A Hanging at Dawn: A Bess Crawford Short Story

by Charles Todd

  My mother smiled. “He probably wouldn’t dare. Politically it wouldn’t do to make the Maharani an enemy. And Parvati is the mother of the Prince’s heirs.”

  “I’m glad for her sake. But I’ve often wondered . . .”

  “Wondered what?” she asked when I didn’t go on.

  “She married as she was expected to marry. But I had a feeling that she would have preferred to marry for love.”

  My mother set the flowers in the center of the table. “Really? Was there someone else she cared for? There were several other young heirs who were eligible.”

  “She never mentioned anyone to me. Of course, she probably couldn’t tell me such a thing—I wasn’t old enough to know to keep her secrets. But she said once that if she ever had a daughter, she would let her choose her own husband.”

  “Really?” my mother said again. “Well, the Prince will probably have something to say to that, I’m sure.”

  And then it was time to dress for dinner, and I was looking forward to wearing that new gown for the first time.

  I thought Simon had changed since the visit to Delhi. I couldn’t quite decide how or why.

  When I said something to my father about that, he laughed.

  “I expect being Sergeant Major has had something to do with that. He’s very young for that honor. But the ranks like him.”

  “Well, he’s had several years to grow used to his new rank.” I hesitated. “He’s not reconsidering going to Sandhurst, is he? I’d be glad for him, of course, but I know all of us would miss him terribly.”

  “He’s said nothing about that to me. Has he mentioned it to you?”

  “No.”

  “Has he treated you any differently?”

  “I don’t think so. We were quarreling only yesterday about something. He treats me like his little sister. And I’m not.” Before he could say anything, I added, “I’ll be fourteen in a few weeks. I’d like to be friends instead.”

  I could have sworn my father smothered a smile—it was a rather choking cough—and I said crossly, “Is that such a difficult thing to ask?”

  “Well, I expect that will happen. Will you be putting your hair up and begin riding sidesaddle and stop outshooting half the ranks?”

  I had to laugh. “I expect Miss would be glad if I did.” I knew there were times when my governess despaired of me. But there was so much of interest to me, and so many things I enjoyed doing out here. Sitting quietly embroidering handkerchiefs for my parents or practicing the piano or painting watercolors of different flowers was all very well, and I was good at them, but I was my father’s daughter, and I loved the Regiment as much as he did.

  Which is why, when something else happened late that year, I was quite surprised, although I think my mother saw it coming.

  We were due to rotate back to Hampshire in late November, and saying goodbye to India was going to be difficult for me.

  My father had finally brokered a truce with the worst of the raiding tribes, and he could leave with an easy mind that all would be well out here. There was talk of the Regiment going to South Africa next, and the ranks were excited about that.

  Then why, when we finally reached London in early December, had my father resigned? And Simon along with him?

  I asked my mother about that, and she’d answered me honestly, I thought.

  “The politics of India had disappointed him, I think. He’d felt let down by that. When we went to Delhi, that time, he was angry with some of the Governor-General’s staff. They’d put political interests ahead of his men when he’d asked for their help. And you know how your father has always felt, that the Regiment came first.”

  “He’s too young to retire to Somerset and grow marrows,” I’d said.

  “He’ll find something to keep him busy. Never fear. And Simon as well.”

  I’d said something to Simon about his future. But he’d shaken his head. “I’ve been a soldier long enough, Bess. The Regiment gave me something I’d been looking for. I’m grateful for that. But your father is right. It’s time to leave.”

  It wasn’t until much, much later, that I was told the truth.

  That neither the Governor-General nor his staff had had the time to consider my father’s concerns for his men. He couldn’t walk away then—he still had his duty ahead of him. Not until that was finished, would he be free to go.

  Even though London tried very hard to persuade both my father and Simon to stay, it would take a war to bring the Colonel Sahib back to the Army. And Simon as well. But that was still four years in the future . . .

  We came home to Somerset to find that Iris and the dailies had taken all the dust covers off the furniture and the chandeliers. The bedding had been aired, the rooms dusted within an inch of their lives. And my father was happier than I’d seen him for years.

  I was afraid that Simon would go home to his own family, even though he’d never talked to me about them or his childhood. But he seemed quite pleased to retire to the cottage beyond the wood at the bottom of our garden. And he was in and out of our house just as he’d always been. I’d often watched the two of them together and thought how alike they were, as if Simon were the son my father had never had. I said something about that to my mother one morning when the Colonel Sahib and Simon were trying to set up a swing for us under a tree in the back garden.

  She had smiled, and said only, “Yes, that’s rather nice, isn’t it?” Then she turned to me and said, “You don’t mind?”

  “I’m happy for both of them. Melinda told me when she came to visit last week that she thought she had met Simon once in Hampshire. Before he was sent out to India. I asked Simon about that, and he told me he’d escorted her to meet one of the officers there.”

  “I’m not surprised. She’s kept up with the Regiment, even though she’s a widow. It was her home for so many years.”

  I could appreciate that—I’d found it hard at first to fit into the quiet life of a young lady, having been accustomed to the freedom I’d enjoyed in India, but I soon made friends among the families within riding distance. Simon teased me about my beaux, the brothers and cousins of those friends. I didn’t know then how many of them I’d lose to war in only a few years’ time.

