Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [108]
Here he was wounded. Ypres had been underlined on the page. Here he met one of the pipers we found to play for us. The name of a small village had been marked. It had become an aid station, Rutledge remembered, and finally abandoned because the smell of death had soaked the ground.
Rutledge moved through the chapter. There were a number of other notes here and there, each relating to some personal event the reader had connected with a place in the guide. Small landmarks in the life of a dead man. A retracing of his journey to death.
On the last page of that chapter was another note, in a hand that was shaking. Here he died. And then below that, a last, touching line. I wish I could die too. E.G.
Eleanor Gray had been here.
Rutledge closed the book with triumph.
She had reached Scotland. The question was, had she ever left it?
23
MRS. RAEBURN WAS BECOMING IMPATIENT. RUTLEDGE opened the wardrobe door before she could protest but saw that it was empty. He moved on to the other bedroom, and then the sitting room.
There was no longer anything in the house of a personal nature. A new occupant could move in that afternoon and never have an inkling of the previous owner. His interests or tastes—loves or disappointments—childhood or death. Except for the books, it appeared that the dead man’s belongings had long since been removed for storage or a missionary barrel.
Had Eleanor Gray left other small tokens of her presence here that had been swept away unnoticed in the general cleaning?
“It wasna’ what she intended,” Hamish said softly.
“No,” Rutledge answered silently. “And that’s very sad.”
He added aloud, “Does the fiscal—Mr. Burns—come to stay often?”
“He did when he went through his son’s clothes and such, after. I think the house holds too many memories now, and business doesn’t often bring him this way. I’ve a mind to make an offer for it if my niece settles down. I’m not as young as I used to be, and it will be a comfort to have her next door.”
“But not in the same house,” Hamish said, interpreting the tone of voice.
“I’d hoped she might marry the Captain. But then he went and got himself engaged to someone else. A pity. Still, she died of appendicitis, Julia did. If he’d come home from the war fancy-free, I’d have tried my hand at matchmaking.”
They went out the way they’d come in, and while Mrs. Raeburn locked the garden door, Rutledge walked toward the garden.
“It was once quite lovely,” Mrs. Raeburn told him, following down the path among the beds. “Now the gardener keeps it up but doesn’t go out of his way. But then, who’s to see it, I ask you!”
She turned around, a broad hint that it was time for him to accompany her back through the gate.
He went on, ignoring her. It was in fact a lovely garden— peaceful and secluded. A high wall marked the end.
It was Hamish who noticed the bench.
It had been dragged from its low stone dais by the wall and set in the midst of a bed of annuals. It looked out of place here, like a whale stranded on a foreign beach. The dimensions were somehow wrong, and the plants set in around it lacked the symmetry of other beds, as if having to compensate for the awkwardness of the bench.
The gardener’s doing—or someone else’s?
Mrs. Raeburn, complaining of her legs, had stopped by the sundial. Rutledge called to her, “How long has this bench been set here? It appears to belong over there by the wall.”
“How should I know? I never come that far—my legs, you know.”
Rutledge squatted on the grass and looked at the soil of the bed. It was loose, friable. As if it had been dug up each spring and restocked with plants that would grow contentedly in this corner shaded by the wall. There were forget-me-nots and pansies and a pair of small ferns set in a half-moon around the bench. But nothing was planted under the bench.
You wouldn’t plant under the bench. . . .
He went to the shed to find a trowel, and Mrs. Raeburn called plaintively, “Have you finished, young man?”
“I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” he replied. “If you wish to go back through the