“You will be seeing Mrs. Davison. Please tell her—” She stopped and shook her head. “No, I don’t suppose she’d want a message from me now.” Her fingers folded and smoothed a pleat in her skirt. “I forget, sometimes, that a murderess has no past. But if the children should ask about me—please, will you tell them that I’m well and think of them often?”

“I will.”

She managed a smile. “They’re too young to know about murder. They’ll be glad to be remembered. And I do think about them. It takes my mind off other—other things.”

He said without stopping to think, “I wish you could trust me and tell me the truth.”

“It isn’t a matter of trust,” she answered quietly. “It’s a question of love.”

“Love?”

“Yes.” She looked away. “I can’t explain it, except to say that there are many faces of love, and sometimes they can be cruel. My mother loved my father so deeply that she grieved herself to death for him. And left me with only a grandfather and an aunt to care for me. I was the child of that love, but it didn’t matter enough to her to want to live. I never understood that. I still don’t. I didn’t want to die when Hamish did. I wonder, sometimes, if that meant I didn’t love him enough.” Her eyes searched Rutledge’s face, begging for reassurance.

“It isn’t a question of loving him enough. The man I knew in France wanted with all his heart to come home to you—”

He caught himself in time, before he’d destroyed the comforting lie of a hero’s death for King and Country. Clearing his throat, he said instead, “—and he’d have wanted you to live. Above all, he’d have wanted that.” For once he knew beyond question that he spoke for Hamish. “And if you lost your own mother when you were very young, you must see that it’s wrong to leave the boy unprotected, as you have.”

“You’ve told me yourself that I’d not be allowed to keep him!”

It was true. But he said, “You were wrong to allow yourself to be taken up on a charge of murder—wrong to allow the evidence to go on pointing to your guilt. Wrong to accept the fact that you will surely hang! There may come a time when the boy will need you and you won’t be there.”

Hamish cried out that it was wrong to use her own words to force her to surrender whatever truth she had hidden so long, so well.