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I could take on a child of six in a brawl.”
    Fleming chuckled. “Nor should you. But that arm will be like new, once you begin using it. Never fear! Just don’t overdo it for the first few days—don’t carry anything heavy or push at anything that doesn’t want to budge. Again, a matter of prevention. I have found in twenty years of treating patients that Nature is a good doctor, too, given half a chance. The problem is, we seldom give her credit and therefore come to regret it.”
    It was, Rutledge knew, one of Fleming’s favorite homilies. “I’m off to Norwich. Which shouldn’t be strenuous.”
    “Cheating the ratepayer, are you? I’d take the train if I were you. Less demanding on the chest muscles than driving.”
    But Rutledge left London in his own motorcar, his claustrophobia still rampant. It was not possible for him to sit in a compartment jammed hip and knee into other travelers. The compulsion to stand and scream for air would be as violent as it was unreasonable.
    By the time he reached Norwich, his chest muscles were in open rebellion, Mother Nature urging them on. Hamish, worse than Dr. Fleming at pointing out Rutledge’s shortcomings, reminded him that he had made the drive against advice.
    As a compromise, Rutledge found a small hotel on the outskirts of town and stayed the night there, not prepared to face the traffic of Norwich at the end of the day.
    Hamish, who had alternately raged at him and baited him for miles of the way, was as tired as he was: The familiar voice was silent over dinner.
    Rutledge slept hard from fatigue. Hamish never followed him into sleep—the voice in his head lived in the waking mind, a bitter and hourly reminder of the bloody offensive in 1916 on the Somme, where so many men had died not by the hundreds or thousands but by the tens of thousands, their lives thrown away in wave after desperate wave of futile attacks. Where he himself had been buried in mud and saved from suffocation by the body pressing down on him. He’d been told over and over again that Corporal Hamish MacLeod had saved his life. But the blood caked like a second skin all over his face and hands had come from the English firing squad and the coup de grâce Rutledge had had to deliver personally in the instant before a direct hit had blown the salient to bits. Hamish hadn’t died from German fire, and Rutledge had been too shaken, too lost in the depths of shell shock to set the record straight: that Corporal MacLeod had been shot for refusing a direct order on the battlefield the night before that final dawn assault.
    The tangled skeins of truth and official reports had left Rutledge with silence, with memory, with a waking haunting that had nothing to do with ghosts. Only with the broken mind of a man who had been sent straight back into battle before he’d had any rest, or come to terms with his own deep sense of guilt for having to choose between one man’s life and the morale of the equally exhausted and dispirited soldiers who hadn’t refused the order to climb out of the trenches and fight again. And three years later, he still had not exorcised that guilt.
    It had become too deeply rooted in blood and bone and sinew, like a second self.
    Rutledge had tried over and over again to die during the last two years of the War, putting himself in the way of danger, courting the unholy bombardments that splintered the earth, daring the hidden machine-gun nests that raked No Man’s Land with lethal fire. Like a lover embracing a bloody mistress he had sought out any peril—and had come through unscathed.
    To find himself again and again hailed as a hero, because he seemed to have no fear of dying.
    It had been the bitterest irony.

CHAPTER 3
     
    THE FOLLOWING MORNING, RUTLEDGE FOUND HIS way through the busy streets of Norwich to the address he’d been given by Chief Superintendent Bowles. It was a small house near the new Catholic church, far older than the building in whose shadow it