Legacy of the Dead (11 page)

A frail strand of hope—

Hamish must have written to her about his commanding officer and what Rutledge had done in civilian life. And Rutledge had written to her, too, giving her the news of Hamish’s death, offering empty platitudes of sympathy and concern: “He spoke of you often. You were his bulwark and shield throughout the fighting, and he would have wanted you to know how bravely he died for his country—”

She had believed the comforting lies. She had cherished them—

He added quickly, “No one told me—the Yard, you see, didn’t know who you were. My superior was concerned with the Gray family.”

“Would you have come—if you’d known?”

He didn’t answer that directly. He said, “It wouldn’t have been my choice—to come or not. It has to do with protocol, not personal decisions.”

“I still have your letter,” she told him. “Did
he
write, before the end?”

Hamish had written a letter that last night, but afterward it had been stained with his blood and with Rutledge’s. The Army had not seen fit to send it. Someone had told Rutledge as much a month or more later.

Heavy censorship kept the people at home ignorant of the suffering and despair in France. The expectation was that loved ones would offer encouragement and hope to the brave men they’d sent off to battle, and bolster their courage—if they didn’t know the truth. The men themselves wrote home what they thought their families could bear to hear. It was a vicious circle of lies that was classified as military necessity: “Good for morale.”

In that last letter, had Hamish told the woman he loved so deeply the truth about his death? Or had he told her sweet lies that would prepare her for the news that would be brought to her? A condemned man was not always circumspect. He wrote what he felt and believed in in those last dark hours. And Hamish had been torn apart—he had wanted to die, before he was forced to lead more men back into the face of certain death.

Rutledge said, “Our sector was heavily shelled. Letters and the like are hard to find in the mud, afterward.” He didn’t add that buried men disappeared in the stinking black depths as well, eaten by rats, used as lumber underfoot until someone could retrieve the decaying corpses.

Rains that last autumn had brought to light a private from Skye, listed as missing for weeks. Even the dogs hadn’t found him. As the water sloshed thickly about the trench, something had tripped up a sergeant, sending him cursing and sprawling. As he got dripping to his feet, he reached out for what he thought was a piece of shell and realized too late that it was a shoulder blade. The rest of the rotting corpse had come up bit by bit, like an overdone chicken falling off the bone. The smell had been unbearable. But they had had to stand there in the snaking line of the trenches for another thirty-six hours before they were relieved.

Rutledge could hardly tell Fiona MacDonald the truth. His letter to her, as Hamish’s commanding officer—like so many others—had been a tissue of lies devised to comfort and to heal and to offer pride of sacrifice in the place of loss. A tissue of lies . . . They had come back now to shame him.

He could feel Hamish’s anger, could feel the torment he carried within himself, like a second soul.

“My son is named for you,” she said into the silence. “Have they told you? Ian Hamish MacLeod. Hamish would have liked that. He spoke so warmly of you—he admired you.”

Rutledge, his mind reeling, heard Hamish cry out. The words were lost, but he thought for an instant that she had surely heard the voice and recognized it. The strength of it was echoing off the walls around them.

“What’s wrong?” She stepped forward, reaching out to touch him. “Are you ill again? Yesterday, I thought—”

“No.” It was curt, an effort of will without embellishment. In the silence he could hear her quick breathing and the
chunk
of the cleaning woman’s brush scrubbing outside the door. His heart pounded in his ears. With fierce determination, he got a grip on himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I try not to remember the war.”

And Hamish said quite clearly, “You remember it every hour of every day. You always will. It’s the cost of surviving.”

And it was true.

“I CAME TO
talk to you about the child’s mother.”

Rutledge picked up the thread of what he’d come to say, forcing himself to shut out everything else. Neither Fiona nor he could afford to lose track of the police inquiry again. “You must surely see that you are condemning yourself by refusing to give the authorities any information about her. If she’s dead, explaining why and how she died can save your life.”

“The police said that to me. How can they know? What if I tell them I choked the life out of her? Or pushed her out a window? Or gave her a drink that muddled her wits and left her to die in the cold?”

“Did you do these things?”

