Rutledge had tried to shut out all feeling after Jean had walked out of his life in the spring of 1919. He hadn’t wanted to feel again. He didn’t want to feel anything now.

But he watched Meredith come to grips with what she had seen, and he wondered if she had wanted this man to be her husband. Or if he was. Either way, here was her chance for atonement.

After a time, she rose and walked toward him. There were no tears now, just the resolve he was dreading, and she said, “Will you take me back to the hospital now?”

It was too short a distance to say anything important, and so they walked in silence. When they reached the hospital with its frivolous roofline of chimneys, she asked that he carry her valise to the door. “They’ll find somewhere for me to stay. Close by. I can visit every day.”

He did as she asked, numbly, knowing he had already been shut out.

As he set the valise down with a click on the marble step, she said, “I’m so sorry. But this is something I have to do.” Her voice was steady, but only just. A little deeper in note as well, from the tears she was holding back.

“Duty is bitter company,” he said quietly.

“I don’t know how long he will live. Months. Years. But I’ll close the London house and live in Bruges for now.”

“Meredith—”

“I wish I had met you then. I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to marry without love.” She rose on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Good-bye, Ian.”

Someone opened the door, as if he or she had been waiting to admit Mrs. Channing. She stepped inside, and it swung shut again behind her.

He stood there for a moment longer, as if hoping she would change her mind. And then he went to the motorcar.

France was just miles away, and he knew where Hamish had died. His service revolver was in his valise.

It was time to end it.

Chapter 22

22

Rutledge crossed the frontier between France and Belgium and soon after found a deeply rutted road through devastated countryside that led in the direction of the River Somme, approaching it from what had been the German lines. The land was healing, after a fashion, grass and weeds struggling to reestablish themselves. Nature seemed to find a way to cover up the scars of tragedy. But men had marched down this road to kill other men, and the land was rough and desolate, as if no one cared to live here where so many had died. He couldn’t blame them. If ghosts walked anywhere, surely they did here, and he felt that nothing grown in such bloody soil would ever prosper again.