A Casualty of War: A Bess Crawford Mystery (Bess Crawford Mysteries)

by Charles Todd

  I bit my tongue. But it did no good, I couldn’t stop myself from answering that charge.

  “You have never met Alan Travis. You have no right to judge him so harshly until you do.”

  “He has overpowered the man sent to accompany him on his walk.”

  “I expect any of us would consider doing that, given what the Captain knew he was going to return to in a quarter of an hour.”

  “What then is his view of his fellow man?”

  I said, “Thank you for coming, Vicar. I can appreciate your concern for Mrs. Travis’s welfare, but she is not my concern. My patient is.”

  “Former patient,” he pointed out as he rose from his chair, and Simon stepped away from the door.

  With a nod to me, Mr. Caldwell walked out of the room. Simon closed the door behind him.

  “You can’t fight their prejudices, Bess.”

  “No,” I said, watching from my window as the Vicar strode toward the church. “But who is Mr. Spencer, and what is his role in all of this? And who is this Carlton Travis?”

  “A very good question.”

  “We can’t very well ask now to speak to Mr. Spencer. Not after the police have talked to the doctor—and possibly even to Mr. Spencer—about Captain Travis.” I turned away from the window. “And there isn’t time to drive all the way to London and look up the family genealogy in Somerset House in the hope of finding this Carlton. I’m not sure what we’ve got ourselves mixed up in. If I could reach a telephone, I’d ask Mother to go to Wiltshire and find out what’s happening. I don’t like being so completely in the dark.” I wandered to the hearth and held out my hands to the fire. It was dying out, but I couldn’t be sure whether the chill I felt was in the room or a part of my own worry.

  “You think Travis is going to kill himself, rather than go back to that hell.”

  I looked up at Simon. “Wouldn’t you? If you’d lost all hope.”

  “I think,” he answered slowly, “I’d want to find out if I really was mad—or not. Then I’d know what to do.”

  “Should I go back to Wiltshire now? And help in the search?”

  “Whatever is going to happen there has happened. I’d wait.”

  Easier said than done.

  In the end we went back to Bury. Not to dine or to call on the firm of Ellis, Ellis and Whitman. Instead we walked in the abbey ruins, in spite of the wind that had picked up. My cheeks were cold and the tips of my fingers felt like they were half-frozen, and my feet were numb in my boots, but I didn’t care.

  We didn’t speak, Simon or I. We strode side by side in a companionable silence, each of us busy with our own thoughts.

  I couldn’t read his expression. His eyes were distant, miles from here.

  A few spits of rain sent us hurrying back to the motorcar, a little damp, but safely inside before the bottom fell out of the sky and the rain pounded on the roof.

  We laughed at our close call—we’d have been soaked to the skin if we hadn’t dashed the last few yards. I felt the better for the burst of activity.

  “I don’t suppose we could find a cup of tea,” I said after a moment. The rain was still coming down too hard for Simon to get out and turn the crank.

  “Not a bad thought. Shall I ring for it?”

  “I wish you could.”

  The rain finally slowed, and a weak sun began to peer through the last of the clouds. We’d parked near The Angel, and I looked up to see Mr. Ellis stalking down the other side of the street, clearly in a foul mood. His face was grim, his mouth a tight line.

  “I wonder if he knows now which papers are missing.”

  “Very likely he does,” Simon responded, waiting until Mr. Ellis was out of sight before opening his door. He turned the crank, and we drove back to Sinclair without stopping for tea.

  “Such a pretty village,” I said as we came round the bend and could see the sweep of the green. “Oh, look, Mrs. Horner’s sign is up. She’s open.”

  He pulled to the verge, and I got down. “I’ll see if she’s still serving,” I said, and skirting the puddles, I walked to the door.

  “Come in,” she called when she saw me standing outside. “The door is open.”

  I turned and beckoned to Simon. He left the motorcar where it was and came to join me.