“No!” she cried. “If I had, how could I have loved the child so deeply? Every time I look into his eyes, I see his mother’s face. How could I hold him and remember
her
dying by my hand? She trusted me with the most precious thing in the world to her. You went to war,” she went on, tears filling her eyes, “and you suffered horribly. But do you
ever
think about what it must be like for
us
to love a man who will never come back, never give us the children we might have borne, never hold us in the night, never watch our sons and our daughters marry? Never carry a grandchild in our arms or grow old together? Do you know what it is like to want someone so terribly that you ache, and dream, and wake up to find that it’s over?” The tears fell and she brushed them away angrily.
“I have given this country my
future too.
And all that was left to me, another woman’s child, you’ve taken as well.”

It seemed to be an admission that the woman was dead. But as he looked into the dark eyes and saw the anguish there, he read something else too—fear. Not for herself, he was sure it wasn’t that. Nor was it guilt.

He struggled to concentrate, called on his intuition to bridge the gap between what he had seen—and what it meant.

Silence came back to him. Nothing but silence. And then—

The woman, he realized suddenly, must still be
alive.
The child’s mother. And for some reason, even to save her own life, Fiona MacDonald dared not name her.

11

LOCKING THE CELL BEHIND HIM, RUTLEDGE STRODE
past the woman collecting her brushes in the emptied pail and went out into the main room, where Constable Pringle sat reading through a stack of reports. He looked up as Rutledge handed him the key ring.

“All settled, then?” he asked.

“For the time being,” Rutledge answered.

He thanked the man and went out into the street. The day was fine, and there were people everywhere, attending to whatever business brought them out on a fair morning. Carts and wagons and lorries vied with motorcars for space on the roadway, and he heard a vendor shouting as a passing horse snatched at an apple from the baskets piled high on a trundle. Rutledge felt alone.

Hamish railed on in wild fury, begging, cajoling, pleading for Fiona, obsessed with what had been done to her. And helpless to change it.

As the warmth of the sun touched his face, Rutledge took a deep breath, willing the tension to subside, willing Hamish into silence, closing his mind to the harshly sharp image of the woman he’d left in the comparative darkness of the small room at the back of the police station. Walking helped, each stride seeming to keep pace with the rhythm of Hamish’s voice, forcing it to remain just out of sight behind him.

What had appeared to be a search for Eleanor Gray had become a complex confrontation with the past and a young woman who might be cleared—or damned—by what Scotland Yard found out about both women.

It was a grave responsibility. It was also a professional conflict.

Rutledge turned toward the hotel, seeking sanctuary without realizing it, seeking the peace and quiet to think. Everything he’d learned here had changed its shape, throwing evidence and emotion and belief into a maelstrom of doubt. And then something Hamish was saying caught at his attention. He found himself listening now.

“It began as a moral issue,” Hamish told him. “That’s what you told yon constable. And who better to ask than the man who didna’ ken what to do about it?”

Mr. Elliot. The minister.

Rutledge reached the main square and went away from the hotel toward the church rising tall and dark from the pavement. Bare of ornament, it seemed to thrust heavily toward the sky, built by men who found in their faith a strong and abiding force but very little beauty. There was no churchyard here, but he thought it must lie behind the building. He’d noticed a wedge of green grass surrounded by a low wall of the same stone as the church, broaching on the street behind. And when he came to the corner of the church, he realized he was right. Headstones marched in tidy rows almost to the apse.

He paused to read the board by the main doors and at the same time saw the small wooden sign on the Victorian house just beyond the church. “Pastor” was written there in Gothic lettering.

He walked on and knocked at the house door. A woman opened it to him. She was young and frail, but she answered briskly enough, “Yes, sir?”

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Elliot if I may. Is he in?”

“He’s just come back from the kirk,” she replied. “Step in and I’ll ask if he’s receiving visitors just now. May I give him your name?”

“Rutledge.”

“Thank you, sir.” He could almost hear her mentally adding,
You must be the policeman from London.
She disappeared down a dark passage, the wood paneling there and where he stood in the high-ceilinged hall bare of decoration but highly polished. It offered a modicum of brightness in the general gloom. The only portrait was a formidable man with a graying patriarchal beard, wearing the garb of a churchman of two hundred years or more before. The eyes were dark and very stern, but the mouth was soft, almost gentle. A face that offered both judgment and compassion.

From down the passage Rutledge heard a light knock, and a door opened. After a moment, the young woman returned.

