A Long Shadow Read Free Page A

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    It had been a visit intended to mend fences.
    Rutledge had last seen his godfather in September, just before Fiona and the child had come to stay with Trevor. He'd found it hard to face the young woman Hamish might have married, the woman whose name he'd spoken as he died. Harder still to greet her as a friend, when Rutledge knew himself to be responsible for Hamish MacLeod's death. It was a shadow that lay heavily between them, even though he'd never confessed the truth to her.
    Yet he'd told himself, as he had left behind the snowy fells of Westmorland barely three weeks ago, that perhaps the time had come to return to Scotland to face the tangle he'd made of his life and find a little peace. It had seemed possible then. A fair-haired woman in a wheelchair had made anything seem possible. Even confessing his nightmares to those who cared about him. Clearing his conscience so that he could feel something again besides despair.
    But his good intentions had been swept away by another letter that had arrived hard on the heels of the first. It had stripped away hope. Now he was glad not to travel north. Glad to be spared what would have been a futile errand. He'd convinced himself that love would make a difference. He'd have ended up making a great fool of himself instead.
    But such protests rang hollow in his ears, and all the while Hamish called him a coward.
    Even after Rutledge had retired, the soft Scots voice kept him awake, taunting and accusing by turns, raking up memories, driving him like a spur.
    He lay there, counting the hours as the clock struck each in turn, his thoughts shifting from one unsettling image to the next. A narrow track of road twisting through the heavy drifts. A child's face. A woman standing in the cold snow light of an open door, her hands on either side of the frame and the room behind her dark as the grave. The sound of a weapon being fired, so loud in the confines of the kitchen that it seemed to ring in his head even now.
    Shifting again, he tried to find a more comfortable position—a drowsiness that might lead to sleep.
    Instead he remembered Mrs. Channing's expression as she greeted him only hours earlier—that fleeting pity, a sense of understanding in her face, as if she'd read his thoughts.
    Or had known him somewhere before.
    France?
    He stared at the barely visible walls of his bedroom.
    Why had she reminded him so strongly of the war and the trenches? Or was it only that bloody shell casing he'd never taken out of his coat pocket?
    By the time he'd drifted into uneasy sleep, he began to dream of the war, as he so often did, jerking awake as the whistle blew to send his men over the top—he could smell the trenches, he could smell the cordite, the sour sweat of fear that bathed his men even in the cold air. He could feel the rough wood of the ladder, the terror of anticipation, waiting for the soft thunk! as a bullet hit its target and someone at his elbow went down. He could hear the yelling, the deafening sound of steady machine-gun fire as they walked out into the barren hell of No Man's Land, moving quickly toward the unseen enemy—
    And then he was truly awake, the noise and smells and drenching anguish of counting his dead fading into the darkness of the familiar room.
    His gaze fell on the second letter lying on his desk by the windows, the paper faintly white in the ambient light. He knew the words by heart, now.
    "Don't come back to Westmorland —"
    The desolation he'd felt when he first opened the single sheet swept him again.
    How do you learn to live again, he thought, where there is no hope, no warmth, no laughter?
    He lay there, trying not to think or dream or remember, until first light.
    Meredith Channing was also awake until dawn, her mind unwilling or unable to settle into peace.
    So that was Ian Rutledge, she thought, that tall, handsome, haunted man.
    Not at all what she'd expected. Maryanne Browning had said, discussing her guests each in turn, "He