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By Root 944 0

than that ran the knowledge that her life now was separating from his. Not as Jean had left him, wanting to be free of what she feared, but in the very fact that living had drawn Fiona into new directions and new feelings and new places that Hamish would never share. He had not known about Duncarrick; he had not known about the child. The silences that followed his meeting Fiona again had been a painful reminder that time did not wait, that there was no holding on to it. That there was an emptiness in death. And yet in some sense, it was as if she was the one who had died, for Hamish mourned her loss with a heavy sorrow, with yearning and despair. And the burden Rutledge carried grew daily heavier with it.

It was Rutledge who struggled with the reality, the fact that Fiona could be found guilty of murder and hanged. He was the one who dealt with the tired face and dark-circled eyes of the woman in the cell. It was Rutledge who bore the brunt of fear and uncertainty about his own views of the evidence and the case building so tightly. Uncertainty, too, about his personal feelings.

He had seen Fiona through Hamish’s eyes for so long that until now she had seemed rather like the Dresden figurines on Frances’s bookshelf—gentle and uncomplicated, frozen in time and place, mourning her dead soldier. A woman wronged by what he, Rutledge, had been forced to do on the battlefield. The martyr, as it were, to his own guilt. Even in the dream in London she had been connected to the death of Hamish, with no existence all her own.

He had, he realized suddenly, seen her through Hamish’s memories. . . .

Now he had his own.

A flesh-and-blood woman, somehow attractive and, right or wrong, displaying remarkable strength in her lonely defiance of the law. Mourning Hamish still and giving that pent-up love to a child . . . The courage of innocence—or guilt? Rutledge found that she had brought out the protective streak in him, and he couldn’t be sure whether it was for her own sake or Hamish’s that he felt bound to do his best for her.

There was confusion and emotion in his mind fraught with his own bitterness, his own loneliness. It was, he thought, forcing him to think without the clarity and objectivity he tried to bring to every investigation assigned to him.

Hamish, God damn it, was right—

“And where was your objectivity in Cornwall—or Dorset?” Hamish demanded. “Where was your clarity then? Those women touched you too. How can you be sure it is Fiona and not you who’s on trial here!”

Rutledge had no answer.

RUTLEDGE STOPPED IN Winchester long enough to bathe and change his clothes and then found his way to Atwood House.

It was a small manor house built of mellow stone by a sure hand in the 1700s. The architect had set it on a knoll that offered splendid views to the south and an old grove of trees to the north, offering privacy and a barrier against cold winds. A stream meandering through the property was lined with wild roses, thick with hips now. Rutledge could see a pair of swans swimming regally on a pond created for the rowboat tied to a post. Someone had opened out the stream to fill the pond, and created a lovely effect at the bottom of the western gardens, a mirror of the sky that barely rippled as the swans floated above their own images.

The drive swept him up to the Georgian front with its dressed stone and pedimented windows. He got out of the car, nodding to the gardener trundling a handbarrow filled with spades and hoes and trimmers across the lawn toward the drive, and walked to the door. A brass knocker, which looked to be a more modern copy of an earlier iron one, clanged mightily as he let it fall.

After a proper passage of time, an elderly butler answered the door.

Rutledge identified himself and asked to speak to Mrs. Atwood.

The butler, noting his crisp collar and the set of his suit across his shoulders, said, “I’ll ask if Mrs. Atwood is at home this afternoon.”

He led Rutledge to a coldly formal room and left him there for nearly seven minutes. The walls, sheathed in blue silk, shimmered in the light