“Come this way, sir, if you please.” She led him toward the back of the house, where he found himself in a large room so crowded with furnishings and shelves of books that it seemed on the brink of collapsing in upon itself.

The man at the cluttered desk was of medium height and build, but he possessed a hatchet nose and the eyes of a fanatic—hot with the belief that he had answers to whatever questions confronted his flock. He was stony-faced, but the eyes were alive with his righteousness. Hamish, a Calvinist to the core, muttered, “He’d burn heretics at the stake if he could. . . .” And there was no praise in the words, only warning.

Elliot held out his hand to Rutledge but didn’t rise. Rutledge took the dry, stiff fingers and shook them briefly.

“What may I do for you, Inspector?”

“I’ve been sent to Scotland to look into this business of the woman who called herself Mrs. MacLeod,” he began easily. “The child’s true mother may have been English.”

“I see.” Elliot frowned. “It could be possible. Yes.”

“Miss MacDonald, I understand, attended services in your church. Have you visited her since her arrest? As her pastor?”

“Only once.” His eyes moved around the room. “Nor has she asked for my counsel and guidance since.”

“Surely even she is worth saving?” Rutledge spoke quietly.

The fierce pale blue eyes came back to Rutledge’s face. “Redemption is not granted. It is earned. She refuses to confess her sins.”

Plural. “Sins?”

“They are many. Arrogance. Pride. Wantonness—”

It was noticeable that murder was not listed among them. Hamish pointed that out, growling. He had taken an instant dislike to the minister. Rutledge made an effort to maintain his own objectivity. But he found himself thinking that this man had used the anonymous letters to punish the recipient, not the sender. Which seemed an odd choice for a man of God . . .

“If the child is not hers, how can she be accused of wanton behavior?”

“I have watched a man sink to his knees and beg God’s forgiveness for the desire she had aroused in him, and agonize over his soul’s danger. He is a decent man, and he cannot bear the guilt.”

“Surely that is his sin to expiate, not hers.”

Elliot smiled coldly. “Women have always been temptresses. Adam ate the apple at Eve’s behest. He fell from grace with God, and our own Savior came to redeem that mortal sin. Redeem it on the cross with His flesh. Fiona MacDonald is a weak vessel. The spirit does not move in her. Such women are to be pitied.”

“From what I hear, no one has accused Miss MacDonald of being a poor mother. She loves the child she called her son.” He found he couldn’t speak the boy’s name.

“All the more reason to keep the lad from her. A God-fearing family will soon wipe away all memory of her and bring him up as he should be brought up. She has no claim upon him, after all.”

“Do you believe she’s guilty of the charges brought against her?”

“Oh, yes. Beyond any question.” Elliot rubbed his chin. “I have seen the faces of my flock turn against her. One by one. It is a judgment.”

“Then she will surely hang.”

Elliot looked him up and down. “Very likely. Why are you convinced of her innocence?”

Startled, Rutledge said, “Am I?”

“Oh, yes,” Elliot said again, steepling his fingers. “I haven’t been pastor of my flock these thirty-two years without learning how to read the men and women who come to stand before me. You are a guilt-ridden man, haunted by the war. And you believe you have seen the face of evil on the battlefield and learned to recognize it. Have you, indeed! You watched
bodies
shatter and minds breaking, in France. But I have watched souls destroyed.”

Rutledge unexpectedly found himself remembering Cornwall, and Olivia Marlowe. “It must be far worse, in its fashion,” he agreed evenly. “But since I am not God, I don’t presume to judge my fellow human beings. I want to find out the truth about Fiona MacDonald. It’s my duty as a policeman. To her. To you. To society.”

“Examine your own motives first, Inspector, and the truth will become clear. Wishful thinking is not the truth. Be careful that your own loneliness does not become a trap of error.”

Rutledge could hear Hamish, a rumble of hostility. Whether against him or against Elliot, it was hard to say. He said, in response to Hamish,
I see her as you saw her—

Aloud he said carefully, “We’ve wandered from the purpose of this conversation. I’m here to ask if you can give me any information about the accused that will help me find the boy’s mother.”

“The boy’s mother is dead. Otherwise she would have come forward to take her child. There has been widespread publicity. By now she would surely have come.”

“What if—for very good reasons—she can’t step forward?”

