Legacy of the Dead (4 page)

Small wonder, with that heritage, that Lady Maude refused to believe that her daughter had come to die on a desolate Scottish mountainside, or that she had borne a child out of wedlock.

Eleanor was destined for greater things than a career in medicine—if she was the daughter of a King, and heir to this house and the fortune that apparently maintained it, she could take her pick of wealthy and titled men.

But if she was as contrary as her mother wanted him to believe, might she not have rebelled against this golden future and found instead some perverse pleasure in making her mother’s nightmares rather than her dreams come true . . . ?

LADY MAUDE SAT
at the broad desk long after the man from London had gone, staring blindly at the closed door.

How had he tricked her into speaking of Eleanor? She had told a
policeman
what she hadn’t revealed to anyone else—that Eleanor was headstrong, contrary, that her daughter’s heritage had meant so little to her that she had walked away from it and never looked back. She had chosen a common
profession
instead, one that dealt with poverty and squalor and hideous diseases. It was unspeakably cruel and headstrong.

She would call London straightaway and have that man
broken in rank
—

Instead Lady Maude went on sitting where she was, reviling him, refusing to acknowledge pain or guilt. Eleanor was
not
dead. The police were incompetent and stupid. She would not allow them to trouble her again.

Something the Inspector had said came back to her. “Another mother will have to bear that grief . . .”

Then find
her
and be satisfied.
And let there be an end to
this!

Sunlight cast long, narrow shadows across the carpet, and still she sat there. She did not need the photograph in the closed drawer to see her daughter’s face, feel the strong presence of her spirit. A mother would
know
—if anything untoward had happened—

They were trying to frighten her into helping them, these policemen, rather than doing their duty as it should be done!

Finally she stood up, took a deep breath, and walked firmly to the door. By the time she had reached the small room where the telephone had been put in, she had made her decision.

5

RUTLEDGE TURNED OUT OF THE DRIVE BACK ONTO THE
main road.

Hamish, reacting to the lessening of tension, spoke after a long silence. “It wasna’ a verra useful interview. But sufficient. A formidable woman, that. I wouldna’ care to grow up in her shadow.”

Was that how Eleanor Gray had felt about her mother?

“My own grandfather was her match,” Hamish was saying, “he could have led the clan into battle, anither time and place. But he had anither side as well, he could recite in a voice that kept the room silent. Verse, and the Old Testament. When it came to the Prophets or Robert Burns, there was none to hold a candle to him. I ken many a night when I lay awake in the loft, listening. Does this one have anither face?”

Thinking it over, Rutledge came to the conclusion that Lady Maude did. If she had been mistress to Queen Victoria’s son, her husband had been willingly, knowingly, cuckolded. Unlike Henry VIII, Edward had chosen his married lovers with great care, to prevent gossip or scandal. And his friends had known which woman to invite to which social engagement. Or had been quietly informed of royal wishes. Still, it must not have been easy for Edward’s wife, Alexandra, or the current favorite herself to live with such an open secret. Or for the favorite to return to her marriage when the Prince’s fancy moved elsewhere.

The problem was, a child seldom recognized a parent’s strength; it saw only stern discipline that couldn’t be easily manipulated by childish whims or caprice. Rebellion was natural—and sometimes dangerous.

Wherever Eleanor Gray might have gone, if she was determined to punish her mother for whatever it was she felt she’d lost or lacked in that grand and cold house, it became a police matter only if she died.

Rutledge found himself hoping that she had not, though Hamish was of two minds about it.

Retracing his route to the town where he had spent the previous night and left his luggage, Rutledge considered his choices. If he made the journey directly back to London today, it would be late when he arrived, far too late to report to Bowles. And this was a Friday. It might be best to find a telephone and make his report orally so that it could be passed along. Inspector Oliver would also be waiting to learn what had transpired.

There was a telephone in the hotel and Rutledge put in his call to London.

Bowles was not in his office, and the sergeant answering the line said, “Rutledge, is it? A moment, sir, I think there’s a message that I’m to give you. Ah! Here it is. You’re not to return to London, sir.”

“Not to return?” Rutledge asked blankly. Hadn’t he finished his business here?

“No, sir. The message reads ‘Tell Rutledge to stay where he is. He’s to call me at nine o’clock on Monday morning.’ That’s all, sir. The Chief Superintendent didn’t explain.”

Even for Bowles it was an odd message. But Hamish was quick to remind Rutledge that the man was vindictive and often intentionally bloody-minded. Rutledge asked the sergeant to repeat the message to be sure he’d been given the whole of it, and then said, “Meanwhile, will you put some men to finding out if an Eleanor Gray is enrolled in any of the teaching hospitals? It’s likely she’s chosen one in London, but be as thorough as possible, will you? I’m told she had a strong interest in becoming a doctor, but if she’s studying anywhere, it’s important that we find her.”

The sergeant laboriously wrote down the particulars and promised to get someone on it right away. Rutledge had a feeling he’d just spoiled the weekend for several unfortunate constables who were on the sergeant’s blacklist for some minor infraction or another. But they’d be more likely to pursue their inquiries with diligence, if only to see their names removed from it.

Rutledge thanked him and hung up the receiver.

He sat there in the tiny, smotheringly stuffy room that had been turned into a telephone closet.

Stay where you are
—

Was Bowles sending him back to the Gray house because there were new developments in the Scottish investigation and he’d been chosen to handle it at this end? Or had something else come up? But if that was true, Bowles would have left full instructions, telling him where to report and what his duties would be.

