A Long Shadow

12

The vehemence in Grace Letteridge’s voice was chilling, and Rutledge, listening to her, realized that she could indeed have killed.

The question was, why?

Hamish said, “She was plain—and the other lass was pretty.”

Rutledge asked, “Where is her archery set now?”

“Truthfully? I have no idea what became of it. Even if I did, I’d be mad to tell you, wouldn’t I?”

“What was Emma Mason to you, that you’d have killed for her?”

She looked at him pityingly. “What was Emma to me? A mirror of myself. Motherless. Her grandmother living in a world of pretense and denial. Only in my case, it was my father who couldn’t cope with the realities of life. My mother died in childbirth, and my father felt that God had cheated him. And so he drank himself into an early grave—the only reason he lived until I was twenty was an iron constitution that refused to give up as easily as he had.

Mrs. Ellison, on the other hand, saw in Emma a second chance. The perfect child who would make up for the loss of her daughter, one who wouldn’t fail her the way Beatrice had.”

“You’re very frank about your own life.”

“I’ve had to be. I grew up very quickly. It wasn’t pleasant, but I refused to let it break me the way it had my father.” She met his glance with her chin lifted, defiant.

Hamish said, “It didna’ break her, but the hurt went deep.”

“I was going to say,” Rutledge commented, “that you’re very frank. But was Emma as frank? Or did you read into her circumstances more than was there?”

“I didn’t read anything. I didn’t need to. Beatrice was amazingly pretty, and people made much of her, the way they do. She was talented as well—a wonderful pianist and a very accomplished watercolorist. She painted these—”

Grace Letteridge gestured to the watercolors on the wall.

“You’ve noticed them, I saw your eyes on them. She gave them to me, before she left Dudlington the first time. She didn’t want her mother to have them, because her mother was against Beatrice going to London to study art. She saw it as a waste. Women got married and had babies. That was their duty and their purpose. Accomplishments were fine, as long as they enhanced the bride price, so to speak. But a woman most certainly didn’t pursue a career among artists. Prostitution was only one step away, in Mrs. Ellison’s view.”

“But Beatrice Ellison married.”

“Yes, of course she did, but she made a poor choice. He wasn’t very good to her, and in the end, he left her with a child, no money, and no prospects. She had to swallow her pride and bring Emma here to live with her grandmother. I can understand why she didn’t want to stay in Dudlington herself, but she knew what her mother was like, and I consider it very selfish of her to abandon the child like that.”

She got up, restless, and went to the window to look out at the street. “She wouldn’t talk to me when she came home.

She was unhappy and unsettled. It was a difficult time. But Emma grew up to be prettier than her mother, and that was the trouble.”

“Trouble in what sense?”

“Everyone made over Beatrice,” she said, turning from the window. “But Emma had inherited her father’s charm, and there was something about her that attracted the wrong kind of attention. It wasn’t just old women cooing over her, it was men old enough to be her father or her grandfather watching her on the street, or stopping her to make comments. ‘That’s a pretty dress, young lady.’ Or ‘I like that hair ribbon. Did you know it was the color of your eyes?’ It made Emma uncomfortable, long before she was old enough to understand why.”

“Did you tell her grandmother what you’d observed?”

She laughed harshly. “She told me I was jealous of the attention being paid to Emma. And my father punished me for bearing tales. I was sent to bed without my dinner for a week. People see what they want to see—or expect to see.

So I took it on myself to be Emma’s protector, and I was hardly more than a child myself. It wasn’t a task I felt I could do, but I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.”

“And Emma accepted this—protection?”

She shrugged. “She appeared to be grateful for it. Or so she said. We more or less looked after each other.”

“How old are you?” Rutledge asked bluntly.

Grace Letteridge bristled. “It’s none of your business.”

But he thought he’d been wrong in his earlier estimate of her age. Young herself, vulnerable, and perhaps reading more into what she saw around her than was true, she might have made up the notion that Emma needed protection. It might, indeed, have been her own loneliness that made her seek out the younger child, and cling to her. Anything but coming home to a drunken father filled with his own misery.

“Why are you so certain that Constable Hensley killed Emma Mason?” he asked.

“He would stop and talk to her, tell her about London, and plays and concerts—which he’d probably never attended in his life—or describe an evening at the opera, watching the King and Queen step into the royal box, and how the Prince of Wales had spoken to him one morning as he rode his horse into the park. It was pathetic, an attempt to hold her attention, and he would lie in wait for her, ready with a new tale to spin, making London seem glorious, and she knew— she knew! —her mother lived there somewhere. I listened to her concocting schemes to go there as soon as the war ended, and find her mother and live in this fairy-tale world. He had no idea what harm he was doing, and it’s possible he wouldn’t have cared.”

“More a reason for you to kill him, than for him to kill Emma.”

“Ah, but what you don’t know is that Emma fell in love!

And that put a spoke in Constable Hensley’s wheel. I believe he killed her in a jealous rage.”

Try as he would, Grace Letteridge refused to tell him who it was that Emma had thought she was in love with.

“It doesn’t matter. He’s dead, anyway. In the war.”

But Rutledge could tell it did matter, a very great deal.

As he left, Hamish was pointing out that very likely Grace Letteridge had been in love with this man herself. It might explain why she went to London—leaving Emma to her own devices—and why she came home.

“I canna’ believe her father would let her go sae easily.

Unless he was dead in 1914.”

In 1914, Grace Letteridge couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Which would make her four and twenty now. And Emma would have been a very impressionable fourteen.

***

Rutledge walked to the churchyard, feeling the cold wind across his face as he reached the gate, and went inside to search the gravestones for Grace Letteridge’s father.

It was a wild-goose chase, trying to find one man amongst so many gravestones, most of them green with moss and overgrown with lichen. But a 1914 grave would still be raw enough.

What he found was unexpected. The young men of the village had not been brought home from France, but stones had been set in a garden for them, and the lonely rows of names struck him as sad and forgotten.

The cold wind had brought more rain in its wake. He stood there, looking at the line of empty graves, and felt a sadness that went deeper than his compassion for their deaths. It was what all of them, the living and the dead, had lost in four years of suffering.

Hamish was silent, for he too was only a marker in a lonely churchyard, his last resting place a muddy hole in France with none of the trappings of home to see him into a peaceful rest.

“There are poppies,” Hamish said finally. “They’ll grow again.”

Rutledge could see the poppies on the shell casings, and hear again the roar of a revolver shot over the sound of his heavy motor and the calls of the crows as they flew up, startled. The flight of the bullet, close enough for its breath to touch his face and its whine to be heard over all the other sounds, brought back more than the war, it brought back his willingness to die for what he’d done.

But not like this, not shot by someone who hid in the shadows, with no reality and no right to be his executioner.

It had all begun at Maryanne Browning’s house in London.

And it was time he went back to the beginning and found out what had gone wrong on the eve of a new year.

He could hear someone shouting and looked up, distracted from his thoughts.

Hamish said, “Yon rector.”

It was indeed Mr. Towson calling from the porch of his house, his voice thin in the rain and wind.

“You’ll take your death standing there, young man.

Come and have a cup of tea before I freeze to death just watching you.”