Legacy of the Dead ir-4

by Charles Todd

  Elliot held out his hand to Rutledge but didn’t rise. Rutledge took the dry, stiff fingers and shook them briefly.

  “What may I do for you, Inspector?”

  “I’ve been sent to Scotland to look into this business of the woman who called herself Mrs. MacLeod,” he began easily. “The child’s true mother may have been English.”

  “I see.” Elliot frowned. “It could be possible. Yes.”

  “Miss MacDonald, I understand, attended services in your church. Have you visited her since her arrest? As her pastor?”

  “Only once.” His eyes moved around the room. “Nor has she asked for my counsel and guidance since.”

  “Surely even she is worth saving?” Rutledge spoke quietly.

  The fierce pale blue eyes came back to Rutledge’s face. “Redemption is not granted. It is earned. She refuses to confess her sins.”

  Plural. “Sins?”

  “They are many. Arrogance. Pride. Wantonness-”

  It was noticeable that murder was not listed among them. Hamish pointed that out, growling. He had taken an instant dislike to the minister. Rutledge made an effort to maintain his own objectivity. But he found himself thinking that this man had used the anonymous letters to punish the recipient, not the sender. Which seemed an odd choice for a man of God…

  “If the child is not hers, how can she be accused of wanton behavior?”

  “I have watched a man sink to his knees and beg God’s forgiveness for the desire she had aroused in him, and agonize over his soul’s danger. He is a decent man, and he cannot bear the guilt.”

  “Surely that is his sin to expiate, not hers.”

  Elliot smiled coldly. “Women have always been temptresses. Adam ate the apple at Eve’s behest. He fell from grace with God, and our own Savior came to redeem that mortal sin. Redeem it on the cross with His flesh. Fiona MacDonald is a weak vessel. The spirit does not move in her. Such women are to be pitied.”

  “From what I hear, no one has accused Miss MacDonald of being a poor mother. She loves the child she called her son.” He found he couldn’t speak the boy’s name.

  “All the more reason to keep the lad from her. A God-fearing family will soon wipe away all memory of her and bring him up as he should be brought up. She has no claim upon him, after all.”

  “Do you believe she’s guilty of the charges brought against her?”

  “Oh, yes. Beyond any question.” Elliot rubbed his chin. “I have seen the faces of my flock turn against her. One by one. It is a judgment.”

  “Then she will surely hang.”

  Elliot looked him up and down. “Very likely. Why are you convinced of her innocence?”

  Startled, Rutledge said, “Am I?”

  “Oh, yes,” Elliot said again, steepling his fingers. “I haven’t been pastor of my flock these thirty-two years without learning how to read the men and women who come to stand before me. You are a guilt-ridden man, haunted by the war. And you believe you have seen the face of evil on the battlefield and learned to recognize it. Have you, indeed! You watched bodies shatter and minds breaking, in France. But I have watched souls destroyed.”

  Rutledge unexpectedly found himself remembering Cornwall, and Olivia Marlowe. “It must be far worse, in its fashion,” he agreed evenly. “But since I am not God, I don’t presume to judge my fellow human beings. I want to find out the truth about Fiona MacDonald. It’s my duty as a policeman. To her. To you. To society.”

  “Examine your own motives first, Inspector, and the truth will become clear. Wishful thinking is not the truth. Be careful that your own loneliness does not become a trap of error.”

  Rutledge could hear Hamish, a rumble of hostility. Whether against him or against Elliot, it was hard to say. He said, in response to Hamish, I see her as you saw her Aloud he said carefully, “We’ve wandered from the purpose of this conversation. I’m here to ask if you can give me any information about the accused that will help me find the boy’s mother.”

  “The boy’s mother is dead. Otherwise she would have come forward to take her child. There has been widespread publicity. By now she would surely have come.”

  “What if-for very good reasons-she can’t step forward?”

  Elliot picked up a book and put it down again, signaling that the interview was over. “Then she is an unnatural mother. A tigress will defy death for her young. No, I am satisfied beyond a shadow of a doubt that the poor woman died at Fiona MacDonald’s hands, giving her son life. May God rest her soul!”

  As the young woman-the housekeeper, he thought- saw him to the door, Rutledge paused on the threshold and asked, “Do you know Fiona MacDonald?”

