Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

  Seeing Rutledge’s face respond to what she thought was her own challenge, she didn’t wait for him to answer, and said instead, “Well, I suppose a conscience can grow accustomed to many things, when it has to!”

  When he’d seen Rachel back to Borcombe, settled the boat where he’d found it, and returned the picnic basket to the inn, Rutledge went in search of Mrs. Trepol, housekeeper and cook. She was working in her garden, her hair tied up in a kerchief and an apron over her dress. As he paused at the gate that separated her walk from the road, she looked up, her eyebrows twitched, and she said, “I knew you’d come here before very long. When I saw you with Miss Rachel awhile ago.”

  “Inspector Rutledge. I’d like to talk to you about the deaths at the Hall.” He opened the small iron gate set into the stone wall.

  “It’s my Christian duty to answer you, but thinking about it bothers my sleep. I try not to.” She set the small trowel in the trug beside her and pulled off the old pair of men’s gloves she wore to protect her hands. “Would you care for a cup of tea, then?”

  Following her into the dimness of the house, he saw that there was a cat in the chair he’d chosen to sit in, and moved instead to the long window overlooking the front garden. She unceremoniously dumped the torn out of the chair and dusted it with her apron. “He knows better,” she said, “but it’s his favorite place. I’ll be just a minute. Sit down, please, sir.”

  He did, and the torn stared balefully at him from sleep-narrowed eyes. The room was small, with more furniture than it could comfortably hold, but clean of dust. Silverplate picture frames of people he didn’t recognize covered one table, beside small seaside souvenirs from Truro and Penzance. A plate holding pride of place commemorated the coronation of Edward VII, and a smaller one marked that of George V and Queen Mary. A cutting from a magazine, a photograph of the Prince of Wales in his Gaiter robes, had been framed and hung over the couch. This could be the parlor of any cottage in the west of England, Rutledge thought, feeling the quiet peace of it.

  “Or in Scotland,” Hamish said with a sense of loss in his voice. “There was my sister’s wedding flowers under a glass bell, and the souvenirs were from Bannockburn and Edinburgh, not the seaside. A photograph of me in my uniform, with Fiona at my side…”

  Mrs. Trepol came in with a tray bearing cups and a teapot, a small dish of cakes to one side. She set it on the tea table in front of the cold hearth, and poured a cup for him. That done, she sighed, as if she’d put off interrogation as long as good manners allowed. Straightening her back, she turned, handed him the cup, and said, “I told the police when it happened-”

  “Yes, I know, and your statement was very clear,” he assured her. “But I’m here merely to satisfy the Yard that the deaths were investigated-er-properly.”

  Nodding, she said, “Aye, well, the family was well thought of. I’m sure everything that could be done was. It was a shock to me, I can tell you! Walking into that house on my day off, and not finding Mr. Nicholas about-but sometimes Miss Olivia had a bad night, and he’d sit with her until the worst passed. After Miss Rosamund died, Mrs. FitzHugh she was then, and the staff was reduced, he was the one Dr. Penrith showed how to rub Miss Olivia’s limbs and her back, to help the pain. Well, there was no entertaining, only the family coming there from time to time, and a full staff was wasteful! But to end their lives like that… I can’t say how long it took me to get over my grief. I felt-I felt I should have been there, somehow.” She brought him milk and the small bowl of sugar, then the cakes.

  “That you could have prevented it? That you’d have guessed what was in their minds?”

  “There was no warning, sir, none, just life going on in its ordinary way!” she told him earnestly. “But I thought if I hadn’t been in such a hurry on the Saturday to leave, to run some errands I’d put off, I might have noticed some little difference, and Mr. Smedley could have come out to the Hall and spoken with them. Restored the balance of their minds!” There was pain in her voice, a heavy sense of guilt as she quoted unconsciously from the inquest verdict.

  Suicide was still viewed as a crime against God. Mrs. Tre-pol sincerely felt a responsibility to save her employers’ souls if she could-as well as their earthly lives. Not out of zeal-ousness but from affection. She cared deeply.

  “But if you didn’t notice anything-if their behavior was normal-then whatever caused them to take their lives must have occurred after you left.”

