Wings of Fire ir-2

by Charles Todd

  “And you never thought of murder?”

  “Good God! Self-murder is terrible enough! And who would want to kill James? He was a kind man, a good man. The house had seen enough grief already, who could possibly want to add to Rosamund’s burdens? There’s no one alive that cruel!”

  Agitated, he spilled his tea, and Rutledge knelt to mop it up with his napkin, his back to the scorching fire.

  “What did Olivia have to say when she was told of James’ death?”

  “I don’t remember,” Penrith said testily. “It was a long time ago, and I was not concerned with Olivia, I was worried about Rosamund, and her father. He never recovered his spirits after that, you could see it clear.”

  The old eyes, fading into a milky gray, looked back into a past he didn’t want to remember. “I walked behind their coffins,” he said sadly. “Not because they’d been in my care. Not for Adrian’s sake. But because in that house I found something I’ve never felt since under any roof, not even my own. Laughter was there, and happiness. And most of all, a glory. Brian FitzHugh told me once that it was in the very stones of the Hall, that it had been handed down with the Trevelyan blood and the Trevelyan land. That’s romantic nonsense, an Irishman’s blarney. But I knew what it was, I knew from the very first day I set eyes on her. It was Rosamund…”

  Emotion had drained him. He began to nod over his tea cup, head sinking slowly until his chin rested on his cravat, and Rutledge gently removed the saucer from the gnarled fingers. Then, with the wet napkin and the tray, he slipped quietly out of the room and into the-by comparison-frigid passage.

  Mrs. Hawkins, taking the tray from him, said apologetically, “He slips off to sleep easier every day. I wonder sometimes…” But she left the sentence unfinished, and instead showed him to the door. “Thank you for coming to cheer him a little,” she said. “I don’t expect you’ll be in Borcombe much longer, but I know he’d be glad to see you again before you leave.”

  “Did you know Olivia Marlowe very well?” he asked, looking out at the rain coming down in sheets.

  “She was friendly enough, whenever we ran into each other, but no, I wasn’t likely to know her well. She didn’t go about much. I was that surprised when they told me she wrote poetry, but then she was an invalid, wasn’t she? With time heavy on her hands. Nicholas was here sometimes in the evening, to visit my father. I always thought he might marry Rachel.” A pink flush rose in her cheeks. “I’ve never known a man quite like him-there was an intensity about him, a-a force.” She began to search through the Chinese stand beside the door, and took out an old umbrella. ‘‘You can borrow this, if you like. Otherwise, you’ll sure to be calling on the doctor with a fever.” Then, in a rush, as if she felt she had to finish what she’d begun. she said, “Nicholas tried to protect Olivia from everything. He thought if he was there, with her, he could hold off the pain, he could keep her from the darkness that beset her. He tried so hard, you could see it- I could see it, I mean-and I thought, when I heard how he’d died, that he was still afraid for her in death. As if, somehow, he could save her from what came after…”

  Rutledge splashed through the puddles on his way back to the inn, heedless of where he put his feet or the dampness spreading through his socks. Wet feet had been the ever-present hell of the trenches; it had cost more men than Stephen FitzHugh their toes or part of a foot. You learned somehow to shut it out, until the smell told you that the rot had begun.

  Hamish was fuming at the back of his mind, telling him something, and he ignored the voice, his mind on Olivia Marlowe.

  If she knew where Richard was buried, then she’d killed him. And if she knew, then it was a place that could be found. The boy hadn’t been taken by gypsies or thrown into quicksand, he’d been killed and hidden.

  “With pansies-for remembrance-”

  Had Olivia meant that figuratively? Or literally?

  “It doesna’ matter. What if she meant pansies to put near him, flowers that wilted and were gone in a day? Who would see them, who would guess what she was about?”

  The angel then, a frailer angel. Herself? Somewhere that Olivia, with her brace, could reach?

  She could ride a pony. That widened the circle. He’d been right to order the constable to search the moors again.

  Rutledge turned, crossed over to the nearest shop. In the small window fronting the road there was a collection of ribbons and laces behind a spill of colorful embroidery thread, packets of needles, and an array of handkerchiefs that reminded him of those he’d seen in Olivia’s room. As he opened the door, a gust of wind and rain nearly jerked the knob out of his hand.

