to pry here, police business or not.
Ignoring Hamish’s irritation, he went through the drawers of the chest, found them neat and orderly, then looked at the back of each. Nothing.
Behind a curtain, clothes had been hung on a wire, and there was a pair of shelves for hats and shoes, but nothing of interest. A sweet perfume followed him as he let the curtain drop. Then he lifted it again, remembering another time and another place. He examined the shelves closely and found nothing. But a floorboard had moved as he stepped deeper into the small space, which was no larger than a cupboard.
Squatting on his heels, he examined the board and found that it was not loose. But the baseboard behind it, he thought, might be. He took out his pocketknife and, finding a seam, tried to pry out the board.
It didn’t come. It was firmly nailed in place, and it had been imagination that had made it appear loose. Wishful thinking.
He moved through the room, searching the dressing table next, then pulled out the bed, which stood against the wall that formed part of the stairs on its other side.
The baseboard here was indeed loose. Eight inches or more yielded to his questing fingers as he worked his knife into the seam.
He stood up quickly as he heard McKinstry come down the passage from the boy’s room beyond.
“Nothing, sir. I’ve looked at every possible place she might have hidden something. Where else should I try?”
“Where did she do the inn’s accounts? Is there an office in the inn proper?”
“Yes, sir, behind the bar. It isn’t an office in the true sense-more a small cubby that has a curtain across it. She kept her account books there.”
“Then you begin with that area. I’ll just finish here and join you when I’ve satisfied myself I’ve looked everywhere.”
McKinstry nodded, and there was a glint in his eye, as if he was glad that nothing had turned up.
But it should have-Fiona had had warning enough to hide private papers from the police, but would she have risked the child’s safety by destroying them?
When the constable’s footsteps had reached the bottom of the stairs, Rutledge waited for them to fade along the lower passage, then turned back to his own find.
Squatting on his heels again to reach into the dark and dusty hole, he nearly leapt out of his skin when the cat brushed against his leg. She started away in alarm, then came again for petting. He rubbed her ears and soft throat, then gently pushed her aside.
From the hole he brought a box, tin, he thought, and no more than ten by eight by six inches in size.
There were letters in it, the deed to the inn, several old envelopes of papers that seemed to go back in time to Miss MacCallum’s father, and a collection of odds and ends that must have been considered family treasures-a man’s pocketknife made of stag’s horn, a pocket watch that had an elegantly engraved case bearing the name MacCallum, a pair of ivory crocheting hooks with a matching ivory thimble, and a little medicine flask made of silver with a fine engraving of the Tollbooth in Edinburgh. And a letter bearing Rutledge’s own handwriting. The letter he had sent from France to a grieving young woman who had just learned that the man she loved was dead.
He could hear Hamish lamenting in his ear, anguish clear in the soft Highland voice.
“It had to be written,” Rutledge told him. “It was kinder than hearing from the Army what had become of you.”
“And none of it would ha’ happened if we’d no’ been so tired and afraid…”
“No. It had to be done. It was done. I had no choice.”
“Aye, it must seem that way now. In the safety of a house that was never bombarded for days at a time!”
“You chose to die,” Rutledge reminded him, but knew even as he said the words that they were a lie. None of them had chosen to die-though he had tried in the months afterward to put himself in the way of a German shell or machine gunner’s sights. They had all wanted to live and come home…
He took each of the other letters out of their envelopes and scanned them quickly. The first came from Fiona, carrying the news that her grandfather had died. The next was also to Ealasaid MacCallum with word of the death of Fiona’s brothers. After that, Fiona had written to tell her aunt about her position in Brae, describing the Davison family and how different the countryside around Glasgow was from the beauties of the mountains to the north.
I will be happier here, she wrote. It is not as lonely, and these people are wonderfully kind to me. The children are a delight…
But the following letter was very different. It read:
I have sad news to tell you, dear aunt. I’ve lost Hamish. He died in the Somme offensive, like so many others. I have just had word. I still don’t believe it. It seems that if I wait long enough, he will come through the door and take me in his arms again. I lay awake last night, praying that it was no more than a dream, but this morning the letter was still beside my bed. I can’t cry, I can’t feel, I don’t know what to do. The minister here has come to offer comfort and Mrs. Davison has been kindness itself. I ache so, I want to die, but I have every reason to live. When Hamish was home last, we were wed in secret. And I am now carrying his child. It will be born in the autumn, and it will never know its father. But I will have a part of him to hold and love-a living memory of the man I married. I hope you will rejoice for me- and not feel that it is sad to be alone. I am not alone now, and I never will be again…
Rutledge folded the page gently and put it back in its envelope without finishing it. He had seen all that he needed to see.
She had told her aunt that she was carrying a child-but he knew for a certainty that Hamish MacLeod had never been home that terrible year to father it. And it was not until Hamish was dead that she had admitted to it.
In ordinary circumstances, this could have meant that Hamish was not the father. That she was trying to pass off another man’s child as his. But these were not ordinary circumstances. The night Fiona had lain awake praying the news was a dream, she had also made some very important decisions.
One of them was to tell her aunt that a child was to be born in the autumn.
A cursory reading of the remaining letters satisfied him that they held no secrets. Only the words of a young woman describing her pregnancy as it progressed. How had Fiona MacDonald known the feelings and the emotions and the sickness that a woman in her condition should have experienced?
Because the real mother had told her-and Fiona had carefully written it all down.
Was it from Maude Cook that Fiona had learned such things? Or-had she cleverly asked Mrs. Davison about her own confinements and what it was like to bear a child? Mrs. Davison, mother of three, would have talked to Fiona as one woman to another, prodded by questions, by interest, by the fact that she loved her own offspring and enjoyed sharing the giving of life.
But the letters offered no answers to that. Or to the question of why Fiona had carefully told her aunt lies, and led her to believe that she was with child.
And she hadn’t been.
She had been very forward-thinking. She had woven the tissue of lies well before her aunt had sent for her. In the last letter, there were the words, I must work out my time here, as I promised Mrs. Davison. And Ian shouldn’t travel just now, it will be difficult for both of us. But by the end of the month, we shall arrive in Duncarrick and I look forward to seeing you more than you know.
Fiona MacDonald hadn’t come upon a woman lying by the roadside in the throes of childbirth, taken advantage of an opportunity to kill her and steal her baby. She had known for some time that a child would be born-she had made sure that her aunt had known too. And it meant, clearly, that the infant had been promised to her.
But by whom?
And if there had been no need to kill the mother in order to take the child, who was the woman whose bones had been found on a mountainside?
More important from the point of view of Lady Maude, what role-if any-had Eleanor Gray played? And where was Eleanor Gray now?
No one could say.
Hamish spoke the thought that Rutledge had already considered-and did not want to address now: that the
