seemed to have very little in common other than that. I thought perhaps Mrs. Cook had come from a wealthy home and had been given advantages that Fiona hadn’t. Which is not to say that Fiona was common. She was a most unusual girl, and I found her a very pleasant companion. Her grandfather had reared her extraordinarily well!”
“How long was Mrs. Cook here?”
“Seven months, I’d say. Then her husband was invalided home, and she went to London to be with him.”
“Fiona had been living here for some time before Mrs. Cook came?”
“Of course. Over a year. And if you’re asking me if they might have known each other before moving to Brae, I seriously doubt it. Fiona left only after she’d had word that her aunt was taken ill and couldn’t manage the inn on her own any longer. She cried when she left, and my children cried with her. I was not above crying myself! That’s why I didn’t ask her to work out her time.”
Not to work out her time -but Fiona had told her aunt that she must!
“How long after Mrs. Cook’s departure was that?”
“Three or four months, I’d say.”
Hamish pointed out that if Mrs. Cook had been expecting a child when she came to Brae, then she had had it alone and without Fiona’s help. Seven months and four months added up to eleven.
Nevertheless, Rutledge made a note of it. He said, “Did Mrs. Cook leave a forwarding address, do you know?”
“If she did, Fiona never said anything about it. Mary Kerr found a pair of gloves in the bedroom after her lodger had gone-they’d fallen under the bed. Mary wanted to send them along to her but didn’t have her direction.”
“Forgive me, but why do you think a woman of Mrs. Cook’s apparent position should wish to spend over half a year in Brae?”
Mrs. Davison smoothed the white tatted cover on the arm of her chair. “I wondered about that myself. Brae left her to herself. And I think that’s what she needed most. I wondered, once or twice, if she might be a married woman who’d had an affair and the man died. Time to heal, you see. Away from everyone who didn’t know and couldn’t understand.” She shrugged. “Perhaps that’s an overly romantic view of her. There could be any number of other reasons. Fiona gave no sign of missing her other than the occasional remark that anyone might make. When the cat had kittens, she said something like ‘Mrs. Cook told me once that she’d never had a cat or a dog of her own. It’s too bad she couldn’t have one of these.’ ”
Hamish said, “I canna’ see a child romping with a dog in Lady Maude’s house.” It was true…
Rutledge said, “Do you recall her first name? Her husband’s name?”
“I don’t think I ever heard her speak of him by name. It was usually ‘my husband.’ But her name was Maude. I thought it was rather pretty.”
A coincidence… it was a common English name.
“Did you say anything to Inspector Oliver about Mrs. Cook?”
“I saw no reason to. I told you, it wasn’t actually a friendship, it was simple loneliness. I don’t suppose they’d have spoken a dozen words to each other ordinarily! But the young women here in Brae had gone away to do war work, and the ones with children, like me, spent a rather dreary war. Fiona and Mrs. Cook, the outsiders, naturally were drawn together.”
“I’ve been trying to locate an Eleanor Gray in the hope that she might throw some light on Miss MacDonald’s situation. Has she visited Brae?”
Mrs. Davison shook her head. “We aren’t a crossroads here, though it may seem as if we are. There was never an Eleanor Gray here. I’d have known if there was.”
With Mrs. Davison’s permission, Rutledge sat at the rough kitchen table with the three children Fiona had cared for: a girl and two boys. The girl was shy, but the boys were eager to talk.
The picture they drew was of a young woman who could sit on the floor and play games with them, who read to them in the evening if they went to bed without fuss, and who knew the most fearsome tales of Highland feuds and battles.
“She spent a night once in a haunted house, and there was a man there who carried his head in his hands. Fiona saw him, plain as day!” the eldest boy told Rutledge with great relish. “He was a Campbell, killed by a MacLaren, and seeking revenge.” He launched into the details of the feud, but his mother, smiling, said, “Yes, that’s all very well, but I don’t think Mr. Rutledge has time for the whole story.”
He spent a quarter of an hour with the children and Mrs. Davison but came away with nothing more. He needed no further reminder from Hamish to pass on Fiona’s message to the children. The shy little girl smiled and said “Fiona” in a soft voice. “Is she coming back?”
Her mother looked over her head at Rutledge and replied, “Not for a while, dear.”
Mrs. Kerr, over sixty and showing her years, told him what she knew of Mrs. Cook, but there was nothing new in what she had to say.
As he got up to leave, Rutledge asked, “Did Mrs. Cook and Miss MacDonald seem to be close?”
“Not close, no. They’d walk in the evenings sometimes. That was all.”
“Where did they walk most often, do you know?”
“Mrs. Cook wasn’t country bred, so they didn’t go far. About the town, mostly, or in the churchyard. It’s protected from the wind, I suppose that’s why. I had the feeling that they both felt comfortable among the graves. Odd thing to say, I know, but there you are. As if they drew strength or peace or the like from the quiet there… Fiona, now, I knew she’d lost the man she was to marry-she told me once that he was buried in France. Mrs. Cook’s husband was at sea. But she never spoke much about herself. At first I put it down to being too good for the likes of us in Brae, then I saw that she was not one to talk. Some folks aren’t, are they? It’s what makes the world go ’round, differences.”
Rutledge crossed the street from Mrs. Kerr’s and walked as far as the small, ugly church. The early Victorian brick and stone mixture had not been successful, but it stood apart, among great old trees planted generations before for an older church. There were paths among the graves, white graveled ribbons through the green, hum- mocked grass. A number of bare plots spoke of recent burials, and he shivered, remembering his own dream.
He went through the gate and spent some time moving through the wilderness of stone, reading the inscription on first this one and then another.
Not far from the rear wall one headstone caught his eye. It was old, the dates smudged and barely discernible, but the name carved deeply into the gray face was quite legible.
Hamish MacLeod.
Not the man he’d killed-the dates were much older, a century or more older. But Rutledge found himself wondering as he stood there and looked down at it, if Fiona MacDonald had also known about it and in some way had taken comfort from it. A gravestone for a man who had none.
A place to sit on the weedy grass while she remembered a past that had no future. It must have offered consolation as well as privacy to mourn.
He had the oddest feeling that he was right.
But what name had Mrs. Cook found here if her husband was still alive? What memories had comforted her?
He walked through the stones again, searching. There were Campbells and Lindsays, MacBrays and MacDougals, a long list of Highland and Lowland names that had no special meaning to him. He found a Trevor, and thought of Ross, then moved on. Little and Elliot, Davison and Robson, Pringle and Taylor, Henderson and one Gray. Evelyn Gray. He had died as an infant.
It was Eleanor Gray’s father’s name-the man she had called father all her life.
Had she been closer to him than to her mother in spite of the fact that he wasn’t her natural father?
Girls were often attached to their fathers, and if Evelyn Gray had accepted her publicly as his daughter, he would have brought her up to the best of his ability. Even if he had not loved her for her own sake, he would have treated her well for King Edward’s sake. The men had been close friends.
And he might have been the only warmth in Eleanor’s life. Rutledge could not envision Lady Maude holding a squirming child in her lap to read it a story, as Fiona had done with her charges in the Davison household.
But then, he might be doing Lady Maude an injustice. He had met her after the quarrel with Eleanor. Her daughter’s refusal to acknowledge her duty to her blood and heritage had hurt deeply. There might have been a
