Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [32]
He moved on, watching people going about their daily lives. Women entering and leaving the shops, a nursemaid with a pram carefully maneuvering it through the door of a house, a woman sweeping her front step, a small boy playing with a top, men in dark suits coming out of offices, others in work clothes, carrying the tools of a trade, a crocodile of schoolgirls marching in the wake of a schoolmistress wearing a thick coat and unbecoming hat.
Ordinary people, their eyes avoiding those of the stranger passing them. No curiosity about his presence or his business. As if once burned, twice shy . . .
Hamish said, “McKinstry was right. They’re a dour lot!”
There was one other common feature among them. Un-smiling faces and thin, tight mouths. As if life was a burden, and they were used to enduring it.
A woman stepped out of a shop close to where he was standing and cast a surreptitious glance in his direction.
Hamish saw her before he did, commenting that she could have studied him just as clearly from the front window. A tall woman, pretty in a severe way, with her hair in a tightly confined bun, her sweater and skirt a very prim gray with only a touch of color in the silk shirtwaist, a paisley of peach and gray and white.
She made a fuss over the potted plants that stood on either side of the shop door. They were pretty, a mixture of rose geraniums and something lavender and white, like pansies. Satisfied, she turned and went quickly back inside. He looked at the neatly painted sign above the door. A. TAIT MILLINERY. He filed it away for future reference. If she had been interested enough to inspect a stranger, she might also be a gossip. . . .
Rutledge retrieved his car from The Ballantyne’s yard and drove out past the church. He found The Reivers again and stopped across the road to look at it. Yes, he’d been right. Comfortable, decent—hardly a blot on the conscience of Duncarrick. Neither a wild tavern nor a seedy lodging.
Small and long, no more than two stories with an attic above, the inn was one of those old buildings that survived because they were in nobody’s way—no one wanted to build a square here, or shops, or a large house.
Duncarrick’s main square, on the other hand, had probably seen the demise of a whole street of houses to widen the space to suit nineteenth-century builders with Progress on their minds.
The houses on either side here and down the lane by the inn’s stables were neither picturesque nor ugly, more a reflection of the straightforwardness of the people who lived in them. Only the house to one’s left facing the inn was by any measure grand, boasting three stories and an extension toward the rear, as if it had grown over the years with the family living there. The windows had been set with some eye to symmetry and style, lending a faint touch of grace.
The inn looked rooted in its earth, tidy, freshly whitewashed in the past year, the door to the bar hidden behind a climbing rose that had spread with age to cover the porch it had been intended to adorn. It was a hardy rose to survive in this climate, and the small garden at its feet showed some care for the impression the inn made on passersby. The bar parlor, on the side facing the narrow lane into the inn yard at the rear, had a green door, and crisp white curtains showed behind the windows next to it.
Time could have turned this into a rowdy pub on the outskirts of town, but the inn had managed, somehow, to retain a certain dignity. Because two women had had the care of it?
“I canna’ think why they’d persecute a lass with such a dowry as the inn,” Hamish was saying.