Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [48]
Hamish said, “It’s the way you listen, I’m thinking. People forget you’re a policeman—I did mysel’ many and many a time!”
Rutledge asked, more as a shot in the dark than with the expectation of an answer, “In London, did you by any chance know Eleanor Gray?”
She shrugged. “I knew who she was. But we moved in different circles. I had no interest in becoming a suffragette. I didn’t find it an attractive prospect to be dragged off to prison and force-fed by beefy matrons with a taste for sadism.”
“Is she still in London? Or has she gone elsewhere?”
“The Honorable Miss Gray was as unlikely to confide in me as Fiona MacDonald is. Why, is she a friend of yours? Is that why you’re looking for her?” She studied him with interest, deciding that he was a very attractive man despite the thinness and the haunted eyes. “Men did seem to interest her more than women did. It was odd, she could collect them by the droves if she was in the mood to talk. Women bored her. Eleanor Gray was one of those people others gossiped about. What she did, what she wore, where she went. I doubt if a quarter of it was true, but it was fun to pass along. But you haven’t answered my question.”
Rutledge smiled. “No, I’ve never met her. Did you ever hear gossip that she was preparing to become a doctor?”
“No, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had. She was a very handsome woman, she had more money than she knew what to do with, and her bloodlines went back to William the Conqueror—or Alfred the Great, for all I know. And yet—there was something that burned in her. A passion. I was never told what it was, but she seemed to waste a good deal of energy on makeshift enthusiasms. Like suffragism. And then the war itself. She was always manning one of the canteens for soldiers, always visiting the hospitals, writing letters for the wounded, always pushing for better care, better conditions. I’ve heard she was a superb horsewoman, too, and was rabid about the treatment horses received at the Front.”
“You know a great deal about a woman you’ve never met.”
She shrugged again. “I was envious, if you want the absolute truth. And so I listened when people talked about her. If I’d had her money and her breeding, I’d have married well and never set foot in this shop. Now, I have a hat that must be finished by this afternoon. Is there anything else you want to know?”
“I understand that Dorothea MacIntyre lives above your shop—”
“She does, and you’ll leave her alone, do you hear me? She goes in lively terror of half the town as it is, and it won’t help to have the police harassing her. She thinks Fiona and her aunt Ealasaid walk on water. Well, that’s as may be. In my humble opinion, Ealasaid should have been taken out and shot for putting that girl into Mr. Elliot’s vicious clutches!”
“In what sense, vicious?”
“Dorothea is a silly goose who never did any harm to anyone, and all he can think of is whether she has unconfessed sin on her soul. On the subject of sin, he’s worse than the Inquisition, that man! And she’s driven to despair thinking that nothing she does is worthy of him. That’s why I offered her a room here—I thought it would be the ultimate cruelty for her to live under Elliot’s roof. It has been an inconvenience and a hardship, but I take great satisfaction from the fact that when she’s here, she isn’t scrubbing and hauling coal and cooking and washing up and fetching the laundry back from Mrs. Turnbull’s, not to speak of the other heavy tasks he puts on her. All because he’s too miserly