The Red Door

“If you’re looking for the others, they’re in the drawing room. I don’t know whether they’re leaving me alone to grieve or if they can’t bear my company.”

His voice was dispassionate, as if he had shut off his own feelings.

Rutledge said, “They’re still trying to come to terms with your brother’s death. And now this—”

He was interrupted by a knock at the door.

Teller said, “Tell them I’m not seeing anyone.”

But it was the rector, Mr. Stedley, who stuck his head around the door. “Walter? They told me you were in here.” He was tall and robust, with a deep voice. “I thought I should come. Mary is with Harry. There’s nothing I can do in that quarter at the moment.”

Walter, rising, said, “Ah, Stedley. Thank you for your care of Harry. It’s very kind of you and Mrs. Stedley to take him in. It’s been very difficult for all of us. And it will be hardest for him.”

“The question is, what can I do for you? Would you like me to go to Jenny and say a prayer?”

“I—yes, if you would. I’m sure she would have wanted that. She’s in the room where Harry was born.”

As the rector went up the stairs, Walter said, “It’s beginning. The flood of mourners. And each time I speak to them, her death becomes a little more real.”

“You must have seen death many times in your work abroad.”

Walter laughed without humor. “My first posting, I buried twelve people on my first day. A cholera epidemic. It was only the beginning. I should be accustomed to death. And then the war. I lost count of the number of men who died in my arms inside and outside the medical tents. Sometimes kneeling in the mud, sometimes watching shells scream over my head. Sometimes by a cot with bloody sheets, or in an ambulance, before the stretcher could even be lifted out. I was quite good at giving a dying man the comfort necessary to make the end easier. And all the while, I knew I was lying to them and to myself. I will say one thing for the King James version of the Bible, the words are sonorous and speak for themselves. All I had to do was remember my lines.”

Rutledge thought about the curate reading from the Psalms for Florence Teller’s service. He had seemed to speak from the heart.

“If those men were comforted, then it didn’t matter what you felt.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“There must have been rewarding moments in your mission work?”

“That too was a sham,” he answered tersely.

“But you spoke eloquently about fieldwork in your book. So I’m told.”

“That was worse than a sham, it was a fraud. But it bought me time. And that’s all that mattered.”

“Time for what?” Rutledge asked, but Teller ignored him.

“You have no conception of what Africa is like. There was a tribe on the far side of the river. Which was hardly more than a stream that fed into the Niger. Still, it kept them from our throats. We only had to guard the crossing. But then their crops failed in the rain. My God, I’d never seen so much rain! And then it was gone, the soil baked nearly to brick in days. I’d been frugal—thrifty. So they came for our crops, pitiful as they were. And I abandoned my flock. I stood in the pulpit and exhorted them to put their faith in a merciful and compassionate God, knowing all the while they’d be slaughtered. And I’d be dead with them if I stayed—the foreign priest who had lured them away from the old worship. I can still see their eyes, you know—looking up at me, believing me, putting their trust, their lives in my promise, and the next morning I was packed and walking out before first light. I dream of their eyes sometimes. Not the poor slaughtered bodies.”

Rutledge said nothing.

As if driven, Walter went on.

“And then there was Zanzibar. We’d had a disagreement with the bishop, and we thought we knew better how to deal with the Arabs. Better than he, surely? And instead we found ourselves charged with insubordination. Zanzibar is an island—have you ever been to a spice island? My God, pepper and mace and allspice, cloves and vanilla and nutmeg—you ride down a hot sunny stretch of road where they’re drying the cloves on bright cloths spread almost to your feet. Small brown spikes, thousands of them, like a carpet that moves with the wind. And vanilla pods—or tiny green seeds of pepper. Mace. That thin coating of a nutmeg is worth its weight in gold. Amazing place, and the sea so blue it hurts your eyes to look out across it. But the smell of slaves is there in the town as well. Misery and grief and pain and helpless anger. That’s Zanzibar as well.”

Hamish said, “You mustna’ let him finish.”

But Rutledge refused to halt the flow of this man’s confession. He could see how the soul of the man had been scoured to the bone.