  The fighting the Regiment had seen on the North-West Frontier would put them into the forefront of that war, and I couldn’t sit idly by while those men were being wounded and killed. And that was why, in the early days of September 1914, I had gone to London, and with my parents’ blessing, applied to become a nurse. My father had always done his duty, and now it was my turn as well.

  An Irish Hostage and A Fatal Lie

  Look for the next entry in the Bess Crawford mystery series

  AN IRISH HOSTAGE

  Coming Summer 2021

  and

  read on for a sneak peek at Charles Todd’s next Inspector Ian Rutledge mystery

  A FATAL LIE

  Coming February 2021

  1

  The River Dee, Llangollen Valley

  Early Spring 1921

  On his sixth birthday, Roddy MacNabb was given a fishing pole by his pa, with promises to teach him how to use it. That was late July 1914, before the Bloody Hun started the war, and his pa had left the village with four of his friends and enlisted. He’d promised to be back before the end of the year, but the war had dragged on, and in 1915, his father had been killed at Bloody Passiondell, wherever that was.

  The pole, long since put away, was in his granny’s attics, and Roddy had only just found it last week, when he’d gone up there to fetch a box for her. He’d brought it down with him, but his mum had told him to take the Bloody Pole out to the shed and leave it there.

  “There’s to be no fishing,” she’d told him. “Not while you’re in school.”

  He’d watched his granny’s mouth tighten at his mother’s words. She didn’t hold with cursing, but Mum had come from Liverpool, and he’d heard his Aunt May say that she’d been no better than she ought to be. St
ill, his father had somehow fallen in love with her and brought her home, and she’d stayed.

  He didn’t remember his real mum, she’d died when he was born. But his pa had told him this was his mum now, and he was to call her that. And so he had, because his pa was the best in the village, and he would have done anything to make him happy.

  On Saturday, with no school and the schoolmaster ill with a chest, Roddy slipped away while his mum was having her usual late breakfast, took the fishing pole from the shed, and went off to the river.

  The Dee here was within walking distance of the farm, and Roddy found himself thinking about his pa and fishing. He’d gone with his father a few times and still had a vague memory of what to do with the pole, once the hook was affixed to the line and a worm was put on it. He’d surreptitiously dug some worms out of the kitchen garden last night and put them into a tin. Most had crawled out, but there were still three left.

  Whistling now, he could glimpse the river shining in the noon sun beyond the line of trees, and he told himself his father would be happy if he could see how tall his son had grown, and only twelve. And off to fish at last.

  The sun was warm, but under the trees—their bare branches crossing over his head like the bones of wood holding up the church roof—the air was cooler. Or perhaps it was the water—he could hear it and smell it now. He came out onto the bank, stiff with the dried grasses of winter, and stood looking down at the drifting current. Too steep here to fish, he thought, and moved downstream a little, beyond the Telford Aqueduct soaring high above the valley. Everyone knew the Aqueduct, but unlike the Roman ones he’d read about in school, which were intended to carry drinking water, it bridged the wide gap between two cliffs, and made it possible for the narrowboats traveling along the canal up there to float right across from one side to the other. He’d heard the horses that pulled the narrowboats, the hollow sound their hooves made as they stepped out onto the path that ran beside the trough of water. It echoed, on a quiet day. He’d been afraid the first time he’d heard it, but his pa had told him about the horses, and once had even taken him up there to see the long boats and the ducks too. He barely remembered it now, that trip, but his father had bought him an ice and told him not to tell Mum.

  Ahead was a lower spot on the bank, and Roddy moved quickly toward it, eager to try out the pole and catch his fish. He didn’t notice what was in the water, not at first. He wasn’t interested in the river, only the pole.

  After two attempts he got the line on the pole, tied the hook to the end, then pushed the wriggling worm onto the hook. On his first try at casting, he caught the bush behind him, untangled the line finally, and tried again. This time he managed better, and the hook actually sailed out over the water and sank into the sunny depths.

  Smiling, he wiggled the pole a little, felt it catch, and burst out laughing. He’d caught a fish, first thing! What would his pa think of that?

  But when he tried to pull the line in, it wouldn’t come, and as he pulled harder, he saw something move in the water, just below the surface. From where he stood, it appeared to be a rock or even a tangle of roots.

  Whatever it was, it bobbed a little as he went on pulling, harder now, desperate to save his only hook, then it suddenly came free from whatever was holding it down.

  And as it did, a face rose slowly out of the water. A face unlike any other he’d ever seen, white and torn and no longer human. Like something the water had taken and hadn’t ever wanted to give back. The lump of whatever was attached to it rolled a little again, making the head move as well, and for an instant Roddy thought it was coming directly out of the water at him. He screamed as he dropped the pole and ran.

  But no one on the narrowboat crossing high above his head heard him.

  2

  Chief Superintendent Markham was in a fine mood. He had been congratulated twice on the successful conclusion of a rather nasty murder inquiry in Norfolk—once by the Home Office, and again in an article in the Times.

