Read Online A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd - Free Book Online Page B

silence, and I tried to tell myself that I had faithfully kept my promise. There was, after all, nothing more I could do or say. And if Arthur had trusted his brother, I must believe he knew he could.
    Then why did I have this feeling that treating Arthur’s last wishes with the greatest respect wasn’t the same as promising to carry them out?
    I could almost hear the Colonel Sahib’s voice: Walk away, Bess. If Arthur had wanted more from you, he’d have told you more.
    The question really was, would Arthur have felt satisfied?
    Well, to be fair, it was possible that Jonathan Graham knew what it was Arthur wanted but not how to go about it. After all, he’d had only a matter of minutes to digest my message.
    Who are you to talk? my conscience demanded. After leaving your duty to the eleventh hour. What would you have done, my lass, if Lieutenant Graham had died of his own wounds?
    I sighed as we walked through the door and would have liked to go directly to my room for a bit.
    But Mrs. Graham was standing there waiting for us, as if she’d watched our progress from a window, and she rushed me into the sitting room the instant I’d handed my cloak over to Susan.
    “You must be freezing, my child. Come and sit by the fire. Would you like something warm to drink?”
    “No, I’m fine, Mrs. Graham, thank you.”
    “You saw the memorial?”
    “It was—touching,” I said, trying to think how to answer.
    “Yes. I think he’d have been glad of it.”
    Jonathan had gone to some other part of the house, and I wondered if he would tell his mother any or all of that message. Or what he would tell her. I was just grateful now that she hadn’t brought up the subject again.
    After lunch, she asked if I’d care to walk around the village. “For the sun is stronger now, and it will be more comfortable.”
    It was the last thing I wanted. The cold, after the Mediterranean Sea, was penetrating. My arm preferred to sit by the fire. But I smiled and said that I would, and she sent me up for my coat.
    Muffled once more in scarf and gloves, I followed her down the lane and into the churchyard. I thought at first she was going to take me back to see the memorial.
    Instead we walked a little way among the gravestones, and I could admire the lovely mellowed stone of the church above us. Itsair of age was comforting, like an anchor—or a rock—that spoke of centuries past and centuries to come.
    Neither of us mentioned the raw graves marking where men had come home to die. Arthur might have been among them, if his leg had waited another few weeks to turn septic.
    In the sea there were no markers for the dead. No place in the deep to mourn, no place to leave flowers. Just degrees of latitude and longitude on a chart.
    Mrs. Graham nodded toward the rectory. “We have a new rector now. And a new doctor. Times are changing. But then nothing stays the same forever, does it? Even one’s children grow up and go off to die.”
    “You’re worried for Jonathan,” I said.
    “Dr. Philips tells me the bandages will be off in another fortnight. After that, it will be a matter of days before his orders come.” I could hear the pain in her voice and for once was thankful that my own mother had not had a son.
    “They’re in desperate need of men,” I said.
    It was not what she wanted to hear.
    She gave me a sharp glance and didn’t answer. We walked on down the street, where brick houses lined the road. One of them, set back a little, was covered in what would be honeysuckle and roses in summer. Their bare branches arched across the front of the house, trembling in the wind.
    Mrs. Graham caught the direction of my interest and said, “That’s the doctor’s surgery. And just down there is the house that Arthur would have had, if he’d lived. It’s part of our property, going to the eldest son on his marriage. There’s a caretaker now, one of my school friends who fled London at the start of the war. She was that certain the Kaiser