reflexes rather than conscious action. He got the brake in time to skid to a stop in the mud, wheels squealing as they locked, sending him almost sideways.

  Hamish swore feelingly, as if he’d been thrown across the rear seat.

  Standing on the road was Catherine Tarrant, bending over her bicycle. She looked up in startled horror as he came roaring down on her, driving far faster than he’d realized, faster than the conditions of the road dictated. His bumper was not five feet from where she stood as the car came to a jarring halt, killing the engine.

  Recovering from her shock, she demanded angrily, “What do you think you’re doing, you damned fool! Driving like that? You could have killed me!”

  But he was getting out of the car, and she recognized him then. “Oh—Inspector Rutledge.”

  “What the hell are you doing in the middle of the road? You deserve to be run down!” he responded with a matching anger, marching toward her, fists clenched against his rising temper. The unpleasant drizzle wasn’t helping.

  “The chain’s broken—I don’t know if something came loose or if I jammed it when I skidded. Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t just stand there, put my bicycle in the back of your car before we’re both wet to the skin, and take me home!” She was in a foul temper as well, but dry, he noticed, as if she’d found shelter somewhere from the worst of the rain.

  They stared at each other, faces tight with self-absorbed emotions; then she managed a wry smile. “Look, we’d better both get out of the way, or someone else will fly around that bend and finish us off! Take me home and I’ll offer you some tea. You look as if you could use it. I know I could.”

  He walked past her, lifted the bicycle, and carried it to his car. She helped him put it in the back—he had an instant’s sharp sense of the ridiculous, thinking that it would crowd Hamish out—and then came around to the passenger side, not waiting for him to open her door.

  He cranked the car, got in, and said, “Did you miss the rain?”

  “I was at the Haldanes’ house. They’re away, I just went by to pick up a book Simon promised to lend me.” She lifted a large, heavily wrapped parcel out of the basket behind her and set it in her lap. “He brought it back from Paris and thought I might want to see it. Something on the Impressionists. Do you know them?”

  They talked about art as he backed the car and drove to her house, and she left a servant to deal with the bicycle, striding past the handsome staircase and down the hallway toward her studio without looking over her shoulder to see if he followed. Setting the borrowed book on a stool, she took off her hat and coat, then said, “Get out of that coat, it will dry faster if you aren’t in it.”

  Rutledge did as he was told, looking about for a chair back to drape it on.

  Catherine sighed. “Well, Mavers most certainly put the wind up everyone in Upper Streetham this morning! What did you think of his little show?”

  “Was it a show? Or was he upset?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? The damage is done. I think he rather enjoyed it too. Lashing out. It’s the only way he can hurt back, with words. Nobody pays any attention to his ideas.”

  “Which is one of the reasons he might
have shot Charles Harris.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is—to make us sit up and take notice. Well, I wouldn’t mind seeing him arrested for murder and taken off to London or wherever! I didn’t enjoy having my own life stripped for the delectation of half of Upper Streetham—the whole of it, come to that! Everyone will talk. Not about what he said of them, but about everyone else. Those who weren’t there will soon be of the opinion that they were.” Catherine moved about her paintings, touching them, not seeing them, needing only the comfort of knowing they were there.

  “That’s a very bitter view of human nature.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve learned that life is never what you expect it will be. Just as you come to the fringes of happiness, touching it, feeling it, tasting it—and desperately hoping for the rest of it—it’s jerked away.”

  “You have your art.”

  “Yes, but that’s a compulsion, not happiness. I paint because I must. I love because I want to be loved in return. Wanted to be.”

  “Did you ever paint Rolf Linden?”

  Startled, she stopped in midstride. “Once. Only—once.”

  “Could I see what you did?”

  Hesitating, she finally moved across to a cabinet in one wall, unlocking it with a key she took from her pocket. She reached inside and drew out a large canvas wrapped in cloth. He moved forward to help her with it, but she gestured to him to stay where he was. There was a little light coming in through the glass panes overhead, and she kicked an easel to face it, then set the painting on it. After a moment, she reached up and undid the wrappings.

  Rutledge came around to see it better, and felt his breath stop in his throat as his eyes took it in.

  There was a scene of storm and light, heavy, dark clouds nearer the viewer, a delicate light fading into the distance. A man stood halfway between, looking over his shoulder, a smile on his face. It was somehow the most desolate painting that Rutledge had ever seen. He’d expected turbulence, a denial, a fierce struggle between love and loss, something dramatic with grief. But instead she’d captured annihilation, an emptiness so complete that it echoed with anguish.