Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [60]
“I’ve been trying to locate an Eleanor Gray in the hope that she might throw some light on Miss MacDonald’s situation. Has she visited Brae?”
Mrs. Davison shook her head. “We aren’t a crossroads here, though it may seem as if we are. There was never an Eleanor Gray here. I’d have known if there was.”
WITH MRS. DAVISON’S permission, Rutledge sat at the rough kitchen table with the three children Fiona had cared for: a girl and two boys. The girl was shy, but the boys were eager to talk.
The picture they drew was of a young woman who could sit on the floor and play games with them, who read to them in the evening if they went to bed without fuss, and who knew the most fearsome tales of Highland feuds and battles.
“She spent a night once in a haunted house, and there was a man there who carried his head in his hands. Fiona saw him, plain as day!” the eldest boy told Rutledge with great relish. “He was a Campbell, killed by a MacLaren, and seeking revenge.” He launched into the details of the feud, but his mother, smiling, said, “Yes, that’s all very well, but I don’t think Mr. Rutledge has time for the whole story.”
He spent a quarter of an hour with the children and Mrs. Davison but came away with nothing more. He needed no further reminder from Hamish to pass on Fiona’s message to the children. The shy little girl smiled and said “Fiona” in a soft voice. “Is she coming back?”
Her mother looked over her head at Rutledge and replied, “Not for a while, dear.”
MRS. KERR, OVER sixty and showing her years, told him what she knew of Mrs. Cook, but there was nothing new in what she had to say.
As he got up to leave, Rutledge asked, “Did Mrs. Cook and Miss MacDonald seem to be close?”
“Not close, no. They’d walk in the evenings sometimes. That was all.”
“Where did they walk most often, do you know?”
“Mrs. Cook wasn’t country bred, so they didn’t go far. About the town, mostly, or in the churchyard. It’s protected from the wind, I suppose that’s why. I had the feeling that they both felt comfortable among the graves. Odd thing to say, I know, but there you are. As if they drew strength or peace or the like from the quiet there . . . Fiona, now, I knew she’d lost the man she was to marry—she told me once that he was buried in France. Mrs. Cook’s husband was at sea. But she never spoke much about herself. At first I put it down to being too good for the likes of us in Brae, then I saw that she was not one to talk. Some folks aren’t, are they? It’s what makes the world go ’round, differences.”
RUTLEDGE CROSSED THE street from Mrs. Kerr’s and walked as far as the small, ugly church. The early Victorian brick and stone mixture had not been successful, but it stood apart, among great old trees planted generations before for an older church. There were paths among the graves, white graveled ribbons through the green, hum-mocked grass. A number of bare plots spoke of recent burials, and he shivered, remembering his own dream.
He went through the gate and spent some time moving through the wilderness of stone, reading the inscription on first this one and then another.
Not far from the rear wall one headstone caught his eye. It was old, the dates smudged and barely discernible, but the name carved deeply into the gray face was quite legible.
Hamish MacLeod.
Not the man he’d killed—the dates were much older, a century or more older. But Rutledge found himself wondering as he stood there and looked down at it, if Fiona MacDonald had also known about it and in some way had taken comfort from it. A gravestone for a man who had none.
A place to sit on the weedy grass while she remembered a past that had no future. It must have offered consolation as well as privacy to mourn.
He had the oddest feeling that he was right.
But what name had Mrs. Cook found here if her husband was still alive? What memories had comforted her?