Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [130]
“Indeed.” The fiscal’s clerk brought in the tea with a plate of sandwiches and a packet of biscuits. Rutledge accepted the cup and the sandwich offered him. Burns went on. “I’ve actually given some thought to the fact that a guilty verdict at the trial will most certainly establish the boy’s heritage. It is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to let him remain where he is for the time being.”
“I’ve been making my way through the list. Did your son have friends here in Jedburgh? I might add one or two names through them.”
“The first two names I gave you were local men. As I told you at the time, they’re dead and not likely to be involved.”
“Did your son have friends in Duncarrick?”
“Robbie went to Harrow, and until the war the majority of his friends were either from there or in the law. He visited Duncarrick a time or two, but I don’t recall anyone in particular he might have known there. Better to describe them as my friends. Certainly I’d have told you if I’d known of any connection!”
Hamish agreed with Rutledge: Unless the fiscal was lying, that meant Holden had never mentioned any meeting with Rob Burns in London.
He finished his sandwich and accepted the offer of another. They were small but very good. The fiscal had already eaten both of his and began to open the packet of biscuits. His appetite was about to be spoiled—
In his mind, Rutledge could hear Fiona’s voice saying, “ The father is an ordinary man. Just—an ordinary man . . .”
Hamish tried to stop him, but he said aloud, “I must tell you, I think that if Eleanor Gray bore a child, there is a very slim chance that the father of her son might be your own. It strikes me that for some leniency shown by the court at her trial, Fiona MacDonald might be persuaded to name the man. I have a strong feeling that she knows who he is. That Eleanor confided in her before she died.”
The fiscal frowned ferociously at him. “If my son had been seriously attached to a woman of Eleanor Gray’s background, there would not have been a clandestine affair. Robbie would have come directly to me and to Lady Maude and made his intentions clear! He would have done the honorable thing!”
“Forgive me, sir, for being direct. You weren’t fighting in the trenches. These were young men who did things out of need and fear that they would never have thought to do in 1914. They loved where they could and when they could, knowing they were going to die. If your son could have settled his affairs before returning to France, I’ve no doubt he would have. Eleanor wanted very much to study medicine. She may have asked him to wait—”
“Preposterous nonsense!” the fiscal said, glaring at him. “I will hear no more about it! My son was still in mourning for his dead fiancée—”
“You’ve made an enemy!” Hamish was saying. “It’s no’ wise—”
“Another excellent reason to wait, I should think,” Rutledge said, ignoring Hamish, and then he backed off. “I can’t tell you that any of this is true. I do know that friends of your son believed he loved Eleanor Gray as much as she loved him. Young men who served with him, to whom he would never have lied about his feelings. Eleanor and her mother quarreled shortly before her disappearance. The timing indicates it was after your son had returned to the Front but before his death. Perhaps Eleanor told Lady Maude that she wanted to marry a country lawyer, not a title. Lady Maude, however, refuses to discuss the quarrel.”
“I will not hear another word! I will not believe that that child in Duncarrick is my son’s bastard! I don’t care who the mother was!”
Like so many bereaved fathers, Fiscal Burns had kept a holy image of his dead son in his heart—the dutiful, honorable young man who had died bravely for King and Country. Reared in another age, believing in other ideals, he could not contemplate the possibility that love had clouded duty in his son’s last days. It would be a betrayal of that pure image, born of the child the fiscal had watched grow up to manhood and march off to war. A Tennyson knight in khaki.
“There’s no dishonor here. He’d have married Eleanor Gray.