Watchers of Time (33 page)

Inspector Blevins would be pleased if they were!

Rutledge sat down on the dusty floorboards, his elbows resting on his bent knees, and held the envelope upright between his spread feet.

There were no identifying marks—it hadn’t been mailed and there was no name on the outside.

As he opened the flap and looked in, Rutledge said “Ah!” in almost a sigh. A fat collection of cuttings met his eye. Drawing them out, careful not to lose one, he could already see that they were newspaper and magazine accounts of the sinking of a ship that was unsinkable.

Sorting through them at random, he noted that certain developments had been clipped together—the publicity over departure, the tragedy, the search for bodies, reports from Ireland, editorial reflections on the tragic loss of life, lists of the dead and missing, accounts of the ensuing inquiry—as if Father James had carefully cataloged each new addition to his accumulating data. In the margins were handwritten notes, referring the reader from one article to another.

Dr. Stephenson was right—this had all the hallmarks of an obsession, not a passing fancy. Too much work had been done to coordinate all the information. Photographs from news accounts ranged from smiling Society figures boarding the great liner to pitiable corpses lying in plain wooden coffins in Ireland, eyes half shut and faces flaccid.

It was, in all conscience, Rutledge thought, a gruesome collection.

He looked down into the trunk to see what else might have been stored there, then ran his fingers again through the oddments of belongings that had formed the bottom layer. A frame came to light, one edge caught in a knitted scarf. Rutledge retrieved it and turned it over.

A young woman standing beside a horse, her face bright in the sun, smiled up at him, her hair shiningly fair. Judging from the lovely hat in one hand and the stylishness of the dress she wore, she was well-to-do.

But who was she? Was this the photograph that Father James had left to May Trent? There was no resemblance between the two women. Nor was there any to Priscilla Connaught. Rutledge hadn’t met most of the other women in Osterley. Frederick Gifford’s dead wife? The doctor’s daughter? Someone from the priest’s youth?

“Look on the reverse,” Hamish suggested. And Rutledge took the back out of the frame to remove the photograph. There was a date:
10 July, 1911.
And he words, lightly inscribed, so as not to mar the face. Gratefully, V.

V. Victoria sprang to mind. It had been a popular girls’ name throughout the late Queen’s reign. As Mary was now, in honor of the present Queen. Vera? Vivian. Veronica. Virginia. Verity. Violet?

He ran out of possibilities.

Still, Blevins could perhaps help him there. Or Mrs. Wainer.

On the other hand—

Hamish said it for him. “I wouldna’ be in haste to show it.”

Getting to his feet, Rutledge found a flat leather case lying in a corner of the room, a coating of dust covering it, and a cobweb linking it to the frame of the bottomless chair beside it. The grip was broken at one end, but it would do.

Rutledge looked around him a last time at the “waste not, want not” philosophy of householders who store in their upper floors and attics the ruined furnishings and venerable treasures they couldn’t quite bring themselves to throw away.
In the event it’s ever needed.
And most of it lay there still, forgotten and unwanted, from generation to generation. Judging by the dust and cobwebs, even Mrs. Wainer seldom ventured up here. . . .

He wondered if Father James had kept that in mind when he stored the clippings and the photograph in his trunk. Or if that was where they were generally kept.

Rutledge shook the dust from the leather case, sneezing heavily, and discovered that there was a mouse hole in one corner of the leather. Human flotsam and jetsam, Hamish pointed out, sometimes served other creatures well.

Smiling at that, Rutledge set the cuttings and the photograph inside, closed the flap, and looked into the small trunk a last time—even stretching his fingers inside the torn corner of the lining on the right side—before deciding that he had the lot. He carefully repacked the clothing before going down the attic stairs.

When Rutledge walked through to the kitchen, the housekeeper was standing at the back door, in the midst of a lively conversation with the coal man. His apron, black with coal dust, matched the color of his eyes, and the bulbous nose matched the heavy chest that spread out from wide, muscular shoulders.

Rutledge’s tea was ready on a tray, the kettle steaming gently on top of the stove. An ironed, white serviette over a plate kept sliced sandwiches moist.

Hamish said, “If you didna’ stay, chances are, he will—”

And in the same instant, the coal man looked up with disappointment on his face as Rutledge stepped into the kitchen.

Rutledge said, “Mrs. Wainer, I’ve finished for the moment. I have a few papers here that I shall need to look over and return to you—”

“Papers?” She turned with some alarm, her eyes flying to the case he was carrying.

“Old cuttings, for the most part. Dated well before the War. I’ll just look through them before you box them up with the rest of Father James’s possessions. But you never know, do you, where something useful might turn up?”

She hesitated, clearly uncertain where her responsibility lay. Rutledge added, “They’re to do with shipping, not church business. Perhaps you’ve seen them on his desk. A hobby of his, was it? To study maritime affairs?” It was as far as he was willing to go, with the coal man unashamedly listening to every word.

“There was nothing like that in his desk,” she protested, but before she could ask to have a look at them the coal man stepped forward.

“Begging pardon, sir. Shipping, you said? Not that ship that sank back in ’12, was it?” His heavy hands, with coal dust thick in the cracks and creases, worked at his apron, as if not accustomed to speaking to his betters before spoken to.

“As I remember there was a reference to
Titanic,
” Rutledge replied guardedly. “Yes.”

“Then if I might offer a word, sir?” There was a diffident smile on his face. “My daughter, she’s got herself a fine situation in London. Father James—God rest his soul!—asked if she might do him a small favor, and he sent her twenty pounds to buy up all the London papers and cut out whatever there was about the ship’s sinking and the inquiry. He wanted every word she could find. And she must have sent him dozens of cuttings, sir, by post every week.”

