Fiona, with nothing to say, watched his face. Rutledge bade her a good morning, and then asked, “There was a Scottish officer who was well known to Eleanor Gray. Robert Burns, called Robbie by his friends. Did you ever meet him?”

She answered, “The only Burns I know is the fiscal. He isn’t young enough to have been in the war. He lives in Jedburgh.”

Rutledge said, “Yes. Well, it doesn’t matter.” He gestured for her to sit, and she looked first at the cot and then at the single chair, and chose the cot, perching herself stiffly on the edge of it. Rutledge took the chair and said conversationally, “Fiona, why do the people of Duncarrick dislike you?”

“Do they?”

“They must. They believed the scurrilous letters about you. They believe now that you’re capable of murder. Would you have picked out, say, the Tait woman at the hat shop as a murderer? Or the young woman who keeps house for the minister? Would you find it easy to believe people who claimed they were whores and worse?”

She flushed.

“But people believed these things about you. If I can discover why, I might know who is behind the lies. It will be a beginning.”

“I’ve told you before—I don’t know why. If I did, I wouldn’t be here, locked away from the sunlight and the wind on my face!”

“I accept that. Have you ever met the father of the boy you call Ian?”

The sudden shift in direction made her eyes widen. But her answer was swift and seemingly honest. “No.”

“You’re quite sure of that?”

“I have never set eyes on Ian’s father. Before God, it’s the truth.”

“Then,” he said with cold reason, “the trouble you are in today must come from the boy’s mother—”

“No! She’s dead. I have told you that.”

The interruption was so swift that she hadn’t allowed him to finish what he had planned to say—the boy’s mother’s family.

“She isn’t dead,” he said gently. “And that’s the problem, I think. She’s afraid of you. Afraid that you might tell her new husband about the child she bore out of wedlock. Afraid that you might grow weary of caring for the child, and decide one fine day to bring him to her doorstep. She is afraid of you, and she’s here in Duncarrick. Or close by. And it is she who has poisoned the town against you.”

Fiona was standing now. “Please leave.”

“Because I’m too close to the truth?”

“No,” she said, her eyes meeting his with firmness. “Because you are so very far from it that you frighten me. I thought—I thought once that you had believed me. I thought you might help me.”

“You refuse to help me.”