  Inspector Carlton had brought in the killer, covering himself with glory as well as the Yard, and he was currently basking in the Chief Superintendent’s smile.

  Inspector Rutledge, on the other hand, was still in his office, buried in paperwork. His last inquiry had stirred up a mare’s nest, and Markham was apparently still smarting from that, because he’d seen to it for several weeks that Rutledge wasn’t given a new assignment.

  Rutledge had not complained—much to Markham’s annoyance, according to Sergeant Gibson.

  When the Chief Constable in a northern Welsh county asked the Yard to take charge of an inquiry into the death of a man found in the River Dee, Markham summoned Rutledge to his office, brusquely told him what was required of him, and said, “Sergeant Gibson will see that someone takes over the reports you were reviewing.” He passed the file across the desk, nodded, and began to read another report already open on the green blotter. The air was chill with Markham’s dislike.

  Rutledge extricated himself from the office as smoothly as he could, collected what he needed from his own room, and informed Sergeant Gibson of the status of the reports on his desk.

  Gibson grimaced. “Does this mean you’re back in his lordship’s good graces?”

  “I doubt it. Northern Wales is rather like being sent to Coventry—out of sight and out of mind.”

  Gibson nodded. “There’s that.”

  It was a Monday morning, overcast, cold. As he walked out of the Yard to his motorcar, Rutledge could smell the Thames, fetid with the receding tide. At his flat, he packed a valise, left a note for the daily, and then headed west through dreary outskirts and a succession of small towns before he reached open countryside.

  By that time he was no longer able to ignore the voice coming from the rear seat.

  It wasn’t there, that voice. He knew it as clearly as he could see the ruts in the road unwinding ahead of the motorcar’s bonnet. Corporal Hamish MacLeod was buried in the black mud of Flanders, and Rutledge had once stood by that grave and contemplated his own mortality.

  It was the manner of Hamish’s death that haunted him, and the guilt of that had turned into denial. By the end of the war he had brought Hamish home to England in the only way possible, knowing he was dead, but unable to free himself of the voice that had stayed with him in the trenches from the Battle of the Somme to the Armistice. It had followed him relentlessly, sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, and sometimes, for a mercy, even bearable. But always there. And with it, the memories of the war.

  What he, Rutledge, feared above all was one day seeing the owner of the voice—and knowing beyond doubt that he had finally run mad. The only answer to that was the service revolver locked in the chest under his bed at the flat.

  For it was he who had delivered the coup de grace that silenced Hamish forever. Military necessity. But even as Hamish had broken during the Somme, he himself had been on the ragged edge of shell shock. England had needed every man that July. No one walked back to the forward aid station and asked for relief from the horror. They withstood it as best they could, week after unbearable week, and hoped for death when the agony was too much.

  Hamish was saying, “Ye ken, the Yard doubts ye. Else, they’d no’ send ye to Wales for a drowning.”

  Rutledge didn’t answer.

  “Aye, ye can try to ignore the signs. But ye’ve seen them for yersel’.”

  Hamish was trying to goad him into a quarrel, but it was only a reflection of his own troubled mind.

  Setting his teeth, he concentrated on the road ahead. There was nothing Hamish could say that he hadn’t heard before, or thought, or dreamed of at night. Tried to ignore—but could never put completely out of his mind. It was there, had been since the trenches. A constant reminder of the war and what he’d done on that bloody nightmare of the Somme. Seemingly as real as if the living Hamish MacLeod traveled with him.

  Rutledge could feel that presence growing stronger as he made his way into the Cotswolds. Waiting for him as
it always did at the end of a long day. He had wanted to drive another twenty or so miles, but as he found himself in a village of butter-yellow stone reflecting the last of the evening light, he knew that it wasn’t possible. There was a small, charming inn near the village center—as good a place as any to face the night. He ate his dinner in a dining room that was only half full. The food was good, the whisky with his tea even better, and he found himself relaxing for the first time in a very long while. Hoping it would last and he would sleep after all.

  A woman across the room laughed. His back was to her, he couldn’t see her face, but the laugh was rather like Kate’s when she was truly amused. His whisky glass halfway to his lips, he paused, caught off guard.

  But Kate was in London . . .

  Setting his glass down, unfinished, he went up to the small room where Hamish was waiting in the shadows for him.

  It was a long night. He’d been having nightmares more frequently of late, Hamish drawing him back into the war, filling him with guilt and despair and a longing for peace that always left him drained in the first light of dawn. As if in the blackness surrounding him the past came back more easily, slipping through the darkness in the room and in him until he couldn’t hold it back any longer.

  His last thought as the nightmare took its firm grip on his mind was, How could I ever do this to Kate? How could I ever let her see this part of me?

  Rutledge arrived at his destination, Cwmafon, on a Wednesday afternoon of soaking rain and lowering clouds that turned everything gray and dismal. Much like his own mood. In spite of a good sense of direction, as he’d driven deeper into northern Wales, he’d struggled with place-names he couldn’t pronounce and others that weren’t even on the English map he’d brought with him.

  He finally found the country lane that followed the River Dee into the village he was after, saw the tiny police station next to a general store, and splashed through the puddles to the door.