Watchers of Time

by Charles Todd

  She regarded the heavy bandages that swathed his chest, still binding one arm close to his body. “I’m surprised the Yard will allow you back until that comes off. Surely there are regulations? You can barely button your own shirt, and I’ve done up your shoes for you all these weeks. A half-dressed policeman is hardly a proper representative of the majesty of the law?”

  “Frances. Shut up!”

  “Yes, I know, it isn’t a pleasant reminder, is it? I’m sorry. But I do think you may be acting prematurely.”

  He put down his razor, splashed water on his face, and groped for a towel. The razor went sailing across the room. This time he swore silently.

  Hamish, reflecting his anger, said, “Aye, it isna’ a brave thing you do, merely foolhardy.”

  Rutledge said, “I am going mad cooped up in these rooms.” The words served to answer both of them.

  Frances said, deliberately misunderstanding him, “Yes, you must be. I did ask you to stay longer at the house. It’s still warm enough to sit in the gardens in the afternoon, or walk across the street into the square. You can come back again, if you like.” She had brought him there from hospital, and found a nurse to care for him until he could fend for himself, then taken over the chore of getting him dressed and undressed each day while he impatiently healed. Wounded tigers, she had thought more than once, would have been less of a handful.

  But in the beginning, when she’d been summoned north, she had been terrified that he’d die before she got there. She’d only just got used to him being home and safe, with War’s end. After four bitter years of killing, her brother had come back to her alive and so she had let her guard down at last. Policemen weren’t supposed to be shot in the line of duty. The shock had left her breathless. Still, she’d done her best not to fuss over him. . . .

  Rutledge, who understood the unspoken concern that lay behind his sister’s efforts to keep him under her eye, had found it impossible to explain to her that he preferred his own flat, where he could swear at the pain or pace the floor at night or simply sit with his eyes closed until the worst had passed. Instead he’d merely said that he needed to learn to do for himself again.

  Now he gingerly stooped and picked up the razor, then turned to grin at her. “Frances, you are the most capable woman I’ve ever met. When it comes to dealing with a crisis, you have no peer. All the same, it’s easier, sometimes, not to have witnesses.”

  She smiled. “Yes, Father was just the same. I can’t remember a time when he was ill that he didn’t want to find himself a burrow somewhere and crawl off until he was better. It drove Mama to despair.” The smile faded. “But returning to work, Ian—is it wise?”

  Rutledge studied her. She knew, a little, what he’d been through in the War. Not all of it. She knew that he had been shell-shocked. But not that he had brought back from the Western Front the living voice of a dead man, Corporal Hamish MacLeod. Nor did she know what it was like to order a man shot, or to send weary and battle-worn men into certain death. To walk on the maggot-ridden bodies of corpses, or watch a friend die hideously, screaming. Nothing deadened such memories. They stayed bottled up. Raw, brutal, barbarous. The stuff of nightmares that the mind scrambles to bury deeper and deeper, just to survive, until there was no way to exorcise the demons that had seized possession of part of him.

  There were stories he could tell when friends or colleagues asked “How was it over there?” And these were tailored to each listener. For some, humorous accounts of the incessant rain and sucking mud. The lack of water for bathing. How necessary it was to shave, so that the gas masks fit properly. To others he spoke of acts of bravery he’d witnessed, or the kindness of the nursing sisters. To a few he was comfortable discussing the shared danger that had turned men who had almost nothing else in common into brothers. But seldom the whole truth for anyone, only a small measure of it. It was, he thought, better that way.

  “This is no’ a wound of war,” Hamish reminded him now. “You made yourself a target, on purpose.”

  Yet in some ways the confinement of this healing had once again left him vulnerable to all the horrors he’d fought these past five months to overcome. Now they were creeping out again in spite of him, reaching out to pull him back into the morass of despair and hopelessness he’d struggled so fiercely to leave behind. In the distraction of work, the subsequent exhaustion that brought him dreamless sleep, the concentration that kept Hamish at bay, he had scraped together a measure of peace.

