by Charles Todd
“What did you throw?”
I searched by my boots, found another flat piece, and held it out to her.
When she’d examined it, I sent it flying as I’d done before. But this time, the piece sank like the proverbial stone.
She watched with some satisfaction, then faced me again.
“How long do you intend to stay out here?” she asked now.
“Until I’m ready to leave,” I retorted, keeping my voice civil, but refusing to be drawn. Then feeling badly about that, I replied, “When the motorcar comes again to fetch me.”
“It’s not coming. Surely you know that?”
“Mrs. . . .” I began, hoping she’d tell me her name.
“Florence Tucker,” she answered.
“Mrs. Tucker, I mean no one any harm. I came here as a part of my duties at the clinic. Wounds like those the Captain has sometimes don’t heal properly. There can be sores, ulcers, draining. Infection.”
“No one came to see my father when he lost his foot,” she said sharply. “I was left to care for it myself.”
“Was he in the war?” I asked gently, thinking of other reasons why a man might lose a foot.
“Of course not. At his age? Don’t be daft.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know the families out here. Someone should have come.”
Did she think I’d been looking for something that might tell me who the dead man was, the one buried in such haste? That I was trying to find anything the storm might have left behind, and making certain that it was sent flying back out to sea?
Surely such bits wouldn’t be washing up still?
But of course the storm had churned the water far out to sea, bringing whatever got caught up in the waves crashing up on this shore.
Remembering what she’d told me about the motorcar, I asked, “Why won’t the firm send another driver to fetch me? Why isn’t one coming?”
She stared at me, tight-lipped, for a moment. Then she said, “Why should it?”
“Because I have duties to return to. At the clinic where I’m posted.”
“Are you taking him back with you?”
“I don’t expect to take him anywhere. I didn’t come here for that.”
“This is no place for strangers.” She cast a glance toward the Down, and the other women watching. “It never was. From the time of The Worm.”
“The Captain isn’t a stranger. His brother was married to Rachel.”
“Well, he’s filled his brother’s shoes right enough,” she said venomously. “Hasn’t he?”
“That’s a very unkind thing to say. Rachel can’t manage without help. And the Captain loved his brother, he’d do what he could for his brother’s widow.”
“And keep her bed warm as well.” She turned on her heel and left me there, staring after her.
“That’s gossip,” I called after her. “Revolting gossip. I can tell you it isn’t true.”
She wheeled, looked at me, and said, “You’re a fool, if you believe that.”
She turned back to the path, and began to climb.
I watched her go, then took my time walking back along the water, refusing to be made to shorten my outing.
But I made a point not to skip any more bits of shell.
I reached the top of the headland, by the hedge, pausing to look back. The women had gone. The Down was bare except for a few men in the distance working at various tasks. I saw one with an armload of hay, another with a wheel sharpening a blade, and a third rubbing down a plow horse.
Why had that woman been so unfriendly?
Why was anything the way it was out here?
I was about to turn away when Mr. Griffith came around the corner of his cottage and spoke to me.
“Good afternoon,” I replied, expecting to walk on. But he had come for a chat, as I quickly realized.
“What happened yesterday?” he asked me, tilting his head a little to one side like a magpie looking for something bright.
“Happened?” I answered.
“You know very well what I mean,” he said, short with me.
“I don’t.”
“I saw him knock the Captain down. And later he was being dragged from the motorcar to the house, and taken inside. It was late when Ellen left. But she was back to fetch him this morning, early enough.”
He did watch what was happening outside his windows. I’d thought as much.
“Are you saying that whoever it was who knocked the Captain down was the man who came to the house with Ellen?”
“Who else could it have been?”
That was confusing. If Oliver had attacked Hugh, who had attacked him?
“I saw Rachel setting out down the hill, a shovel in her hand.”
“What?”
“Did she stand up for the Captain? Was that it?”
“Mr. Griffith. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They say that when they took that soldier to Ellen’s cottage during the storm, the house wasn’t what it used to be. Walls pulled down. Floors pulled up.”
I blinked at him, I was so astonished.
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“’Course you do. You went down there. Who sent you? The Captain, I’ll be bound. It’s not likely to have been Rachel. What’s he after? And was that why the man came after him?”
“Mr. Griffith. I never went inside the cottage. And I don’t know anything about Captain Williams fighting with anyone. Or Rachel, for that matter.”
He just stood there, looking at me. “You’re a fool,” he said, “but I’m not.”
I didn’t say anything. I walked away, leaving him standing there.
“You’d best go,” he called after me. “If you don’t want to hear the truth. She got there before you with that one. Nothing for you here now.”
Ignoring him, I went on across the road, up the path to Rachel’s house, and opened the door. Without looking back.
What was wrong with these people out here? What was happening?
And why was it happening now? What was the catalyst, when had it begun?
Was it the arrival of Captain Williams, the outsider? Or the dead man people wanted to believe was his brother?
Had Tom Williams been a part of something out here, and Hugh’s arrival reawakened whatever it was?
