“I might have guessed it was Mr. Leeds’s vexatious passion for meddling that lay behind this business. He shall hear from me!” Anger flared in Lady Maude’s eyes, deepening the color to dark violet.
“I’d no’ like to be in his shoes, then,” Hamish reflected.
“He, too, is required by law to carry out his duties to the best of his ability.”
“Indeed. Involving the police is an entirely unnecessary course of action.”
“I cannot believe that a young woman of your daughter’s rank would neglect her duty.” Rutledge paused and then repeated, “It is cause for concern.”
“Nonsense. Eleanor is young, contrary. She has had some ridiculous notion that she wanted to take up the study of medicine. It was the war; it unsettled all of us. But she insisted that she was well suited to it and that her goal was to become a physician. I hoped that with the Armistice and an end to the dying, this absurd dream would be seen in a different light. My daughter is something of a romantic, I must confess. Very like her late father.”
Rutledge, still standing, thought to himself, We’ll have to contact the teaching hospitals – Aloud, he asked, “Would she have settled for nurse’s training instead?”
“A nursing sister? Hardly that!” Impatiently, Lady Maude said, “Sit down, young man! That chair, to your left.” She crossed to the desk and took the chair behind it. As if putting a solid barrier between them. “When my daughter sets her heart on something, she’s single-minded about it. And I must tell you that she doesn’t cope well with disappointment. Eleanor has always been rather impatient of impediments and usually finds a way around them.” Lady Maude gave Rutledge a space to digest that before continuing. “Now, as for this business of climbing in Scotland-or having an illegitimate child-it’s so out of character that I am at a loss to understand how your Scottish policeman arrived at such a conclusion. The man’s an idiot. I won’t allow him in this house. Nor the local man; he’s as great a fool as they come.”
“Your daughter never expressed an interest in climbing?”
“Not at all. She’s not one of these robust women with an enthusiasm for athletic pursuits. She enjoys a game of tennis. And she’s very fond of riding. Before the war, she spent some time at school in Switzerland, and never indicated then or afterward that she cared for climbing. As for the other business, she has far too much respect for herself and her family to find herself in trouble.”
The words were spoken with absolute conviction. Women of Eleanor Gray’s class were taught from birth what was expected of them. They were to be married off to the greatest advantage, social and financial. Lovers taken after marriage-with absolute discretion-were another matter. Never before it.
The more he heard, the more Rutledge found himself agreeing with Lady Maude that the dead woman found in Scotland was unlikely to be her daughter, Eleanor. None of the facts matched. Still-height and age did. And possibly timing?
“Would it be possible to see a photograph of your daughter, Lady Maude?”
“She’ll no’ allow it,” Hamish told him. “But yon solicitor might have one.”
She glared at Rutledge. “To what end?”
“Merely to give me some feeling for the person you’ve described. I have found that faces tell me more than facts sometimes.”
She hesitated. Rutledge was certain he’d given her the wrong answer, and had lost. Then she opened a drawer in the desk. From it she drew a silver filigree frame and passed it across to him without looking at it. He rose to take it from her hand, and sat down again before turning it over.
The face staring back at him was smiling, one hand on the horse at her side, the other holding a trophy. Beneath the riding hat it was difficult to see her features clearly, but she was an attractive young woman with her mother’s bearing. There was something familiar about the face all the same, and he frowned as he studied it. All at once he made the connection.
She reminded him quite strongly of one of the royal princesses As if his thought reached her at the same time, Lady Maude extended her hand imperiously, and he had no choice but to return the photograph to her.
Hamish, following his thought, was scandalized.
His sister Frances would know, if anybody did. But looking at the woman in front of him, and remembering the photograph she’d taken from him, Rutledge found himself wondering if Eleanor Victoria Maude Gray was- possibly-the child of a liaison between Lady Maude and the late King Edward VII. The king had had an eye for beautiful women. It wouldn’t have been surprising if she’d come to his notice.
Small wonder, with that heritage, that Lady Maude refused to believe that her daughter had come to die on a desolate Scottish mountainside, or that she had borne a child out of wedlock.
Eleanor was destined for greater things than a career in medicine-if she was the daughter of a King, and heir to this house and the fortune that apparently maintained it, she could take her pick of wealthy and titled men.
But if she was as contrary as her mother wanted him to believe, might she not have rebelled against this golden future and found instead some perverse pleasure in making her mother’s nightmares rather than her dreams come true…?
Lady Maude sat at the broad desk long after the man from London had gone, staring blindly at the closed door.
How had he tricked her into speaking of Eleanor? She had told a policeman what she hadn’t revealed to anyone else-that Eleanor was headstrong, contrary, that her daughter’s heritage had meant so little to her that she had walked away from it and never looked back. She had chosen a common profession instead, one that dealt with poverty and squalor and hideous diseases. It was unspeakably cruel and headstrong.
She would call London straightaway and have that man broken in rank -
Instead Lady Maude went on sitting where she was, reviling him, refusing to acknowledge pain or guilt. Eleanor was not dead. The police were incompetent and stupid. She would not allow them to trouble her again.
Something the Inspector had said came back to her. “Another mother will have to bear that grief…”
Then find her and be satisfied. And let there be an end to this!
Sunlight cast long, narrow shadows across the carpet, and still she sat there. She did not need the photograph in the closed drawer to see her daughter’s face, feel the strong presence of her spirit. A mother would know -if anything untoward had happened They were trying to frighten her into helping them, these policemen, rather than doing their duty as it should be done!
Finally she stood up, took a deep breath, and walked firmly to the door. By the time she had reached the small room where the telephone had been put in, she had made her decision.
5
Rutledge turned out of the drive back onto the main road.
Hamish, reacting to the lessening of tension, spoke after a long silence. “It wasna’ a verra useful interview. But sufficient. A formidable woman, that. I wouldna’ care to grow up in her shadow.”
Was that how Eleanor Gray had felt about her mother?
“My own grandfather was her match,” Hamish was saying, “he could have led the clan into battle, anither time and place. But he had anither side as well, he could recite in a voice that kept the room silent. Verse, and the Old Testament. When it came to the Prophets or Robert Burns, there was none to hold a candle to him. I ken many a night when I lay awake in the loft, listening. Does this one have anither face?”
Thinking it over, Rutledge came to the conclusion that Lady Maude did. If she had been mistress to Queen Victoria’s son, her husband had been willingly, knowingly, cuckolded. Unlike Henry VIII, Edward had chosen his married lovers with great care, to prevent gossip or scandal. And his friends had known which woman to invite to which social engagement. Or had been quietly informed of royal wishes. Still, it must not have been easy for Edward’s wife, Alexandra, or the current favorite herself to live with such an open secret. Or for the favorite to return to her marriage when the Prince’s fancy moved elsewhere.
The problem was, a child seldom recognized a parent’s strength; it saw only stern discipline that couldn’t be easily manipulated by childish whims or caprice. Rebellion was natural-and sometimes dangerous.
Wherever Eleanor Gray might have gone, if she was determined to punish her mother for whatever it was she felt she’d lost or lacked in that grand and cold house, it became a police matter only if she died.