  “Until Scotland.” It was a refrain that Hamish had dinned in his head day and night for the past three weeks. Until Scotland . . .

  Rutledge told his sister lightly, forcing the shadows out of his conscious mind, “There’s sanity in work. I’ve a desk full of papers to get through—hardly a test of endurance. And I am on sick leave, not permanent disability. This will heal, in good time.” Unlike the spirit . . . “It’s little more than a week early.”

  Frances was that rare woman who knew when to stop persuading and start encouraging. “All right, then, let’s try a compromise. You can manage your own breakfast, and find yourself a midday meal, but come to me for your dinner. At least I can be sure you’re eating properly. You don’t, you know. You are far too thin, still—”

  But it wasn’t eating improperly that kept Rutledge thin and drawn. It was so many hauntings . . . Hamish. The War. The impossibility of forgetting, when England was full of wounded men, struggling to go about lives that years in the trenches had altered irretrievably. People looked away from such men now, embarrassed by them, unable to think what to say to them. The War was finished. Over and done with. Except for the crosses in Flanders’s Fields. And the living reminders no one quite knew what to do with. He saw himself a dozen times an hour on the streets—among the amputees, the blind, the ugly coughing of the gassed—even though he’d come home from France whole in body. His wounds were invisible, yet he shared the misery of such men. Even now he could see clearly the poor devil he’d watched from his window that very morning, clumsily managing his crutches and attempting to steer a reasonably straight course among the passersby. Or the hideously burned face passing under the street lamp three nights ago, long after dark. The man had tried to hide the worst of his scars with a scarf. But with one ear missing, his hat had settled awkwardly . . . A pilot, shot down in flames and unlucky enough to have lived through it.

  As he had lived through Scotland . . . somehow.

  Hamish said, “Ye ken, I wasna’ ready for ye to die!”

  To silence his thoughts, Rutledge agreed to dinner with Frances. The prospect of working a full day again was daunting; he knew quite well he hadn’t regained his full strength. All the same, it would do no harm to try, and possibly offer him some little respite from Hamish’s morbid concentration on Scotland.

  Rutledge didn’t want to think about Scotland.

  Scotland had haunted him while he was recovering from surgery. It had filled his drugged dreams. It had brought him upright, drenched with sweat and pain, in the darkest part of the night when defenses were at their lowest ebb. Words, faces, the sound of pipes, that last day of rain when nothing stayed dry . . . It was all there in his mind when he was most vulnerable—on the edges of sleep, waking in the predawn hours—fighting the overwhelming pain for fear the doctor might give him more drugs if anyone guessed how much he suffered.

  He’d never wanted to go back to Scotland. Too many Scots had been killed in the trenches—he had given the orders that sent hundreds of them charging into No Man’s Land through gunfire that was pitiless, inhuman. He had watched them scream, he had seen them drop, he had stepped in the thick red blood where they had crawled in agony toward their own lines. He’d heard their last fumbling words as they died. It was a burden of guilt that still burned like live coals in his conscience. But the Yard had seen fit to send him north, whether he wanted to go or not. Barely a month ago, he’d done what he had sworn he would never do. And he didn’t want to think about it now.

  There
were letters from his godfather, David Trevor, who lived near Edinburgh, lying in his desk across the room. Unopened. He didn’t want to read them until he was well, until he was back at the Yard and his mind was filled with other problems. He didn’t want to hear how it had ended. He wished to God night after night that it had never begun—and knew that he lied even as he said the words. He had had to stay—

  But Hamish reminded him of those letters day and night, and he’d ignored the voice until his head ached. When he was healed, fully healed, he’d read them. . . . Not until then. Hamish be damned!

  Oh, God. Scotland be damned—!

  Frances was watching his face, and he dragged his thoughts back to the present before she could read them.

  Much as he disliked admitting it, she was right— one-armed, he was worse in the kitchen than he was with a razor. And his cooking would keep her happy, too. Less likely to chide him for looking like a scarecrow.