  Startled, a middle-aged woman looked up from a cushion of bobbins and threads and a half-finished lace collar on her lap. “Could I help you, sir?” she asked, trying hastily to get to her feet.

  “No, sit down, I’m too wet to come in. I need directions, that’s all.”

  She sank back into her chair, somehow preventing the bobbins from roiling to every point of the compass. Then he saw that like the Belgian nuns he’d come across during the war, she had them pinned in place. “To where?”

  “I’m looking for the man who did the gardening at the Hall. Wilkins is his name.”

  “Oh, you’ve come the wrong way, sir! He’s down towards the river, in a little house you can’t miss. There’s a stone wall and a garden in front, and beehives out back.”

  Five minutes later, his shoes squeaking with rain water, Rutledge was knocking on the door of a stone house half hidden under its slate roof.

  Wilkins came to answer the summons with his bedroom slippers on his feet. He grinned at Rutledge and said, “I’ve seen drowned men drier than you! Here, wait till I’ve fetched some rags.”

  As Rutledge furled his umbrella, Wilkins disappeared down the dark stone-flagged passage towards the back of the house, and soon returned with a handful of old cloths. Rutledge dried his shoes as best he could, and then followed the old man into his kitchen, where something smelled suspiciously like rabbit stew in the pot simmering on the hearth.

  “I knew you’d be along before the day was out. They say you’re nosing around the Hall and the village, looking for answers that London wants. About the deaths at the Hall. Aye, I’m not surprised. If you ask me, Inspector Harvey is a fool, and Constable Dawlish too full of himself to know the difference between his nose and his toes! I’ve got some good ale in that jug over there, fresh from The Three Bells. And if you’ll hand it to me, I’ll pour you a cup.”

  Rutledge picked up the heavy stone jug and passed it to him. Wilkins filled two cups and sat down with a sigh of satisfaction.

  “I never thought Mr. Brian was killed falling from his horse. He was too good a rider. Born on a horse, like as not, and knew what he was about. And you don’t ride a valuable animal through sea-wet rocks, not if you’ve got any sense, with the risk of ruining his legs! It were murder, pure and simple, that happened that day-to man and mount!”

  12

  Caught off balance, Rutledge stared at the old man. “Did you say this to anyone at the time? When Brian FitzHugh died?”

  Wilkins gave him a toothless grin, “Lord, and lose my job on the spot? Which I nearly did anyway, when Miss Rosamund gave up the racing stables. And come to that, what was I to say to her? Or to the police?” He drank his ale, belched with pleasure, and shrugged his shoulders with almost Gallic expressiveness.

  “But if you believed it was murder-”

  “Aye, it were murder,” he said bluntly. “I were there when they raised the alarm, running for all I was worth to see what were wrong and to look to the horse. I’d saddled him for Mr. FitzHugh, I knew which mount he’d taken out!”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “Mr. FitzHugh was lying face down in the sea, blood on his head, and they found blood on one of the rocks just there, where he’d been thrown and then rolled into the surf. But the horse were deeper among the rocks, wild-eyed and shaking. A spur had raked one flank, not the other. I’d nev
er known Mr. FitzHugh to use a spur on his horses, and I’d never known Lucifer to need more than the lightest rein, he were that clever. Read your mind almost! Something happened that put the fear of God into him, and he bolted. But with an empty saddle, if I know anything about it!”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “There were neither horse hair nor blood on Mr. Fitz-Hugh’s spurs. And if he’d been throwed, just there, where he would hit his head on the rocks coming down, then roll over, his face into the water, why was there water in his hoots when I pulled ‘em off him, so’s they could carry him back to the house?”

  “Surely the police asked that same question?”

  “Aye, and they answered it, too, that the sea’d come in with the tide, soaking his trousers and his stockings. There were no footprints on the shingle but ours and Master Nicholas’, coming up from his boat, no signs of a struggle or trouble of any kind, and the doctor, he said Mr. FitzHugh had drowned, before he’d regained his wits from the fall.” He finished his ale, then went to stir the stew, squinting in the heat of the fire.