It was also possible that Bowles was being perverse, making the assumption that Rutledge would fail in his attempt to reach Lady Maude, and ordering him not to retreat until he’d succeeded. He’d brought only a small case with him; he’d need more shirts, shoes, and another suit if he was ordered to stay beyond two or three days.

Hamish said, “For all you know, he’s sacked you and is letting you dangle in uncertainty until he tells you himself—” Rutledge shut out the cutting voice.

And meanwhile?

He was free to spend the next two days in Lincoln or York. Before the war, he’d have leapt at the chance, having friends he could call on, houses where he knew he was welcome. But two of those friends were dead now, and a third was blind, in hospital, struggling to learn a new profession while his wife waited for him to come home. Still, there were hotels where he could stay—

At loose ends, alone and with only his thoughts and Hamish as company? It wasn’t a prospect Rutledge relished. He found himself preferring to be called back to London immediately, with another investigation to be handled, keeping him busy, keeping him from remembering that he had ever had a past beyond the last week or even the day before today.

Two days . . .

Guilt stirred again. He owed his godfather a visit. Or an explanation. He was going to find it hard to do either.

Hamish said, “Why does he no’ come to London?”

David Trevor had turned the London architectural firm over to his partner in the last year of the war. His son’s death had taken the heart out of him, and he had retired to Scotland to heal. He was, according to Frances, writing a book on the history of British architectural style, but it might be no more than an excuse to bury himself in the past until he could face a bleak future.

“For him Scotland offers sanctuary.”
But not for me.

Hamish made no reply.

After a moment, Rutledge picked up the receiver again and put in a call to David Trevor. His intent was to make his excuses, to satisfy his conscience. To explain that the press of business made a journey to Scotland in the foreseeable future unlikely. To put off what he could not face yet.

Surely David would be willing to meet him in Durham or somewhere else for the weekend! A compromise to suit them both—on ground that held no memories for either of them.

As Rutledge waited, Hamish said, “He willna’ come—”

“He will. For my sake.”

But twenty minutes later, Rutledge was driving north once more. This time toward the Border. Something in his godfather’s voice, a relief at hearing from him, a need that wasn’t spoken—a surge of warmth when he thought Rutledge had called to give his time of arrival—had made it nearly impossible to refuse or suggest any alternative. It had been taken for granted. As if nothing had changed.

Better to return to the rain of London and the empty flat—better to go to York or Lincoln or Carlisle rather than Scotland, where voices at every turn would remind him of Scots he’d commanded. Men he felt he’d betrayed . . .

There was hardly a town of any size in the Highlands that he didn’t know by name, because one or a dozen of the men under his command had lived there.

How many lies had he told frightened boys facing battle for the first time? How many lies had he written to grieving women who had just lost a son or a husband? And yet his men had trusted him. He’d listened to them talk about families, crofts, the land, small victories won in short lives— lonely men leaning against the wall of a trench in the dark watches, wanting to remember home, or lying on a stretcher, trying to die bravely. The Scots had made good soldiers and they’d died hard. Not in their tens or hundreds, but in their thousands. Rutledge felt a duty to them still, and it was a burden he hadn’t healed sufficiently yet to put down. It wasn’t easily explained—but it was there, that sense of duty to the dead.

He was going to Scotland now, there was no turning back—

It’s not as if I’ll be driving as far as Edinburgh,
he argued with himself.
The Lodge is in the country, for God’s sake! Once
there, I could be anywhere—in any part of Britain. It will have
to be done sometime. I can’t hide from the past—somehow I
must do this—

It would be arrant cruelty to call again and say I’ve
changed my mind—

But in the deep recesses of his mind, he could feel Hamish refusing to accept any justification Rutledge might offer. For Rutledge this was a hurdle of the spirit. For Hamish it had been the unacceptable horror of dying in France—his permanent exile from the Highlands. He had not come home then. He would not come home now.

The strain of traveling with that stiff, solid wall of refusal began to take its toll.

APPROACHING NEWCASTLE, ON
a whim Rutledge took a side turning and drove west for a time, toward Hexham. When he stopped the motorcar in the middle of nowhere, he got out and walked nearly a mile to where the Great Wall that Hadrian had built across the top of England so many centuries before snaked still across the green land. A rampart of earth and stone to keep the Scottish barbarians at bay, supported in its day by forts and garrisons, shops and sentry posts, long since crumbled and covered by time. He had come here as a boy, and the memory of it had stayed with him.

Soldiers had lived and fought and died here, but that was not the odd pull of this place. It was the rolling green land, the high bowl of sky—the vast
stillness.

There had been no peace in France. Men standing cheek by jowl in the trenches had had no privacy. The guns, even when silent, could be heard in the bones, that ache of thunder that dulled the brain and deafened the ears for hours afterward. The aeroplanes passing overhead, horses struggling through the mire, the lorries moving up, voices swearing and singing and talking day and night. Or screaming and cursing in pain after an attack, and the barking of dogs searching for the living among the dead.

There had been no stillness in himself either, with Hamish rampant in his mind. He was never truly alone.

But here it was palpable—the quiet—

He stood there, looking up at the empty blue sky, his head tilted back, his arms out from his sides, his fists unwittingly clenched. And drank in the stillness.

Even the wind had dropped off. Hamish, for a mercy, was silent. And there was no birdsong; the birds had turned south to winter in another climate. The beating of his heart seemed muffled beneath his coat.

Stillness.

It seemed to spread through him, it seemed to wrap him about, it seemed to fill him full.

For nearly a quarter of an hour he stood there alone and listening.

When he turned away to walk back to the car, there were tears in his eyes.

But he had found the strength he needed.