  “What’s this I hear about the police from Bury coming to The George, and then crossing to the surgery? That poor man who fell down the stairs isn’t in trouble, is he?”

  She was eager to gossip. But I said truthfully, “I have no idea why they would wish to see him.”

  Disappointed, she kept talking about the police, speculating on their reasons for being in Sinclair. “They must have gone to The George first,” she went on. “And discovered that he wasn’t there, he’d had his accident. But they didn’t take him into custody, did they? Quite a mystery.”

  “Ask Betty, at The George. She usually knows what is going on there.”

  Mrs. Horner made a face. “I would, but it’s her afternoon off. Worst luck.”

  Her back was to us where we sat near the door, and I grinned at Simon.

  And then her next words wiped the grin off my lips.

  “I don’t hold with the cards,” she was saying as she worked with the tea things, “but Miss Fredericks likes them, and she knows how to read them. She says. What’s uncanny is how the things she tells us actually happen. She’d warned us that a stranger would come to Sinclair. And he’d bring death in his wake. Now we’ve had three strangers, two of them men, and one of them fell down the stairs and could have killed himself. I don’t know how to take all this.”

  After a moment, Simon asked, “And who is Miss Fredericks?”

  “She’s the daughter of Mrs. Travis’s head groom. Well, he was head groom before the war, of course. He’s retired, now, but he still lives on the estate in a grace-and-favor cottage.”

  I’d met Scots who firmly believed in The Sight. In knowing the future before it happened. But it wasn’t usual in a village like Sinclair—Suffolk was progressive: railways, improvements in agriculture, close enough to London to understand town ways.

  Still, sometimes the old superstitions lingered in small ways. Many people still tapped wood, tossed spilled salt over their shoulders, avoided black cats, wouldn’t walk under ladders, feared setting shoes on the table, or took it to heart when a knife or fork fell to the floor—a warning that strangers were coming. The list was long and even varied by county.

  “What does Mr. Caldwell have to say about the cards?”

  Sensing our disbelief, Mrs. Horner said defensively, “I’ve never heard him speak against them. He tries to be fair-minded. But Miss Fredericks saw the baby. Before it came. She told us there was a right cradle and a wrong one, and to watch out. Even he couldn’t say she was wrong there.”

  “What baby?” I asked, sipping my tea.

  “That French girl, the one who came claiming she had James’s child. Pretty little thing, the baby. A lovely smile. But Mrs. Travis looked into her, didn’t she, and discovered the French girl had been living in London since before the war. Hardly the refugee she claimed she was. Nor any truth to her tale that James saved her from the Germans. I doubt she ever saw a German soldier. Mrs. Travis never discovered who put the girl up to it.”

  Small wonder Mrs. Travis was wary of strangers!

  “What did she have to say about us? Miss Fredericks?”

  “She told the Vicar that trouble came in many guises, and mercy was one of them.”

  Taken aback, I asked, “And do you believe everything Miss Fredericks has to say?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Horner replied honestly, setting aside the tray on which she’d brought our tea. “I ask myself how she could know such things, when what she tells us comes true.”

  “Has she ever been wrong?” Simon asked.

  “I’ve never heard of it, if she has. You’ve probably seen her about. She comes to the inn sometimes to help if they’re shorthanded.”

  But I co
uldn’t be sure I had.

  She turned away, busying herself with cleaning the counter by the stairs. I thought she might be regretting that she had ever brought up the subject.

  Here in this pleasant village, with its long street winding through a cluster of houses set facing the green, it was hard to imagine a Miss Fredericks, but on the other hand, I had never doubted that some people had gifts that we didn’t understand. I had been there as a child when my mother had a premonition that the village my father had gone to visit was a trap. The visit had been set up as a reconciliation mission, trying to reestablish friendly relations after two of the villagers had shot an English soldier. My father had been very good at this sort of thing, and many of the village headmen respected him for his courage and his honesty, even when they were enemies of the Raj. She paced the floor all that night, her face pale, her mind following my father into the Khyber Pass. It wasn’t until he and his men came riding in just after dawn that she relaxed.

