Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [66]
He could hear Hamish lamenting in his ear, anguish clear in the soft Highland voice.
“It had to be written,” Rutledge told him. “It was kinder than hearing from the Army what had become of you.”
“And none of it would ha’ happened if we’d no’ been so tired and afraid. . . .”
“No. It had to be done. It was done. I had no choice.”
“Aye, it must seem that way now. In the safety of a house that was never bombarded for days at a time!”
“You chose to die,” Rutledge reminded him, but knew even as he said the words that they were a lie. None of them had chosen to die—though he had tried in the months afterward to put himself in the way of a German shell or machine gunner’s sights. They had all wanted to live and come home. . . .
He took each of the other letters out of their envelopes and scanned them quickly. The first came from Fiona, carrying the news that her grandfather had died. The next was also to Ealasaid MacCallum with word of the death of Fiona’s brothers. After that, Fiona had written to tell her aunt about her position in Brae, describing the Davison family and how different the countryside around Glasgow was from the beauties of the mountains to the north.
I will be happier here, she wrote. It is not as lonely, and these people are wonderfully kind to me. The children are a delight. . . .
But the following letter was very different. It read:
I have sad news to tell you, dear aunt. I’ve lost Hamish. He died in the Somme offensive, like so many others. I have just had word. I still don’t believe it. It seems that if I wait long enough, he will come through the door and take me in his arms again. I lay awake last night, praying that it was no more than a dream, but this morning the letter was still beside my bed. I can’t cry, I can’t feel, I don’t know what to do. The minister here has come to offer comfort and Mrs. Davison has been kindness itself. I ache so, I want to die, but I have every reason to live. When Hamish was home last, we were wed in secret. And I am now carrying his child. It will be born in the autumn, and it will never know its father. But I will have a part of him to hold and love—a living memory of the man I married. I hope you will rejoice for me— and not feel that it is sad to be alone. I am not alone now, and I never will be again. . . .
Rutledge folded the page gently and put it back in its envelope without finishing it. He had seen all that he needed to see.
She had told her aunt that she was carrying a child—but he knew for a certainty that Hamish MacLeod had never been home that terrible year to father it. And it was not until Hamish was dead that she had admitted to it.
In ordinary circumstances, this could have meant that Hamish was not the father. That she was trying to pass off another man’s child as his. But these were not ordinary circumstances. The night Fiona had lain awake praying the news was a dream, she had also made some very important decisions.
One of them was to tell her aunt that a child was to be born in the autumn.
A CURSORY READING of the remaining letters satisfied him that they held no secrets. Only the words of a young woman describing her pregnancy as it progressed. How had Fiona MacDonald known the feelings and the emotions and the sickness that a woman in her condition should have experienced?
Because the real mother had told her—and Fiona had carefully written it all down.
Was it from Maude Cook that Fiona had learned such things? Or—had she cleverly asked Mrs. Davison about her own confinements and what it was like to bear a child? Mrs. Davison, mother of three, would have talked to Fiona as one woman to another, prodded by questions, by interest, by the fact that she loved her own offspring and enjoyed sharing the giving of life.
But the letters offered no answers to that. Or to the question of why Fiona had carefully told her aunt lies, and led her to believe that she was with child.
And she hadn’t been.
She had been very forward-thinking. She had woven the tissue of lies well before her aunt had sent for her. In the last letter,