Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [39]
It wasn’t until the door of the cell swung open, and the scent of lavender reached him, that he turned his mind toward the woman he had come here to see. His thoughts in a turmoil, he had nearly forgotten about her as an individual.
“It’s remembering that poor devil in his cell in Dorset— Mowbray,” Hamish offered in explanation.
But was it?
The woman in the room had risen from its single chair and turned to face them. She was pale, circles beneath her eyes, her shoulders braced as if anticipating a blow. The dress she was wearing, a soft gray, enhanced the paleness and made her seem almost invisible against the grayer walls.
Even as Inspector Oliver made the introductions, Rutledge had lost the thread of everything. And Hamish in his mind was railing like the banshees of hell, a cry of grief and torment and repudiation that rent the soul.
Rutledge had seen her picture many times in France. She was the woman Corporal Hamish MacLeod had loved and expected to marry. The woman whose name Hamish had cried in the last instant before the rifles fired and he fell dying in the mud. Fiona. Fiona MacDonald. Who now called herself Fiona MacLeod.
Rutledge was unprepared, defenseless.
How could he have known? How could he have connected a Fiona MacLeod of Duncarrick with the face of a woman he’d thought lived far from here? It was a common enough name in the Highlands—
How could he have known—?
Fiona MacDonald. Who would in truth have been Fiona MacLeod if he hadn’t shot the man she loved.
The woman in the dream he’d had in London . . .
10
SHE WAS LOOKING AT RUTLEDGE, A SADNESS IN HER face.
Hamish had told him so much about this woman during the war. It was hard to imagine her now as the girl haying on a hot August day in 1914. Or walking through a small Highland village beside a tall man dressed as a soldier, saying good-bye. Hamish had cried out her name over the roar of the guns as the firing squad shot him down. He had wanted to die—but not to lie in France, far from the ancient churchyard where his ancestors rested. He had not wanted to live—but he had wanted to come back to her.
Rutledge’s mind was whirling. Did Fiona MacDonald sometimes feel Hamish’s presence, just as Rutledge had felt Ross Trevor’s in The Lodge outside Edinburgh? It was odd how some people left their stamp so vividly on a time or a place. And she would know, better than most, how profoundly Hamish had loved the Highlands. Had she wept into her pillow because there was no marker where she could take her grief? Or had she walked the hills and felt closer to Hamish than she could have in any churchyard?
This brief, silent, strained confrontation affected Rutledge’s perception of Fiona MacDonald. Of the crime she’d committed—was alleged to have committed. Of the debt he owed to Hamish MacLeod for being the instrument of his corporal’s death. It magnified the burden he’d carried back from the war in the dark reaches of his mind.
He turned around and walked out of the room without a word, and Oliver, startled, was left standing in the doorway, staring uncertainly at the woman Rutledge had come to see.
Rutledge, breathing hard, his heart pounding, his mind a blank, blundered into the corner of a desk and then somehow found his way to the outside door. He flung it open and stepped out into the rain, oblivious.
It was some minutes before he realized that Oliver stood just behind him, sheltered by the doorway, saying something to him—
“I’m sorry—” He kept his back to Oliver, afraid of what could be read in his face. He added lamely, realizing it was expected, “Suddenly I needed air—” He could feel the rain wetting the shoulders of his overcoat, and his hair felt heavy with it, matted flat to his skull. How long had he been standing there—for God’s sake, how long—! He couldn’t remember; he couldn’t think; he couldn’t clear the horror out of his mind.
And Hamish, after that first cry, had gone silent, a black weight on his spirit, like the weight of the dead.
Rutledge