Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [2]
It was a very long drive back to where they’d come from. Long and cold and wet and dreary. She glanced at the other woman from time to time, saw that she was silently crying with her eyes closed, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Her pale face reflected misery and exhaustion.
I don’t know how I’d feel, “Sarah” said to herself despairingly. In her shoes. Bleak of heart. Afraid. But I’ll think of something. God help me—I must think of something! We can’t come back here again. We haven’t the strength!
It was very late when they reached their destination. The town was dark and still, a dog howling somewhere, the wind whispering around the church tower and swooping among the gravestones of the churchyard—as if confiding the latest news, “Sarah” thought, turning the old horse toward his stable.
I’m so weary, I’m imagining things.
She glanced for the hundredth time at the woman beside her. Her eyes were still closed, but she wasn’t asleep.
“We’re home,” she told her friend gently, trying not to startle her. They were wet through, hungry because they’d been reluctant to stop along the way at the rough pubs or places where decent travelers stayed. They had been afraid of being seen, of being recognized. Of someone remembering that they’d been on the road from Glasgow, where they weren’t supposed to be.
“Yes.” She opened her eyes, saw the churchyard, and shuddered. The cold white stones seemed to be pointing fingers. “I wish I were dead too!”
Following a path through the stones with her eyes, the younger woman murmured with infinite sadness, “So do I.”
2
1919 DUNCARRICK
THE LETTERS BEGAN TO ARRIVE IN THE MIDDLE OF June, hardly more than a few words scribbled in cheap ink on cheap paper.
Fiona never discovered who had received the first of them. Or even—in the beginning—what had caused the coldness toward her. It seemed over the course of the month that one by one the women who were her neighbors found excuses not to hang out their laundry or weed their gardens when she worked in the inn yard. The friendly greetings across the fence, the occasional offer of flowers for the bar parlor or a treat for the child, stopped. Soon people no longer nodded to her on the street. And failed to speak in the shops. Custom fell off at the bar. Men who often came in for a pint in the long summer evenings avoided her eyes now and hurried past the inn door. The coldness frightened her. She didn’t know how to fight it because there was no one to tell her what lay at the bottom of it. She wished, for the hundredth time, that her aunt were still alive.
Even Alistair McKinstry, the young constable, shook his head in bewilderment when she asked him what she had done to offend. “For it must be that,” she told him. “Someone’s taken a word wrong, or I neglected to do something I’d promised. But what? I’ve tried and tried to think of anything!”
He had seen the looks cast her way behind her back. “I don’t know. Nothing’s been said in my hearing. It’s as if I’m shut out as well.”
He smiled wryly. Half the town must know how he felt about her. “It may be a small thing, Fiona. I’d not take it to heart.” Which was no comfort at all. She had already taken it to heart, and wondered if that was the intent, to give her pain. But why?
On the first Sunday in July, the old woman who invariably sat in the back of the church hissed at her as she came in with the little boy, leading him to their accustomed place. The single word was lost in the first hymn, but she knew what it was. Wanton. It made her flush, and the woman grinned toothlessly in grim satisfaction.