  And she had been right. It had been a trap. Only, my father had managed to spring it before he and his men were caught in it, and the village headman had claimed it was none of his doing. Whether that was true or not, my father was never sure.

  For a very long time afterward, I remembered that look of anguish in her eyes, her helplessness in the face of danger to do anything to protect my father. Perhaps the Vicar thought that Miss Fredericks, in her own way, protected Mrs. Travis.

  We finished our tea, and as Simon rose to pay for it, Mrs. Horner said, “It’s nonsense, really. I shouldn’t have passed it on.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I told her. “I found it interesting.” And I had, to see that from the first day we’d been under suspicion.

  As we splashed our way back to the motorcar, the street a minefield of puddles filling the deeper ruts, Simon commented, “It’s easy to foretell the future if you’re vague enough. The Delphi Oracle was a master of that. ‘Right cradle–wrong cradle’ could mean anything, and so could ‘the guise of mercy.’”

  “It doesn’t matter how we view it. It’s how everyone else sees it. Even Mrs. Travis. She probably dismissed much of it as nonsense but still felt wary when that young French girl appeared. Or I came, in the uniform of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service.”

  We walked into The George to be met by the owner. He held out a telegram, and I saw that it was addressed to me.

  Fearing something was wrong at home, I opened it quickly, and Simon, just behind me, leaned forward to read it over my shoulder. The telegram was from my mother, sent simply to “The Inn, Sinclair.”

  Bess. Someone from the Wiltshire clinic was here looking for Captain Travis. They are worried. It seems he has gone missing.

  Captain Travis had known I came from Somerset—but not precisely where, and it isn’t a small county. Nor could I believe he would waste time searching for me. For all he knew, I’d already returned to my duties in France.

  I looked up at Simon, silently conferring with him.

  “Not bad news, I hope,” the owner of the inn asked. But his tone of voice indicated that he would be just as glad to learn that this was a summons to go elsewhere. Anywhere but The George.

  “Not at all,” I said, folding the single sheet and stuffing it and the envelope into my pocket. With a smile, I turned toward the stairs, and Simon followed. When we were out of hearing in the passage above, I said, “What should I do?”

  “There’s nothing you can do. Except to go home to Somerset and put this business behind you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems—it feels as if I’m giving up on Captain Travis.”

  “You’ve done what you could.”

  I had a headache that evening, and instead of going down to dinner, I went to bed with a cold cloth over my eyes. I seldom had headaches, and this one, I thought, was really the battle going on in my mind over what to do.

  Simon brought me a pot of tea and a custard, and I managed to eat them.

  Afterward I drifted from drowsiness to a light sleep, and then to a deeper one.

  And dreamed that the war hadn’t ended, and I was in the forward lines watching a blaze of fire from the German artillery. Knowing as I watched that the casualties would soon come in, ones and twos at first, then a longer line that soon doubled and then tripled. We were working as hard as we could to deal with all of the wounded, one broken body after another being gently lifted to the table where the doctor and I worked. There was blood everywhere; we only had time to wash our hands and our surgical pieces before the next soldier was brought in. I remembered brushing a hand across my forehead, pushing back the strands of hair that had escaped my cap. And the doctor leaned across with a pad in his hand to wipe off the streak of blood I’d left behind.

  The next patient came in, and I saw to my horror that it was Captain Travis, and I knew without checking his vital signs that he was dying. His eyes were open, accusing, pleading, but even though we worked frantically we couldn’t stop the bleeding. I watched helplessly as he died, and it was only then that I realized he had slit his wrists, it wasn’t shrapnel that had killed him.

  I turned away as the stretcher bearers, at a signal from the doctor, began to carry the body out of the tent.

  And I began to cry, something I had never done in such circumstances. The doctor said to me, “Sister Belmont. Pull yourself together. Do you hear me? There are other men here.”

  But Sister Belmont was the Sister who had broken down, not me. I’d been sent out afterward to help the remaining staff at the aid station to cope.

