Read Online The Walnut Tree by Charles Todd - Free Book Online Page B

with worry. Henri had managed to get a single torn and filthy letter through, sending it back with a wounded friend, but after that, silence. She too had heard nothing from Alain. She didn’t know whether to go on to the Loire or stay in Paris. But young Henri was thriving, and she wanted above everything for his father to come home and see him. Once, please, dear God, so that he would know . I could feel the anguish behind those lines.
    Was I promised to a living man? A ghost? My heart refused to believe that Alain was dead. I’d have known, I’d have felt something. Madeleine believed she would know instantly if anything happened to Henri. Would it be the same for me? Had Alain known I was in danger there on the Ypres road?
    Why did I feel nothing? Was it because I didn’t care enough? Or was he well, tired but alive.
    Because of my duties, I had had to remove Alain’s ring, but I wore it beneath my uniform on a gold chain. I touched it lightly from time to time, when I needed courage.
    Like everyone else, I carefully scanned the British casualty lists in the Times . It was depressing, reading the names of men I knew, men I’d laughed and danced and played tennis with, who had been friends since childhood, there amongst the killed, the wounded, the missing. But not the name I watched for. Captain Gilchrist.
    I told myself that I had every reason to be grateful to him. But why did I dream sometimes and see his face so clearly?
    There were no such lists in England for French casualties. I had to wait for news.
    Twice while taking a letter for France to the post office, I’d seen the same man I’d crossed paths with in Portsmouth—the one who had been seated next to me on the train—coming out, and each time he was carrying a parcel wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with string. The parcels were of different sizes, but so like the one I’d found in my valise in Calais that I felt a surge of suspicion. On the third occasion, I waited until he’d come out of the post office and walked on. Staying well behind him, I followed him through the London streets and waited at the corner when he went into a shop that specialized in old books and fine paintings.
    Had he been posting just such a parcel to London when I’d encountered him in Portsmouth after sending my telegram to Cornwall? And that was decidedly odd, because the train would have carried him and the parcel to London so much faster.
    When he came out of the shop—without the parcel—I waited until he had disappeared around the next corner and then went inside.
    The proprietor was a middle-aged man with a limp and heavy dark-framed glasses. He peered at me as I came through the door, and I greeted him with all the hauteur of my station, asking if he had any interesting paintings of Scotland that I might buy for my father’s birthday.
    He showed me several, fine paintings all of them, and I thought perhaps I’d been wrong about the man with the parcel. While pretending to decide whether I liked any of the paintings on offer, I noticed on the edge of his desk several tiny flecks of paint.
    Just like the ones I’d seen caught in my silk scarf when I’d searched my valise for the missing parcel.
    And in the dust bin behind his desk was a coil of string very like the one around my parcel.
    Had someone put that parcel in my valise while I was on the train to Calais—and then retrieved it in Calais while I was in the north helping with the wounded? But why?
    If the police had come through the train searching the luggage, perhaps that Highland painting would have aroused little suspicion in the hands of a Scotswoman. And then there were the flecks of paint. That ugly painting . . . had it been hastily overlaid on some more recognizable work? If not properly dried, it would flake. Had whatever was underneath it been looted from a house or museum in Belgium or northern France?
    I had no