Legacy of the Dead ir-4

by Charles Todd

  “There was an officer about that time. From London. I can’t tell you his name. But he came alone, arriving quite late. That’s why I remember him.”

  “Because he came later than expected?”

  “No, no. He woke me out of a sound sleep, all but knocking the door down. It was raining, and he was wet through. I handed him the key, then slammed the door shut against the wind. But I watched from the window to see he got in all right. The lock is sometimes stiff in bad weather. I’d have known if he’d had a woman with him, wouldn’t I? I’d have seen her go in with him!”

  “How long did he stay at the Burns house?”

  “He was to stay a week, and left after two days.”

  “Did he tell you why he was leaving?”

  “I didn’t ask. He brought back the key and thanked me. But it had rained every day. I suppose he found that depressing.”

  “How was he wounded? Shoulder? Leg?”

  “Sometimes it isn’t possible to tell, and I never care to ask. He was very brown. I did ask about that. He’d served in Palestine, he said.”

  “Was he Scots?”

  “Yes. He told me he was English, but he was Scots.”

  “Would you recognize him if you were to see him again?”

  She shook her head. “I expect I wouldn’t. He didn’t have a remarkable face.” She studied Rutledge, pushing her spectacles up on her nose. “You do. I’d remember meeting you.”

  Rutledge said, “If you still have the key, would you allow me to go in and look through the house?”

  She stared at him suspiciously. “Why should you wish to do that?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Oh, very well. Come along. But I warn you, I can’t stand on my feet while you take your time about it!”

  She went off to fetch the key, and led him to a gate in the middle of the low hedge between the two properties. He looked at the house carefully as they made their way around back. If the bedrooms were on this side, Mrs. Raeburn might well know who had come to stay here. But if they were on the other side Mrs. Raeburn unlocked the garden door and bade him wipe his feet before he came into the house. He did as he was told, then followed her down a short passage to the kitchen.

  As they walked in, Hamish objected, “There’s nithing to find here-”

  He was right, the house would have been cleaned many times since Eleanor Gray had come here-if indeed she’d come at all. But Rutledge thought now he could guess the reason why she might have wished to. With news of Robbie Burns’s death, she had wanted to see the house where he lived. Where she might have lived as his wife. But where would she have gone from here?

  Rutledge and Mrs. Raeburn walked from room to room. The dining room, the parlor, a small study. The furnishings were comfortable, with a number of lovely old pieces that Burns must have inherited, and a wonderful mantelpiece in the parlor. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, one on Mrs. Raeburn’s side of the house, and one on the other, with a sitting room in between. The far bedroom appeared to be the master bedroom, and Rutledge studied it with particular interest.

  It held a large spindle bed, a wardrobe of carved mahogany, a maple desk under the window, several comfortable chairs, and a tall bureau that matched the wardrobe. He went to that and was about to open one of the drawers, but Mrs. Raeburn stopped him.

  She didn’t hold with police prying into people’s lives, and told him so. “Not without a warrant!”

  He turned to the bookcase. Law books for the most part. He touched the spines of several novels, a three-volume history of Scotland, and a collection of six works recounting travels to Europe. He pulled one out at random, expecting to hear Mrs. Raeburn scold him. But apparently books were not as intimate as the contents of a drawer.

  It was the volume on traveling in Italy, many of the pages still uncut. He put that back and took out one of the law books. Robert Edward Burns was inscribed in handsome copperplate on the flyleaf. The novels held nothing of interest, and he moved on to the volume of travels in France. These pages had been cut, and from the way the spine fell open to “Paris,” the chapter had been read a number of times. He flicked through the pages, admiring the line drawings of cathedrals, chateaux, and statues, found nothing of interest, and was on the point of closing the book, when something in the margin of one page caught his attention. The chapter heading was for the north of France. What had become, in fact, the battlefields of the war.

  There were brief notations here, in a woman’s handwriting. He took the book to the window, his back to Mrs. Raeburn, and read one after the other.

