only a grandfather and an aunt to care for me. I was the child of that love, but it didn’t matter enough to her to want to live. I never understood that. I still don’t. I didn’t want to die when Hamish did. I wonder, sometimes, if that meant I didn’t love him enough.” Her eyes searched Rutledge’s face, begging for reassurance.
“It isn’t a question of loving him enough. The man I knew in France wanted with all his heart to come home to you-”
He caught himself in time, before he’d destroyed the comforting lie of a hero’s death for King and Country. Clearing his throat, he said instead, “-and he’d have wanted you to live. Above all, he’d have wanted that.” For once he knew beyond question that he spoke for Hamish. “And if you lost your own mother when you were very young, you must see that it’s wrong to leave the boy unprotected, as you have.”
“You’ve told me yourself that I’d not be allowed to keep him!”
It was true. But he said, “You were wrong to allow yourself to be taken up on a charge of murder-wrong to allow the evidence to go on pointing to your guilt. Wrong to accept the fact that you will surely hang! There may come a time when the boy will need you and you won’t be there.”
Hamish cried out that it was wrong to use her own words to force her to surrender whatever truth she had hidden so long, so well.
She seemed fragile and alone in this ugly cell, but Rutledge did not make the mistake of underestimating her strength. She squared her shoulders with a courage he deeply admired and replied, “It must be a painful way to die. I’ve made myself try to imagine what it’s like-”
Harshly, caught up in his need to bring her to her senses while there was still time, while they were alone in this cell and there was no one to stop him, ignoring his own conscience hammering at him over the anguish of the voice at his shoulder, he said, “I’ve watched men hang. What happens to the body as you die is not something a woman would wish for herself.”
She had flinched as he spoke, and he instantly regretted the words, cursing himself. Wanting to recall them. But they seemed suspended like a wall of coldness in the air between them.
He took a single step forward, then stopped short, forbidden by who he was-and who she was-from offering any measure of comfort. “I’m sorry-”
She said only, “I won’t be alive to know, will I?”
But as he left the room, he could see the tears filling her eyes.
Charles Todd
Legacy of the Dead
13
Dodging a lorry, then a dog sniffing the pavement with intent interest, Rutledge walked back to the hotel. He encountered Oliver just coming out the door.
“Found McKinstry, did you?”
“Yes, thanks.” He was on the point of walking on, and realized all at once that Oliver had something he wanted to say. Rutledge stopped and waited.
Oliver looked over Rutledge’s shoulder at the square beyond, as if surveying his domain. “I’ve thought a good deal about our Eleanor Gray and what might have brought her to Scotland. The father of the child might have been a Scot. Women can be sentimental about such things as their time draws near, and she might have decided the child ought to be born here. Or perhaps it was the father’s last wish in his last letter. Who’s to say? But there’s our reason for coming north! Lady Maude’s daughter or not, she’s still a woman, and apt to go mawkish. Do you agree with me so far?”
Rutledge thought of Eleanor Gray, the suffragette chaining herself to fences and letting herself be dragged off to prison. “Mawkish” wasn’t a word he’d have chosen to describe her. Still, Oliver had a point to make. Rutledge nodded.
“Next question, then. What happened between crossing the border and meeting Fiona MacDonald, as she must have called herself then? Did our Miss Gray, for sake of argument, leave too late and never make it to her original destination? Women have been known to be wrong about their time!”
That was true. But Eleanor Gray had wanted to be a doctor. Would she have got it wrong?
“Yes, I can see the possibilities. That she felt ill and stopped for help. Or that something else had gone wrong with her plans.” He looked down at Oliver. “Glencoe isn’t necessarily where she died. If she is dead.”
“Oh, she’s dead, right enough. And those are her bones out there in the glen. Who would know better where to hide a victim than someone who’d grown up in the district? If I had a corpse on my hands, I’d take it to such a godforsaken place no one was likely to stumble over it until it was clean bones. And that’s just what the MacDonald woman did. The local police didn’t have any luck at all identifying the remains last year when they were discovered. If we hadn’t come along, she’d be without a name still.”
Hamish, angry, described Oliver’s ancestry and future destination in some detail. Highlanders were, as a general rule, creative in their cursing.
“A dangerous choice, wouldn’t you say?” Rutledge found himself defending Fiona MacDonald. “I’d have taken the body miles from where I lived.”
“How far could the accused go, burdened with a newborn child and a dead woman?” Oliver said thoughtfully. “Or turn it upside down-she might have felt a little safer with each passing year, when the body didn’t come to light and there was no hue and cry for a missing child. Knowing it was there, if she ever had to devise an account of finding the mother dead. But herself safely out of the picture here in Duncarrick, otherwise.”
Words that would come back to him later-but Rutledge said now, “No, I don’t see that. Why didn’t she tell you those clever lies when you first became suspicious of her?”
“Because she misjudged me. She thought we’d be satisfied tearing the inn apart and coming away empty- handed.” Oliver smiled. “She failed to see, didn’t she, that making a fool of me was a blunder! I’d stake my hope of promotion on that. And now all that’s left is to put a name to that corpse. Which is why you are here.” It was a friendly warning not to cross the lines into Oliver’s own patch. The smile faded. “If I were a vengeful man, now, I’d look forward to presenting the haughty Lady Maude with proof that her daughter is not only dead but bore a child out of wedlock to some unknown soldier. First time that’s happened in her family tree, I’ve no doubt.”
Rutledge ate a hurried lunch, then informed the woman at the hotel desk that he might be away for several nights but wished to keep his room.
Morag had seen to his laundry for him, but he had written a brief note to Frances in London asking her to send a larger case north. He handed that to the clerk to be mailed. It appeared that he was going to be in Scotland for some time. Like it or not. But he was damned if he’d go any farther north than the borders!
Heading west from Duncarrick and then bearing north, Rutledge made first for Lanark. There was no direct road to Brae. It was only a small village on the way to somewhere else. The browns and golds of September already colored the landscape. The open land, with few of the hedgerows that the English used to set off fields, had been made suitable for sheep rather than agriculture. The cramped and compact towns, so different from the picturesque villages farther south, seemed to be locked into a harder past. The people here, independent and far less class-conscious, shared a different history from the English, and it had marked them. Set me down on either side of the border, he told himself, and I would know instantly on what ground I stood, English or Scottish.
As Rutledge settled into the long drive, Hamish turned from his annoyance at Inspector Oliver’s obtuseness to his memories of Fiona MacDonald before the war. Rutledge tried not to heed them, but the words kept pushing aside his own thoughts.
They had known each other from childhood, Fiona and Hamish. She had been lively and intelligent even then, accustomed to games with her brothers and their friends, running barefoot in the summers, her long, dark hair and her skirts tangled with briars and straw. Her grandfather’s favorite, she had learned to read at an early age and to form her own opinions freely. As she grew into a woman of humor and warmth in the summer of 1914, Hamish MacLeod had asked her to marry him. Only he’d marched off to war within a matter of weeks, and in 1916 died in France, far away from Fiona and the Highlands, from everything he held dear.
Small wonder she’d been tempted to take a motherless child and love him as her own, to bring him up as she and Hamish might have brought up their brood. A legacy of the dead, a child with his name if not his blood.