  I wanted to tell him that, but I couldn’t stop crying, my shoulders shaking, and yet through my tears I could see the wounded outside the tent, waiting their turn, looking at me, at my weakness, as they died, one after the other.

  It was all horribly, shockingly vivid.

  And then someone was shaking me, calling my name, and I opened my eyes to the room in The George, in Sinclair, the firelight dim, shadows all around me, and Simon sitting on the edge of my bed, one hand on my shoulder.

  I was crying, wracking sobs that came from somewhere deep inside me. He pulled me into his arms and said, “It’s all right, Bess, you’re safe. It’s all right.”

  It was a while before I could get a grip on myself, though I tried hard. Finally I pulled away and began to apologize as he handed me a handkerchief.

  “I heard you crying out,” he said gently. “You’ve nothing to apologize for, Bess. I’ve seen strong men break. And be stronger afterward.”

  “The war—” I began, then stopped, unable to describe what I had seen in my dream. So much death all around me . . .

  “I know. And it’s over now. Finished.”

  He was a black silhouette against the fire’s glow, and I couldn’t see his face.

  “But the wounded and the dead are still wounded and dead.”

  “I know.” His voice was grim. “Their faces will stay with you for a very long time. All those you tried to save. They’ll come back in dreams, or you’ll glimpse someone crossing a street—passing in an omnibus—sitting at a table in a shop. And for an instant, you’ll think you know who it is. But it isn’t. And the hope that had flared will fade again. The dead are gone, except in your memory. There they are still young and whole and safe. Let them stay there. Until they’re ready to leave.”

  I knew then that he too had dreams he couldn’t escape, and perhaps my father as well. Anyone who had been to war and watched men die.

  He sat there in the chair by the fire until I was calm enough to sleep again, and perhaps he stayed there for a while longer. He never said.

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, the swelling around my eyes required wet cloths dipped in the very cold water in the pitcher on my washstand and longer than I cared to remember before my efforts finally persuaded the puffiness and the redness to go away sufficiently that I could face the dining room and breakfast. The fire on the hearth had gone out, but I had to ignore it and dress qu
ickly in the chilly room.

  Simon was already there. He smiled but said nothing about what had happened last night, and I ate my porridge and toast, and drank my tea in a comfortable silence, knowing I’d never have to refer to it again.

  And truth was, I felt better. I had never had time to mourn. For the war, for the wounded, for the dead. The war had ended almost as an anticlimax, blessed though it was that hostilities had ceased. There had been no glorious celebration, not where I was, for the stretcher bearers and the walking wounded were still coming in from the Front. The hospitals were still full. My duties had changed very little.

  We were halfway through our meal when the village Constable walked into the dining room. An older man, he was graying and rather stout. He paused in the doorway, and after looking around, spotted us and crossed to our table.

  “Good morning,” I said when he stopped there.

  “Morning, Sister, Sergeant-Major. If I could have a word?”

  “Now? Could it wait until we’ve finished?” Simon asked.

  “Now, if you please.”

  I put down my napkin and we followed him out to Reception, and from there into a small parlor that I hadn’t seen before. It was dim, the curtains still drawn, no fire on the hearth, and no lamp lit. Even so, I could see that the Constable was all business, and that was worrying. I wondered if Inspector Howe had sent him.

  His name, according to the small board above his pocket, was Simpson. J. R. Simpson.

  He looked around, found a lamp, and proceeded to light it. We stood there, waiting.

  Finally, taking out his notebook and wetting the end of his pencil with his lips, the Constable said, “Could you tell me where you were last night?”

  I felt my face grow warm, but I said calmly, “I had a headache and missed my dinner.”

  “And you never left your room?”

  “I did not.”

  “And you, sir?” He turned to Simon.

  “I finished my dinner, stepped out to see the weather, and then went to my room. They can confirm in the dining room that I came down to my breakfast at seven thirty. A little after sunrise.”