  Here he was wounded. Ypres had been underlined on the page. Here he met one of the pipers we found to play for us. The name of a small village had been marked. It had become an aid station, Rutledge remembered, and finally abandoned because the smell of death had soaked the ground.

  Rutledge moved through the chapter. There were a number of other notes here and there, each relating to some personal event the reader had connected with a place in the guide. Small landmarks in the life of a dead man. A retracing of his journey to death.

  On the last page of that chapter was another note, in a hand that was shaking. Here he died. And then below that, a last, touching line. I wish I could die too. E.G.

  Eleanor Gray had been here.

  Rutledge closed the book with triumph.

  She had reached Scotland. The question was, had she ever left it?

  23

  Mrs. Raeburn was becoming impatient. Rutledge opened the wardrobe door before she could protest but saw that it was empty. He moved on to the other bedroom, and then the sitting room.

  There was no longer anything in the house of a personal nature. A new occupant could move in that afternoon and never have an inkling of the previous owner. His interests or tastes-loves or disappointments-childhood or death. Except for the books, it appeared that the dead man’s belongings had long since been removed for storage or a missionary barrel.

  Had Eleanor Gray left other small tokens of her presence here that had been swept away unnoticed in the general cleaning?

  “It wasna’ what she intended,” Hamish said softly.

  “No,” Rutledge answered silently. “And that’s very sad.”

  He added aloud, “Does the fiscal-Mr. Burns-come to stay often?”

  “He did when he went through his son’s clothes and such, after. I think the house holds too many memories now, and business doesn’t often bring him this way. I’ve a mind to make an offer for it if my niece settles down. I’m not as young as I used to be, and it will be a comfort to have her next door.”

  “But not in the same house,” Hamish said, interpreting the tone of voice.

  “I’d hoped she might marry the Captain. But then he went and got himself engaged to someone else. A pity. Still, she died of appendicitis, Julia did. If he’d come home from the war fancy-free, I’d have tried my hand at matchmaking.”

  They went out the way they’d come in, and while Mrs. Raeburn locked the garden door, Rutledge walked toward the garden.

  “It was once quite lovely,” Mrs. Raeburn told him, following down the path among the beds. “Now the gardener keeps it up but doesn’t go out of his way. But then, who’s to see it, I ask you!”

  She turned around, a broad hint that it was time for him to accompany her back through the gate.

  He went on, ignoring her. It was in fact a lovely garden- peaceful and secluded. A high wall marked the end.

  It was Hamish who noticed the bench.

  It had been dragged from its low stone dais by the wall and set in the midst of a bed of annuals. It looked out of place here, like a whale stranded on a foreign beach. The dimensions were somehow wrong, and the plants set in around it lacked the symmetry of other beds, as if having to compensate for the awkwardness of the bench.

  The gardener’s doing-or someone else’s?

  Mrs. Raeburn, complaining of her legs, had stopped by the sundial. Rutledge called to her,
“How long has this bench been set here? It appears to belong over there by the wall.”

  “How should I know? I never come that far-my legs, you know.”

  Rutledge squatted on the grass and looked at the soil of the bed. It was loose, friable. As if it had been dug up each spring and restocked with plants that would grow contentedly in this corner shaded by the wall. There were forget-me-nots and pansies and a pair of small ferns set in a half-moon around the bench. But nothing was planted under the bench.

  You wouldn’t plant under the bench…

  He went to the shed to find a trowel, and Mrs. Raeburn called plaintively, “Have you finished, young man?”

  “I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” he replied. “If you wish to go back through the hedge, I’ll come across in five minutes.”

  She was mumbling something about taking advantage; he could hear her voice retreating even as she did.

  It wouldn’t take considerable strength to move the bench. It was heavy and cumbersome, but a person could shift it if he or she knew how to “walk” it off the dais and into the bed. And it had rained both days…

  The feet were deep into the soil of the bed now, as if the bench had stood there for several seasons. Rutledge used the side of the trowel to scrape away the layer of compost mulch that kept down the weeds. Then he put the tip deep into the ground and lifted the first clump of soil.