  “Now let’s see about that tie. Then I must go, I’ve a party tonight and nothing to wear.” She smiled as she rose and crossed to the wardrobe. “This one, I think, with the gray suit.”

  Chief Superintendent Bowles was not happy to see him. But then Bowles never was pleased to find Inspector Rutledge at his desk. The Chief Superintendent had hoped Rutledge might die of septicemia. Foolish of him to get himself shot in the first place! It went to prove that Rutledge was neither dependable nor competent to deal with police work. All the same, one could hope that the next time he was fired upon, the bullet would fly true.

  There was already talk in certain quarters about the possibility of a promotion. Bowles had squelched it, saying, “Too soon, too soon. He’s not been back at the Yard half a year yet. Give the man time to find his feet!”

  Bowles greeted his returning Inspector with what could best be described as subdued enthusiasm, and set him to clearing up files, going over paperwork for the courts, looking at the disposition of cases. Wouldn’t do to have Rutledge out on the streets, fainting in the midst of an inquiry. He’d told his superiors that as well. Wait until the man’s healed! Time enough then for him to take on a new case.

  Rutledge, in fact, didn’t care. The mind-numbing concentration needed to finish each report or check every document kept Hamish at arm’s length and silent. It was respite in the form of inescapable boredom, and he embraced it with prodigious gratitude.

  The other urgent requirement was to rebuild his stamina, depleted by enforced idleness. And so he began a regimen of walking each day. To breakfast in a dark-paneled pub, chosen because it lay several streets above Trafalgar Square. To lunch at any one of several pubs on streets that ran toward the Tower, and then an ever larger loop that would bring him back to the Embankment. Frances, under the impression that he was prudently taking the Underground, said nothing about his gray face each evening. But the thought of walking down into the crowded, noisy tunnels turned him cold with nerves. It was too much like being buried alive in the trenches.

  The first day, Rutledge arrived back at the Yard shaking from the exertion, and still made himself take the stairs two at a time. Even on the weekend, he refused to stay indoors and rest. By his third day at the office, a Tuesday, he could walk without the black shadows of exhaustion clouding his mind to the point that he was a danger to himself and traffic in the streets. On the afternoon of the fifth, he was able to breathe reasonably well, and stop to look about him. His legs, he thought wryly, belonged to him again. Their tendency to wobble in his weakness had angered him more than the arm strapped to his chest.

  There was work being done on a plaster War Memorial in the middle of Whitehall. The construction had snarled traffic for some time, and before returning to the Yard, Rutledge decided to have a look at it. Simplicity had been the goal, but the memorial seemed inadequate, he thought, to hold the memory of so much spilled blood and so many ruined lives. Depressed, he moved on toward St. Margaret’s Church, to stand on the corner of Bridge Street for a time, looking up at Big Ben and watching pigeons wheeling against the sky. Reluctant to return to his desk in his stuffy, ill-lit office, he listened to the traffic on the Thames, and considered crossing the busy bridge.

  Hamish, relishing the wind from the river and a sudden gust of rain that swept down on them, was lost in his own reflections.

  The sound of voices, like small birds twittering in a bush, brought Rutledge’s eyes back to St. Margaret’s, and his thoughts back to the present. A group of young women, stylish in black, stood waiting at the door for another, just descending from a motorcar in the street. She waved and hurried toward them, the wind catching the skirts of her coat, as if sweeping her out of his reach.

  He recognized her walk before he heard her voice calling to her friends. It was Jean—

  She caught up with the others, and laughter surrounded them, her face holding the pale light for an instant before they turned and went inside the church. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement and warmth.

  Her wedding was to be held at St. Margaret’s in a fortnight’s time.

