Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [57]
Small wonder she’d been tempted to take a motherless child and love him as her own, to bring him up as she and Hamish might have brought up their brood. A legacy of the dead, a child with his name if not his blood.
In the trenches, where men talked of home and a lost, safer world, Hamish had drawn a picture of a caring woman, of laughter and trust and abiding affection, that a soldier had carried with him to war.
But Rutledge had seen something else in her—through his eyes, not Hamish’s.
He had seen strength in her, and the ability to look directly at the world. He had seen courage—and fear. He had seen a fierce longing for something to come out of the ashes of her heart. And now even that had been taken away.
She was everything, he realized suddenly, that Jean—whom he’d wanted to marry, who he’d believed cared for him—had never been. And for the first time since Jean had broken off their engagement, he was entirely free of her spell. As if scales had fallen from his eyes, he saw clearly how very different Jean’s conception of marriage had been from his. She had wanted a future that was protected and secure, accepted by society, applauded by her friends. A man in turmoil, his mind shattered, his future uncertain, was a terrifying prospect.
Fiona MacDonald knew what love meant, and what it cost, and what the war had taken from her. She would have loved Hamish if he’d come home scarred with burns, without his legs or his arms. She would have loved the man he’d become as well as the man he was.
She would even have loved him shell-shocked and consumed by nightmares—
Rutledge refused to follow that line of thought.
But his mind brought back other images, the women like Jean who came to the clinics and stared with horror at the ruins of husband or lover—he had once encountered one of them running out the door, face buried in her handkerchief, moaning in shock. And in the room behind her, a man with bandages where his face had been lay mute with clenched fists, unable to cry. There had been others who had accepted the living shell gratefully, with an intense sense of wonder that they had been among the lucky ones to have their soldier home again.
Fiona would have been among those. . . .
That was the kind of courage she possessed. Was she also a murderess?
Rutledge felt the betrayal even as his mind framed the question. A betrayal of Hamish and of Fiona MacDonald.
HE SHUT THE war out of his mind and tried to concentrate instead on what lay ahead.
Fiona had left her grandfather’s home and moved south to Brae.
But why Brae?
“Because it was different from the glen,” Hamish answered unexpectedly. “It held no memories. Of her grandfather, of me. Of her brothers who had died.”
Rutledge recalled the statement McKinstry had read to him. When she’d been asked if Fiona could have been pregnant when she left Brae, Mrs. Davison had answered unequivocally. “No. I would have known,” she’d said. “I kept a strict eye on Fiona—not because she was likely to find herself in trouble, but because she was a young girl, alone and in my care. Come to that, it wasn’t hard to do—she seldom took her day off, and even in the evenings, when the children were in bed, she’d sit with me and do the mending or read aloud.”
Oliver’s comment on Mrs. Davison’s character was “I’d take my oath that she’s telling the truth. Forthright to a fault, as my sergeant put it.”
Mrs. Davison might well have told the exact truth. People often did.
The whole truth was another matter. And how an investigating officer probed for it determined how much of it came out. Objectivity . . .
Oliver was convinced that Fiona MacDonald was a murderess.
If she wasn’t, how did she come by the child? That was the stumbling block, and her life depended on the answer. And Rutledge was going to have to find it.
BRAE WAS SOUTH and east of Glasgow, on the outskirts of an area that had suffered from fast expansion and then