  It was thick with what he took at first to be roots. And then he saw that he had uncovered a piece of cloth. Clothing, he amended, looking at it closely. No, it was a corner of blanket. No more than two inches by three.

  Blankets weren’t put in with compost-they didn’t decay at the rate of garden clippings and hedge trimmings. An old blanket went into the dustbin.

  He dug about under the bench for some time, but the ground yielded nothing more.

  Hamish said, “Someone buried a pet here, a cat or a small dog, and moved the bench so that the grave wouldna’ be disturbed.”

  Rutledge, rocking back on his haunches, reluctantly agreed. A pet wrapped in an old blanket…

  After all, he hadn’t wanted to find Eleanor Gray here, buried in a back garden. It would finish his investigation in Scotland.

  He hadn’t wanted to come to Scotland. Now he didn’t want to leave. There was too much still to be done.

  Rutledge kept his promise and met Hugh Fraser for luncheon. It was a small restaurant that was popular with the noonday throng of marketgoers, and Fraser apologized for that. “But if we go to the hotel, a dozen people will stop by the table, their minds on business.”

  “My father followed the law. He found it a fascinating mistress.”

  Fraser grimaced. “The law is all right. And I’ve made a good living. My clients come from all corners of the district, from Loch Lomond to Callander. I just don’t have the same taste for it I once had. I never got used to watching men die. France was bad enough, but there we were firing back. The influenza epidemic was very different. There was a nurse bending over me, changing the dressing on my arm, and she collapsed across the bed. The orderlies carried her away like a sack of onions. Before dawn she was dead. It was like some damned medieval plague. The men on either side of me died of it, and seven men in another ward. I remember priests coming in the night, and not enough orderlies to bring us water. My father saw two people drop dead in the street before they could reach home.” He laughed without humor. “You’re a damned good listener, did you know that?”

  “A professional requirement,” Rutledge said lightly.

  “I’ve never talked about it before. The truth is, I couldn’t. I’d survived, you see-even come to terms with losing my arm. I was ready to go on living. And then this nightmare came out of nowhere. And I was terribly afraid of dying from it. It shook my nerve rather badly. I’m only beginning to understand that.”

  “We all have our nightmares,” Rutledge said with more feeling than he’d intended. “Even when they last into the daylight.”

  “Yes, but most people don’t wake up in a cold sweat, on the verge of screaming. I’ve done that a time or two-frightened the hell out of my wife, I can tell you.” But his face said it had happened far more often than he cared to admit.

  The woman serving tables came to take their order. Fraser leaned back, sipping his wine. Some of the lines in his face smoothed out as he relaxed.

  “Find what you were looking for at Robbie’s house?” he asked with frank curiosity.

  “I may have. It appears-there’s no proof, mind you!- that Eleanor Gray came here in 1916, shortly after she heard the news of Captain Burns’s death. And she stayed at the house for two nights.”

  Fraser stared at him. “Old Raeburn-I’m sorry, she’s the neighbor, Mrs. Raeburn-never told me that!”

  “She didn’t know. Eleanor came to Scotland with someone who’d been told which door to knock on to find the key. Therefore a friend of Burns’s. Or so we assume. He could have been a friend of Eleanor’s, acting on her instructions. Mrs. Raeburn remembers him.” Rutledge gave Fraser a brief description of the man, pieced together from what Mrs. Raeburn had told him and a description of the friend who’d come to the Atwood house with Robbie Burns. “Recognize him?”

  “Lord, no.” After a moment, he added, “Robbie must have met him in London while he was convalescing. Palestine, you say?” He shook his head. “Afraid I never had much to do with that lot. And the first time I was invalided home, I came here, I didn’t stay in London. I wonder why Robbie stayed.”

  “He’d met Eleanor.”