  “What could have happened? There were no visitors expected that I knew of, and the post had come already, I’d have heard if it brought bad news. And look back on the day as I will, there was nothing that changed in that house! Nothing to cause such anguish that they’d want to die!”

  “People don’t kill themselves without a reason,” he said, preparing to ask the question he knew very well would hurt her more. “Unless you think that Miss Marlowe was in such terrible pain that Mr. Cheney gave her too much laudanum, saw what he’d done, and then killed himself in grief.”

  She put her own cup down and stared at him. “Mr. Nicholas would never have done such a terrible thing as give her too much! Oh, no, sir, he was not the kind of man to make a mistake like that!”

  Without answering her directly, he shifted tactics. “There has been a good deal of sadness in the Hall. Two children dying young. Miss Rosamund losing her husbands before their time. Then Mr. Cheney and Miss Marlowe. And finally, Stephen FitzHugh.”

  “As to that, sir, we all have our crosses to bear,” she said stiffly.

  “But sometimes there’s a history of violence in a family. And sometimes one person is at the root of it.”

  “And who do you think stands at the root of this family’s tragedies, sir?” she asked, bristling. “Mr. Cormac, who lives in London? Or Miss Susannah, who’s the last of the Treve-lyans? They’re all that’s left to do anybody a harm!”

  “Miss Marlowe was an unusual woman. She wrote poetry of a kind that few men can produce. Where did she learn so much of life?”

  “I never asked her, sir! Come to that, I never knew until she’d died that she was a writer of poems or anything else. Mr. Nicholas must have known, he sat working on his ships in her study, or went to find books she wanted in the library, or talked to her long hours of the day and night. I’d hear their voices, quiet and steady, as I moved about doing my cleaning. I think she’d have told him, she told him most everything important to her.”

  “Except the name of the man she was in love with?”

  Her mouth fell open. “And who was that likely to be, I ask you! She never had suitors coming to the Hall, and she went out so little. No man was likely to stumble over her in Plymouth or London and sweep her off her feet! Mr. Nicholas and Mr. Stephen, they were her brothers. And old Wilkins couldn’t light a fire in a grate!”

  “Cormac FitzHugh wasn’t her brother. He wasn’t related to her or to her mother. A stepbrother by courtesy alone.”

  Mrs. Trepol gave Rutledge an odd look. “What makes you think Miss Marlowe was fond of Mr. Cormac? Or he of her?”

  “Because she wrote of love in one of her books of poetry, and no woman-no man for that matter-could have written of love with such emotion if he or she had no knowledge of it.”

  Mrs. Trepol laughed. “Oh, there was love enough in that house to write a dozen books of poetry! Miss Rosamund loved her husbands and her children and her father with a deep and abiding feeling. Just living there, as I did as a young housemaid, you could wrap yourself in it. And Miss Olivia, she was very fond of Mr. Stephen; he could brighten her day just like his mother did. Mr. Nicholas used to tease her that she’d spoil him-Mr. Stephen-and Miss Olivia would say, ‘He was born to spoil and love. Some people are.’ “

  Which told Rutledge that Mrs. Trepol had never read the Wings of Fire poems…

  “Mr. Cormac FitzHugh used to live in the household. Miss Marlowe might have loved him once.”

  “But he never loved her, sir! I’d swear to that on a Bible, if I had to. He was
close to her, in an odd way, Mr. Cormac was, like he knew her better even than Mr. Nicholas did. But it wasn’t love between them. At least not on his part.”

  Because Cormac FitzHugh had recognized Olivia Marlowe for what she was, a murderer?

  “Do you think that Miss Marlowe was capable of killing anyone? Besides herself?”

  “Killing anyone? Miss Marlowe? I’d sooner believe my own husband, God rest his soul, could do such a thing! Whatever put such a nasty idea into your head? Not anyone in Borcombe, I’d trust my life to that!” The indignation in her voice was very real.

  “And you’d be willing to swear, in a court of law, that no one in the Hall-none of Miss Rosamund’s family-was capable of murder?”

