Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [43]
In that last letter, had Hamish told the woman he loved so deeply the truth about his death? Or had he told her sweet lies that would prepare her for the news that would be brought to her? A condemned man was not always circumspect. He wrote what he felt and believed in in those last dark hours. And Hamish had been torn apart—he had wanted to die, before he was forced to lead more men back into the face of certain death.
Rutledge said, “Our sector was heavily shelled. Letters and the like are hard to find in the mud, afterward.” He didn’t add that buried men disappeared in the stinking black depths as well, eaten by rats, used as lumber underfoot until someone could retrieve the decaying corpses.
Rains that last autumn had brought to light a private from Skye, listed as missing for weeks. Even the dogs hadn’t found him. As the water sloshed thickly about the trench, something had tripped up a sergeant, sending him cursing and sprawling. As he got dripping to his feet, he reached out for what he thought was a piece of shell and realized too late that it was a shoulder blade. The rest of the rotting corpse had come up bit by bit, like an overdone chicken falling off the bone. The smell had been unbearable. But they had had to stand there in the snaking line of the trenches for another thirty-six hours before they were relieved.
Rutledge could hardly tell Fiona MacDonald the truth. His letter to her, as Hamish’s commanding officer—like so many others—had been a tissue of lies devised to comfort and to heal and to offer pride of sacrifice in the place of loss. A tissue of lies . . . They had come back now to shame him.
He could feel Hamish’s anger, could feel the torment he carried within himself, like a second soul.
“My son is named for you,” she said into the silence. “Have they told you? Ian Hamish MacLeod. Hamish would have liked that. He spoke so warmly of you—he admired you.”
Rutledge, his mind reeling, heard Hamish cry out. The words were lost, but he thought for an instant that she had surely heard the voice and recognized it. The strength of it was echoing off the walls around them.
“What’s wrong?” She stepped forward, reaching out to touch him. “Are you ill again? Yesterday, I thought—”
“No.” It was curt, an effort of will without embellishment. In the silence he could hear her quick breathing and the chunk of the cleaning woman’s brush scrubbing outside the door. His heart pounded in his ears. With fierce determination, he got a grip on himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I try not to remember the war.”
And Hamish said quite clearly, “You remember it every hour of every day. You always will. It’s the cost of surviving.”
And it was true.
“I CAME TO talk to you about the child’s mother.”
Rutledge picked up the thread of what he’d come to say, forcing himself to shut out everything else. Neither Fiona nor he could afford to lose track of the police inquiry again. “You must surely see that you are condemning yourself by refusing to give the authorities any information about her. If she’s dead, explaining why and how she died can save your life.”
“The police said that to me. How can they know? What if I tell them I choked the life out of her? Or pushed her out a window? Or gave her a drink that muddled her wits and left her to die in the cold?”
“Did you do these things?”
“No!” she cried. “If I had, how could I have loved the child so deeply? Every time I look into his eyes, I see his mother’s face. How could I hold him and remember her dying by my hand? She trusted me with the most precious thing in the world to her. You went to war,” she went on, tears filling her eyes, “and you suffered horribly. But do you ever think about what it must be like for us to love a man who will never come back, never give us the children we might have borne, never hold us in the night, never watch our sons and our daughters