  Rutledge bent down, untied his shoes, and looked at his stockings. They were wet with rain. The shoes themselves were pliable with rain water. But when he upended them, water didn’t run out. The stockings and the lining had absorbed it. Interesting point, he told himself as he laced them again.

  “And no one else raised objections about the horse?”

  “Mr. Cormac did. He said his father wouldn’t have taken Lucifer among the rocks, not without good reason.” Wilkins came back to sit down at the table, refilling his cup and offering more to Rutledge, who shook his head. “We found a bee caught under the girth,” he said. “Where it’d stung the horse. And that satisfied the lot of them. But I walked back down there later and had a look around. Before the stir, mind you, Master Nicholas’d drawn his boat up on shore just a few yards away, and turned it over, planning to come back and work on the seams. Well, I looked under it, and I found the print of Mr. Brian’s riding boot, next to the print of another shoe, but the tide had half erased that. He were on foot, then, talking to someone. He weren’t alone down there on the shingle, not the whole time!”

  “He might have been there when Nicholas Cheney brought the boat in, and helped drag it above the tide line.” ‘‘Then why didn’t Master Nicholas say so?” “All right. Who would have wanted to kill FitzHugh?” Wilkins sighed. “That were the problem, you see. Not Miss Rosamund-siie were Mrs. FitzHugh- she’d not be likely to send him off. The twins, now, they were little ‘uns, and you’d not see them on the strand or near the headland or in the stables without their nanny in tow. Miss Olivia were a cripple. Mr. FitzHugh were Mr. Cormac’s own father. None of the servants, that I knew of, had any quarrel with him. Mr. FitzHugh had a temper, mind you, but he were fair, and no one held any grudge that I’d heard about. And that left Master Nicholas, whose boat it was. Why would he want to harm his stepfather? It made no sense to me. So I held my tongue and waited to see what happened, and when naught did, I kept on holding of it.”

  Nicholas might have no reason to kill his stepfather, but he might well have covered up for Olivia, if he’d had any fear that she was involved.

  With the brace on her leg, could she have moved around among the rocks?

  He asked that question aloud. Wilkins thought about it. “She weren’t one to plead helplessness. I’d see her struggle to do what she wanted to do. Aye, she could get over them rocks, spider fashion, pulling her leg along. Slowlike and careful. But where she had the will, she got her way.”

  Remembering what Constable Dawlish had said, Rutledge asked, “You put the horse down, didn’t you? Was she there, watching?”

  “Aye, it were left to me, and a hard job it were. Loved that horse, I did. Mr. Cormac were there, his head buried in the horse’s neck and crying. Miss Olivia came with Dawlish, who were only a boy then, and said, There’s no saving him? Not even if he never races again? Must we put him down?’ And I said, The smith looked at that foreleg, miss, and he said t’were shattered, there were no way to mend it so’s it’d take his weight.’ Fleet as he were, I couldn’t watch him live out his days a cripple, struggling over every step, though I didn’t say that to her face, her being a cripple herself!”

  He looked into his cup and swished the ale thoughtfully. “She stayed till it were done. Not a bit squeamish, as you’d think in a young lady like her. Afterward, she told Mr. Cor-mac, if he cared so much for Lucifer, he could help dig the hole to bury him in. And we did it, out on the headland, Mr. Cormac and a few of the lads and me.”

  Rutledge walked back to the inn as the church clock struck twelve. The rain had turned into a misty drizzle again, and the street was no longer a river under his feet. More people were about, now, men and women, a few of them nodding to him in recognition. Mrs. Trepol, hurrying past, wished him a good day, and in the distance he glimpsed Rachel moving head down towards the woods that separated the village from the Hall. Hamish, rumbling with suppressed irritation, kept Rutledge from concentrating his thoughts on the morning’s work. Or was it his own reluctance?

  At the inn, Mr. Trask took his umbrella and greeted him with the news that he had a visitor waiting in the parlor. Rutledge went through into a long narrow room with a ceiling so low it seemed to brush his head. In the wave of claustrophobia that followed, he saw only the dark furnishings, the empty grate, and a tall man with white hair who rose from a chair and stood where he was, waiting for Rutledge to speak.