Elliot picked up a book and put it down again, signaling that the interview was over. “Then she is an unnatural mother. A tigress will defy death for her young. No, I am satisfied beyond a shadow of a doubt that the poor woman died at Fiona MacDonald’s hands, giving her son life. May God rest her soul!”

AS THE YOUNG
woman—the housekeeper, he thought— saw him to the door, Rutledge paused on the threshold and asked, “Do you know Fiona MacDonald?”

She hesitated, casting an eye uneasily over her shoulder and down the passage before saying, “Yes, indeed. She and Miss MacCallum—her aunt—were very good to me when I was ill. It was—I nearly died. Fiona sat beside me and held my hand through the night, until I was out of danger the next morning.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask what she had been ill of. But the pleading look in her eyes stopped him. She had taken her courage in both hands to put in a good word for the accused—a kindness for a kindness.

“Do you know her—um—child?”

“Oh, indeed. Such a pretty lad! And well-mannered. I worry what’s to become of Ian now. But no one will tell me.”

“He’ll be well cared for. I’ll see to that.” The words came out of their own volition. He hadn’t meant to say them.

Hamish growled something that Rutledge didn’t catch. He let it go.

“I’d like to think so. Such a shame that Miss MacCallum isn’t alive. She’d have set this all to rights. She was that sort of person. It was Miss MacCallum who found this position for me. Mr. Elliot’s housekeeper had died of pleurisy.”

Rutledge would have liked to ask Hamish about Ealasaid MacCallum. But there had been no mention of her the long night that he and the condemned man had spent talking in the guttering light of a candle.

“Is Mr. Elliot a good man to work for?” Rutledge asked instead, curious.

The young woman’s face flushed blotchily. “He does God’s work. I try to be as quiet as I can. But I’m sometimes clumsy and in the way.”

Which no doubt meant that Elliot was a demanding bastard on his own turf and made her life wretched. Rutledge found Hamish agreeing to that. Hamish, apparently, had seen very little to approve of in the minister.

“Do you live here?” Rutledge asked, concerned for her.

“That wouldn’t be fitting! Mr. Elliot is a widower. I have a room at the top of the road there, above the milliner’s shop. Miss Tait offered it to me.” She pointed with a small, thin finger.

“Were you surprised when the rumors began about Miss MacDonald?”

“I never was told them,” she said naively. “Not until much later. People don’t confide in me, not often.”

No, this writer of poisonous letters appeared to have chosen each recipient with an eye to inflicting the most damage on Fiona MacDonald’s reputation. The thin, frightened housekeeper to the minister was not likely to sway the citizens of Duncarrick with her views on any subject.

“Thank you—I’m afraid I don’t know your name . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

“Dorothea MacIntyre, sir,” she told him shyly. “Will that be all, sir?”

“Yes. If—er—Mr. Elliot should ask, I wanted to know only if you’d received one of the letters.”

“I’m grateful, sir!” She closed the door softly behind him as he stepped out into the street. The sacrificial lamb, he thought. Too poor to be anything but dependent on the generosity of others, afraid of her shadow, and well aware of her duty, having had a lifetime of charity to teach it to her.

RUTLEDGE WENT BACK
the way he’d come, passed The Ballantyne without stopping, and searched out the milliner’s shop he’d seen the day before. Where Dorothea MacIntyre lived.

A silver bell rang genteelly as he opened the door. The woman arranging hats on a stand in the back looked up, then walked briskly to meet him. “May I help you, sir?” She cast a swift glance over her merchandise, and then waited with folded hands for him to speak.

It was a woman’s shop, intimate and yet vividly decorated with almost Parisian flair, oddly out of tune with Duncarrick. Orange and peach and shades of lavender, with a strong pink thread drawing it all together.

Hamish said, “I’d no’ like to hear what Mr. Elliot thinks o’ the colors.” He himself seemed to be of two minds about them.

The shop carried lace collars, gloves in kid or cotton, stockings, some twenty or so hats in every style from drab to elegant, handkerchiefs with dainty edging, shirtwaists, and what Rutledge took to be undergarments, discreetly folded into brightly painted boxes set along one wall.

The woman herself, tall and boldly attractive, seemed the antithesis of Dorothea MacIntyre. Rutledge wondered if Ealasaid MacCallum might have found a haven here for the girl, someone who would play dragon at the gate.