  She hesitated, casting an eye uneasily over her shoulder and down the passage before saying, “Yes, indeed. She and Miss MacCallum-her aunt-were very good to me when I was ill. It was-I nearly died. Fiona sat beside me and held my hand through the night, until I was out of danger the next morning.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask what she had been ill of. But the pleading look in her eyes stopped him. She had taken her courage in both hands to put in a good word for the accused-a kindness for a kindness.

  “Do you know her-um-child?”

  “Oh, indeed. Such a pretty lad! And well-mannered. I worry what’s to become of Ian now. But no one will tell me.”

  “He’ll be well cared for. I’ll see to that.” The words came out of their own volition. He hadn’t meant to say them.

  Hamish growled something that Rutledge didn’t catch. He let it go.

  “I’d like to think so. Such a shame that Miss MacCallum isn’t alive. She’d have set this all to rights. She was that sort of person. It was Miss MacCallum who found this position for me. Mr. Elliot’s housekeeper had died of pleurisy.”

  Rutledge would have liked to ask Hamish about Ealasaid MacCallum. But there had been no mention of her the long night that he and the condemned man had spent talking in the guttering light of a candle.

  “Is Mr. Elliot a good man to work for?” Rutledge asked instead, curious.

  The young woman’s face flushed blotchily. “He does God’s work. I try to be as quiet as I can. But I’m sometimes clumsy and in the way.”

  Which no doubt meant that Elliot was a demanding bastard on his own turf and made her life wretched. Rutledge found Hamish agreeing to that. Hamish, apparently, had seen very little to approve of in the minister.

  “Do you live here?” Rutledge asked, concerned for her.

  “That wouldn’t be fitting! Mr. Elliot is a widower. I have a room at the top of the road there, above the milliner’s shop. Miss Tait offered it to me.” She pointed with a small, thin finger.

  “Were you surprised when the rumors began about Miss MacDonald?”

  “I never was told them,” she said naively. “Not until much later. People don’t confide in me, not often.”

  No, this writer of poisonous letters appeared to have chosen each recipient with an eye to inflicting the most damage on Fiona MacDonald’s reputation. The thin, frightened housekeeper to the minister was not likely to sway the citizens of Duncarrick with her views on any subject.

  “Thank you-I’m afraid I don’t know your name…” He left the sentence unfinished.

  “Dorothea MacIntyre, sir,” she told him shyly. “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Yes. If-er-Mr. Elliot should ask, I wanted to know only if you’d received one of the letters.”

  “I’m grateful, sir!” She closed the door softly behind him as he stepped out into the street. The sacrificial lamb, he thought. Too poor to be anything but dependent on the generosity of others, afraid of her shadow, and well aware of her duty, having had a lifetime of charity to teach it to her.

  Rutledge went back the way he’d come, passed The Ballantyne without stopping, and searched out the milliner’s shop he’d seen the day before. Where Dorothea MacIntyre lived.

  A silver bell rang genteelly as he opened the door. The woman arranging hats on a stand in the back looke
d up, then walked briskly to meet him. “May I help you, sir?” She cast a swift glance over her merchandise, and then waited with folded hands for him to speak.

  It was a woman’s shop, intimate and yet vividly decorated with almost Parisian flair, oddly out of tune with Duncarrick. Orange and peach and shades of lavender, with a strong pink thread drawing it all together.

  Hamish said, “I’d no’ like to hear what Mr. Elliot thinks o’ the colors.” He himself seemed to be of two minds about them.

  The shop carried lace collars, gloves in kid or cotton, stockings, some twenty or so hats in every style from drab to elegant, handkerchiefs with dainty edging, shirtwaists, and what Rutledge took to be undergarments, discreetly folded into brightly painted boxes set along one wall.

  The woman herself, tall and boldly attractive, seemed the antithesis of Dorothea MacIntyre. Rutledge wondered if Ealasaid MacCallum might have found a haven here for the girl, someone who would play dragon at the gate.

  “Inspector Rutledge,” he said, “Scotland Yard. I won’t keep you. I’m searching for the mother of the child Fiona MacDonald calls”-he hesitated-“Ian MacLeod. I’m asking young women who might have known her if she had at any time confided in them.”

  “Are you, indeed?” Her eyes were angry suddenly. “Well, if Fiona had seen fit to confide in me, why should I rush to tell you whatever might have been said between us? It’s ridiculous to expect anything of the kind. You’re a policeman. You should be able to do your duty without my help!”

  Hamish said, “Aye, but then, she doesn’t know you, does she? Or how well or ill you do your duty!”