  After a moment, he managed to say, “I’m Rutledge. I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.”

  The man looked him over, then said, “Chambers. Thomas Chambers. I represent the Trevelyan family-”

  Rutledge had him pegged. This was the lawyer who had courted Rosamund and almost won her. The family solicitor, handling the wills. Regarding him with new interest, he crossed the room to light the lamps on the chimney piece. Their glow, added to the one lamp already burning on the table, pushed back the darkness and the cavelike atmosphere of the room. Breathing more easily, he could concentrate on what Chambers was saying.

  “-and I understand that you’ve come down to reconsider the circumstances of their deaths. I’d like to know why.”

  Rutledge stood with his back to the cold hearth and said, “Because the Home Office wished to be sure that all was as it should be. Miss Marlowe-as O. A. Manning-is a person of some prominence.”

  Chambers all but snorted in disbelief. “You may tell the locals that, and they’d be impressed. I’m not.”

  “Suspicious, are you?” Rutledge asked.

  “Of course I’m suspicious when Scotland Yard feels it needs to stick its nose into a death where I’m handling the estate.”

  “Is there anything wrong with the wills? Any provisions that make you especially nervous?” He was deliberately misunderstanding the man, stripping him of his authority and aggressively taking charge of the meeting. Not out of personal animosity but as a tool.

  Chambers stared at him. At the thinness, the gaunt face, the lines that had prematurely aged a much younger man than he’d guessed at in the beginning. And wasn’t above a little aggression of his own.

  “In the war, were you?”

  Rutledge nodded.

  “Wounded?”

  Rutledge hesitated, then said briefly, “Yes.”

  “Thought as much! Stephen looked the same way when he came back. Shell of himself. Damned foot killed him in the end, too.”

  Over Hamish’s rude comments about that, Rutledge recaptured the salient.

  “What did you do in the war?”

  “They wouldn’t take me,” Chambers said in disgust. “Too old, they told me. But I knew that part of France better than they did! My mother’s mother was from there. Stupid place to fight infantry battles, for God’s sake! No geographical advantage. No high ground. Prolonged deadlock, that’s what you’ll get, I told them. Enormous loss of life, I told them. No one will come out of it a winner. Americans tipped the balan
ce, of course. And the tank. And still the best they could do was an Armistice!” Chambers realized suddenly that he’d mounted one of his hobby horses, and stopped, watching the advantage slip back to Rutledge. Then he grinned. ‘‘Over to you, I think.”

  Rutledge found himself grinning back. He liked Chambers. He could also see what had attracted Rosamund FitzHugh to the man.

  “Who sent for you?” Rutledge asked. “Susannah Hargrove?”

  “Daniel Hargrove. He was worried, because his wife is in delicate health and this whole business was upsetting her. They tell me now she’s likely to bear twins, but that runs in the family, not surprising.”

  They were still standing, Rutledge by the hearth, Chambers at the far end of the room, a position chosen to make Rutledge come to him, not the reverse. Rutledge said, impatiently, “Sit down, man!” He was aware of the smell of wool again, and with resignation ignored it. Hamish, perversely, did not.

  After a moment, Chambers moved forward and took one of the chairs near the fireplace. The room was damp, chill, with an old coldness that seemed to come from the walls, seeping up from the earth that waited to consume the stone when it finally sank under its own weight.

  Rutledge took the chair across from him, and said, “Actually, I’m glad you’ve come, I was considering traveling to Plymouth to find you.”

  Surprised, Chambers said, “Not about the wills, I think?”

  “In a way. I know that Olivia Marlowe made her half brother Stephen FitzHugh her literary executor. But then Stephen died soon after. And I haven’t been able to find her papers. Do you have them?”

  “No, I understood that Stephen knew what was involved in that bequest and was prepared to deal with the responsibility himself. If Nicholas had survived, he’d have had that duty.”

  “And if Stephen died?”

  “Ah, now that’s a very good question. I think Susannah, Mrs. Hargrove. He didn’t specify her as literary executor, you understand. His will was made out while Olivia was still alive and it would have been presumptuous to consider that need. But he did leave everything else to her, and the courts will, I think, accept the inclusion of Olivia’s papers in his estate.”