  She regarded him severely. “I don’t know what they are getting up to in London,” she said tersely, “to send you down here with such questions as that to ask decent, law-abiding folk, but I’ll tell you straight out, that if there was murder done in the Hall on the night that Miss Olivia and Mr. Nicholas died, it was a cruel and godless person that did it and he’s nobody we’ve ever seen in Borcombe or want to see. Now if there’re no more you want to ask me, I’ve plants in my garden that still need to be watered!”

  Back in his room at The Three Bells, Rutledge sat in the chair by the window with the books of O. A. Manning’s poetry in front of him. But looking at the slim volumes, he found himself thinking instead about the poet. About the woman who had found such resources of understanding within her. And yet who had killed herself because her strength somehow came to an end.

  Could a man or woman be so deeply aware of the mysteries of the human soul and yet be capable of such terrible crimes as the murder of children? Could she live with that knowledge of herself, and still create such beauty? Was that, finally, why she had killed herself? Assuming that Cormac FitzHugh had told Rutledge the truth…

  How did you write poetry? How many words did you put on paper, and how often did you throw them away because they didn’t say what you heard in your spirit? How many poems went wrong, how many lines were flat and soulless, how many were trite and tired and empty? How many pages were crumpled up and tossed aside before a few unexpected words sang in your head, while you responded with blood and bone? How easy had it been-or how painfully arduous? How tiring or overwhelming?

  He thought about the opening lines to one of the love poems.

  Love

  Comes on wings of fire

  That sear the heart with longing

  And a white-hot heat.

  In its wake, no peace remains,

  Only the scars of a terrible loss

  That mark the end of innocence.

  How many times had she revised that until she was satisfied?

  He’d been inside the study where she had worked and died.

  It was amazingly tidy.

  Where Nicholas had been carving his fleet of ocean liners, there were scraps and curls of wood, the fineness of sawdust from sanding, the small splashes of paint from finishing touches put to bow and portholes and the funnels. He hadn’t put them away, swept and dusted, before swallowing the laudanum. It was as if he’d expected to come back to them tomorrow.

  But where the poet worked there was only the shawl-covered typewriter. No balled up sheets of paper, no pen or pencil lying where she’d scribbled a line to think about it, or tried a rhyme and found it weak. She had known she wasn’t going to sit there ever again and write. She’d prepared for her death.

  His hand came down hard on the embossed leather cover, hard enough to sting the flesh as he swore aloud. Inventively.

  Olivia Marlowe had bequeathed O. A. Manning -all her papers and letters and contracts-to her half brother Stephen. And Stephen was dead.

  Where were these papers now? And what was in them?

  9

  But neither Rachel nor the rector could tell Rutledge what had become of Olivia Marlowe’s papers.

  “I-I think Olivia’s will is still in probate. And Stephen’s as well,” Rachel said. “I really wasn’t interested in the papers. I mean, I was, in the sense that they were important for a study of Livia’s poems, but not in any personal sense. If you’re asking me if there was box sitting in the middle of a room, marked Papers for Stephen, or something, there wasn’t. I just assumed-well, if she’d left them to him, he must have known where to look for them.”

  She was standing in the doorway of the cottage where she was staying, and Rutledge could hear someone moving about inside, and then a bird singing from a cage. It was a pretty place, with vines swallowing the narrow little porch and hollyhocks leaning against the walls between the windows.

  “Which firm is handling the wills?”

  “Chambers and Westcott for Olivia and for Nicholas. I don’t know about Stephen. He had a friend in the City who was a solicitor.”

  It would be easy enough to find that out in London.

  He thanked her and walked on to the rectory, expecting Smedley to be tending his garden, but the grim-faced housekeeper announced that he was having a nap and she wasn’t about to disturb him.

  Rutledge was just turning away when Smedley came down the stairs into the hall, his hair standing up in the back and his shirttail on one side hanging out of his trousers.

  “Good afternoon, Inspector,” he said, voice still thick with sleep. “Give me two minutes, and I’ll walk in the garden with you.”