  “I’m not,” Rutledge said gently, “looking for evidence to convict her. Only for evidence of the child’s parentage so that he can be returned to his mother’s family. Or, failing that, to his father’s.”

  She turned away. “I have better things to do with my time than provide you with local gossip. I don’t particularly like Fiona MacDonald. Anyone will tell you that. On the other hand, I think she’s been wretchedly treated, and I’m not going to be one of those throwing stones.”

  “Why didn’t you like her?”

  “I thought we might become allies. We were alike in one thing, at least. We didn’t squeeze dutifully into the rigid mold of Duncarrick. Silly notion, as it turned out. She kept to herself. I suppose that’s understandable in light of what’s happened since, but at the time I felt-betrayed. As if she’d turned her back on me, preferring instead to ingratiate herself with her aunt’s friends. Apparently, she didn’t succeed very well, did she? In the end they turned their backs on her!”

  “Did you receive one of those anonymous letters?”

  Her laughter pealed out, harsh and startling in the ambiance of the shop. “I am more likely to be the subject than the recipient of such things. In point of fact, I’ve sometimes wondered why they targeted Fiona rather than me. There are people in this town who would gladly see the back of me.” She gestured at the walls and the hangings that shut off the back room of the shop for privacy, their flamboyance almost a defiance. “But I’m trapped here. I inherited the shop, and I don’t have the money to walk away from Duncarrick and start again elsewhere. I lived in London for a time- worked there before the war and for two years of the fighting, learning my craft from a Frenchwoman who had come from Paris to design hats in London. She closed her shop- no one had a taste for extravagant hats, no one wore them anymore, the war changed that. Women made do with what they had or refurbished them themselves. And I came here. This place had stood empty for nearly three years-it had been a haberdashery.” With an angry shake of the head, she added, “Why am I telling you this!”

  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 to hire another girl. He took her in, you see, when she had no work, and he never lets her forget the duty owed him for that kindness!” Her eyes blazed.

  He was on the point of asking if Fiona MacDonald’s child could have been Dorothea MacIntyre’s, and then stopped himself. Mr. Elliot’s housekeeper was no guardian of secrets, her own or anyone else’s.

  12

  The Bedrock of police work was the statement, A record of every witness questioned, scrupulously preserved in evidence.

  Rutledge walked back to the station and asked Constable Pringle if he might read statements taken down when Inspector Oliver interviewed everyone who had received one of the letters denouncing Fiona MacDonald.

  Pringle handed him a thick file box and said tentatively, “They’re in proper form, sir.”

  “I’m sure they are.” He smiled, took the box, and moved one of the chairs nearer the door, giving
himself a semblance of private space. Sitting down, he untied the red string. Pringle went back to his own work, glancing up from time to time. As if, Hamish growled, Rutledge were not to be trusted.

  Ignoring that, Rutledge lifted out the papers inside and began going through them.

  Mrs. Turnbull, laundress. “I’m a respectable woman. I don’t have anything to do with the likes of her. ” Question: Have you ever done her washing? “No, I have not, and I thank God for it!” Question: Why, then, would someone send you such a letter? “Because they know I’m a good Christian, that’s why. And I’d lose custom if it got around that I was taking in washing from whores!”

  Hamish, incensed, swore.

  Mrs. Oliphant, neighbor. “It was a warning to mind where my husband was of an evening. But I didn’t need it, did I? Hadn’t I seen her slipping out of the inn late at night, while her aunt was still alive?” Question: Did you speak of this to Miss MacCallum? “I did not. She was ill, dependent on Fiona. It seemed a cruelty.” Question: Do you know where Miss MacDonald went when she left the inn so late? “I’m a decent woman, I don’t go prowling about in the dark.” Question: How often did she do this? “I saw her with my own eyes four, or maybe even five times.” Question: What direction did she take? “It was always the same, away from the town.” Question: How can you be so sure it was a lover Miss MacDonald went to meet? “Because I went out to that pele tower the very morning I found the letter on my doorstep. To see for myself if it was true. I found a bed of straw where a part of the roof had tumbled down and left a dry corner behind a heap of stone. And it smelled of lavender-that’s her scent!” Question: But you wouldn’t have thought to go to the tower if the letter hadn’t suggested it. “Oh, I’d wondered, right enough! Where else might a whore have some privacy?”

  Hamish said bitterly, “Can ye no’ see that it’s what they want to believe?”

  Or someone had been a step ahead of Mrs. Oliphant, and set the scene she was expecting to find…