Did they think Hugh knew something? Or were they afraid he might learn something?
I shut the door behind me.
The house was silent. I went up the stairs to my room, and as I crossed to the window, I saw Mr. Griffith walking back to his door.
I could hardly tell Rachel about either conversation. Or Hugh for that matter.
But something was wrong out here, and I wasn’t sure exactly what it could be. I didn’t know these people well enough to judge.
The rest of the day seemed to drag. For in my mind’s eye, I could see the long drive up to the door of the clinic, and the orderly at the small desk in Reception. Matron in her own little cubby of an office, and staff moving about on their duties. I ought to be coming up that drive an hour before tea. I was to go on duty at four.
But I wouldn’t be there, and Matron would send someone to inquire if I had arrived—and if I had, why I hadn’t reported to her. I’d have a new list of patients. Possibly some of those I’d tended before. I’d need to be put into the picture, given what was known about the wounds and the spirits of each man. Any changes in staff would be brought to my attention. And then Matron would ask after my parents and if leave had brought me any peace of mind.
She was an astute woman, she could read us just in the same way she could read patients, alert to a man’s depression, to his isolation, even when he smiled and said all was well. It would be there in his eyes, I thought. A difference between the smile on the lips and the shadows in the eyes. And Matron would take steps to deal with the problem.
I sighed as I finished the small chores I’d set myself, and then wandered into the little room where Rachel
worked. The loom stood silent witness to the fact that she had used it recently. But it also told me that her mind hadn’t been on what she was doing. There was a stiffness in the colors running through the loom now, where before there had been almost a lyric sense of what blended and changed and surprised.
She had worked for the relief it gave her, but that was all she’d done. Something was missing . . .
Closing the door, feeling as if I’d been intruding, I wandered about the house until it was time to begin our dinner.
We’d just sat down to it when there was a knock at the door.
Rachel rose quickly and went to open it. I heard voices, realized that one of them was Ellen Marshall’s, sharp with worry. I glanced at Hugh, then got up to hurry down the passage.
Ellen, looking over Rachel’s shoulder, greeted me with relief.
“I’m so sorry to disturb your dinner,” she said quickly to me. “But Oliver is running a fever. I’m worried about him. What can I do?”
“Would you like me to come down and have a look?” For the motorcar was sitting in the road in front of the house. It wouldn’t take long. “I’ll just fetch my coat.” I could feel the cold air swirling about our ankles and skirts as I came to stand by Rachel.
“No—no!” she said hastily. “It will only worry him more, and I can’t have that. But if there is something I might do for his fever—to make him more comfortable?”
I said, “I think it would be best for him to go to hospital. I might be wrong about his ribs. There might be other internal injuries—bleeding—that I couldn’t find last evening. I can help you get him into the motorcar, brace him with pillows to make the journey as comfortable as possible.”
“You don’t understand—I can’t leave the house. Not after what happened to Oliver. It wouldn’t be—wise.”
I thought she had been about to say safe, but changed it at the very last moment.
The cottage had been standing empty for years. Surely it was more important to find medical attention for her friend than to worry about it.
But then I’d just been told that she was doing something there, tearing up floors and pulling down walls. Searching for something?
Was that true? Was that what she was afraid to leave?
She was waiting for me to answer her.
Rachel volunteered, “I have some aspirin. Would that help?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “Just the thing for fever. But there’s the issue of internal bleeding, and it wouldn’t be a very good idea—”
Ellen interrupted me. “Please. If you could spare them? I would be grateful.”
Rachel turned and went up the stairs to her room.
I said to the woman waiting anxiously in the doorway, “Please listen. You could be doing the wrong thing. How long would it take to carry him to hospital? And you could come directly back. I’d even sit in your cottage if you like, until you return. Or let me drive him there, while you keep watch.”
“He’s got a fever. Nothing more. This will be all I need. Another day or two won’t matter, once the fever drops.”
I wanted to say, If you care for him at all, be sensible.
But I had no authority here. I was a visitor, not a Sister with the backing of the staff and Matron and the doctors on duty. I couldn’t order treatment. I could only advise. And it was clear enough that my advice wasn’t welcome.
Besides, Rachel was coming down the steps with a few aspirin done up in a twist of paper.
“These should help. I hope Oliver will feel better soon.”
“Thank you,” Ellen said with the first genuine smile I’d seen. “I’m very grateful. And I won’t keep you. Good evening.”
She turned and hurried back to the motorcar, and we stood there watching her drive a little too fast to the long slope down to the coast guard station.
That told me she was more worried than she wanted anyone to know.
But about leaving the man—or the cottage—unprotected?
Rachel shut the door and latched it, turning back with me toward the kitchen. “Poor man. He must be in a great deal of pain.”
Hugh said as we joined him, “I heard most of that. I think Bess is right, she ought to have taken Oliver to hospital.”
Then as I sat down and prepared to serve my plate, Hugh said, “Would you have gone back with her, Bess?”