  Rutledge went around the back, walked along the tidy rows of vegetables and flowers, and was nearly to the small, scummy pond that had once held fish before Smedley stepped out the back door and came to join him. His hair was combed and his shirt neatly tucked into his trousers, his braces in place.

  He cast a look at the sky, and said, “It has been a beautiful day. I hear you and Rachel took a boat out.”

  Rutledge smiled. “We did. And lived to tell the tale, though she had some doubts in the beginning. Who was the gossip?”

  “It came by way of Mrs. Hinson, who had seen Mr. Trask outside the inn on her way to morning service. She then stopped to offer my housekeeper a small pot of the jam she made yesterday. And I was given the news with my tea, along with the jam.”

  “What do the gossips of Borcombe have to say about three deaths at the Hall, all in a matter of months?”

  “Much as you’d expect. The women felt that Olivia’s writing must have turned her mind. We aren’t used to famous poets in Borcombe. I think they believed somehow it was a proper judgment on her, for writing about things best left unsaid and probably best left unfelt in a woman.”

  “And the men?”

  Smedley frowned as he stooped to pull a yellowed leaf off the nearest carrot. “The men are of two minds about Olivia Marlowe. She was of course a Trevelyan, and they’re above the common lot, in most eyes. You forgive a Trevelyan much that you might hold against the greengrocer or your neighbor across the road. At the same time, dying by her own hand was an admission that she’d overstepped the bounds, in a manner of speaking, and finally became aware of it. The universe, you might say, is now back in its stable orbit.”

  “What about Stephen FitzHugh? And Nicholas?”

  “Stephen was a sore loss. Half the village adored him- every female under sixty, and more than a few over that! The other half, the men, admired him. A good man to have on your side, sense of humor, knew how to lose as well as to win. Quite a reputation for courage in the war, was wounded, decorated. Sportsman. Successful in his business, which was banking. Popular with the ladies. Yes, he was admired-and sometimes envied. That’s natural. Nicholas was respectedRosamund’s son, the natural leader in village affairs, the man you turned to when there was trouble. Pillar of strength. Not the sort you’d expect to choose suicide. The general belief was that he found Olivia dead or dying, and in the first shock of grief, took his own life. That’s romantic nonsense, but they’re more comfortable with it than with the truth-that he might have wanted to die. But this isn’t why you came to see me, I think?”

  “I wanted to know what
became of Olivia’s papers. The ones she left to Stephen as her literary executor.”

  “They’re probably still at the house. Stephen didn’t want to sell, he wanted to keep the Hall as a memorial to his sister. The others took a few personal things, but he was dead set against removing much else. And was prepared to fight a bitter battle to have his way. Have you looked in Olivia’s room? Or her desk?” He read the expression on Rutledge’s face. “No, of course not. Well, I’d start there. It’s not likely, is it, that Olivia sent them off to her solicitor? He’d have guessed something was wrong, and she didn’t want that. Besides, we aren’t sure just how soon after she decided to put an end to her life she acted on that decision. A day? A month? Five years? A few hours?”

  “She had straightened up her desk. Nicholas hadn’t cleared away his ships.”

  Smedley looked at him. “That’s proof of nothing.”

  “Of, perhaps, a state of mind?”

  “You’re saying that she knew where she was going, what she was planning to do, and Nicholas didn’t?”

  Rutledge watched the light and shadows play on the upper windows of the rectory, a bird’s flight reflected in them, and the movement of the apple tree’s higher branches. “I’m saying that she was prepared. He wasn’t.”

  “Or it might be that her poetry was terribly important. And his ships weren’t. He could leave those, in safety.”

  Which brought Rutledge back again to those literary papers.

  He walked to the Hall after dinner and stood looking up at the house in the golden shadows of the westering sun. He could hear sea birds calling, and somewhere a jackdaw singing lyrically. In his mind’s eye, ghosts of the people who’d made the Hall a home stirred and moved about the lawns, laughing and talking and bringing life to the scene. To the emptiness.

  Someone said, behind him, “They’ve not left-”

  He turned to find the old woman, and remembered her name this time. Rachel had called her Sadie.

  “No,” he said. Then, playing her game, he asked, “Which ones do you see? Is Anne there?”