Rutledge opened the case and pulled out the cuttings, laying them on the table and spreading them with one finger. “Like these?”

The coal man came closer, peering down his nose as if shortsighted. “Aye, I shouldn’t be at all surprised, though I never saw ’em. Jessie sent them straight to the rectory.” He paused, and when Rutledge didn’t move the cuttings, he added, “When t’other ship was torpedoed, that
Lusitania,
my daughter wrote him to ask if he wanted her to do the same again. But he thanked her and said he’d seen enough of tragedy. His very words.”

“And so it would be your guess, would it, that this was a passing fancy?”

“He never spoke to me about that ship!” Mrs. Wainer seemed hurt that she’d been left out of his confidence. “It was the talk of England, and I don’t remember he ever said anything more than what a pity it was.”

“But do you recall seeing the letters coming from London?”

“As a rule, Father James collected the post,” she explained. “But you’d have thought, if they were that important, he might have asked me to be on the lookout for them.” She peered down at the cuttings again. “I’d have put them in a scrapbook for him if he’d wanted me to. It’s just not like him not to say a word!”

“And no’ like him to lie to the doctor,” Hamish added, an echo of Rutledge’s own thought.

Turning to the coal man, Rutledge asked, “Did you ever tell anyone about the favor your daughter was doing for the priest?”

The jowly face flushed. “No, sir!”

“It would be natural—a matter of pride!”

“My work takes me into any number of houses, sir,” the coal man said with a certain dignity, “and I never gossip about one to t’other. Ask Mrs. Wainer if she’s ever heard me gossip!”

Mrs. Wainer shook her head. “No, he never does.”

Rutledge collected the cuttings once more and put them back in the case. “Thank you, Mrs. Wainer. You’ll have these papers back within the week. I shan’t have time for tea after all. Do you mind?”

She was still more than a little concerned about the papers, but said doubtfully, “If they’ll help in any way, sir, then by all means . . .”

Rutledge spent the next hour in his room, going through the yellowing cuttings. They were dated in an untrained hand, with the name of the newspaper or magazine written underneath. The coal man’s daughter? Another—the priest’s?—had underlined names of passengers, marking each with an S noting survivors, an X noting the recovered and identified dead, and an
M
for known missing. This was a sad and depressing list, but those who had not been recovered were sometimes mentioned by name—the wealthy, the powerful, the famous. There were hundreds with no grave but the sea and no one to ask about them— or grieve for them. Whole families lost together.

Which was, in a sense, more haunting, but at the same time perhaps, kinder.

Rutledge put the cuttings aside for a moment and stood by his windows looking out at the marshes. He glimpsed Peter Henderson walking along the quay, head down, shoulders hunched, and wondered if the man had a home to go to. And then recalled that his family had cut him off. Where then did he live?

His mind on the clippings again, Rutledge felt a sadness that came from touching the tragedy of others. One could claim that it was fate, the invincible weight of the iceberg and the unsinkable ship colliding on a cold night in the North Atlantic, where there should have been no such danger at that time of the year. Who chose those who would live, and who would die? Was that what disturbed the priest? That so many could simply be left to freeze and drown in the sea by an omniscient and all-powerful God? There were 1,513 known to be dead. . . .

Or was it far more personal than an exercise in the definition of God?

He went back to work, rubbing his shoulders as he concentrated on the cuttings, looking for a clue.

And in the end, he found not what he was looking for, but what he had not expected to see in these articles.

The name of Marianna Trent . . .

She had been dragged into one of the lifeboats, unconscious from a blow to the head. A blessing perhaps, with fractured ribs and a broken leg. Speculation was that she’d been struck by another boat while floating in the water. A sensation at first, for she had no name, and later of no interest to journalists hungry for fresh news. She must have remained in hospital in Ireland for some time, because there was a small cutting dated three weeks after the disaster, relating that this woman had been released and was returning to England, her leg still in a cast but healed sufficiently to travel. The article also contained a small and telling final paragraph.

“Miss Trent, whom the doctors have pronounced fully
recovered, has no memory of the tragedy, but says that she
dreams at night about falling into black water. When interviewed by the shipping authorities, she could provide no
new information about the collision or the subsequent actions of officers or passengers to save the doomed ship.”

How well, Hamish asked with interest, did Father James know this woman before she came to Osterley?
Titanic
went down in April 1912—

It was, Rutledge thought, a question to pursue.

In the end, Rutledge went not to Inspector Blevins but to the Vicar of Holy Trinity as the most likely person to give him the truth.

Mr. Sims had been sitting in his study, working on his sermon for the coming Sunday service, and he led Rutledge to the cluttered, book-filled room with the air of a man just released from prison.

“You’d think,” he said ruefully, “that for a man of the Cloth, divine inspiration would pour forth like water from a holy spring. I’ve agonized over this week’s message for hours and still have no idea what I’m trying to say.”

He looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept, shadows emphasizing the blueness of his eyes.

“How is the painting coming?” Rutledge asked, for the smell of wet paint was still pervasive.

“With greater speed than my persuasive powers. My sister is wary about changing schools this far into the year. Her children are sad to leave their friends. Her own friends are asking her if she’d be happy here in the Broads. I have run out of words for
her,
too.” The last was said on a sigh.

When they were seated in the study, with its dark paneling and almost grimly Victorian austerity, Hamish said, “This is no’ a place of inspiration!”

Rutledge had to agree. The gargoyles that surmounted the hearth, and the agony-stricken caryatids that supported it, two well-muscled monsters with their mouths twisted open with effort, were depressingly vivid.

Catching his expression as he glanced at them, Sims smiled. “I find this room most useful when I’m discussing appropriate behavior in church with small boys. They can’t take their eyes off the figures, and it drives home my message quite well.”