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.