I looked across at him, uncertain what he was asking me. Whether he was hoping I would say yes—or no.
I kept my reply even, but yes. I intended to go.
“If she’d asked me, to help shield him from the worst of the ruts, I’d have agreed. But I also offered to watch her cottage while she carried him to Swansea. I thought she was worried about that for some reason.”
Rachel said, “Do you think so? The cottage has stood empty all these years. I can’t imagine why she should suddenly be so concerned about leaving it now.”
It was an echo of my own thought earlier.
I waited until we were halfway through our dinner to pose the question uppermost in my mind.
“Rachel. You told me that Ellen’s grandfather had sent his daughter to school in Cardiff. Who paid for her fees? It wouldn’t have been cheap.”
She stared at me. “I have no idea. It never occurred to me to wonder.”
“Is it common for people in the village to send their children off to boarding school? I don’t recall seeing a school out here.”
“There was one before the war. You probably didn’t notice it the night you arrived, because it looks very much like just another cottage. Then the schoolmaster enlisted. He wasn’t replaced, and Rector stepped in, helped by one of the younger village women. Swansea and Cardiff are Welsh. We’ve sort of become clannish out here, with our English roots—they do go back hundreds of years, and we’re rather proud of them. Still, my father insisted on sending me to Swansea to finish my own schooling. My first year was wretched.”
I thought it was a measure of how much her parents loved her, to send her away. All the same, she must have found it just as hard to come home, after living in a town.
She was saying, “I was so taken with Ellen’s clothes and manners—what seemed to me as a little girl just the utmost in sophistication. And there I was in school with girls who teased me about my clothes and the style of my hair and my accent. I begged to come home again. But I’m glad I stayed and made the best of it. If I’d left, I’d never have met Tom.”
I let it go.
But I couldn’t help thinking that this house was larger than most out here. There must have been money in this family as well, at one time.
We were just finishing our meal when Hugh asked, “Ellen hasn’t told you anything that she’d learned from Oliver, about who’d attacked him?”
I realized that he hadn’t wanted to be the one who brought it up. But we hadn’t said anything all through dinner, and he’d finally had no choice.
Rachel was silent. I stepped in before it was noticeable. “She was so concerned about the fever. I should have thought to ask if he’d told her anything. I was too busy worrying about what could be wrong. And then she was gone.”
Even as I answered him, I wondered why Ellen hadn’t told us something. Surely she’d asked Oliver what he’d seen, where the man had come from, what had started the fight. But she hadn’t said a word.
Why was everyone out here so secretive?
Why wasn’t there a Constable here at the very tip of the peninsula? Or a doctor? Or even a regular post? Why had the residents of this tiny village chosen not to have outsiders in their midst?
What were they hiding? Or hiding from?
Chapter 11
We had seven lambs in the shed by the next evening. The ewes were tired but doing their part, cleaning their young and nursing them. It never ceased to amaze me that the lambs, shaky and unsure of their feet, quickly got their legs under them and would soon be gamboling about the fields, steady and playful.
Watching them, Rachel said, “I see this cycle o
f life every year. That’s what keeps me here. It’s rather wonderful, isn’t it?”
I thought she was regretting the fact that she and Tom had never had children. But many soldiers had made that choice. Leaving a widow behind when they were killed was one thing. Leaving a woman to cope alone with young children and only a small pension was another. And if they weren’t killed, it could be worse. An invalid who was a constant drain on his family. So many soldiers had told me they feared that most of all. Death to them was clean and final. A life that was hardly a living terrified the bravest . . .
I shook off my thoughts and watched the lambs with her for another few minutes. Satisfied that they were going to be all right, even the smallest of them—born to an experienced ewe—she turned and led the way out of the shed.
A cloud-ridden moon hung in the sky, giving a hazy light. Instead of going into the house, Rachel crossed the road, and I walked with her to the hedge, where we could look down on the bay. It was almost magical, waves moving the surface with a steady but gentle pace, leaving that lacy foam on the strand as it rolled in and swirled a bit, and then softly withdrew.
I thought she’d brought me here to talk—finally—about what had happened to Hugh. And so I waited for her to begin.
To my surprise, after a moment she said, “Do you think Hugh sees me as his brother’s widow?”
“But you are,” I replied. “That’s your relationship to him.”
“You’re saying he feels responsible for me. That he must look after me for Tom’s sake. Because of Tom.”
“Rachel. If you’re asking me if Hugh could love you for yourself, I think it’s possible. But you must remember that if he does have feelings for you, he’s likely not to show them. For fear of overstepping the bounds. After all, you loved Tom, and he knows that. Hugh lives on your charity—no, don’t deny it, I am sure that’s how he sees it. He’s taking care of you—but you are also taking care of him.”
“But if I send him away—we have nothing.”
“You mustn’t send him away. He needs this opportunity to see himself as whole again. Not physically, of course, but mentally. He’s useful, he’ll do anything you ask of him. Or try his very best to do it. That helps him.”