  “Yes. That probably explains it.” Their meal arrived. Rutledge saw that someone in the kitchen had already sliced Fraser’s chicken for him, the pieces tidily rearranged so that a left-handed man could spear them with his fork. “He was in hospital for well over a month, you know, then spent another two getting his strength back. It might be possible to discover the names of other patients there at the same time. The house was somewhere in Sussex. Saxhall-Saxwold-some such name.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see what I can learn there.”

  Fraser put down his fork and reached for his glass. “She must have cared for Robbie,” he said. “To come all this way. Sad that they had no future.” He quoted lines from one of O. A. Manning’s poems. “We walked away from all that was warm and dear and stood frightened in cold rain where the guns fired, and in the end, we died in pain, the black stinking mud our shroud, embraced at last not by living arms, but by the bones of those who before us died…”

  Rutledge recognized the words. But he said only, “Manning understood better than most.”

  “Yes.” Fraser sighed. “Well, when you catch up with Eleanor Gray, if she isn’t happily married to someone else by this time, tell her Robbie loved her too. I truly think he did.”

  “Do you know if Captain Burns kept a dog? A cat?”

  “He didn’t. He traveled more than most. But his fiancee was fond of King Charles spaniels.” He smiled. “Julia would bring them whenever she came, nasty little monsters, always wanting to climb into one’s lap. How Robbie put up with them, I don’t know! Love is blind, I suppose.”

  “Did Captain Burns bury one of them in his garden?”

  “Good God, how should I know?” Then he grinned. “Killed it, you mean? Robbie must have been sorely tempted a time or two.”

  Rutledge drove east out of the Trossachs, through some of the heart of Scottish history.

  Many of the soldiers in France had seldom been farther from home than twenty miles in their short lives. Clan battles made for lively conversation among the Highlanders who had long memories for the feuds, ambushes, and massacres that had colored each family tree until the Battle of Culloden and the Highland Clearances had changed Scotland forever.

  The Lowlanders had had a different perspective. Stirling, a great castle on a crag overlooking the Forth, had been a royal residence until James VI had taken himself off to London. Now it was a quiet county town lost in the backwaters of the past. Bannockburn, where the Scots had won the
ir famous victory over the English, was a monument to Robert the Bruce’s determination to be free of the southern kingdom that had dominated his country for a lifetime. There were Scots who had only the vaguest notion now where the battle had been fought. Mary Stuart had been born at Linlithgow Palace, on its knoll above the loch. A queen from birth, she’d grown up to become a thorn in the flesh of Elizabeth of England. John Knox had thundered against Mary from the pulpit, and she had finally been forced to abdicate, a pensioner of the English crown. A rough and glorious past, now no more than a footnote in time.

  The Highlands had been emptied and the Lowlands had become the poor cousin forgotten by an England with its eyes on Empire, and left to poverty and ignorance. As someone had said, Scotland’s greatest wealth, her sons, had bled away to the colonies. Half the Scots under Rutledge’s command had had distant cousins in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada.

  At Edinburgh, Rutledge turned west. And decided, after some thought and a good deal of comment by Hamish, to go directly to Jedburgh rather than to Duncarrick. To report to the fiscal rather than to Oliver.

  He stopped for a quarter of an hour at Melrose, whose ruined abbey held only a shadow of its former beauty. Stretching his legs as he walked through the broken elegance of nave and chancel, Rutledge tried to picture it as the Cistercians had built it. It was an important enough house that the heart of Robert the Bruce had been buried there, brought home from Palestine and lost for a time in Spain.

  Melrose had fallen victim to the Border wars that had burned Duncarrick and Jedburgh and bled half the Marches.

  But Hamish remembered only that Field Marshal Haig, commander-in-chief of the British forces during the war, had been born near here. He did not like Haig, and was restless until Rutledge drove on.

  In Jedburgh, burns rose to meet Rutledge but did not offer his hand. “I understand from Oliver that we’re ready to go to trial. I could wish that you had been more successful in finding what has become of the Gray woman. This brooch most certainly puts the accused in the glen near the bones that were found, but it would have been helpful to go into court with proof of her identity clearly set out.”