  Jason Webley had told him that, coming to visit him in hospital at the end of September and after a time awkwardly turning the subject to the woman Rutledge had once been engaged to marry. “I say, old man, have you heard? Jean’s set a date, end of next month.” Webley paused, then added, “She asked Elizabeth to be in the wedding party. Elizabeth asked me what her answer ought to be, and I told her I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  “No.” But he had minded. Not because he begrudged Jean her happiness, but because she’d taken away so much of his. He could still remember the day, nearly eight months before, when she’d told him, haltingly, in another hospital ward, that she wished to end their engagement. And he’d seen the fear in her eyes, the dread of being tied to a broken man. . . . He hadn’t yet begun to recover, a silent, empty man in the grip of nightmares she couldn’t understand, and she’d believed that he never would be more than that. An object of pity for the rest of his life.

  Hamish reminded him, “It was a near-run thing!”

  It had been. But Rutledge was as unprepared for her desertion as he would have been for a slap in the face. He’d needed comfort, a gentle reminder of that normal life he’d lost somewhere in the trenches. Jean couldn’t have chosen a worse time to break her engagement to the man she’d once sworn she loved above all others. A week or two more—a month— Would it have made a difference if she’d offered him the compassion of waiting a little longer? Held him in her arms and told him it didn’t matter, she loved him still— even if it was a kind lie?

  He would never know. Jean had scuttled out of the hospital room in undisguised relief, grateful that he’d been willing to set her free. By August she had become engaged to a diplomat and was looking forward to a new life in Canada, where the man was taking up his next posting.

  Blithe, unshadowed, she had brushed away the war years as if they were a bad dream. Shallow, Frances had called her—a woman who would never have made him happy.

  Staring at the church door, Rutledge found himself thinking that he was, after all, a lucky man. He hadn’t married Jean in that golden haze of 1914, when war was gloriously linked to romance and adventure, not to suffering. She had tried to persuade him to agree to a hasty wedding then: uniforms, crossed swords, and a hero off to fight the Hun. And he had reminded her that she was far too young and lovely to find herself a widow. . . .

  He wondered what kind of life they might have shared these past seven months, after he’d finally been released from the clinic, still a prisoner of his own terrors. And how deeply they would have come to hate each other, finally. Or if she might have found herself wishing that the bullet he’d taken in Scotland in September had put an end to their pretenses.

  Hamish said, “She’d ha’ been bonny in black.”

  Certainly she would have carried herself with great courage, impressing all his friends, trailing behind her the whisper of great passion and love lost, where neither had ever existed.

  Still
, he was swept by a sense of loss as he watched her pass through the door of the church, oblivious. She hadn’t felt his eyes or his thoughts. She hadn’t sensed his presence and turned to look for him. There was a loneliness in that.

  By the end of that week, Rutledge told himself that he’d made rather remarkable strides from the crippled man struggling to shave one-handed while his sister watched. The throbbing in his shoulder and chest muscles had begun to subside into a dull ache that he could put out of his mind. He could do without the sling now for hours at a time, al hough the arm was still tightly bound.

  Another week, he told himself, and I’ll be fit again.

  The dinners with his sister were beginning to wear thin. Much as he loved her, enjoyed the variety of her cooking, and appreciated the fact that she did not fuss, Frances worried about him, and he found it difficult to smile and ignore that. On the other hand, before the War, it had been Rutledge who had worried about her. And he knew too well the signs of unspoken concern. Of skirting around issues that ought not to be discussed—what had happened in Scotland, Jean’s approaching wedding, mutual friends who were in worse straits than he was. He had reached the point of wanting to blurt out, if only for the sake of clearing the air between them: “Look—I know David is worried that I haven’t written him—I just can’t face it yet. Don’t ask me why! And as for Jean, I wish her well, I’m not heartbroken. I’m lonely, that’s all, but I don’t want to meet a dozen of your suitable friends. For God’s sake, that’s not the answer!”

  Hamish reminded him, “Ye’re no’ fit company for yourself, much less a lassie. Get drunk and get it o’er with!” As advice, it wasn’t bad.

  But that Friday there were more pressing matters to consider. Chief Superintendent Bowles, after a consultation with the police surgeon, considered his options, then went to see Rutledge.